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06/09/2026

The Man Who Won the World Cup With His Boot — And Rewrote the Art of Kicking Forever

There are players who win matches with their legs. There are players who win tournaments with their hands. And then, once in a generation, there is a player who wins a World Cup with his boot — and in doing so, changes the way the game is played forever.

Grant Fox was that man.

When New Zealand lifted the inaugural Rugby World Cup in 1987, the photographs showed the whole squad celebrating beneath a New Zealand winter sky in Eden Park. But if you looked carefully at the numbers, one truth was undeniable: a quiet, not particularly tall first five-eighth from New Plymouth had carried his country on the end of his right boot in a way that has never been equalled since.

Here is the number that stops people cold.

126 points. In a single World Cup tournament. A world record that still stands. And alongside it, 30 conversions in that same competition — another world record, from the same man, on the same stage. Grant Fox did not just play in the first Rugby World Cup. He dominated it statistically in a way no kicker in the thirty-seven years since has been able to touch.

The beautiful, complicated thing about Fox was that the game he mastered was never the fashionable one. He was not, as those closest to him freely acknowledged, a great runner with the ball in hand. His inability to score tries was a running joke inside the All Blacks camp — made sharper by the moment in 1989 when a try he did score against Ireland was ruled out due to a prior infringement by a teammate. The rugby gods were thorough in their teasing. Yet when it mattered, when the posts loomed and the test match hung in the balance, there was no man on earth you would rather have standing over that ball.

Between 1985 and 1993, Fox wore the black number 10 jersey for 46 test matches, accumulating 645 points — 118 conversions, 128 penalties, seven drop goals and that single solitary test try. Playing outside him on the Auckland provincial side and for the All Blacks was John Kirwan, whose world-record career statistics owed something to the precision of the ball delivered onto his chest by a man who understood distribution the way a watchmaker understands gears.

Fox is also regarded as a genuine pioneer of the modern technique of goal kicking — specifically the practice of leaning the ball forward at address, a technical detail that world-class kickers subsequently adopted as standard. The coaches talk about it. The analysts trace it back. The lineage leads to Fox.

His path to that 1987 glory was not without shadow. In 1986, Fox was a member of the New Zealand Cavaliers, the rebel squad that toured apartheid South Africa following the cancellation of the official NZRFU tour the previous year. For that decision, he was banned from All Blacks selection for three tests — a price he paid, and then moved past, earning selection in the Rugby Almanack of New Zealand's five players of the year in 1984, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1993.

After the playing days ended, Fox stayed loyal to Auckland, contributing at coaching level and sharing in their NPC title successes in 1999 and the 2002-2003 season. He moved into broadcasting, providing commentary on Sky Sports, NBC Sports, and in the EA Sports rugby series, covering World Cups on ABC, alongside Al Michaels in 1999 and 2003, and Mike Tirico in 2007. In 1995, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his services to rugby. In 2011, he took on a selector's role with the All Blacks — the quiet technician, still shaping the black jersey from a different angle.

And beyond all of it, he raised a son — Ryan Fox, who went on to become a professional golfer. Two generations. Two sports. The same standard of excellence.

Some men win the world's biggest prize and let the years do the talking. Grant Fox's 126 points in 1987 have been talking, without pause, ever since.

06/09/2026

The Captain Who Almost Lost It All — And Then Won Everything

There is a moment in rugby that defines a captain. Not the trophy lift. Not the final whistle. The moment when the match is against you, the crowd is against you, and everything you have built is about to come apart in front of the world.

For Sean Fitzpatrick, that moment came in the third Test against the British and Irish Lions in 1993.

New Zealand were 10–0 down. The series was alive. The Lions had already avenged their narrow first Test defeat — a 50-metre Grant Fox penalty in the dying seconds having been the only thing that separated the sides — by producing their highest-scoring Test win ever on New Zealand soil. Now, in the decider, Fitzpatrick stood facing the prospect of becoming only the second All Blacks captain in history to lose a home series to the Lions. The weight of that was not just personal. It was generational.

Here is the thing that should stop you cold.

He brought them back. From 10–0 down, the All Blacks recovered to win the match convincingly, and with it the series. No drama in the retelling can match the quiet, granite-hard quality of what that required — a captain steadying men who had felt the ground shift beneath them, pulling them toward a result that should not have been possible.

