THEY came by the thousand to pay their last respects at lunchtime on Thursday and listen in their sorrow to the sound of John Denver, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson. In death, as in life, Sir Brian Lochore left generations of All Blacks with a smile on their faces and a song in their hearts.
The great and the good converged on Memorial Park in Masterton, where the teenaged Lochore set out more than 60 years earlier on a journey which made him, in the words of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, ‘the quintessential New Zealand sportsman’.
In his innate humility, Lochore would probably ...