Rugby legend Sir Wayne Shelford is done with being a 'hard man'

Wednesday, 16 November 2022

TikTok has introduced a whole new audience to one of New Zealand rugby’s “most mythical moments”. A clip that opens with the question “is this the toughest man ever to play rugby?” ends with Sir Wayne “Buck” Shelford telling his teeth-rattling story, which involves the words “testicle”, “ripped”, “scrotum”, “hanging”.

The clip has 3 million views on the All Blacks’ official TikTok account, more than half of those within the first 24 hours of it going online.

It has been 36 years since Shelford (Ngāpuhi) endured intimate and agonising injuries in a test match against France, the so-called Battle of Nantes, and kept playing to the end of the game. It’s what comes up again and again whenever Shelford is mentioned: he's a hard man, a tough guy, he's staunch as bro.

'That's not how I see myself though,' the man himself says. 'I see myself as a very well-balanced person. I'm talking about the balance of work, family, friends and a social life.”

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The former All Black captain is quietly shifting the dial on the Kiwi bloke stereotype, opening up the way men talk about health, both physical and mental. It’s come after his own cancer journey, advocacy roles and surprisingly impactful spells on reality TV.

Then how does he feel about that hard man reputation? I ask when we meet in a café on Auckland’s North Shore. People seem to love that idea of being man enough to never admit to being hurt or in pain

'The thing is that's not how it was,' Shelford says. 'I didn't even know it had happened. I got kicked down there and it bloody hurt like a bastard. But I chucked a bit of water down there and carried on because I didn't know [the scrotum] had ripped until after the game. It was just an injury. It wasn't life-threatening. Once I knew about it, I went to the doc who stitched it up.

'People like telling it. Maybe it's because of that male staunchness, that idea that you still have to carry on, no matter what happens, you still have to get out there and do it. That's not how it was. And I'm over that story myself.'

The power of reality TV

Now when talking about Shelford people, unsurprisingly, often focus on his contribution on the rugby field: the 48 appearances for New Zealand he made between 1985 and 1990, 31 as captain and including 22 tests – the 14 tests he played as captain, all undefeated – the 22 tries he scored.

And people talk about his significant work for charitable causes too. Especially as a campaigner for men's health and an ambassador for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, but also in areas including youth suicide prevention, Māori education, community housing for the disabled and organisations focused on supporting service men and women and their families.

Last month Shelford, who enlisted in the navy at 17 and served as physical training instructor until he was first named as an All Black in 1985, became the new national president of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association (RSA).

Rarely however does anyone mention another space in which Shelford has made a real contribution in Aotearoa, and that is in our locally produced reality television.

Shelford has been doing some incredible work advocating for men's health on prime-time TV over the past few years. Never in that sententious public service announcement-way either, just gently gently, sometimes using te reo Māori, which Shelford learned as an adult, sometimes as part of the banter.

It came up when he was a contestant on 2021's (absolutely iconic series of) Celebrity Treasure Island on TVNZ (where a group of New Zealand public figures compete against each other in order to win real money for the charities they support). His chosen charity was Te Kiwi Māia, which provides care for frontline workers and service people who have been injured, mentally or physically, in the line of duty (his wife, Lady Joanne Shelford, sits on the charity's advisory board).

He's also highlighted a lot of important kōrero on the subject as the host, alongside Sir Graham Henry, on the 2020 and 2022 series of Three show Match Fit, where ex-All Blacks confront their own serious and occasionally even life-threatening mental and physical health challenges in an attempt to get 'match fit' for one last game (and also, you know, to save their own lives and be around for their children and grandchildren).

There's something powerful in seeing Shelford - the “toughest guy ever to play rugby”, an unbeaten All Black captain, the epitome of staunchness - talk openly and frankly about men's health, including mental health, demonstrate vulnerability and admit his own past weaknesses and failures, and advocate for men to communicate more, seek help when they need it and check in on each other more.

‘It’s about getting past your fears’

Shelford himself became particularly passionate about the cause of men's health after he was diagnosed with cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, in 2007. He admits before that he had let his health slide, and was carrying an extra 40kgs on top of his 110kg playing weight.