That was the measure of Sean Fitzpatrick.

Born in Auckland on 4 June 1963, Fitzpatrick carried rugby in his blood — his father Brian was also a New Zealand international. He came through Sacred Heart College and the mighty Auckland provincial system, breaking into the All Blacks in 1986 as one of the so-called Baby Blacks on tour in France, the squad assembled largely because the senior squad had been suspended following the unauthorised Cavaliers tour of South Africa. He went into the 1987 World Cup as second choice ho**er to captain Andy Dalton. Dalton was injured, Fitzpatrick took his chance, kept his place even when Dalton recovered, and watched David Kirk lift the Webb Ellis Cup after the final victory over France at Eden Park. He was part of it. He was building toward something far larger.

By 1992 the captaincy was his, and he would hold it until the very end. The years that followed were not easy. France produced a stunning 2–0 series win in New Zealand in 1994 — the first and, until 2022, the only European nation to do so. England picked up a win at Twickenham. The 1995 World Cup brought the greatest All Blacks side many had ever seen — Jonah Lomu, Zinzan Brooke, Andrew Mehrtens, Jeff Wilson — and they swept through the tournament, including a semi-final destruction of England in which Lomu scored four tries. They met South Africa in the final. Joel Stransky's drop goal in extra time sent the Webb Ellis Cup to the hosts. The finest team in the world left empty-handed.

Fitzpatrick answered that pain the only way he knew how. In 1996, the All Blacks went to South Africa and won the series — the first New Zealand side ever to achieve that on South African soil. The same year he lifted back-to-back Super 12 titles with the Auckland Blues. His Auckland provincial side won the National Provincial Championship eight times across his career. The records accumulated with a quiet inevitability: 92 caps, 63 consecutive Test appearances, 23 successive Tests without defeat.

He made his final appearance as a substitute in a 42–7 victory against Wales at Wembley on 29 November 1997, carrying an injury, included because coach John Hart believed his presence alone was worth something to the younger men around him. That, perhaps, says more about Fitzpatrick than any statistic. He was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to rugby in the 1997 New Year Honours.

Some careers are built on talent. Sean Fitzpatrick's was built on something harder to name — the refusal to accept a story that was going the wrong way, the calm authority of a man who had earned the right to stand at the front when the tide turned against him.

He was down 10–0. He won the series. The greatest All Blacks captain of the professional era, and the last of a kind rugby may never see again.

06/09/2026

The Twin, the Tour, and the Trophy Nobody Can Take Away

There are rugby stories built on clean heroics — the try, the title, the standing ovation. And then there are stories built on something more complicated, and ultimately more honest: the story of a man who stumbled, was punished, and then came back to stand on top of the world anyway.

Alan Whetton's story is that second kind.

Born on 15 December 1959 and raised inside Auckland rugby alongside his twin brother Gary, Alan came into the game during an era when New Zealand didn't just want to win — it expected to. By 1981 he was playing representative rugby for Auckland, and he was good enough, and versatile enough, to play number eight, lock, and flanker before finding his truest home as an openside. He made his All Blacks debut in 1984 on tour in Australia, pulling on that black jersey for the first time in a Test match on 21 July against the Wallabies. Most players would say that was the summit. For Alan Whetton, it was only the foothills.

But here is where the story gets complicated.

In 1986, Whetton joined the New Zealand Cavaliers on their controversial tour of South Africa — a rebel tour that defied the international boycott of apartheid-era sport. The consequences were swift and real. He was banned for two matches. His All Blacks future, only recently secured, was suddenly uncertain. There are no clean heroes in that chapter of rugby history, and Whetton himself wore the cost of that decision. The ban was served. The judgement, wherever it came from, was absorbed.

What happened next is the part that deserves to be told loudly.

By 1987, Alan Whetton had fought his way back into the fold, and New Zealand was preparing to host the inaugural Rugby World Cup. He was not a passenger. He was not a fringe player clinging to a squad spot. He was one third of a loose forward trio — alongside Wayne "Buck" Shelford and Michael Jones — that would play 13 Tests together and become one of the most destructive units in All Blacks history. Thirteen Tests. The same three men, again and again, working in perfect concert, the kind of rugby brotherhood that coaches spend entire careers trying to build and almost never find.

