The verdicts of posterity are, by their very nature, not always fully evident at the time of events. The fearsome power of New Zealand All Black teams in the 1960s has become identified with the towering figure of Colin Meads, by general consent one the greatest All Blacks of all time.
None of that is undeserved. And his contemporaries knew that Meads was by any standards a truly exceptional player, remarkable for his all-round skills, power and durability. But there were other players who were seen in a similar light.
Kel Tremain was one. Another was prop Ken Gray, who would have been 80 on 24 June. Sadly, he fell well short of any such celebration. Gray died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 54, in 1992.
Grahame Thorne, a teammate on the 1967 tour of Britain, France and Ireland, reckoned that Gray "was the equal, at least, of Meads. He was the best forward I ever played with." This is not to diminish Meads, but underlines quite how good a player Gray was.
He was a comparatively late developer with a remarkable trajectory for a prop. He was a wing, then half-back at Wellington College, played No. 8 for a season with Paremata and became a lock on joining Petone, rapidly earning elevation to full provincial honours. Wellington moved him to prop in 1961, but he continued as a lock for his club until 1963, the same year he earned selection for the All Blacks.
There was little doubt that he found his true calling in the front-row, for which he was superbly equipped both physically and mentally -- 17 stone, with the strength and fitness of a man who farmed 2,200 acres.
In 1963 he was a beneficiary of the extensive trials with which the All Blacks once used to preface major tours, working his way through from the first match to win selection for the tour party.
Even then he looked a long shot for the Tests. One place at prop was occupied by the captain, Wilson Whineray, while Gray's other rivals included Ian Clarke, a former captain already capped 24 times, a veteran of the 1953 team whose selection made him the first All Black to tour Europe twice.
Early on, Gray was fortunate enough to miss the only defeat of the tour, at Newport, and played against London Counties, a 27-0 win which sports writer Terry McLean reckoned was the finest performance he had ever seen by an All Black team. Chosen for the first Test against Ireland, he played all five for a team only deprived of the Grand Slam long sought by the All Blacks by a 0-0 draw with Scotland.
From then until his last game in 1969, he was a regular in the All Black team. Even when the form of fellow-prop Jules Le Lievre came close to forcing him into the Test team there was no thought of dropping Gray, rather of moving him to lock and Meads to his original position at No. 8.
It says something about how rugby has changed in half a century that a career which could now bring 80 or 90 caps yielded only 24. But there is a foretaste of All Black modernity in a career winning percentage of close to 90 percent, with defeats by Australia in 1964 and South Africa in 1965 and that draw against Scotland the only blemishes. And there was nothing undemanding about the opponents he beat, with two tours of Europe in 1963 and 1967, a home series against the Boks in 1965 and ending with consecutive European champions, France in 1968 and Wales in 1969. He was there at the beginning and end, and most of what fell in between, of the remarkable 17-match winning run which stretched from 1965 to 1969.
Meads recalled in his memoirs that he "was probably the best prop in the world through the middle and late 1960s. I certainly never played with or against a better. As a line-out jumper he was matchless, handled the ball well and was a great runner in close-contact. He was a highly intelligent and sensitive man."
And like Meads, he occasionally overstepped the line. Journalist Wynne Gray wrote in his selection of the 100 greatest post-war All Blacks that he "tarnished his reputation on the field with too many acts of thuggery". In a club match for Petone in 1968, he broke the jaw of University lock John Tovey, a noted early campaigner against contact with apartheid-era South Africa.
Whatever differences he had with Tovey, they certainly were not political, because adherence to the same cause ended his international career, choosing not to go on the tour of South Africa in 1970.
"Very simply I decided that I would not play against a racially selected South African team," Gray said. "My decision came, I suppose, from my own readings and my own moral feeling." His announcement provoked a number of abusive letters, the most insulting of which, he noted, were anonymous -- and was particularly offended by the one suggesting that he wouldn't have made the team.
An All Black selector rang him the week before the trials pleading with him to change his mind but to no avail. It is perhaps no coincidence that the 17-match winning run came to a halt in the first Test of the South African tour, or that the All Blacks were unable to exert their useful dominance in the scrum over the 1971 Lions.
By then Gray was embarked on a very different career; politics -- elected in 1971 to Hutt County Council and beginning a long career in local government. Earle Kirton, a colleague on the 1963 and 1967 tours, reckoned he was a potential Prime Minister.
As with the All Blacks in 1970 and 1971, it has to go down as a 'might have been'. But what is not in doubt is his greatness as a player, or the importance of what he did at the end of his career. Had it been left to Rugby Union, South Africa might still have apartheid.
That is no criticism of the majority of players of his time, who exercised their individual right to play in officially-sanctioned Test matches against South Africa, which were generally - and nowhere more than in New Zealand - regarded as a supreme challenge.
But the game owes much to others like Gray, John Taylor and, later on, Graham Mourie, Stuart Barnes, Ralph Knibbs and Steve Bainbridge who took a moral stand against playing with apartheid, showing that the complicity of officialdom was not universally accepted.