Frank Bunce has reopened the most colourful chapters of his All Blacks career on the Dom Harvey podcast, recounting the moment he nearly took a swing at coach Sir Laurie Mains, explaining how he and Eric Rush served as Jonah Lomu's buffers, and revisiting the food-poisoning final that has shadowed the 1995 Rugby World Cup for three decades.
The 55-Test centre, regarded as one of the great All Blacks midfielders, set the tone for the conversation by recalling one of the more confrontational moments of his time under Mains. The interaction, which Bunce admitted very nearly turned physical, took place in a team hotel.
"He had a meeting and he goes, you don't want to play, aren't you into this? And he goes, I'll be up in my room. This is after training before we went down for lunch. He goes, I'll be up in my room. He goes, if you want me to take you out of that team, you come up," Bunce said.
"Of course, I never went up. I went down, had lunch and stuff. He walks in and he leans on the table, gets right in my face, and he goes, I was waiting. You didn't come up and see me. I was going, took all my willpower not to. I wanted to smack him," Bunce said.
The Bunce-Mains relationship was one of the more unusual head coach and senior pro dynamics of the professional era's first wave, and even today, looking back at his selection at 30, Bunce concedes the call from Mains was the breakthrough moment of a long career.
"At the age of 30, that's how your All Black call up. You must have thought that ship had sailed," the interviewer said. "Yep. Yep. Definitely," Bunce replied.
Bunce was equally candid on what life with Lomu was like at the start, when the teenage winger arrived in the All Blacks set-up and the senior players were asked to help carry the load of his sudden global fame.
"I think we were the buffers," Bunce said. "To be fair, it was Rushy really, because in the earlier years before Jonah burst onto the scene, Eric had come to us and said, I heard about this guy Jonah Lomu, young fella, at school, and he's heard all this stuff about him. He goes, I'm thinking of taking him overseas because back then you could go and play sevens tournaments all over the world."
The 1995 game plan, Bunce admits, came down to one principle. Get the ball to the wing as quickly as possible and back him up. Opposition coaches teased him about it, and Bunce's answer was a shrug.
"People used to tease us. Oh, your game plan is get the ball to Jonah as quick as possible. And then, of course, it is. What's your problem? Get the ball to Jonah as quick as possible. Back him up. Done," Bunce said.
The centre also confirmed one of the more enjoyable pieces of folklore from that World Cup. Bunce had used a move called the 'double dummy cut' that Mains had explicitly told him not to use in a Test, and the coach apparently still bears the grudge.
"With Jonah, you go Jonah, so you set up, say there's a scrum or something, and you go Jonah, come out outside Mertz, come, and then get the ball and you run," Bunce said.
The global impact of Lomu, Bunce said, was beyond anything else he saw in his career, including in the most unlikely corners of the world.
"I'd go and ask a question about, where you from? Oh, New Zealand. And people, this in the middle of Egypt, New Zealand, oh, Lomu, Lomu. You just go, they got no idea about New Zealand as a whole, but the impact that he had changed the game, changed the rugby landscape, and still is, for good," Bunce said.
The inevitable section of the conversation came when the 1995 final at Ellis Park returned to the table. Bunce was direct about the food poisoning that struck most of the squad in the days before the final, and equally direct that he believes South Africa would still have been a difficult team to beat.
"There was food poisoning, but the question is, was it deliberate? Who, if it was deliberate, who did it? And Laurie thinks he seems to think he's got the answer, but no one really knows. It's kind of cool. That's one of those great sporting mysteries," Bunce said.
The centre confirmed that several All Blacks were genuinely unwell.
"I just had diarrhoea. It wasn't like the day, the night, like the Friday night and then game on Saturday. I think it was earlier in the week, and I just went and got some, had my gut was a bit off, went to the doc. And he said, I think it was Craig Dowd and Jeff Wilson, there were a few guys that were really struggling, and most of the squad had some issues. But it was more the preparation, the training, the organisation of the week, then that started to unfold," Bunce said.
Three decades later, Bunce is at peace with the result, even if it still rankles when South African fans bring it up.
"We still had opportunities to win the game. We had good guys coming off the bench. But 30 odd years later, I think the right team won, to be honest," Bunce said.
The loss, he admits, was hard to process.
"Took a while. Took a while to get over it properly. We sat ourselves down in the team room and went for about three or four days just drowning the sorrows," Bunce said.
It is the rawness of those memories, paired with a 30-year arc of distance, that makes Bunce's testimony one of the most valuable accounts of an era the All Blacks rarely talk about with this much honesty.