In that 1987 World Cup campaign, Whetton did something remarkable: he scored a try in each of the Pool matches, the Quarter Final, and the Semi Final. Not a single knockout round went by without his name on the scoresheet. When New Zealand lifted the Webb Ellis Cup — the very first team to do so — Alan Whetton's tries were woven into every step of that journey.

He kept playing. He kept delivering for Auckland, eventually finishing with 150 appearances for his province — a number that speaks not to flash, but to endurance, consistency, and the kind of loyalty that provincial rugby demands. He was still in the All Blacks shirt at the 1991 World Cup in England, right up until the semi-final defeat to Australia that ended New Zealand's reign. He walked away having given everything that rugby could ask of a man.

After hanging up his boots in New Zealand, he took his knowledge to Japan, serving as a player-coach for Kobe Steel from 1996 to 1999. Later, he found a second voice as a commentator on TV3 during the 2007 Rugby World Cup, and today he is part of the Solid Gold breakfast radio team, still connected to the public life of the game he shaped.

He played alongside his twin. He absorbed a ban and came back stronger. He scored tries in every knockout round of the first World Cup ever played. And then he just got on with living.

Some men win the world — and carry it quietly.

06/09/2026

The Man Who Scored The First Try — And Then Refused To Play On Sundays

There are players who win World Cups. And then there is the man who scored the very first try of the very first Rugby World Cup, then told the sport's greatest tournament that he would not play on Sundays — not for any team, not for any trophy, not for anyone.

That was Michael Jones. And that choice cost him more than most rugby fans ever stopped to consider.

It is 1987. The inaugural Rugby World Cup has barely drawn its first breath. New Zealand are playing in their opening match, the tournament's opening match, and a 22-year-old openside flanker from Te Atatū South sprints onto history's first page and scores its first try. Not just the first try of the All Blacks' campaign. The first try of the entire competition. A bronze statue now stands outside Eden Park in Auckland, frozen at the moment the ball touched down, carved into permanence by sculptor Natalie Stamilla. The world would go on to call him the third greatest All Black of the twentieth century, behind only Colin Meads and Sean Fitzpatrick. His coach, John Hart, the man who first selected him for Auckland, called him almost the perfect rugby player.

Almost. Because Michael Jones also believed, completely and without compromise, that Sunday was not for rugby.

Here is the thing that should stop you cold.

The 1991 Rugby World Cup came around, and Jones was selected. But three of the tournament's games fell on Sundays. He did not play in any of them. Then 1995 arrived, and the selectors worked out that the quarterfinal and the semifinal — the two games where everything is decided — would fall on Sundays. Michael Jones was not selected for the squad. Not because he wasn't good enough. Because the schedule meant he could never be available for the moments that mattered most. A man who scored the tournament's first-ever try in 1987 was effectively ruled out of competing in 1995 by a calendar.

He was once asked how a Christian such as himself could be so uncompromising a tackler. He answered by quoting scripture: it is better to give than to receive.

The injury record tells its own brutal story. Two serious knee injuries — in 1989 and again in 1997 — and a broken jaw in 1993 meant that across a period when New Zealand played almost ninety internationals, Jones managed fifty-five caps. Fifty-five. He was usually first choice whenever fit, which makes the arithmetic even harder to absorb. A career shaped by faith and fractured by injury, and yet the quality never dimmed. Thirteen international tries. A Rugby World Cup winner's medal in 1987. National Provincial Championship titles with Auckland in 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1999. Two Super 12 titles with the Blues in 1996 and 1997. In 1997 he succeeded Zinzan Brooke as captain of both Auckland and the Blues.

The rugby he played was breathtaking in his early years — raw pace, ferocious work rate, an openside flanker who seemed to operate at a different frequency from everyone around him. As the knee injuries accumulated and that early speed faded, he adapted, shifting to blindside flanker and number eight, finding different ways to contribute when the old methods were no longer available to him. That is not decline. That is rugby intelligence.

After he retired at the end of the 1999 season, Jones served as national coach of Samoa from 2004 to 2007, having previously assisted at the 2003 World Cup. His connections to the Pacific ran far deeper than sport — he holds the matai titles of La'auli and Savae from his extended Samoan family, was one of the most recognisable Samoan New Zealand figures of his generation, and was awarded a knighthood in 2017 for services to the Pacific community and youth. Since 2002, he has managed the Village Trust food bank in Avondale, Auckland. The calls to appear on television were passed over, declined, because the food bank needed him more. In 2025, he was inducted into the Pasifika Rugby Hall of Fame.

