“We’ll be sent down for 40 press-ups,” I mutter as we approach Sir Fred ‘The Needle’ Allen’s Whangaparaoa redoubt. “And a lap round the block,” adds North & South’s photographer. “Possibly two.” We’re four minutes late.

We dawdle down the path, heads bowed, condemned men awaiting our fate. We’re entitled to be nervous: as Sir Brian Lochore has noted, The Needle didn’t earn his nickname on account of his Singer sewing machine-savvy.

The former All Blacks captain, the great, undefeated All Blacks coach, was an accomplished tyrant — the hardest taskmaster the game has known. My father used to slip him into conversation as half-hero, half-ogre — a boogie monster invoked to terrify young boys into tidying their rooms, making their beds with hospital corners and keeping their singlets and underpants separate.

I knock.

His biographer, 95-year-old Alan Sayers, opens the door. Fred’s not well, he tells me. He’s been having terrible flashbacks from the Second World War — from his time as an infantryman in Guadalcanal. He is tired, sick, old — at 91, he’s the oldest-living All Black. So Fred’s driven himself to Orewa for “a top-up”. A blood transfusion. He’ll be back in an hour and a half.

In the meantime, he’s instructed Alan to show me round. Give me the tour. And talk about the book, just out, titled Fred The Needle.

We start in an alcove off the lounge. A framed hand-coloured photograph of a woman in her 40s. “That’s the wonderful mother,” Alan tells me. “Flossie.” He runs two fingers over the glass, along the line of her cheeks. “You can see the character in Flossie’s face,” he says. “She had a drunken husband. Fred used to stand up to him and get smashed to the ground.”

The father, also called Fred, lost his job on the railways during the Depression and ditched his family. Young Fred, the fifth child of six, took a delivery job with the local baker. Tough times, Alan avers. “He pedalled those cakes on his bicycle for his poverty-stricken mother when he was a kid. And his mother, Flossie, realised that this was a very, very special boy. He showed a character then — a reliability and steadfastness — that has never wavered.”

But you’ll hear more about Flossie later, Alan says. He picks up another photo. Fred’s late wife Norma. “Mrs Needle,” he says. “That gives you an idea what a gracious, beautiful woman she was.” More photos. Fred’s “beloved” granddaughter, Nessie, who is studying politics at Otago University. “Beautiful,” Alan says. “She looks like a movie star… like Brooke Shields.” And then a photo of Fred’s old dog Basil.

In case you’re thinking age has blunted The Needle, Alan is keen to stress the old soldier has maintained his standards. He opens Fred’s fridge. “Look how tidy this is for a bachelor,” he exclaims. “Immaculate.” He’s right — the carrots are neatly stacked, the Brussels sprouts in formation. The pantry is perfect: tins are lined up by genre, the jars of pickles all face label-out.

Now follow me, he says. Back through the house — “That’s Fred’s bedroom there!” — and down the stairs to the double-garage. “This was stacked with boxes and books and papers,” Alan says. “An Aladdin’s cave.”

He and co-biographer Les Watkins spent days rummaging through the boxes.

A case can be made that The Needle, more than anyone, is responsible for how we play the game. Our national style where you pass and run — and only kick when you have to. “Where 14 men aim to give the 15th a start of half a yard.”

I open an iron sea-chest. Books, rugby programmes, sepia postcards, old Super 8 film rolls, framed black and white photos. The 1938 Linwood Rugby Football Club’s senior team (club player 1937–1940 F.R. Allen). The 1946 All Blacks who beat Australia 31–8 (captain F.R. Allen). The 1967 All Black team that toured Canada, Great Britain and France (coach F.R. Allen).

Another box, then another. Books. Colin Meads, All Black by Alan Veysey.

The greatest All Black of them all has written the foreword to Fred The Needle. “I was his number one disciple,” Meads writes. “Fred Allen is the most dynamic and inspiring individual I have known in 60 years’ involvement in sport.”

