WELLINGTON city councillor John Morrison has apologised to a man he accused of holding up the Targa Rally for a tennis game.

He says he was wrong and when the man, David Wutzler rang to tell him, he accepted “his word entirely, without any problems”.

In August, Mr Morrison (right) rejected a challenge to the closure of Makara Rd for the annual rally because, he said, sole complainant David Wutzler would not reschedule his Saturday tennis match.

“I think it’s time we addressed the issue of people holding everybody up because they’re unprepared to move one single tennis match by half an hour or an hour,” he told the road closure committee he was chairing.

Mr Wutzler could not attend the morning meeting because he was working, but rang Mr Morrison after reading a report in The Wellingtonian.

He told the councillor his written complaint had no mention of tennis and that his concern was over 200 Makara households would be cut off from the city for half a Saturday.

Mr Morrison has apologised: “Basically, I came to believe that, because that was what I was told at the time.”

He can not remember now who informed him (about a tennis match), but says he knew Mr Wutzler was the only remaining complainant after extensive consultation with affected residents by Targa and the council.

He told Mr Wutzler he was sorry.

“He accepted that, and that’s very good of him to do that.”

Mr Wutzler told NewsWire (which published the original story) that the tennis reference confused him and he suspects it was injected by one of the parties as a distraction from his actual complaint – “which obviously worked”.