He scored the try that started it all. He held the line that others would not hold. He gave the better part of thirty years to a community that had nothing to do with rugby.

Some men chase legacy. Michael Jones simply lived it.

06/09/2026

The All Black Who Won a French Title — And Sparked a Scandal That Took 13 Years to Unravel

Gary Whetton had already conquered the world. He knew what winning felt like — the deep, bone-certain kind, earned on the biggest stages the game has to offer. But one afternoon in France in 1993, his name would be attached to a victory that the rugby world would argue about for more than a decade.

He was the twin brother of fellow All Black Alan Whetton, a lock forward of 58 tests and 180 appearances for Auckland, a man who had stood at the centre of New Zealand rugby through some of its proudest years. By the time he crossed the Channel to play for Castres, Whetton had already lifted the Rugby World Cup, already captained the All Blacks on 15 occasions, already written his name into the fabric of the game. His post-playing career in France should have been a quiet footnote — a respected servant of rugby, finishing his days in a different language, a different light.

Then came the 1993 French Championship final.

Here is where the story gets complicated.

Castres faced Grenoble in what should have been a clean, hard-fought final. Referee Daniel Salles awarded a decisive try to Whetton. Castres won 14–11. The title went to Whetton and his teammates, and the trophy was lifted. But the moment it happened, Grenoble knew something was wrong. A try by their player Olivier Brouzet had been denied. And the try that had handed Castres the championship — Whetton's try — should never have stood. The defender Franck Hueber had reached the ball first in his own try zone. The referee had missed it. Castres had won a title they should not have won, and Gary Whetton's name was at the very centre of it.

Jacques Fouroux, who had already been in conflict with the French Federation and had suspected foul play before a ball was kicked, cried conspiracy. The match burned in French rugby memory for years — not as a great final, but as a wound that never fully closed.

And then, thirteen years later, Daniel Salles admitted the error.

Thirteen years. A generation of rugby players had retired by then. Brouzet's denial and Hueber's desperation in his own try zone had been validated at last — not by a replay, not by a review panel, but by the referee himself, finally speaking the truth out loud. It is the kind of admission that does not restore a trophy or rewrite a record book. It simply confirms what everyone already knew.

Whetton himself was a man who had earned his place among the all-time greats of New Zealand rugby long before that afternoon in Toulouse. The 1987 World Cup — the first, the original, played on home soil — remains one of the defining moments in All Black history. New Zealand were relentless, scoring 43 tries across six games and conceding just 52 points. They beat Italy, Fiji, Argentina, Scotland, Wales and France, and then dismantled that same French side 29–9 in the final. Whetton was part of the engine that drove all of it. Back home with Auckland, he won the National Provincial Championship seven times — 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990. Seven titles. A decade of dominance in one of the most competitive provincial competitions in world rugby.

After hanging up his boots, Whetton remained close to the game, serving on the Auckland Blues board and being elected as its Chairman in April 2012. He chose to stay in rugby, to give the game more of himself even when the playing days were long behind him.

The World Cup is his forever. The titles with Auckland are permanent. The controversy of 1993 belongs to history too — not as a stain on the man, but as proof that rugby, even at its highest levels, has never been entirely free of its human flaws.

Gary Whetton won more than most players ever dream of. And one of those wins, the record books will quietly note, came with an asterisk nobody asked for.

06/09/2026

The Man Who Never Lost in an All Blacks Jersey

There are rugby careers built on appearances, and then there are careers built on something harder to measure — on presence, on endurance, on the quiet refusal to be broken by circumstances entirely beyond your control.

Norm Hewitt was never going to dislodge Sean Fitzpatrick. Nobody was. For the better part of a decade, Fitzpatrick owned the All Blacks number two jersey with the kind of iron certainty that makes selectors stop dreaming about alternatives. And so Hewitt waited. He trained. He played. He led. He did everything a rugby man could do with the years he was given, and he did it without complaint.

Here is the number that should stop you cold.

Nine test matches. Four of them off the bench. And across every single one of those appearances — every minute he wore black in a test — Norm Hewitt never lost. Eight wins and a draw against England. An unbeaten test record that many players with fifty caps cannot claim. The All Blacks jersey meant something to him precisely because he understood how close he always was to never wearing it at all.

