The sharpest argument in this episode of The Ruck's archival series comes from Auckland-based rugby historian Jamie Wall, who makes the case that New Zealand's repeated exclusion of Māori players from tours to South Africa — in 1928, 1949 and 1960 — was not coerced but voluntary, predating the formal apartheid statutes. "They were kind of engaging in apartheid themselves," Wall says flatly. The episode uses Fred Allen's furious retrospective — "We should have told the South Africans where they could shove their tour" — and the All Blacks' infamous 1949 record of losing two tests on the same day in different continents to illustrate precisely how self-defeating that capitulation was. Mornay Duplessis, speaking from Hermanus, provides the counter-perspective from inside the Springbok camp: his generation knew the political situation existed but were, as he puts it, "pretty much guarded from a lot of the real news" while chasing the ultimate prize of a Springbok jersey.
Wall also pushes back against the received wisdom that the catastrophic fallout from the 1976 tour — Soweto, the Montreal Olympic boycott, the blood-and-tears editorial from the Dominion — represented a turning point in New Zealand public opinion. He argues the opposite: a National Party election campaign built on keeping politics out of sport won that year, showing that a substantial portion of New Zealanders simply did not care about the international condemnation and just wanted to watch the Boks play the All Blacks. The episode ends on a cliff-hanger with 1981 still to come — reason enough to stay subscribed.