It’s effusive praise. And the book has more of the same, much more. Sometimes too much. Nevertheless, a case can be made that The Needle, more than anyone, is responsible for how we play the game. Our national style where you pass and run — and only kick when you have to. “Where 14 men aim to give the 15th a start of half a yard.” We’re standing in the garage of Total Rugby’s architect.

Alan takes me back upstairs. “Have you ever met him face to face?” he asks. “No? Well, you’re about to meet a man who is the greatest psychologist I have ever known — and I’m 95 years of age. He is an amazing, amazing personality. It was his ability to diagnose men that was his success. He can see right through you. You’ll be very pleased to meet him. You’ll remember this for a long time.”

It’s at this moment that an old man’s head slowly bobs up the stairs. He has his back to us; Alan, sitting on the couch and facing away, has his back to him. Neither man can hear the other. It is an odd interlude: the biographer praising his subject who eventually gets to the top of the stairs where he stands before a larger-than-life photoshopped portrait of himself in medieval armour, his hand on his sword (a gift from the Mad Butcher).

Behold Sir Needle.

Fred was knighted in 2010 for services to rugby. While his war-interrupted playing career was short (he played 21 times for the All Blacks, always as captain), he was incomparable as a coach. He guided Auckland to a Ranfurly Shield-equalling 25 defences. Steered the All Blacks to 37 games without defeat.

He sits in Norma’s old chair. He’s weary, takes a few minutes to find his range. But he fires up when asked if his methods — his style — would work today.

“Of course. There’s no difference. They stupidly keep changing the laws, but the fundamentals are the same. Position. Possession. Pace. It’s a simple game.”

There is some old-school harrumphing. He doesn’t like socks down round the ankles — he always wore garters. He thinks lineouts have become unnecessarily complicated and scrums collapse too easily. Pick ’n’ goes give him the “guts-ache”. And he has no time for showboating.

“These signs and all that they do — I don’t know what the hell they’re supposed to be. It’s a 15-man game — those guys have forgotten there are 14 other blokes on the field who are responsible for the try. I tell you what — they wouldn’t be doing it if I were coach.

A pat on the back is enough. If you’re going to start hugging men and jumping on their backs… I say go down to Windmill Road or Hagley Park [netball venues] and put a gym-frock on and play with the girls…

“There’s a place for all sorts of things, but rugby’s a physical game. A pat on the back is enough. If you’re going to start hugging men and jumping on their backs… I say go down to Windmill Road or Hagley Park [netball venues] and put a gym-frock on and play with the girls.”

“Brilliant!” Alan chirrups. The Needle grins — then calms his inner curmudgeon. Unlike a lot of old-timers, he’s complimentary about modern players. He rhapsodises over Quade Cooper (“He’s extra good: he’s got a dummy that anybody would nearly take”), Conrad Smith (“He’s tougher than I thought he was”) and, of course, Carter and McCaw. The captain’s got great body position, he says. “But he’ll get penalised a lot in the World Cup, I’m picking. They’re starting to get at him a bit now.” Fairly or unfairly? “Probably both.”

Now his eyes are dancing. He’s not interested in the past — we’ll come back to that, he says — and wants to talk about the game now. He watches several games a week — on the telly, on his own, preferably, as he finds chatter distracting, or at Eden Park where he is the patron of Auckland Rugby.

“It’s a simple game,” he repeats. “Run. Pass. Tackle. But I see some shocking passing today. There’s too much fancy stuff — flinging the ball without looking where it’s going.” Moreover, a technical flaw besets our players. For generations, we’ve favoured the broken-elbow pass, rather than the swing pass (so beloved of the French). “Our passing is among the worst in the world,” he says. “I used to walk the All Blacks the whole field after training and get them to pass the ball, put it in front of the next bloke. Learn how to pass properly.”

Simple stuff, he says. “It’s where your feet are placed. You hit against your shoulder. One movement. Keep your head down. It’s like golf — if you lift your head, the ball goes up in the air. Now, that Southland halfback [Jimmy Cowan] has really sped up his pass. He’s passing beautifully now. One sweeping movement.”

Speed, he continues. Everything must be done at speed. Now, he says, we can go back. To understand his playing philosophy, we go back to the war. Back to the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force’s “Kiwis” Army team that barnstormed across Europe in the winter of 1945–46.

