Golden period: The Wallabies celebrate winning the 1999 Rugby World Cup. Credit:Tim Clayton "I'm from New Zealand," I replied. "New Zealanders know everything about rugby." Alexander literally grabbed me and marched me down to the office of the sports editor, Tom Hammond. "This is the new rugby columnist," he said. "He is to run with a dinkus every week during the season." A dinkus is the small, identifying photograph that was given to only a handful of columnists. It is a sort of journalistic knighthood at the SMH. The combination of the photo and my unusual name, for a rugby writer, gave me a certain familiarity to the readers of the column. After the appearance of a couple of columns, the SMH published a querulous letter, with the heading: Who Is Spiro Zavos? For a long time, too, I fielded questions from radio interviewers making a similar point that someone with a name like mine should really be writing about the real football code.

Early on, too, the SMH's chief rugby correspondent, Jim Webster, came up to me at work and said: "Here's the tape of Alan Jones' press conference today. Mate, you've got to listen to it. " The context of the conference was the 19-15 loss by the Wallabies, coached by Jones, to the All Blacks at Ballymore after they had squandered a 12-0 lead. The Wallabies had closed up shop after gaining the lead. I had written a column arguing that "this attitude runs counter to the traditional Australian approach of letting the backs have their heads". Moreover, the safety-first rugby propounded by Jones was "paradoxically, a high risk way of winning". The tape captured those early moments of a press conference when no one is willing to ask the first question. You could hear the shuffling of chairs and some nervous coughing before, finally, someone asked Jones: "Have you read that article in The Sydney Morning Herald about the Wallabies blowing the second Test?" There was a moment's silence on the tape and then Jones' clipped reply could be heard: "That fellow with a name like a Russian wrestler? We don't take any notice of people like him." Alan Jones coaching the Wallabies in 1987. Credit:Paul Mathews

Jim Webster, along with Phil Wilkins and Greg Growden, was one of a group of dedicated rugby writers on the SMH who, for decades, were fearless and accurate in writing up everything about the rugby game in Australia and around the world, the warts and all. I was lucky enough to use their reporting as the basis for my columns. Another group of fine sports editors, Tom Hammond, Alan Kennedy, Steve Meacham, Rod Allen and in recent years Ian Fuge and Ben Coady put smart, eye-catching headlines on my columns and saved me, from time to time, from errors of fact and bad judgments. I tried to make my columns focused on news rather than mere expressions of opinion. I took this approach from the greatest editor of the SMH, Vic Carroll, who used to ask me when I brought the paper's editorial for the following day into him for his approval: "Is it a new idea?" This notion of a "new idea", the deepest meaning of news in my view, I transported, or tried to transport, across to the rugby column. This meant a lot of hard thinking about my opening sentence, which had to carry the burden of the "new idea" news I was trying to get across. I usually spent all day Thursday writing the column. Then some more time re-writing early Friday morning before sending it in. Like Rousseau who once apologised for writing a long letter because he didn't have the time to make it shorter, I found getting everything I wanted to say about a rugby matter into 700 words much tougher mentally than writing an article consisting of several thousand words. The response from my readers continually reminded me, though, that the hard slog to make the column an easy read was worthwhile. Just one example of many responses comes to mind. I was on the train to watch the final of the 2003 Rugby World Cup. A group of good old boys, most of them in their 20s, were bantering energetically about the coming match. One stared at me. Something clicked in his memory. He rose from his seat and walked across to me. "Are you Spiro Zavos?" he asked. "THE Spiro Zavos."

"That's me," I replied, a bit warily. He shook my hand and told his mates: "Hey guys, here's Spiro Zavos. I always say that I never make up my mind about a Test until Spiro tells me what he makes of it!" England's glory: Jonny Wilkinson, left, is grabbed by teammate Ben Cohen as they celebrate their Rugby World Cup win over Australia in 2003. Credit:Phil Walter A lot of my columns have been about the politics of rugby. I would say that the golden era for rugby in Australia – and journalists – was in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Wallabies won every trophy available to them to win, including the Webb Ellis Cup. The trinity of Wallabies coach Rod Macqueen, Wallabies captain John Eales and chief executive of the ARU John O'Neill led the game to unprecedented success. For a time it looked likely that rugby would overtake rugby league in popularity. Now the game is slipping behind football even in popular appeal.

