Bona fide legend: All Blacks’ captain Richie McCaw Photo: GETTY IMAGES
\nRichie McCaw: The quest for perfection – what makes the New Zealand captain the world’s greatest player
\nInspirational 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<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cA student – he was an A-plus student\u201d. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5770,13473,15362,15361,11574,5743],"class_list":["post-76169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ulster-rugby","tag-for","tag-mccaw","tag-perfection","tag-quest","tag-richie","tag-the"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76169"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76171,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76169\/revisions\/76171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intouchrugby.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe combination of academic and sporting prowess exemplified by this farmer\u2019s son from the Hakataramea Valley was the precise blend prized by the Cecil Rhodes committee, who each year would reward 10 of New Zealand\u2019s 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.
\nAfter 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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"