Even the great Richie McCaw found out lately that fame doesn't last forever.
In a moment he described as "humbling", the 148-test All Black captain found out that there is a new generation of All Black fans that haven't grown up watching his on-field deeds either in person or on TV.
"I was doing some promo work in Christchurch, and a lady came in to say she'd told her 10-year-old son that she was meeting Richie today,' he said in a lengthy interview before the All Blacks' test in Chicago this weekend.
"She told me her kid thought she meant Richie Mo'unga, so that kind of put it all in perspective."
That young All Black fan was born the same year McCaw's career ended, with him hoisting the World Cup for a second time being his last act in test rugby. He largely disappeared from the public eye after that, content to give away being arguably the highest profile person in the country in favour of setting up his own helicopter business.
"I had to prove to myself that I could succeed as Richie McCaw the person, rather than the All Black," he said.
The business was a success, one that he's now sold and moved on to a few more in the Canterbury region. McCaw is unsurprisingly in demand on the speaking circuit, which is why he's in Chicago as part of NZ Rugby's off field activities in what is a big week for the All Black brand.
"It makes it worthwhile to come up here and do that sort of thing… these weekends provide the opportunity. There's time to show people what the All Blacks are about, both the game and who the people are. The networks are pretty extensive, so you never know what can come from these things," he said.
Despite not being immediately recognised by 10-year-olds, there's little doubt that McCaw has considerable success off the field rubbing shoulders with wealthy potential sponsors. After all, he is considered to be the greatest All Black of all time.
McCaw admitted that times had changed around players being able to leverage their own brand image but said that it was a complicated line between that and maintaining the All Black team mentality.
"No one owns it - even when you play for the All Blacks, you don't own it, you're just there to give to the team for what is a big legacy," he said.
"So, when you're trying to show that - and you do that through personality - it's a real balance between showing that it's about the team, and everyone's, no matter who you are, there to just be one of the team. I think that's what's a little bit different to other sports. You might have a team and individuals that you're quite happy to promote because that's what fans want. It's a real balance."
The famously social-media averse McCaw said that part of the situation now was about how incentivised people are around promoting themselves.
"One of the things in the All Blacks was always about when you come in there, it's what you give to the team and you'll get rewards out of that, but it's about putting 'we' in front of 'me'. If you look at years gone by, people probably had that first thought. Whereas now it's a little bit more about… what I can get out of that?'" he said.
The state of the game now
Would McCaw be as effective these days as an openside flanker, given how much the game has changed since he hung up the boots?
"I don't know. This game's certainly changed and it looks way more physical. I reckon you just adapt, you know? Like, I look at my career, when I started to when I finished the game, it changed quite a lot," he said.
"And if you don't adapt you end up not surviving. So I like to think I'd adapt. You look at players. Maybe you get back to the 80s, 90s. They would've adapted because they're athletes, if they had all the same stuff we had, they would have had no trouble."
McCaw admitted that he has some frustration around watching rugby these days, especially in a couple of areas of the game that will have a lot of fans nodding in agreement.
"The time to set the scrum, for example. It's meant to be 30 seconds… I used to get frustrated on the field. That's an easy way of speeding the game up [if they fixed it].
"We're our own worst enemies when it comes to picking up mistakes through television. You don't want to see howlers that cost people the game. But my view is that the game has grey areas and has human input… how a ref interprets it. We're so critical of a referee gets it wrong and he's worried about getting it wrong, so we make sure we get 100 percent right, which makes the game quite stalled in my opinion."
McCaw will hopefully not have to put up with too much of that when he watches the game from a Soldier Field luxury box. That's his arena now, shaking hands and swaying opinions, at the end of a very big financial week for the All Blacks and NZ Rugby. His sentiments about the 2025 All Blacks are pretty similar to everyone else, that they need to find consistency.
"When they put it together, they are as good as any team probably we've seen. It's just being able to do it for long periods in a game and then week after week."
