Ex-All Black recalls ‘ridiculous’ fight in Argentina that left him ‘thinking we are seriously going to die’
Ex-All Black Frano Botica in his rugby league days with Wigan and, inset, his hero, Serge Blanco of France
Franco Botica has vividly recalled the incredible fight that the Maori All Blacks encountered when touring Argentina in 1988, branding the on and off-field dust-up as “the scariest experience we had”.
A year after Botica and co. had helped the All Blacks win the first ever Rugby World Cup, the Maori embarked on an 11-match tour of Europe and Argentina, and what transpired in their 12-3 win over Tucuman was “ridiculous”, something the fly-half has never forgotten.
Now 62 and recovered from the stroke he suffered last year (“I probably can’t remember things quite as well, but I wasn’t that great before the stroke”, Botica has guested on the latest Dom Harvey Podcast show.
Some outrageous stories emerged over the course of the 105-minute interview, including his colourful recollection of the November day in 1988 when the Maori were left “thinking we were going to die” in Argentina.
“The crowd were getting wild and started throwing s*** at us…”
Asked for his worst memories from his rugby career, Botica began: “Just the injuries I have had over the years. Not serious but they hold you back a little, cartilage trims and those sorts of things in your knees. Missing the birth of a couple of the kids as well.”
He then brought up what happened in Argentina. “I have got another worse one, it was actually playing a team called Tucuman with the New Zealand Maori team. They are at the bottom of the Andes mountains, and they are renowned for fighting.
“They kicked off and all 15 of them came running in and started a fight. We had Buck Shelford, Hika Reid, Frank Shelford, the Brooke brothers (Robin and Zinzan), Steve McDowell – and they [Tucuman] wanted to start a fight.
“We didn’t want to, but we had no choice. There was a fight for the whole game; it was ridiculous. There was one time when it was sort of like a comedy show where you are chasing someone and they stop, you stop, come on, come on, and then they take off and you go again. It was just terrible.
“The game was called off five minutes before full time because the crowd were getting wild and started throwing s*** at us. So, we had to stand in the middle of the field until they ran out of ammunition.
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“Then we had to walk to the sideline together in a line, and there was a cage but the cage only went five metres and the gap to get under there was 10 metres. We had five metres of walking through a corridor of angry locals who were hitting us with umbrellas and all sorts of s***. So that was the worst, the scariest experience we had.
“We were under the grandstand, and we were looking for s***, like weapons. There were guys on barbecues, we were taking their forks or bits of wood off the side of it, just so we had something.
“Because we had to walk another 30 metres out the back from the changing rooms and we were thinking we are going to die, we are seriously going to die. The police had gotten around the back and blocked it off, and we had to grab our bags and jump straight on the bus and go back to the hotel.
“We jumped on the bus and were going, ‘Thank god’. The cops were in there saying, ‘Put your heads down, boys, don’t look and we’ll get back to the hotel…’ They were banging on the windows and the side of the bus, and we were saying, ‘Driver, hurry up, run them over if they are in the way’. We were then told not to go out that night because you might not be safe, so no one went out.”
Tucuman were eventually banned for two years by the Argentinian rugby union, but their fighting attitude didn’t diminish, judging by their 1993 encounter with the Springboks.
“Someone sent me a little clip of it [the Maori versus Tucuman game], so I went online to have a look at it and I was like, ‘Man’. Then above it, it had some other team, it might have been South Africa or something, so I pushed that and they are fighting too. Geez, it wasn’t just us; they [Tucuman] are just crazy. So that was scary,” said Botica.
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Switching his best memory, he chose his 1986 All Blacks debut against France as he got to play against his hero, Serge Blanco, whom he originally got to meet five years earlier. “The best was definitely the very first Test against the French down in Christchurch, without a doubt,” said Botica.
“You always remember your first one, and especially against one of my heroes, Serge Blanco. In 1981, I had left school and was playing for North Shore and got an opportunity. One of the players had married a French girl and he came to training one day and said, ‘I need a 10 and a seven to come to a little French rugby club to play for a season’.
“I’m like, ‘Is it free because I have no money?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, they’ll pay for you and they will give you a job’. So I ended up playing over there, it was a ski resort in the Pyrenees mountains, and it was beautiful. And Serge Blanco used to go there.
“So, I had met Serge Blanco in a café having a few drinks because all the guys I knew in the rugby team knew him because in the winter he would come down there a fair bit. So, I got to meet him there and it was like meeting Buck Shelford, I have got a poster of you and all that in my bedroom back in New Zealand.
“And so to then play my first game in the All Blacks when he is getting towards the end of his career was amazing, it was really good. Very, very excited to do that, and also a little scared because he was my hero and I’d watched him and he had scored tries from behind his own posts.
“Potentially, I could be the last line of defence and he is in front of me. I gave myself a slap and said, ‘Don’t think negatively like that. We are going to beat these fellas’, and we ended up winning.”