I've been reading Greg McGee's Tall Tales (Some True): memoirs of an unlikely writer which is a rollicking good yarn if you're interested in rugby, writing and an insight into the curious machinations and contorted history of modern New Zealand theatre and television.
McGee - for those who have forgotten and others who never knew - is, most famously, the author of the play Foreskin's Lament.
He has also written a plethora of others - Tooth & Claw, Out in the Cold, Whitemen - and probably as much homegrown television as any New Zealand writer.
His credits include Roche, Erebus - The Aftermath, Street Legal and Doves of War.
It is his first play that stays with me, partly because it was so much "of its time".
Given its title it is probably dodgy to call it seminal, but if any Kiwi play of the era earned the distinction, it was Foreskin's Lament.
There's another McGee, of course, one the old Otago rugby stalwarts will recall: the lanky long-haired lad from Oamaru who arrived at the University of Otago to study law, was soon in the University A's - coached by Duncan Laing - and not long after in an Otago side and part of an era replete with "names": Chris Laidlaw, Earle Kirton, Laurie Mains . . .
For anyone who participated in university rugby of that era, it is a nostalgic read: life revolved round the practices, the games - inevitable encounters with agricultural assassins out to show the pansy students a thing or two - the Saturday night after-match skinful, and the bruised boozy weaving waltz home via the pie-cart or the burger bar or the fish and chip shop.
But the real fascination is the tale of Foreskin's Lament, a tragedy that so perfectly echoed the zeitgeist of the early '80s and, through the transformative crucible of the Springbok Tour of 1981, which it uncannily anticipated, the possibilities of a different kind of society.
Out of the ashes . . . as they say.
We are all in certain respects rugby aficionados now.
Well, perhaps not all, but whatever its detractors say - and from time to time I'm among them myself - the era of professionalism, corporatism, wall-to-wall TV coverage and the celebrity athlete (think Dan Carter and his Jockey billboards) has made the sport a lot more approachable to a greater spread of people.
Today, even the post-feminist intelligentsia can enjoy a good game of rugby and not feel they've been slumming.
But it wasn't always like this.
Back in the early to mid-70s it was much more macho, clubbish and cultish - if that seems possible. By its very nature, the game played seriously demanded its allegiances seriously in return.
The team was everything: the loyalties, the relationships, even the animosities bound up in a culture that was both engrossing and enveloping and beyond questioning.
This was the world of McGee's fictional squad, his Foreskin and Ken and Mean and Clean and Irish.
It was difficult to let go, and to find out who was behind that hard-living, big-drinking, vague outline of a person staring back at you in the mirror the morning after, black-eyed or grazed-faced, forehead tattooed with the tread of aluminium sprigs.
Whaddarya? It still echoes down the years, to bone-chilling effect.
For those of us who were prisoners of our own making, who keenly felt the guilt of the anticipated betrayal we would inflict on our mates and everything they stood for - especially when we took the other side during the tour of '81 - Foreskin's Lament and Greg McGee shone the light and eased the way.
Gave us the courage.
It wasn't just a play: for some of us it was an endorsement of identity, a map to the future - and Foreskin's final anguished, heartfelt howl a bugle calling us out on to the road.
Flicking back through the pages of an edition, purchased in the bookshop beneath New Zealand House in London's Haymarket in the early '80s, is quite some trip.
Full of passion and intensity and wordplay, it is a brilliant, colourful exposition of its times.
It was, back then, also a radical recuperation of culture for the "common man"; it was a vision of the possibilities for a vital, urgent - angry - New Zealand theatre that reverberated way beyond the box office and into changing rooms of the team itself.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor of the Otago Daily Times. He played senior rugby for Massey University in the mid-70s.
Tall Tales (Some True), by Greg McGee and published by Penguin, will be reviewed shortly on the book pages of the ODT.
