Richie McCaw: The quest for perfection – what makes the New Zealand captain the world’s greatest player

Bona fide legend: All Blacks’ captain Richie McCaw Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Richie McCaw: The quest for perfection – what makes the New Zealand captain the world’s greatest player
Inspirational All Blacks’ World Cup-winner is the game’s imperishable totem whose remorseless sense of duty has defied the limitations of age to reinvent himself

Richie McCaw was very nearly a Rhodes Scholar. When Phil Gifford, a columnist for the Sunday Star-Times in Auckland, attended a dinner at the All Blacks captain’s alma mater of Lincoln University in Canterbury, he was told by one professor that the young McCaw, who read agricultural science, was not simply an “A student – he was an A-plus student”.
The combination of academic and sporting prowess exemplified by this farmer’s son from the Hakataramea Valley was the precise blend prized by the Cecil Rhodes committee, who each year would reward 10 of New Zealand’s brightest and best with generous bursaries for postgraduate study at Oxford. McCaw, who admits he continues to reproach himself for scoring 99.4 per cent rather than 100 in his sixth-form maths exam, appeared the type of model perfectionist they craved.
After all, he can still remember the one question he got wrong. It was, he recalled to Greg McGee as they worked on his autobiography The Real McCaw, a diagram of a circle with a hexagon inside it. All he needed to do was to calculate how much of the circle remained once the six-sided shape was removed………………….. see the full story at :- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/international/newzealand/11214905/Richie-McCaw-The-quest-for-perfection-what-makes-the-New-Zealand-captain-the-worlds-greatest-player.html