Whipped Cream Difficulties

Keith Murdoch, rugby player.

This is another one of those strange and sad stories. Mr. Murdoch was selected to tour with the New Zealand All Blacks in 1972. But after the first match of the tour, he got into a fight with a security guard at a hotel. He was thrown off the tour.

But Murdoch, in fact, did not go home. Issued with a ticket back to New Zealand, he got off the plane in Singapore and diverted to Australia — to the city of Darwin, on the northern coast, the gateway to the vast, sparsely populated Northern Territory.

And there, for all intents and purposes, he disappeared. He “went bush,” as the Australians say. He became a rugby version of Bigfoot and the subject of a play, his legend growing in inverse proportion to the confirmed sightings of him.

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After “going bush,” Murdoch dropped from sight until the late 1970s, when Terry McLean, the dean of New Zealand’s rugby writers, tracked him down. McLean came upon him at an oil-drilling site near Perth, capital of the state of Western Australia, only to be advised, firmly and crisply, what he should do to preserve life and limb.
“I got back on the bus,” McLean wrote.