‘Goose’ steps through memories

Press, 9 January 1986, Page 26

‘Goose’ steps through memories

By

PETER COMER

Watching the Kapiti four in action at the Waterside Workers Bowling Club in Heathcote yesterday, it was easy to tell which was J. G. (Johnny) Simpson, powerhouse prop for the All Blacks against South Africa in 1949. Thirty-five years on, the physique is still muscular, the hands seem big enough to make a full-size bowl look like a tennis ball, and the handshake crunchingly memorable. Known variously during his rugby days as “The Goose” or “Iron Man,” Johnny Simpson is one of a number of notables from other sports playing in the Rothmans national bowls tournament in Christchurch. The former Kiwi prop took up bowls in 1950, the year after the ill-fated 1949 tour to South Africa on which the All Blacks lost all four tests. He suffered a bad knee injury in the third test against the touring British Isles team and decided to give rugby away. “I thought bowling might help my knee, and it did,” he said yesterday.

Bowls today is very much a young person’s game, but it was a different story 35 years ago. At the age of only 28, the barrel-chested “Goose” must have cut an incongruous figure on the green among fellow players 20 and 40 years his senior. But he fell in love with bowls. Today, he is not only still playing at national level but also working hard for the sport as president of the new Kapiti Coast Centre and a councillor on the New Zealand Bowling Association. Not surprisingly, Johnny Simpson had little trouble in the form of physical confrontations during his 32 years in the pub business, the last few as mine host at the Paraparaumu Hotel. Aged 64, he is now retired and living at Raumati Beach, occasionally having a beer with his old friend, Fred Allen. The formidable All Black front row of Johnny Simpson at tighthead prop, Has Catley hooking, and that renowned self-defence expert, Kevin Skinner, as loosehead prop, was about the qaly success story of the 1949 tour to South Africa, which “The Goose” does

not paint as darkly as some. The main problem, he says, was that the ageing Alex McDonald, well into his 60s, went as coach instead of the obvious choice, Otago’s brilliant Vic Cavanagh. In the end, McDonald had very little to do with the All Blacks. “It put a terrible lot on . Fred Alien’s shoulders, being captain and trying to coach at the same time. Just playing the Springboks is enough to keep anyone going,” he said. Johnny Simpson had encountered Alex McDonald before, when the latter was coaching Wellington in 1946. The Kiwis had just romped round the country, winning every game with the fast, sparkling, open rugby that made them famous. Wellington reneged on pre-match promises to play an open game, played it dull and tight, and ground the Kiwis down in the forwards to win, 18-11. Winston McCarthy reckoned that moral victory for nine-man rugby set the game back 20 years. Johnny Simpson said it probably made little difference, and

that the same thing would have happened anyway. Having been co-opted as assistant coach to Fred Allen throughout Auckland’s great Ranfurly Shield era of the early 19605, he took a more than keen interest in the Canterbury-Auckland game last season to see if Canterbury would pass Auckland’s record of 25 successful shield defences. “Naturally I was pleased to see Auckland take the shield, but what a great way for Canterbury to lose it. It was a terrific game,” he said. Johnny Simpson takes his bowls seriously — he would not be playing in the national championships otherwise — but he believes that the sport has great social benefits as well. Three score years and four he might be, and genial with it, but one fancies that more than one bowler playing that gentle game alongside “The Goose” may have suppressed a little shudder to think that they could have met him in a rugby scrum in 1949. Footnote; Simpson’s Kapiti team, which is skipped by Dave Middleton, has qualified in the fours.