Ponsonby prepares to farewell Director of Rugby Nathan Kemp (with a Gallaher Shield win?)

Nathan Kemp has been the face of Ponsonby rugby in a number of ways for a number of years. He was the guy whose yell of triumph was captured just after the final whistle in the 2002 Gallaher Shield final. He was one of a succession of captains to hold the Gallaher Shield aloft during Ponsonby’s epic 10 titles in 11 years run in 2001-11. He played for Auckland and, briefly, the Blues. His 85 matches for the club would have been higher except he was one of the new breed of player who was good enough to win a professional contract and ply his trade offshore.

He was the face of the KFC Super rugby commercial in 2017 – with his boys proudly wearing Ponsonby kit in the ads. He has been the face that meets and greets many players from around town or around the world when they first arrive at Ponsonby, or want to discuss their options for future development.

When he returned from England, married and with a young family, his playing days were done but his biggest contribution to the club was just about to begin – and that’s not forgetting his recognition as the Chairman’s Trophy winner in 2004 for ‘Special Services to the Club – Non-playing’.

Kemp’s 2002 photo had been incorporated into the one-off wallpaper used to redecorate the Committee Room in the 2011 rebuild at Western Springs, but being chosen to fill Bryan Williams’ Director of Rugby shoes in 2015 was among the ‘Hardest Act to Follow’ appointments in club history.

Undaunted, as any good Ponies front row man would be, Kemp set about putting his own stamp on a job that was changing with  the times, but never forgetting for a minute what made the club special. He had to keep the traditions strong, but in the new rugby world often found himself dealing with a player whose values were not necessarily the same as those of his father’s generation. Finding the balance could be a delicate operation.

In his own way, he managed to achieve this. He has been a little bit visionary, a little bit taskmaster, a talent scout at times, a planner, a guy who has to have the community interest in the forefront of his mind, a driver and a sounding board. He has to deliver results; that’s still as important as it has ever been at Auckland’s most successful and most famous club.

Kemp came into his job not long after Ponsonby completed one of the outstanding eras from any period in Auckland rugby history. In the way of life, there has to be a turn of the wheel. But at Western Springs five years without a Gallaher Shield is akin to a drought, and the faithful get a little antsy should the special cupboard on the wall remain empty too long. Of all the items on the check-list, this one stood out as a must-do.

Despite the pressure and occasional growling, Kemp didn’t panic. He saw a three-year road to the next title and held the faith with his management team and players. This looks almost prescient; in 2016 the Premiers weren’t really in the hunt; a year later they were closer but fell short in a winnable semi-final at University; in 2018 they went into the playoffs as winners of the Alan McEvoy Trophy, and then accounted for Eden 24-7 in the semi-final.

Below Premier level the club is still the powerhouse it has been in Auckland for generations. Every team is expected to be good, simply because of the famous colours they wear. Every team presents a Director of Rugby with challenges as well as moments to savour, and this they all do on an almost weekly basis. Kemp survives with sanity intact, and somehow all the work has been completed on time. It’s no easy job, but it has been ably filled for the last three years.

On Nathan Kemp’s last day in his current position, Ponsonby will face 2017 champion University in the Gallaher Shield final at Eden Park. No doubt this coincidence will be raised in team meetings during the week, but it won’t be by the man himself – that’s not his style. Others will want to achieve that win as a going-away present to a good bloke.

Kemp will head for England with his family bearing the club’s best wishes for his future, and thanks for services already rendered. It is an impressive list. There will be a large number of Ponies fans who will consider a Gallaher Shield win to be a fitting cap on those years of toil on the club’s behalf.

We’ll know about 4.30 on Saturday afternoon if this story will have the dream ending.

Passing on the Ponsonby spirit to the club's younger members

Sir Bryan Williams

Most of this tribute was penned for the new book, Passion and Pride Continues. But with the announcement of the New Year knighthood for Sir Bryan Williams, the ending changed a bit.

Writing about Bryan Williams is an unavoidable part of writing about Ponsonby, and also an enjoyable feature. Anyone who has ever spent time at the club will have seen Williams there, probably had a chance to have a chat, and most likely has felt the urge to buy the legendary ‘Beegee’ a beer. You doubt anyone ever emerged from those encounters disappointed, and certainly many a young player will have been given sound advice about both rugby and life - delivered in such a way that it will never be resented, and never forgotten.

            Williams was, deservedly, given a chapter to himself in Passion and Pride and the claim was made then that if he hadn’t been around, the club most likely wouldn’t have had a 125th Jubilee. I have never heard a single person argue to the contrary – almost unique in a rugby club environment, where opposing opinions are almost mandatory on any topic.

            Since that book was written Williams virtually doubled what was already a colossal service to the game of rugby. He has been an international coach, a coach in the professional environment in this country, a coach involved at club and school level for years, a trustee of the club who was heavily involved in its financial restructuring, the Director of Rugby at Ponsonby, involved with Mt Albert Grammar’s rugby programme, no doubt a whole bunch of other things at school, club, provincial and national level, a Trustee on several other rugby bodies including the New Zealand Rugby Foundation that does so much for seriously injured players, a tour leader, a sought-after speaker, a man who was often contacted for a quote, and one who has a deserved if unofficial ranking as one of the game’s wise men. That standing was only reinforced when he was asked to stand Patron of the Barbarians Club, an esteemed position with a club that he has had a great deal to do with for 50 years or so and which does a great deal for rugby in Auckland.