This decline is linked, in my view, to the board of the ARU being totally out of touch with the real interests of the rugby community. The only meeting I have had with Bill Pulver, the chief executive of the ARU, involved a shouting match (unfortunately). A former noted Waratah and Wallaby rang me up last year and told me he would "smash your face in" because I had written something about a relative working for the ARU. A board member of the ARU has threatened me with a libel writ for something I wrote about the strange appointment of Richard Graham as Queensland's coach. The heartland of rugby, in my opinion, needs to overthrow the ARU board and install John O'Neill as chairman to lead a needed renaissance of the game. In the 30 or so years of writing my column I never missed a deadline. The column got through, like the mail in the good old days, despite all sorts of problems. When the British and Irish Lions toured New Zealand in 2005 I was given a special assignment by the SMH to write several columns a week throughout the entire tour. I wrote my first column and when I tried to send it through to Sydney my laptop locked up. Nothing would go through. Hours went by. I was writhing on the floor like a pathetic child having a tantrum. Then the radio announced the news that the main internet cable in New Zealand had been cut by a farmer plowing a field in Taranaki. The cable link has just been restored, the announcement stated. A couple of clicks on my laptop and my column went through to Sydney. Saved! When the Wallabies (20) played the All Blacks (16) at Sydney on August 17, 1994, under lights on a Tuesday night, a gaggle of SMH reporters were given special brick phones to send back their stories as soon as the Test ended for the next day's edition. In the reporters' room you could hear all of them leading off with "Gregan's tackle …" Peter FitzSimons commandeered my phone because, as he explained, he had to send in the front page story. By the time he returned my phone, I had about five minutes before the deadline struck. The hurriedly re-written story I sent through to the copytaker described how the crowd rose in their seats screaming out "Tackle, Wallabies! Tackle!" as the All Blacks mounted their last desperate attacks.

In the first week of the 2007 Rugby World Cup tournament in France, I lost the C key on my laptop. There is a different keyboard arrangement in France to the QWERTY system in the English-speaking world. So I had to improvise. My columns were written with me holding a pair of scissors in my left hand and stabbing the space where the C key should have been. But despite the difficulty of trying to find different words from those with C in them, the columns got through and as always, on time. One of the greats: David Campese in ation for the Wallabies. Credit:Getty Images My favourite column was published in the SMH on March 5, 1996. The sports editor gave it a terrific title: Fragile Talent On Display – And Gone. The column tied together the death of a colleague I had worked with at the SMH, Wanda Jamrozik, and the last days in big time rugby of our favourite player, David Campese, "the Great Campo", the magician of broken field running. The column tied together a number of themes. The splendid improvement of the Wallabies in the 1990s: the advent of people like us, myself, Jamrozik, Campese, "wogs" in her description, having major roles in the Anglo-Celtic code of rugby: the impact, on and off the field, of the charismatic Campese: and how in life and in rugby most things end in tears and death. Wanda Jamrozik became "besotted" with Campese and rugby after the 1991 RWC tournament. She was typical of a large new cohort of supporters who came into rugby at the time. She picked my brains about the game. She was enormously thrilled with a glowing profile she wrote of her hero, David Campese. She sat beside me when the Waratahs played their home matches and asked questions throughout the matches. One evening she wasn't there. I learnt that she had died from a drug overdose. Her death coincided with the decline of the extravagant, match-winning, crowd-pleasing talents of Campese. He started to make mistakes. He had been dropped from the Wallabies. He couldn't pull off the tricks that came to him so effortlessly in his glory day. "The instinct to do the fabulous was still there – as it will be for as long as he plays. But the genius that worked off that instinct is fading," I wrote.

I ended the column in a plangent manner: "Walking out of the SFS after New South Wales' comprehensive victory, a Latin phrase came to my mind – lacrimae rerum (the tears of things) – Virgil's gentle warning about the fragility of life and wondrous talent." I have always regarded the honour of writing the rugby column for the SMH in the same sort of way a player treats his Wallaby jersey. It is yours, until you hand it on. My advice to my successor is to enjoy the privilege, have some fun, honour the game, keep the bastards honest and write-on in the tradition set by the "onlie begetter" of the column, the great Evan Whitton.