WELLINGTON – All Blacks great Colin Meads was a supremely competitive family man who was passionate about New Zealand rugby, yet would faint at the sight of blood and even learned to knit as a child, his brother Stan said in a eulogy to the former lock on Monday.
Meads, who in 1999 was named New Zealand’s greatest rugby player of the 20th Century, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and the former lock died in hospital in his home town of Te Kuiti on August 20.
“Every fibre in his body was competitive,” Stan Meads, a fellow All Blacks lock, told a funeral service in their home town on Monday. “Be it marbles or when we were kids and someone would say ‘I’ll race you to that tree there’, it was on.
“He didn’t believe in coming second. That wasn’t part of Pinetree’s makeup,” he added, referring to his brother’s nickname.
The small town in the King Country in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island came to a virtual standstill for the funeral, with politicians, former All Blacks and administrators flocking to pay their respects to Meads.