But the test record was only the thinnest slice of the man. While Fitzpatrick was commanding the world stage, Hewitt was quietly building something enormous beneath it. Nearly three hundred first-class matches. Fifteen appearances for New Zealand Māori — a jersey he wore with particular pride, connecting to his Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Tūwharetoa roots. Sixty-six Super Rugby matches, missing just one game in the first five years of Super 12. One hundred and forty-three NPC matches. He captained New Zealand A, New Zealand Māori, the Hurricanes, Hawke's Bay, and Wellington. He was not a man who sat with his arms folded waiting for greatness to find him. He went out and built it, town by town, province by province.

The moments that defined Hawke's Bay rugby in the nineties often had Hewitt at their centre. A 29–17 defeat of the 1993 British Lions. A 30–25 win over the 1994 French tourists. These were not just upsets — they were the kind of results that get told in clubs for generations, that young players inherit as proof of what provincial rugby can be when the right men believe hard enough.

Then there was Wellington. In 2000, Hewitt captained Wellington to the NPC title against Canterbury — playing the majority of the final with a broken wrist. If you need a single image to understand what kind of player he was, that is it. Strapping something together that should not work, and refusing to leave the field.

Off it, he was equally unflinching. After a drunken incident in 1998, he made a public apology and spent years afterwards as an outspoken advocate for changing drinking culture. He won the first series of Dancing with the Stars in New Zealand in 2005 alongside professional dancer Carol-Ann Hickmore, donated his winnings to the literacy charity Duffy Books in Homes, and committed himself to Rangikura School in Porirua. In 2018, he appeared in the documentary Making Good Men, alongside his former schoolmate Manu Bennett, exploring what it means to raise boys into something decent.

Norm Hewitt died in Wellington on 16 July 2024 from motor neurone disease. He was fifty-five years old.

He spent his whole career in the shadow of a player most rugby historians would rank among the greatest to ever lace a boot. He never let that shadow diminish him. He played nearly three hundred first-class matches, led every team he was ever trusted with, wore the black jersey without a single test defeat to his name, and gave the rest of his life to the people around him.

Some men are remembered for the caps they won. Norm Hewitt deserves to be remembered for the man he became when the cameras stopped watching.

06/08/2026

The Man Who Coached Three World Cups — And Still Chose the Forgotten Game

There are coaches who chase the biggest stage, the loudest crowd, the cameras and the contracts. And then there is Wayne Smith — a man who, having already stood on the summit of world rugby not once, not twice, but three times, chose to spend his final chapter coaching a women's team that the rugby world had barely bothered to watch.

That decision tells you everything you need to know about him.

Smith grew up in Putāruru, a small town in the Waikato, and worked his way through school rugby, c**t grades and B teams before frustration pushed him south to Canterbury. The move changed his life. Under Doug Bruce and Alex Wyllie, he developed into a first five-eighth good enough to win 17 Test caps for the All Blacks between 1980 and 1985, and in 1984 the Rugby Almanack of New Zealand named him one of their five players of the year. Not bad for a kid who spent a season sitting on the bench for Waikato and wondering if that was as far as it went.

But here is the part the highlight reels never show you.

After his playing days wound down, Smith didn't walk quietly into a comfortable role. He went to Italy — twice. First as a player-coach with ASD Rugby Casale between 1986 and 1988, then returning to coach Benetton Treviso from 1992 to 1994. These were not glamour postings. They were a man learning his craft in places where nobody handed you anything, building something in a country that rugby had barely touched. It was unglamorous, patient work — and it was exactly the foundation that would define his entire coaching life.

When he finally returned to New Zealand and took charge of the Crusaders in 1997, the rugby world began to pay attention. Back-to-back Super Rugby titles in 1998 and 1999 arrived with a quiet inevitability. The All Blacks appointment followed, though his time at the top would prove painful — two agonising losses to Australia in both the 2000 and 2001 Tri Nations, the Bledisloe Cup slipping away each time, and then the coaching job itself given to John Mitchell when Smith reapplied. He was bitterly disappointed, by his own account, and who could blame him.

