Bryan Williams became an All Black aged 19 and won several series but was also in the first All Blacks team to lose a series against the Lions

The radio in the Williams’ little house at 35 Kingsley Street was tuned to the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, just like every other set in the country. It was the afternoon of Saturday 18 July 1959 and the All Blacks were playing the Lions in the first Test at Dunedin. The games were not on TV. Instead everyone followed them through Winston McCarthy, “the voice of New Zealand rugby”.

McCarthy had a lot of catchphrases: “Goodness gracious me”, “They’ll never catch him now!” and “Listen! It’s a goal!” He used the last one a lot that day. Don Clarke kicked six penalties for the All Blacks and they won 18-17. At No35, the family were gathered around. Bryan, their nine-year-old boy, sat rapt: “Come on Black!”

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“That,” Bryan Williams says, “was when I first became aware of the Lions.” Twelve years later, he was playing against them. He made his debut in 1970, on the All Blacks tour of South Africa. It was the first the team had made in 10 years, since South Africa refused to play against New Zealand’s Maoris. Williams’s father was Samoan, which made him the first player with Pacific Islander heritage to be picked for the team. The South African government gave him “honorary white” status for the tour. It was the only way he would be allowed to play. He was 19 and so overwhelmed he had a panic attack when he arrived but he lit up the pitch and scored 13 tries in 14 games, two in the Tests.

The Lions arrived a year later. “They sort of caught us on the hop,” Williams says. The last time they had been to New Zealand, in 1966, they were swept 4-0. That team were torn apart by the All Blacks pack, who were unchanged through all four games. Williams reels off the names. “Brian Lochore, captain and No8, Waka Nathan, Kel Tremain, Colin Meads, Stan Meads, then the front row was Jack Hazlett, Ken Gray, and Bruce McLeod.” Wales, Barry John, Gerald Davies, JPR Williams and all, came down on tour in 1969, and were battered in both Tests, 19-0 and 33-12. So the Lions, Williams says, “didn’t loom large in the mind as a threat”.

Until they won the first Test 9-3. “A really tight game. Our forwards dominated for a lot of it but we kept making these really frustrating little handling errors. We had quite a few passing rushes, that just when we were building something, someone would drop the ball.”

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The Lions’ Scottish prop Ian “Mighty Mouse” McLauchlan scored the only try. “I saw him just the other day,” Williams says. “I said: ‘Mouse, you must have run 50 metres for that try.’ ‘Oh, Jesus!’, he told me, ‘it was 60 at least.’” McLauchlan actually charged down a kick on the All Blacks’ tryline and fell on the ball.

Williams remembers the All Blacks dressing room was “a morgue” after the match. The old salts did not take losing well. Meads called it a “national tragedy”. Williams was only a kid in the corner. “I was 20 years old. A young Polynesian boy from Auckland, with all these grizzled old veterans from the South Island, Canterbury and around. We were like chalk and cheese. I tell you that sure as hell took some getting used to but we were team-mates and we were all wearing the black jersey, so you tried to come together as much as you could.”

They shifted Williams out from the centre to the wing for the second Test, which the All Blacks won 22-12. Ian Kirkpatrick ran one in from the halfway line. Williams would have scored another himself, “but Gerald Davies jumped on my back just before I got the ball”. The referee gave them a penalty try “but it still robbed me of a score.” He was injured for the third Test, “an ignominious defeat”, 13-3, but came back for the fourth, a 14-14 draw. It was the first time the All Blacks had lost a home series since 1937 and the only time they have lost against the Lions. So far.

The Lions of 71 left a legacy. “They revolutionised rugby in this country with their counterattacking style,” Williams says, “not so much in the Test matches but in the provincial games. They really brought that counterattacking game right to the forefront. It was really good for New Zealand rugby. When you get a lesson like that, if you don’t learn from it, you’re stupid. And we did learn from it.”

It took All Blacks a few years but by the time they toured Britain in 1974, they were playing the kind of running rugby, which, Williams says, “put us back on the map”. In 1977, when the Lions came again, the All Blacks won 3-1, with Williams in the thick of it throughout.

“Being the only team to ever lose to the Lions is a cross we’ve got to bear but you bear it graciously, because they were such great players. Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Mike Gibson, Gerald Davies, JPR, David Duckham, Mervyn Davies, Willie John. The names still flow off the tongue. And I’ve become good mates with a lot of them.”

That, in the end, seems to matter more to him now than who won and who lost. “That’s the beauty of rugby. When you lose, you get up off the ground, shake your opponent’s hand, and you go and break bread together.”

And besides, he missed the third Test. “As far as I’m concerned,” he says with a gust of laughter, “we drew it 1-1.”