Reese Griffiths
New Zealand rugby league footballer
Reese Kenneth Griffiths (25 December 1937 – 16 September 2016) was a New Zealand rugby league player who represented New Zealand in the 1957 and 1960 World Cups.
Playing career
Griffiths played in the outside backs for Runanga in the West Coast Rugby League competition. He represented the West Coast between 1954 and 1964, and the South Island in 1965.
He was first selected for the New Zealand national rugby league team in 1957 and attended the World Cup that year as an injury replacement for Neville Denton. Griffiths went on to play in eleven test matches for the Kiwis between 1957 and 1963, including at the 1960 World Cup. He finished his international career having played in 35 games and scored 18 tries for New Zealand.
In 1960 Griffiths was also involved in the West Coast side that won the Northern Union Cup from Auckland.
Personal life
Griffiths worked in the West Coast mines and also owned a commercial fishing boat. He is commemorated in a mural on the side of a Runanga dairy, alongside George Menzies and Bernie Green.
Griffiths died in Greymouth on 16 September 2016.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Reese Griffiths” is new Zealand rugby league footballer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Reese, Griffiths and Zealand, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7306999. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937, 2016, 1957 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reese Griffiths” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.