Tony Johnson

In fact, I bought a copy of it along for you, and so you can give it away to one of your subscribers maybe or something like that, someone who follows you regularly.

But yeah, thanks very much for having me.

Lynn McConnell.

Yeah.

So it's called He Piko He Taniwha, which means on every bend, a Chief, literally.

And it goes back to the Waikato River.

It's a legend of the Waikato and they adopted it as one of their catchphrases when they had this transformation at the Chiefs when Dave Rennie came in and they went on a bit of a journey of discovery.

But the origins of the book was that Lynn and I had worked on a book that did pretty well about 10 years ago called Behind the Silver Fern.

And it was a story of the All Blacks in the words of the players.

So we had to go back into archive material, diaries, old interviews, and get the words of the players to take us through the first 50 or 60 years.

And then after that, we interviewed about 60 players, some very notable All Blacks, and we put it all together.

And so this was the story of the All Blacks in their words, right up to, I think it was the 2019 World Cup in the end.

And Kent Currie, who's a real mover and shaker at the Chiefs organisation, they were setting up for their 30th anniversary something called the Ruakura Rugby Club, which is alumni based.

It's for their old players, but it's also a connection with their fans.

It's set up at Ruakura, which is their training facility that they kind of built themselves out of an old abattoir and is now their headquarters.

And to mark that, he had seen the Behind the Silver Fern book, which is still available, by the way.

You can do it on Mighty Ape.

But they wanted a book to mark it in the style of Behind the Silver Fern.

And so he asked us to write this book.

We called it, as I say, He Piko He Taniwha.