This was one of the great tours. The Kiwis lost just two of their 33 games and beat Wales, who’d beaten the 1935 All Blacks at Cardiff Arms Park. But it was the style of their play that stirred the imagination: the Kiwis played exhilarating 15-man rugby, masterminded by halfback Charlie Saxton. Meanwhile Fred, playing first-five, emerged as one of the tour’s stars. “He could sidestep off either foot,” wrote commentator Winston McCarthy. “He had a turn of speed, he had good hands, he had a good head. He was a beautiful footballer.”

However, the Saxtonian style perished three years later in a tour that would become known simply by the sobriquet “49” — the All Blacks’ 1949 tour to South Africa. All four tests were lost. It was New Zealand rugby’s greatest humiliation.

But that team’s captain bridles at the commonly-held notion they were thrashed. “We only had six tries scored against us in South Africa in 23 games. And we scored more tries than them in the tests.”

The difference between the teams was nothing. And everything.

Factor in the 27-day trip across by sea on the cramped Tamaroa; the cross-country train trips up to 35 hours at a time; the metronomic Okey Geffin who hardly missed a kick; and of course, the refs who, he snarls, “were bloody cheats”.

Now take out the Maori players — the likes of Johnny Smith, Vince Bevan and Ben Couch. “They’d have made all the difference. But our gutless administrators bowed to the South Africans. It was disgraceful.

We should have told the South Africans where to stick their tour.”

Still. Four nil. On the way home, aboard the Dominion Monarch, Fred told his team that they’d played the game the right way, unlike their opponents. “No captain has ever been as proud of his team as I am of you.”

On the deck in front of his team, he place-kicked his football boots into the Indian Ocean. He’d never play representative rugby again. He was only 29.

“It hurt me so much for a long time,” he says. But eventually he’d come back to the game. He’d coach Grammar, then Auckland, then, in 1966, the All Blacks.

What a team this was. The forward pack — Ken Gray, Bruce McLeod, Jack Hazlett, Waka Nathan, Kel Tremain, Brian Lochore and the Meads brothers — was close to an all-time All Black eight. They were masters of 10-man rugby, the grinding game where the ball was hidden up the jumper and rum- bled slowly, inexorably upfield. It was dour, dull, but effective. We’d learnt our lesson from ’49. Leave the flash stuff to the Aussies, the French, the Brits: we played the game to win. But when the 1967 All Blacks were named, The Needle unilaterally declared a revolution.

“This will be one hell of a team but it won’t be playing the type of football you’re used to seeing. This team will run with the ball at every opportunity and it will win by scoring tries — not by kicking goals.

“Rugby is basically a running, passing game so our number one priority will be to attack at all times from all parts of the field.”

This will be one hell of a team but it won’t be playing the type of football you’re used to seeing. This team will run with the ball at every opportunity and it will win by scoring tries — not by kicking goals.

He was, in effect, going back to the future: to Charlie Saxton and the “Three Ps” — Position, Possession and Pace. These commandments had in turn been passed to Saxton from earlier generations — from Cliff Porter’s 1924 Invincibles, from Dave Gallaher’s 1905 Originals, from Joe Warbrick’s Natives of 1887.

The Three Ps. First you must be in the right place to get the ball. Position. Then you must hold on to it. Possession. And when you see space, strike. At Pace. Says The Needle: “Rugby is a game which should be played at speed all the time.” Speed of the pass always beats the man. “And once you pass, back up the ball carrier.”

In the 17 matches they played in 1967, the All Blacks scored 71 tries. England, France, Scotland and Wales were beaten, Ireland spared by a foot-and-mouth outbreak.

It’s perhaps surprising, that the architect of Total Rugby, rugby where players were encouraged to express themselves, was also, as Colin Meads said, the “strongest disciplinarian to ever coach the All Blacks”. Then again, maybe that’s why his expansive game worked. The razzle-dazzle rested on structure.

He’s in benign grandfatherly mode at the moment, but imagine The Needle in full niggle. When he called a 6.30am training session on a frigid Greymouth morning and told recalcitrants: “Get up you bastards or you’ll never play for Auckland again.”

