Phil Gifford: King’s Birthday Honours 2026: Earle Kirton recognised for rugby legacy with ONZM
Earle Kirton has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Photo / Photosport
Earle Kirton’s appointment as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the King’s Birthday Honours list is a richly reserved reward for a rugby career that combined huge ability on the field, extraordinary resilience and selectorial gifts.
The statistics tell one story. He played 41 times for New Zealand, including 13 tests. He was a selector of one of the greatest All Blacks teams to not win a World Cup, the 1995 side in South Africa.
Kirton, at 85, is still as good-natured and obsessed with rugby as he was when he was a player. What stats don’t detail is the fact that with the encouragement of the great coach Fred Allen, Kirton played his natural game on the unbeaten All Blacks tour of Britain and France in 1967. In the process, he provided a model for first five-eighths play the world had never consistently seen, a player whose first thought was to run, not kick, the ball.
“I was lucky to be born when I was,” Kirton told me this week. “That was a great forward pack, and inside me I had great halfbacks Chris Laidlaw and Sid Going.”
He was extraordinarily fast, so quick that he was able, at test level, to use a move that he’d first perfected at club level in Dunedin. British critics raved about his ability to pass to All Blacks second five-eighths, Ian McRae, then back up outside him, immediately giving New Zealand an extra man.
He had been a shock selection for the 1963-64 All Blacks who toured Great Britain and France under the captaincy of the great Wilson Whineray. After Kirton’s stellar display at first five-eighths for the South Island against the North in 1963, Whineray said: “I don’t usually comment on other players, but I have to single out this boy Kirton.”
Unfortunately, his debut for the All Blacks against Newport was a disaster. The team lost 3-0, and Kirton says that was largely because he had his worst game ever in the black jersey. “Everyone blamed me for the loss, from the media, to fans, to the other players – and they were right.
A wide-eyed medical student, Kirton was just 21. This week, he told me that the first call he got after the game was from his father in New Zealand. He told me not to worry. “You’re just too young to have realised what they wanted. They don’t want a running first-five, they want a kicking one. But you’ve got the best thing on your side, you’ve got your age, boy. You can come back.”
So it would prove. Allen took over as national coach in 1967, and told Kirton to ignore the past. “You’re my man,” he told Kirton, who watched in amazement as Allen ripped to shreds the South Island selectors who had left him out of their inter-island squad.
His resurrection in the All Blacks would soon be complete.
As selectors in 1995, Kirton and Laurie Mains went against the norm when they decided Jonah Lomu was too good to be ignored. After an average 1994, he wasn’t picked for a February 1995 training camp. “Laurie and I paid ourselves for him to join the camp.”
Lomu would become the sensation of the World Cup.
“I just consider rugby to be the greatest sport for a young person to play,” says Kirton.
He certainly made his mark, just – as he laughs – in the way the game has made its mark on him. He’s walked with a cane for several years, the result, he told me, of a rogue French forward kicking him in the lower back. “I don’t blame rugby. He was just a dirty bugger.”
There are many great Earle Kirton stories and one of my favourites comes from the days when Ric Salizzo was a TVNZ sports reporter. He’d arranged to interview Kirton at his dental surgery to record an interview. Salizzo was waved in by the nurse and, to his surprise, found there was a patient in the chair with a mouthful of dental equipment. “Oh, sorry, I’ll come back later,” said Ric. “No, no,” replied Earle. “Just carry on – this guy’s a big rugby fan, too.”
Phil Gifford is a contributing sports writer for NZME. He is one of the most respected voices in New Zealand sports journalism.