No-one knows whether Keith Murdoch will be watching New Zealand’s World Cup quarter-final in Cardiff this weekend, but the All Blacks have certainly not forgotten their fallen giant.
Players and coaches from the world’s top-ranked side went to the Angel Hotel in the city this month to perform a ritual of atonement for a moment of madness when a security guard was floored by an All Black.
Players have gone to the bar each time New Zealand have been in the city since Murdoch’s ill-fated appearance there in 1972 after scoring a winning try for his team against Wales at Cardiff Arms Park next door.
They have now been 12 times since 1972.
This time the team arrived two days before beating Georgia 43-10 on October 3, a staff member at the Angel told AFP.
“There were seven or eight of them, players and coaches. They stayed for an hour, drank one or two beers and left, as usual,” the worker said.
A team spokesman said it is not an official pilgrimage “but every time the All Blacks are in Cardiff there are some players who will go to the hotel to pay their respects”.
There are few regulars left who remember Keith Murdoch, a giant of a man weighing more than 110 kilograms (240 pounds) and wearing a distinctive Pancho Villa moustache.
His chest was so big that the New Zealand tailor had to sew extra material into his shirts.
New Zealand were on a 32-match tour of Europe — including club teams as well as Tests — in 1972/73, with the colossus seldom out of the action early on.
– All Black humiliated –
The 13th match on December 2 pitted Ian Kirkpatrick’s All Blacks against a Wales side featuring Gareth Edwards and JPR Williams.
Cardiff Arms Park was jam-packed with 52,000 people who saw prop-forward Murdoch play the game of a lifetime, scoring the winning try in the 19-16 victory.
The celebrations were in the Angel Hotel. But when closing time came Murdoch went looking for beer in the kitchen. Security guard Peter Grant confronted him and insults and then punches were thrown.
Grant ended on the floor with a black eye. Murdoch awoke with a hangover expecting to apologise but, as media pressure mounted, within two days he was on a plane home. Murdoch was humiliated, the first All Black to be sent home from a tour.
But he never arrived. At a changeover in Singapore, he used an assumed name to fly to Australia and was never seen in public again.
He has spent much of the time wandering in Australia. Some journalists have found him, however.
In 1977, Terry McLean tracked down Murdoch at an oil-drilling site near Perth in Western Australia. Murdoch unceremoniously told the reporter what he could do with his questions. McLean quickly left.
Three years later he was seen in New Zealand. Friends told how Murdoch had saved their son from drowning in a swimming pool.
New Zealand journalist Margot McRae found him in 1990 in Tully, Queensland. Murdoch only agreed to speak off-camera.
“He was a deeply shy person and not very articulate,” said McRae, who eventually wrote a play, “Finding Murdoch”.
“There was a real sense of a wound that has never healed,” she said.
In 2001, Murdoch was a witness in an inquiry over a missing Aborigine youth, who had once tried to break into his home near Alice Springs.
He has not been seen since. Some of his New Zealand team-mates have expressed regret that more was not done for Murdoch, while Kirkpatrick made an appeal for the prop to be left alone.