'It was owning a pub,' he says. 'When you are a publican there's a lot of after hours drinking and eating, you don't get out of the hotel until one or two in the morning. It wears you out, that life.'

But the cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment (six months of chemotherapy) made him realise not just how important it was to take care of your own health - and that men often didn't - but that men's health was not talked about publicly enough.

'There wasn't even a lot of material in the cancer ward about men's health,' he says. 'There were flyers for breast cancer, cervical cancer, ovarian cancer. How to spot the signs. But very little for men.'

There are admittedly serious barriers to seeking help that are to do with equity, he says: for families where money is scarce, it can be hard to justify paying to see a doctor. 'Especially in our Māori and Polynesian families, cost is a real issue.'

But he has seen a psychological barrier too, particularly for men. He says Kiwi men have a fear about seeking help, especially around their health. 'They put on this tough guy facade but really it's fear. But I look at it and I say that you only have one chance at life. We need to get over it. We all fear things. It's about getting past your fears.'

'Men don't talk to their sons about testicular cancer, about prostate cancer. We need to educate our boys more and earlier.'

If you want to be well: ‘make friends with people’

Health is not just physical of course, he says. When he was in the navy there were regular medical checks, where the doctor didn't just check you out physically, he or she would ask how you were feeling, how your marriage or relationship was faring, or how you were coping as a parent.

'Whereas today I think that technology is killing us,' Shelford says. 'It's conditioning us to live on devices. There's no real communication any more, there's no face to face stuff.

If you want to be well: 'Make friends with people,' he says. 'When you have real friends, you have friends for life. But you have got to be a friend to have friends. I ask questions of the guys all the time. How's your health, how's your mum doing, how are the kids. And sometimes they might not tell you everything. But I keep asking.'

It's not all straitlaced and serious though, Shelford says. 'Men banter,' he says. 'Like on Match Fit. The boys would take the mickey out of each other. But in doing that they also support each other. When we were training someone would fall behind we'd go back and say keep going, keep going. But it's the banter that keeps us going.'

He and co-host Henry did not know the backstories of the other men on the show before it was filmed, Shelford says, and some heavy stuff gets shared: the men talk about the struggles they have faced, especially after they stopped playing, the issues they have had with anxiety and depression, the often problematic relationships they have with food and alcohol, and unresolved trauma from their childhoods - more than once related to the early death of a father from the very health challenges they are now trying to forestall.

'Just because we are All Blacks, we are humans too,' says Kees Meeuws in the first episode of series one. 'There have been times I have been down and I have had self-doubt. You can be the toughest man out there but if you lock it all down it's going to come back and bite you in the arse.'

In series two, one of the participants is Va’aiga Tuigamala, aka Inga the Winger, who died, aged 52, just months after the show finished filming, from heart-related issues.

“We didn’t have the support back then,' Tuigamala said in one episode. 'It was just ‘harden up and get on with it’, don’t show any emotions.”

Generational change

Buck Shelford's father, Natanahira Eruera Shelford (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Toki me Ngāti Horahia), was born in 1926.

'He was a very quiet man,' his son says. 'A very humble man. He was part of J Force in the Second World War, part of the cleanup in Japan”

He was a good provider for the family, tending a garden bearing watermelons and pumpkins and helping build their home in Rotorua.

“But that generation, men didn't talk much,” says Shelford. “Only really to make sure you did your jobs around the house. I mean we saw him on Saturday afternoon. And at dinner every night. But you'd have dinner at five or six and then he'd be asleep. He worked big hard days. But I left home at 17. I never really knew him. So there's a lot of questions I would like to ask him now.'

It is a very different world now from the one his father was born into, he says. That old model of staunch and silent masculinity, which his father embodied - or perhaps that idea of being “tough enough” to punch on through, to ignore pain and play on that some might think Shelford himself personified - was not serving men well.

'Back in the day men survived by fight or flight,' Shelford says. 'So if we fear something, we avoid it or we fight it. I think some men are still doing that. And back then that might have worked. But I'm not sure if it is working for men now.'