Most men would have retreated. Smith went to Northampton Saints, rebuilt himself in English club rugby, then accepted an assistant coaching role under Graham Henry in 2004 — a role that asked him to put his ego on a shelf and serve the All Blacks without the title. He did it. For over 200 games. He did it again in 2015, stepping back in as assistant to help deliver New Zealand's second consecutive World Cup title. His final coaching record with the All Blacks across that time stands at 212 games, 184 wins, 21 losses and 7 draws — and his name does not appear on the trophy.

After stepping down in October 2017, he moved to Japan and guided Kobelco Kobe Steelers to back-to-back Top League championships, losing just once in 27 games. And then, in April 2022, New Zealand Rugby gave him the Black Ferns.

What happened next was not a retirement project. Smith coached the Black Ferns to twelve wins from twelve matches and the 2022 Women's Rugby World Cup title — the job most coaches had overlooked, the one that carried the least prestige, and the one he delivered with the same quiet precision he had brought to every challenge since those early winters in Italy. The rugby world took notice. He was named World Rugby Coach of the Year at the 2022 World Rugby Awards. In 2023 he was knighted — Sir Wayne Smith, KNZM — and his citation included not only his services to rugby but his charity work helping children with cerebral palsy. Then in 2024 he received the inaugural Legacy Award at the New Zealander of the Year Awards.

Three World Cups. Three different teams. One man who never stopped choosing the harder road.

Justin Marshall said it better than any trophy cabinet could. Smith once told him, during a difficult patch, to trust his instincts and be decisive — that if you act with purpose, you will make good of it even if the option is wrong. That was the coaching philosophy that ran like a spine through everything Wayne Smith touched. Not the roar of the crowd. Not the prestige of the title. Purpose. Every single time.

06/08/2026

The Irishman Who Played for the Lions — Then Became the Voice of a Nation

Some men outgrow one life entirely and build another, far from home, beneath a different sky. John Robbie did exactly that — and in doing so, became one of the most unusual figures Irish and South African rugby has ever produced.

He came from Dublin, shaped by the game early. At The High School, Dublin, he was part of a Leinster Schools Cup winning side in 1973 — the kind of teenage triumph that hints at something larger waiting down the road. Trinity College followed, then Christ's College, Cambridge, and at both universities he did not merely play — he led, captaining the rugby teams at each institution. That is not a footnote. That is a man who earned the trust of the room, twice over, in two of the oldest academic institutions in these islands.

His first cap for Ireland came on 17 January 1976 at Lansdowne Road, against Australia. Nine caps in total would follow — nine times he pulled on the green jersey and carried with him everything that represented. It is not a mountain of appearances by modern standards, but for a scrum half from Greystones RFC, it was a life's ambition made real.

Here is the part that stops you in your tracks.

In 1980, John Robbie toured South Africa with the British and Irish Lions — one of the most celebrated and contested tours in rugby history. He played in one Test match on that tour, part of a squad that went to the beating heart of apartheid-era South African rugby and faced the Springboks on their own ground. The courage required — physically, politically, emotionally — should never be underestimated. Those Lions carried an enormous weight that went far beyond the scoreboard.

Then, in 1981, he made a decision that changed everything. He moved to South Africa. He joined Transvaal, one of the great rugby provinces, and buried himself deep into the game on a continent he had first visited as a tourist in Lions colours. The story took another extraordinary turn from there: he was selected twice for the South African national team. Twice. But he never received a Springbok cap. An Irishman, who had worn the Lions jersey on South African soil, now finding himself on the edge of Springbok selection — and then, nothing. The cap never came.

It is the kind of detail that deserves a long silence.

What happened next was a second act that very few rugby players of any generation have matched. John Robbie became a broadcaster, eventually settling into the morning slot at Talk Radio 702 in South Africa, one of the country's most listened-to stations. He was there for thirty years. Thirty years of cutting through the noise, interviewing heads of government, political figures, sporting heroes and business leaders. His motto — "Cut the Slush!" — became a signature, a signal to his guests that comfortable half-answers would not pass. He was described as hard-hitting while remaining fair and honest, a balance that is far harder to maintain than it sounds. He also served as a rugby commentator on television and in the press, particularly with Independent Newspapers, and became a Laureus Sport for Good Foundation Ambassador.

He said his final farewell on 15 December 2016, walking away from the microphone after three decades of asking the questions that others avoided.

A Lions tourist who became a Springbok prospect. A Dublin scrum half who spent thirty years as the morning voice of Johannesburg. Some men find one calling — John Robbie quietly assembled two, and gave everything to both.

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