Eventually forgiven (although he had nothing to be forgiven for) by the administration that had cold-shouldered him a dozen years earlier when he was coaching Manu Samoa, Williams reached the highest off-field pinnacle available to any rugby man in this country – the Presidency of the New Zealand Union. Many felt there could be no more appropriate figure to head the national body in the World Cup year of 2011 than Williams, whose service to the game was, after all, international. By any measurable criteria, Ponsonby’s favourite son was also as good a candidate as there was available anywhere in New Zealand. Needless to say, he did the job proud and proudly.

            Because he’s given so much to the game, trying to decide which of those contributions was the most significant is extremely difficult. Different people will look at different things. But any Ponsonby person will argue long into the night that it has been the dedication he showed to his one and only club for half a century and more that tops the rest.

            No-one, except perhaps Lesley Williams, would have any idea how many thousands of hours Bryan has poured into the club. He was paid for some, but most were donated. He could have earned many times whatever the club paid him by putting his services on the open market, but he never showed any interest in going down that route. For an international star of the first magnitude, he always remained a quintessential club man at heart.

You will often hear people say, ‘We’ll never see another like him / her / that again,’ even if the claim sounds exaggerated when it’s made, but in this case it will, most likely, prove to be true. There weren’t many club stalwarts like Bryan Williams even in the days when the local rugby club was a big thing in the community, far bigger than most are now. To have a man of Williams’ playing accomplishments give so much for so little to a club is a throwback to a different, simpler time. Not necessarily a better time, but a different time. The world keeps changing, and the rugby world with it. But Bryan Williams’ loyalty to Ponsonby never flickered, not even for a second.

            For his many and varied rugby services, Williams is deservedly famous. Playing skill became coaching skill, and he became famous to another generation. All the legal work that was done on the club’s behalf – and plenty of it was arduous – was welcomed and greatly appreciated. But both those things, rugby and law, were what he had trained for since he was a boy in the first case and a young man in the second.

            Therefore I’m going to exercise a writer’s privilege and push forward those hours of agonising over the books, staring at frighteningly large figures in red ink and wishing they would go away, trying to find ways of exercising some magical transformation that would change red into black, trying to squeeze another day or two out of an increasingly dry bank account in the 1990s and time spent on the club’s behalf as a Trustee of the funds realised by the almost-too-late sale of Blake Street as his greatest achievement.

That was not something he had trained for; it was something he learned on the fly and it was never less that exceptionally difficult – a task to make a trained money man head for the hills. It was also a task that couldn’t contain mistakes, for there was no time to recover from them. It had to be done right, first time, every time. The fact Ponsonby is still here and on the downhill run to its 150th Jubilee is testament to how well that incredibly onerous task was carried out. It wasn’t Bryan alone, of course, but his name is the one that crops up most often, on most committees, wherever the fight to survive was at its toughest. He was the rallying point for the whole club.

It’s fitting that one of the most prized trophies in the club, for the Premier team Player of the Year, should be the Beegee Williams Cup. And it’s appropriately named, too – not the Bryan Williams Cup, or the B.G. Williams Cup, but as it is, since that’s how everyone at the club knows him.

Williams must have come mighty close to a knighthood in 2013, especially as a number of leading players, coaches and administrators were being recognised around that time in the wake of the World Cup success, but a CNZM (which he was awarded) is not to be sniffed at no matter that people may have felt it was still one step down from what was really merited.

Now that ending changes. Many people felt the ultimate recognition still needed to be made and, in the New Year List for 2018, it was. A lot of people around the world will feel satisfaction that justice has been seen to be done. Among them will be rugby people, the Pacific community, New Zealanders in general and everyone who likes to see good guys get what they deserve.

The Ponsonby Club offers its sincerest congratulations to Sir Bryan and Lady Lesley on this well-deserved honour. To us you’ll always be Beegee, but we’re mighty proud of Sir Bryan.

Sir Bryan is the tenth All Black to be knighted; the list is:

Henry Braddon (NZ 1884) for services to Australia during World War I

Harcourt Caughey (NZ 1932-37) for services to health administration

Wilson Whineray (NZ 1957-65) for services to sport and business management

Brian Lochore (NZ 1963-71) for services to sport and the community

Colin Meads (NZ 1957-71) for services to rugby and the community

Fred Allen (NZ 1946-49) for services to rugby

John Graham (NZ 1958-64) for services to education and sport

John Kirwan (NZ 1984-94) for services to mental health and rugby

Michael Jones (NZ 1987-98) for services to the Pasifika community and youth

Bryan Williams (NZ 1970-78) for services to rugby

Joe O'Leary and the overlooked Life membership

Joe O'Leary

At the recent Ponsonby AGM the story of Joe O'Leary and his forgotten election to Life Membership was told, after it had unexpectedly come to light 102 years later. It's a fascinating tale, so here it is:

Joe O’Leary was not only a significant figure in Ponsonby rugby in the immediate pre-World War I years, but he was also a significant figure in New Zealand rugby. He captained the 1913 All Blacks at home against Australia and was, for almost 100 years, the only man to lead an All Black test team from fullback; Mils Muliaina was the next player to achieve the honour.

