History
Rugby football was introduced into New Zealand by Charles John Monro, son of the then speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives, Sir David Monro. He had been sent to Christ's College, East Finchley in north London, where he became an enthusiastic convert to the new code. He brought the game back to his native Nelson, and arranged the first rugby match between Nelson College and Nelson Football Club, played on 14 May 1870.
When New Zealand's national rugby team (the All Blacks) toured Britain in 1905 they witnessed the growing popularity of the breakaway non-amateur Northern Union's games. On his return in 1906, All Black George William Smith met the Australian entrepreneur J J Giltinan to discuss the potential of professional rugby in Australasia. The first New Zealand team to play professional rugby was known as the All Blacks. To avoid confusion, the terms professional All Blacks or All Golds are used.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand National Rugby League Team
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)