Or, a few years later, when Colin Meads made the mistake of yawning during a team-talk. “Am I boring you, Pinetree?” he barked. “Because if I am, there’s a bus that leaves on the hour for Hamilton and you’ll be on the next one.”

“Fred Allen was not a man to be trifled with,” Meads says. “But although he could be fearsome at times, he was always fair. His loyalty and integrity ensured he enjoyed enormous respect from his players.”

When The Needle’s coaching career ended prematurely — sawn off, he says, by duplicitous NZRU panjandrums — his players presented him with a cup. “That cup is the most precious I have,” he says, in the book. The inscription reads, “To Needle. In appreciation from the 1968 All Blacks in Australia.”

Loyalty, he says, is essential to building a team. And it’s hard to imagine a more loyal friend than Alan Sayers. They met in 1946 at Eden Park. Alan, who won a bronze medal in the 4x440 yards at the 1938 Empire Games, was reporting for the Auckland Star. Fred was playing for Grammar.

A friendship formed. They’d meet for a drink at the RSA (Fred had fought in the Pacific and Italy and was twice wounded; Alan served in naval intelligence). They’d go fishing together. Later, Alan would drive Fred to Eden Park. “I’ve been very privileged to know this man,” Alan told me ear- lier in the afternoon. “I was very honoured when he trusted me to write this book.”

Fred The Needle is a reverential account. We read about a boyhood dog — a Labrador called, believe it or not, Rover. A school report notes young Fred was an “extremely well-behaved pupil… and a pleasure to have in the classroom”. There’s a charming account of the first All Black test Fred saw, one he relates to me now. “I was 10 years old. I was on the bank with my mother. I was looking through the wire because I couldn’t see over the rail, but I’ll always remember the great George Nepia. Two of the English stars [C.D.] Aarvold and [J.C.] Morley were running at him. Two on one. Right in the middle of the field — a certain try. “But Nepia somehow pulled them together and got them both. It was incredible. He mesmerised them. He was like a witchdoctor.”

There was always going to be a certain sadness to this memoir. Many of the people in the book are no longer here. His mother, Flossie, who took him to all his games, and who he would always look to after scoring, was critically injured in a traffic accident shortly after he was named All Black captain. “I visited her every day,” Fred says.

“For months. She slowly passed away.” His son, Murray, died suddenly aged 42, a subject too sensitive for Alan to investigate. Wife Norma died in 2009. Then there were his fallen comrades from the war. “Some were some terrific footballers,” he recalls. “You could see they were going to go places, but the only places they went were in the tall weeds.”

Time marches on — and The Needle’s greatest hits were more than four decades ago. However, Alan strives heroically to fill the gap. We read about Fred’s parallel life as a women’s dressmaker. We hear his thoughts on nuclear war, performance-enhancing drugs and fishing; we hear how he saved Manly Yacht Club (chapter sub-title: “When an historic yacht club is on the verge of extinction, Fred steps forward to assist”). Meet Super Fred aka Captain Needle.

Struck by the respectful tone of the book, I had asked Alan if Fred had any weaknesses? “It’s a great question… but I, I really… couldn’t. I’d have to think that one over.” Ten minutes later, he returned to the question. “I cannot think of any faults. He was a great coach because he was a great man.”

And there were successes after he finished up with the All Blacks. In 1973, he got a call from the Marlborough Rugby Union asking if he’d help them out for a Shield challenge. “Everybody thought Canterbury was going to win by 50 points. But I went down and Marlborough picked the Shield up 13–6.”

His tape-recorded team talk — he was called back to Auckland on business prior to the match — is quoted in the book. It was stirring, Churchillian. Said Marlborough captain Ray Sutherland afterwards: “What he instilled into our team cannot adequately be described in words. He taught us the value of cohesive teamwork and you have just seen the result.”

Then, for five years from 1984, Fred managed a Rugby News XV of U21 players and took them away to the North. Fifteen went on to become All Blacks.

Needless to say, they never lost a game.