O’Leary was elected a Life Member of Ponsonby in 1915, but his name is missing off the Honours Board and it’s not too hard to work out how that happened.

His nomination and election came after he announced his retirement from playing; as was the norm back then, he made that announcement at the AGM.

The 1915 AGM took place on 8 April. Just over two weeks later, before the rugby season had even kicked off, the Gallipoli landings had taken place and New Zealand was, not surprisingly, rather distracted.

The 1915 rugby season was chaotic as huge numbers of men joined the Army, and any influence O’Leary hoped to have in a coaching capacity was lost.

From 1916 to 1918 the game was restricted to boys under call-up age (20), and Ponsonby struggled for numbers in Senior, although lower grades were strong. Still, the club was not operating as it had been and only George Nicholson and Thomas Aitken played significant off-field roles in those dark years.

By the time the War was over, after the 1918 season, O’Leary had returned to Masterton. He spent the better part of his later life there; it was also where he had grown up. Therefore he wasn’t around the club through the 1920s as a number of the early Life Members were, and the club’s records were destroyed in two fires in the middle of the decade; whatever the 1924 fire missed, the larger blaze in 1926 burnt.

The club also had a problem keeping track of its Life Members; both Aitken (1930 and 1938) and Ernie Matthews (1934 and 1955) were both elected twice. Given that 21 years passed between Matthews’ two elections one may be forgiven for not remembering the first, but Aitken’s were only eight years apart.

O’Leary died in December 1963 at Masterton, having played little part in Ponsonby rugby for nearly 50 years. The Honours Board was prepared not long after he had died, but given that he hadn’t been around for half a century it’s not surprising that his election was forgotten. The other Life Members, to a man and woman, had been around almost permanently for decades.

O’Leary was clearly highly regarded; his election as the club’s second Life Member – a year after Nicholson and 15 years before Aitken – says that. He had been a strong figure in rugby’s camp during those years when a real battle for supremacy was going on with rugby league, and for much of the time the 13-man game looked as if it was winning. Men like O’Leary, an All Black captain and widely regarded as one of the country’s best players, did a great deal for the union game simply by staying in it when they could have made big money by shifting their allegiance.

That was almost certainly the reason (unstated) why he was voted to a Life Membership. Ponsonby had taken a string of hits since 1910 – that great 1909 side was shorn of half a dozen leading players by 1911 for a start, and more were changing codes all the time – and having a strong man stay with the club was a significant thing. Nicholson’s Life Membership, awarded in 1914, was strongly dependant on the same factors; he had only joined the club in 1907 and back then, when Life Memberships were seldom awarded, nobody in the normal course of events got one for seven years’ work.

O’Leary had joined Ponsonby in 1909 after a significant career with Wairarapa; he made his debut when only 16 and had captained Wairarapa-Bush against the 1908 Anglo-Welsh team when aged 24. Therefore he had six playing years with the club and not even three championships would qualify him for Life Membership if it was just his on-field record that was being considered.

Still, it is clear from three separate sources (New Zealand Herald, Auckland Star and The Observer) that he was elected to a Life Membership of Ponsonby in 1915.

Akira Ioane becomes Ponsonby's 46th All Black

When Akira Ioane made his All Black debut against the French XV, he became the club’s 46th All Black and briefly extended Ponsonby’s advantage at the head of the list of most All Blacks from any club to two – until flanker Dillon Hunt joined him on the field moments later, giving Otago University its 45th national representative.

The Ioane brothers are the second sibling set from Ponsonby to both win All Black honours, after the Solomons of the 1930s. Like the Solomons, who were born in American Samoa (Frank) and Fiji (Dave), the Ioanes were also born in different countries as Akira first saw the light of day in Japan and Rieko in New Zealand.

Akira has been tipped for top honours since his schooldays, when he was a star at Auckland Grammar and, soon after leaving school, for the New Zealand Sevens team. He has made all the national teams going, joining a small group (Adrian Cashmore, Christian Cullen, Caleb Ralph, Dallas Seymour and John Timu are the only others in the club) to represent New Zealand at Schools, Colts, Sevens, Maori and All Black levels. Akira can also claim honours the others cannot, as he has represented New Zealand at sevens in both Commonwealth Games – which some of the others did – and Olympics, which none had the chance to. Short of winning Heartland XV honours, there’s not much left for him to achieve in terms of national teams represented.

He was the 53rd Auckland Grammar School Old Boy to make the All Blacks, extending that school’s lead over all its rivals, and the first Ponsonby player chosen as an All Black loose forward since Mark Brooke-Cowden just over 30 years ago.

Akira is All Black No 1166. His selection also completes a rare and possibly unique achievement for the family, as now both brothers as well as parents Eddie and Sandra are all international players in the 15-a-side game.