Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

by James Kerr

Neville Carter wanted to give his son Daniel something special for his eighth birthday, so waiting on the back lawn one morning was a set of full-size rugby posts, painted in the blue and white of Southbridge, the local rugby club. ‘He’d be out there for hours and hours,’ Neville told the New Zealand Herald. ‘Every day after school and in the weekends.’ He would even kick the ball over the house, breaking drainpipes, his father says, but never a window. Dan Carter became the highest points scorer in Test history. Champions do extra. Around the age of thirteen, brothers Ben and Owen Franks told their father, Ken, that they wanted to be All Blacks. Pretty much every New Zealand boy tells his father this at some point but Ken, a personal trainer, took them seriously. ‘It wasn’t a pushy parent thing,’ he says, ‘you have to have that drive, and they did. So first we set some goals . . . where you want to be in one year, in five years, but also where you want to be in six months, one month, one week, tomorrow.’ He says, ‘We got them into the gym – just technical stuff, you know, building the platform. But by the time they were eighteen they were lifting more than the All Blacks of that time.’ The brothers now prop the All Blacks scrum. ‘Everything they do is at intensity . . . It’s the business of Ben and Owen – it’s something they invest in. You don’t rest on your laurels; you’re always seeking that perfection.’ Within a couple of weeks of winning the World Cup Ben flew in a tr...