A moment in time

The questioners usually have a slightly patronising expression and tone, as if it must have been a hoot playing in some sort of novelty event.

Many people seem to think the 1987 tournament was a tin-pot affair, thrown together at the last minute, attracting fairly small crowds and meandering to the inevitable All Blacks victory at home.

Actually, it was an extraordinary birth for what is now the third largest sporting event, after the Olympics and the Football World Cup.

The birth of the Rugby World Cup in 1987 in Australia and New Zealand was about as fitting as it could have been. First, for we biased Antipodeans, because it was held in the one part of the world willing to court the ire of the cigar- smoking, port-sipping, arch-conservative Home Unions. John Kendall-Carpenter, of England (honorary Antipodean, for the purpose), Sir Nicholas Sheahadie, of Australia, and Dick Littlejohn, of New Zealand, were the three musketeers who took on the might of empire, apathy and self-satisfaction to make the whole thing happen.

It very nearly didn't.

It took a tense final vote at the International Rugby Board, in which two of the Home Nations split their votes - one for and one against - to tip the balance. I don't recall exactly, but I have a feeling it was no more than about 18 months after the final go-ahead was given that the first game kicked off.

Australia and New Zealand had bid together and, mercifully, had sorted which country would host which games beforehand. They stuck to the deal they had struck, unlike their successors in 2003.

New Zealand had three of the four pools, Australia one. The quarterfinals were split two each, while both semifinals were in Australia and the final and bronze final (which in those days luxuriated under the more prosaic "third and fourth playoff") were in New Zealand.

It couldn't be fairer than that and no one complained about anything.

The tournament was, of course, nothing like the commercial and televisual extravaganza it is today. But then nothing that went on in 1987 was anything like the commercial and televisual extravaganza that it is today. In 1987, metrosexual soccer players past their best going to pasture in the Land of the Dollar Bill didn't rate a mention, even if they were married to bony former song- synchers.

Nor was the internet invented or pay TV, outside the US, for that matter.

The Cold War was still nominally on for young and old, but we had a sneaking suspicion the Ruskies were running on empty. The Berlin Wall was still well and truly up and Ronny Raygun and Magic Thatcher held sway.

We were in the middle of a serious bull market and asset bubble in most parts of the world (Black Tuesday, when the New York Stock Exchange crashed, came along in October 1987).

In our part of the world it was the era of the perpetually rising sun. The Japanese had achieved most of what they failed miserably to pull-off in World War II - that is, to own most of the West. They did it by funding Reagan's fabulous spending spree on military toys.

We rugby players thought of it as akin to the drinking games we knew so well - you drink, I drink, you drink, I drink - the first one to puke loses. That sort of thing. The brief diversion into geo-political drinking games was to introduce the main sponsor in 1987, which was - you guessed it - Japanese. Well, they had all the money, didn't they? As I sit here I can turn my head and see the NDD steel bowl I was given as a member of the winning team. NDD (I think the N stands for Nippon) is a large and still successful Japanese telecommunications company. They deserve to be better known.

While the Japanese as a nation were buying American Treasury bonds like there was no tomorrow (they may well not have been had things turned out differently) to fund the American leg of the arms race, NDD took time out to fund the first Rugby World Cup.

Without them, there wouldn't have been a Rugby World Cup in 1987. Sponsors of the magnitude required were not lying about idly looking for world cups to sponsor. Nor did the finding of a sponsor involve sophisticated negotiations over what we now call media and intellectual property rights.

In 1987, it was basically find some decent blokes who could clearly afford it and ask them nicely. The TV rights went to national broadcasters (it was a tournament between national teams, after all) and the BBC had legendary rugby commentator Bill McLaren, so, of course, they got the rights.

It was a different world in 1987. It was a small tournament in terms of ground sizes, attendances and financial surpluses, but this, to quote A A Milne, is what "makes him so funny/ if you give him a smile, every once in a while/he never expects any money".

What did matter was the opportunity to be world champions. There had never been such an opportunity for any rugby player who had ever pulled on his country's jersey. The opportunity had not been there for Colin Meads or Mark Ella, or Willie-John McBride or Bill Beaumont, or Garth Edwards or Morne du Plessis, or Jean- Pierre Rives or Andy Irvine - legends all. British Lions, test series victors, Five Nations champions, but never world champions.

This was, above all, what the 1987 Rugby World Cup meant to the players. It was the first, and for most of us, the only chance to be acknowledged as a part of the best team in the world. Holders of the Rugby World Cup.

There were a lot of things going on in New Zealand rugby in the mid- 1980s. A cancelled tour to South Africa in 1985, a rebel tour in 1986, players banned, a lost series at home to the Wallabies and a brutally lost test match in France at the end of 1986.

The 1987 Rugby World Cup was an opportunity for the players to be world champions and for the game to be redeemed in the eyes of a disaffected public.

The tournament kicked off on a squally Thursday afternoon in Auckland. New Zealand took on Italy.

A half-full Eden Park witnessed the birth of one of the greatest All Black eras. Sean Fitzpatrick, Michael Jones, Wayne Shelford, Grant Fox, John Gallagher, Joe Stanley, Steve McDowell, John Drake. It seems scarcely credible, but none of these great players had played more than three matches each for the All Blacks before this match.

That's more than half the team - and four on debut.

Throw in the great John Kirwan, Warwick Taylor, a couple of Whettons, Murray Pierce, Craig Green and a captain there because of injury (Kirk), and you have, quite incredibly, as if by magic, one of the great All Black teams. (And waiting in the wings as reserves were others, including no lesser figures than Zinzan Brooke and Richard Loe.)

Every player at every world cup has a personal experience.

Each player has their own moments in their own matches. And if they are one of the 100-plus players who have won the Rugby World Cup, theirs will be memories like mine.

Memories of pool play where the one tough match gave purpose to the jaunts against inadequate opposition; the quarter or semifinal when it nearly all came unstuck, when the horror of "the next plane home" hit with a sickening reality.

And then the final, the moment, the opportunity, the destiny . . . or not . . . to be remembered or forgotten, knowing viscerally: first is everywhere, second is nowhere.

For me, it funnelled into one moment.

Twenty years of playing in the Kiwi crucible of rugby, frosty fields in bare feet, cold sawdust under old wooden stands in provincial towns, mum and dad in the stand, always there.

Fitz throws long, Joe smashes it up in midfield, back the blindside, Foxy to the Iceman, his explosive power takes him through, inside to me, angle for the corner, I'm going to make it . . .

That was the moment I knew we had won. Absolutely knew.

I hit the ground and a wave of joy, relief, awe swept over me, and then hands were pulling me up by the jersey, hugging me.

I felt like crying. It was ours. The Rugby World Cup.

- © Fairfax NZ News