Old-timers like to say they “don’t make ’em like they used to,” but it is difficult to disagree when you hear tales about possibly the toughest rugby player of them all, Alex “Grizz” Wyllie, who died this week at the age of 80 on his Canterbury farm.
The All Blacks have had many a toughie, including the legendary Colin “Pinetree” Meads and Wayne Shelford, who played on with a ruptured scrotum in a game against France, with his testicles dangling out.
Father Time appears to be the only opponent Wyllie could not lick over a lifetime littered with anecdotes of his uncompromising approach to life and rugby.
When I heard that Grizz had passed on, my mind shot back to the stories that shocked me when Wyllie coached Eastern Province and Transvaal.
It is not stretching things too far to suggest that Wyllie remotely influenced the 1995 Springbok World Cup triumph because he coached most of the Springboks at Transvaal.
In the early ‘90s, Wyllie had had enough of his Transvaal team underperforming. He called a meeting in the change room, put cases of liquor in the middle, and said, “I’m locking you useless bastards in here. You’re not getting out ‘til the booze is finished and you have sorted your s..t out.”
The players did just that and started winning.
Wyllie and whiskey… He had a taste for it, and doubles were for cissies. He would order three of them (doubles, not cissies), pour them into a tall glass, and down them like beer.
Tales of his hell-raising, on and off the field, could fill a book. They have. Several books on his life have been published in New Zealand, where he is a national hero.
It was at Eastern Province that Wyllie found his home from home. In the amateur era (pre-1996), EP were notoriously tough and often dirty. Many of them came from Rassie Erasmus’s blue-collar neighbourhood of Despatch, where babies have knuckledusters in their prams instead of rattles.
I recall a reporter telling me that at one practice, Wyllie had wanted to fight battle-hardened locks Adrie Geldenhuys and Armand du Preez, along the lines of, “If you don’t listen to me, I am going to have to drill it into you.”
They declined, and that is something because the aforementioned threw a few haymakers in their day.
I asked former EP captain Jaco Kirsten for his recollections of Grizz.
“We think South Africans are hard, but Grizz was the toughest man I ever met. He fitted right in at EP. We loved and feared him in equal measure.
“One story I will never forget, I can see it as plain as yesterday,” Kirsten said, warming up. “We heard a whisper from New Zealand that Grizz had this nickname that he disliked, ‘Hereford head’. We were not sure why he found the name so offensive, but a few guys learned the hard way not to say it out loud in his company.
“We had been celebrating a win, and the liquor was flowing. One of our bigger guys started chanting “Hereford head”. Grizz walked up and punched him.
“We had a No 8 called Harold Karele. He was battling to understand a move Grizz wanted us to perform. Grizz’s patience ran out, and he told Harold to move to the opposition defence, and he took Harold’s place. He charged into Harold like a madman, leading with a stiff arm. He said, ‘Now do you understand what I want?’”
Kirsten said that Wyllie’s unorthodox methods resulted in a wave of success that propelled EP into the Super 10 competition with the best teams from New Zealand and Australia.
“When we got off the plane in New Zealand, there were cameras everywhere and we thought we were rock stars,” he said. “But we quickly learned that the cameras were for Grizz. He was huge in New Zealand, and nobody cared about us.
“But we cashed in on his fame. He organised whiskey-tasting tours and visits to breweries. And sports companies lavished us with kit. We got more kit on that tour than we ever did in SA.”
Wyllie came from farming stock in Canterbury and went to school in Christchurch. Besides rugby, Alex excelled at boxing, but the school had to scrap it because he kept knocking opponents out.
As a young club player, he dislocated his thumb in a game, and the medics could not put it back in. He refused to go off, saying, ‘I’ll just tuck it behind my hand.
His nickname did not come from his resemblance to a grizzly bear but from a scrumhalf who had had his ear bent all game by Wyllie’s vicious verbals.
“You’ve done nothing but grizzle, grizzle, grizzle all game,” the scrummie complained (grizzle is New Zealand slang for “complain.”
In 1970, Wyllie toured South Africa with the All Blacks. He was a constant menace as a combative flank in the first two Tests (the Boks won the first, the All Blacks the second) and the Boks celebrated when Wyllie couldn’t play in the third because of injury, which is odd given he felt no pain. The Boks won the third and fourth Tests.
Wyllie went straight into coaching after finishing as a player (he played a staggering 210 times for Canterbury) and had exceptional success coaching his former team and, later, the All Blacks (they had a 91 percent win record when he was the coach from 1988 to 1991, with 58 Test wins, five losses, and a draw).
He coached Argentina from 1995 to 1999 and steered them to their first World Cup quarter-final in ’99.
Even the queen of England heard of Wyllie’s rugby exploits, and for services to sport, he was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire).
Like many tough guys, Wyllie had a good sense of humour.
On the eve of a big game between Canterbury and Auckland, a news reporter remarked in an interview, “The stadium is sold out. All the seats have gone.”
Deadpan, Wyllie responded, “Have they? They were there when we trained this afternoon.”