Grizz Wyllie: The soft side of All Blacks legendary hard man

By Phil Gifford

There were large elements of truth in Alex “Grizz” Wyllie’s public persona as the toughest rugby player and coach to ever come rampaging out of North Canterbury.

But as I found out working on his book Grizz The Legend in 1991, there were different, lesser-known, sides to the man.

There was a lot more to his coaching philosophies than crash, bash and knock your opponents over. He was the first rugby coach in New Zealand to introduce grid skill training developed by a former Scottish football player Jim Blair. “I never dreamed,” Blair once told me, “Alex would seek out a guy to work with him (in 1982) who had never played a game of rugby in his life, and worse still, was a soccer player, from the sooks’ game. At the time it was quite remarkable.”

Another aspect of Wyllie that didn’t fit the ruthless image came in 1984 when seven Canterbury players returned from touring Australia with the All Blacks. He found it so hard to drop the replacement players he had used for Canterbury while the All Blacks were away, that for a couple of weeks there was hardly room on the training field for the extended squad. Eventually the job of breaking the news to the players who weren’t wanted was assigned to his assistant Doug Bruce.

Nevertheless the perception of Wyllie as personifying old-school hardness in the vein of Colin Meads and Ken Gray had a solid basis too.

He was certainly physically intimidating. When he was at high school at St Andrew’s College in Christchurch, they dropped boxing from the school sports for fear of what Wyllie might do to his heavyweight opponents.

As a young club player for Glenmark he soon showed his ability to play through pain. Clubmates recalled a match against the United club when, 10 minutes from the end of play, Wyllie dislocated a thumb that wouldn’t go back into place. “Go off and get it fixed,” they urged. “No, I’ll tuck it under my hand,” said Wyllie. He finished the game.

His nickname came from All Black halfback Lyn Davis. After a Town-Country game at Lancaster Park, Town halfback Davis, his ears still ringing from a string of Wyllie’s verbal on-field sprays, snapped back. “God, you’ve done nothing but grizzle, grizzle, grizzle all game.”

So it was that Wyllie became Grizz to his mates in Canterbury and All Black rugby, and to grateful headline writers all over the world.

He became Canterbury’s captain in 1972, and remained their leader for 108 games, until he retired from provincial play at the end of the 1979 season, having played 214 games for his province.

As an on-field leader he was more conservative than he would be as a coach. Even fellow forwards thought he liked the idea of dominating the scrums just a little too much.

Canterbury and All Black hooker Tane Norton recalled in particular a game with Bay of Plenty in Rotorua. “We were playing in ankle deep mud,” said Norton. “We had a scrum set that was almost on the halfway mark. Alex wanted us to go for a pushover try! We just told him to get stuffed.”

Taking over as Canterbury coach in 1982, Wyllie issued a famous edict at the first training run in Amberley. One player says Wyllie reckoned the only excuses for missing training were death or docking. Another that it was death or crutching. In 1991, Wyllie himself couldn’t remember which it actually was, but the important point, he said, was that there “were no bloody excuses at all really”.

His training sessions in those days were always brutal. Lock Kerry Mitchell said: “Very early on Alex made us train for hours at Rugby Park. I was completely stuffed. My wife had cooked a nice meal, and she was really unimpressed when I got home. She thought I’d got boozed after training. I couldn’t even talk to explain. I was gone.”

But there was more going on than many realised. Jim Blair, who would go on to be a skills expert with the All Blacks, was flying down from Auckland on a weekly basis in 1982. Wyllie soon saw how Blair’s methods sharpened the Canterbury attack.

The respect was mutual. “Once you get to know him,” said Blair, “you realise that Alex’s a much maligned man as far as his intelligence goes. He has a very conceptual approach to rugby, and you can’t have that unless you’re a deep thinker.”

Canterbury would hold the Ranfurly Shield a record-equalling 25 times. The most impressive victory in that era was in 1983, when a very good Auckland team was beaten 31-9. Wayne Smith, Canterbury’s All Blacks first five-eighths, recalls a dramatic moment just before the game. “We were in the tunnel, waiting to go on the field. Alex suddenly grabbed my jersey and said, ‘Run it from everywhere.’ He just had a feeling, and at the last second decided it was on to run it all day.” By the time the game was over Canterbury had five tries, Auckland none.

Oddly, my pick for Wyllie’s best coaching moment came in what was fairly called the game of the century, in 1985, when Auckland took the Shield from Canterbury, winning 28-23. John Hart’s team, on the cusp of a great era, blitzed the first half, leading 24-0 at halftime.

Wyllie said he was disappointed for his men, but not in any way angry. “They were letting themselves down, after doing so much for the game in Canterbury. After proving themselves, and getting as far as they did, it was looking as if they might lose by 40 points. It was just a matter of me saying, ‘Auckland have scored 24 points, there’s no reason why you can’t. The ball’s there, just get the bloody thing and start scoring points!’” The second-half comeback remains one of the most dramatic in our rugby history.

Wyllie’s time coaching with the All Blacks was a mix of triumph and deep disappointment.

It began with the appointment of Wyllie and Hart as assistants to head coach Brian Lochore for the first World Cup, in 1987.

At one of the early training runs in Auckland, Lochore, Hart and Wyllie all turn out in tracksuits. Lochore sees the confusion in the team. Who’s actually in charge? He makes an instant decision. For the rest of the Cup only he and one assistant at a time will run the side.

Wyllie’s key moment in ’87 comes before a quarter-final with Scotland, whose pack is bigger and probably stronger than the All Blacks’ eight.

Lochore hands the squad over to Wyllie for a Thursday morning training session at Rugby Park in suburban Christchurch.

Wyllie rounded up some of the bigger men from his old Canterbury pack, and set scrum after scrum after scrum. Initially some All Blacks kept count, for their own amusement, but when the tally neared 50 the humour faded. Best guesses of the total by the time they’d finished ranged between 70 and 90. It all paid off. Many in the team rated the 30-3 drubbing of Scotland as the best game the All Blacks played in the Cup.

When Lochore stood down many thought Hart, who was appointed coach for an end-of-year tour to Japan in 1987, would lead the All Blacks to the 1991 World Cup. Instead Wyllie gets the job. At first Hart makes himself unavailable as a selector.

But by the end of 1988, Hart returns to the selection panel. When the ’91 Cup rolls around the NZRU appoint Wyllie and Hart as co-coaches. Brian Lochore commented: “They took the two of them out with one stone.”

The problem, as I saw at close range working on Wyllie’s book in 1991, was that Hart and Wyllie genuinely disliked each other. A brutal summing up by Mike Brewer, a senior All Black at the time, was sadly accurate: “Harty saw Grizz as a bumbling drunk, and Grizz saw Harty as a jumped up little shit.” It was probably inevitable that a deeply divided team, as loaded with talent as it was, would not make the ’91 final.

I last caught up with Alex (I could never quite bring myself to call him Grizz) at a 2022 reunion of his great Ranfurly Shield team in Christchurch. What in hindsight feels like a perfect tribute to a multi-faceted man came when Victor Simpson, a talented centre from the team, said to me: “You know, the best thing about this side is that when we played we were all mates. And we still are.”

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission