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I started playing football for Dunedin City as a 7-year-old so by the time the All Whites began their epic 1981 World Cup qualifying campaign I'd been called a "poofter" for a solid six years.
I was not alone.
As far as our rugby-playing mates were concerned, all football players were limp-wristed visitors from the planet Soft, and it was their birthright to at all times undermine any claims we might have had towards masculinity.
There was little malice involved. It was just the way it was in New Zealand.
The national rugby team wasn't called the All Blacks for nothing. They blocked out the sky. The sun shone on them and them alone.
The solid Kiwi kids (or meatheads as we called them) played rugby. The skinny kids and sons of Poms ("football sissies" as they called us) played football.
The banter was as relentless as it was unsophisticated. The rugby players called us "poofters". We pointed out they played a game most of the planet had never heard of.
They said football players kissed each other when they scored. We pointed out that football players got paid enormous amounts of money to score. They said football players kissed each other when they scored. We cut our losses and shut up.
Then 1981-82 happened and it all changed. Well, for a couple of years anyway. For us football kids, the start of the World Cup campaign was just New Zealand being extremely ordinary at football again, a sideshow to the main business of watching Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal on Big League Football on television on Sunday afternoons.
The All Whites were our team, but we were under no illusions. They were a bunch of British hacks and some no-name Kiwis. We knew they were rubbish.
But then it turned out everyone in our qualifying group was even more rubbish - and New Zealand qualified for its first World Cup, the 1982 finals in Spain.
Nothing is more infectious than winning and so a nation bruised by the 1981 Springbok Tour quickly caught World Cup fever. Football was suddenly everywhere. Shops started selling All Whites calendars.
Families threw away the biscuit tins they had bought to commemorate Charles and Di's 1981 wedding and replaced them with All Whites biscuit tins sporting shining team photos of their new heroes.
Playgrounds across Dunedin were packed with kids kicking a round ball. We footballers had the edge. The better sportsmen among the rugby players (the backs) picked the game up quickly. We were gutted they were so good.
My brother and I sent away for All Whites kits and they took weeks to arrive, and when they did, the shirts were itchy and too tight and the shorts were see-through.
But we wore them with pride to the park for our endless two-man kick-abouts (where, despite the New Zealand kits, we still pretended to be playing for Everton or Manchester United).
The year after the World Cup came the ultimate victory.
Some of the same rugby players who had derided us switched codes and started playing football.
That was some turnaround in a country where until the 1970s boys used to have to produce a note at school if they didn't want to play rugby.
For me it was bittersweet.
There was a sense of gloating that we had been right all along, but there was also the feeling that a precious secret had been busted open - like every moron in the neighbourhood had suddenly become a fan of the cool band that only you and your friends had heard of.
But that was all afterwards.
After the drama of the qualifying that built to a breathless climax, with whole families gathered around the TV.
After the strange pride of watching your country at the finals, not caring about getting hammered because just being there was enough.
After witnessing Steve Wooddin notch a world-class goal against Scotland and realising that he had played for Dunedin City (my old club!) and maybe we weren't, after all, complete rubbish at football.
Needless to say, football fever didn't last for long. By 1984, all the rugby kids were back playing rugby again.
Although something had changed. The world had moved on.
We were no longer called "poofters". No, if I remember rightly, the vogue insult for football players was then "woofters".