The Real McCaw: Richie McCaw: The Autobiography

by Richie McCaw

  The Real McCaw

  For Mum and Dad and my sister Jo.

  Your love and support have helped me every step of the way.

  And to all my other family and friends,

  a very big thank you.

  Contents

  Writer’s note

  G.A.B.

  The wrong picture

  All choked up

  Big sky

  Robbie & Ted & Smithy & Shag

  Canterbury tales

  Survival of the fittest

  Crusade

  Locked and loaded

  Numero uno

  Partners

  Start again

  Down

  Keep getting up

  Bring it on

  Blue Zone

  Broken

  What else?

  Semi tough

  The right picture

  Enjoy

  Statistics

  Acknowledgements

  Index of names

  Copyright

  Writer’s note

  One of the first things Richie said to me when I saw him in late December 2011, a couple of months after the Rugby World Cup final, was ‘I feel like I’ve been in a tunnel for four years and just got out.’

  The image of him I’d been carrying was from moments after the whistle blew in the final: that battered, bloodied warrior at the end of his tether, not so much on his last legs, but, as we now know, on his last leg, and looking a decade older than his 30 years.

  Two months later, the young man who opened the door of his townhouse in Christchurch was scarcely recognisable as the same man, despite the moon boot. He looked radiant. He looked like a man with the sun on his face.

  I’d come down to Christchurch to ask a question, before anything was signed and sealed. I wanted to ask him face to face with no agents or publishers around if he was doing the book out of a sense of obligation or pressure, because if he was, I doubted that I’d get the access or material the book would need. I should have known better. Richie doesn’t commit to anything lightly, and after about two minutes, I knew it was a question I’d never have to ask.

  What was supposed to be a half-hour chat turned into an animated two-hour exchange about what we were going to do, how we were going to attack it. His opening statement suggested a way forward: that we go back into that four-year tunnel and discover what it took to find the light. From there, we would spin backwards at opportune times to defining events and people in Richie’s life.

  As we did that, I came to see Richard Hugh McCaw as an increasingly rare alchemy of old-school and contemporary. His origins are as rural and tough as any All Black icons of the past, yet he’s also a boarding school and university-educated urbanite. He’s technologically extremely adept, runs everything off his smart phone, but would as soon eat his own entrails as tweet. He’s the consummate professional yet essentially plays for the love of the game. He’s driven by an elemental fierce joy for the conflict, yet has sought out an understanding of the psychological underpinnings of behaviour and motivation. He trusts his instincts and what he knows, but is hungry to learn what he doesn’t know. And perhaps the biggest paradox in his life these days: he now occupies a hugely public position in the nation’s psyche, yet is a man who likes to keep a substantial part of himself to himself.

  He shares some characteristics it seems, with all champions. Dominic Lawson of The Independent was thinking of Roger Federer—who, more than most champions, gives an impression of languid grace and effortless genius—when he wrote: ‘A proper investigation of the careers of the supreme achievers, whether in sport or other fields, reveals that they are based above all on monomaniacal diligence and concentration. Constant struggle, in other words. Seen in this light, we might define genius as talent multiplied by effort.’

  I would hesitate to call Richie monomaniacal, given his many other interests and pursuits, but my hope is that no one who reads this book should be left in any doubt about what it took for him to do what he did.

  Greg McGee

  July 2012

  I was 12 years old when my father told me I’d enjoy my rugby more if I got fitter. That was how he put it. I was a big kid, and he could have said I might make a better player for losing some weight, or that I might be selected for better teams. Instead, he said I’d enjoy it more.

  That stuck; I don’t know why.

  The County Council had left markers in blue paint on the verge of the loop road and I worked out these markers were 500 metres apart, so I tried to run five markers one way and back three or four times a week. Three kilometres, four kilometres, five. Right through late summer, as the sun burnt the valley brown, I jogged down our shingle driveway after school, past the sheep yards and on to the loop road.

  I’d turn left and head up towards the Kirkliston Range, past my grandfather’s farm, to where the road turned north and linked back to the main road running up the valley towards Cattle Creek. On either side, grazing and cropping flats rose to high-country tussock, where there’d be snow on the tops through to October most years. Familiar sentinels watched over me: the Kirklistons in front of me, Mount Domett and Te Kohurau to the south, the Hunter Hills running up towards Mount Menzies to the north, where the road petered out and our river began. The Hakataramea River ran down through our valley and fed into the Waitaki. At the confluence, there was a one-way wooden bridge across to Kurow, a little two-pub town on the road that connected the Mackenzie Country basin to Oamaru on the east coast. These were the boundaries of the world I knew.

  A year later, my world expanded when I became a boarder at Otago Boys’ High School in Dunedin. When they left me there, Mum and Dad told me this was a big opportunity that I had to make the most of. I put myself up for every sport that came along and worked so hard at my studies through the years that some of my mates from the First XV and First XI felt I was overdoing it, in danger of becoming a geek.

  That didn’t worry me. What worried me more was letting myself down.

  Aged 12, on top of the Kirklistons. Behind me, Lake Aviemore looking towards Otematata.

  In our end-of-year exams for sixth-form maths, I got 99.4 per cent. I missed one bloody mark. The very last question on the paper. I can still remember what I missed and how I missed it—it was the only one I didn’t check. There was a diagram of a circle, with a hexagon inside it. I had to work out how much of the circle was left if you removed the hexagon. I worked out the radius and tangents, made the calculations and wrote it down. I forgot to multiply it by six.

  If I hadn’t known the answer, I could accept that. I could forget it.

  The reason I still remember every detail of it is because I did know it, but lost concentration.

  The following year, my world enlarged again, when I was selected for the New Zealand Under 19 trials. We had one camp in Wellington before Christmas and one after, and we’d been given a programme for the summer to get fit for the trials in late January.

  After I got home from the first training camp, my Mum’s brother, John ‘Bigsy’ McLay, and his family met us in Timaru for a family lunch prior to Christmas. Uncle Bigsy had been a really good rugby player who’d been selected for the New Zealand Colts and New Zealand Universities. He hadn’t quite reached his potential due to injuries from a car accident, but he’d still played around 100 games for Mid Canterbury, many of them alongside Mum’s other brother, Peter. Uncle Bigsy was someone in the family who knew a bit about rugby and was a mentor, interested in strategy and motivation.

  There were a few of us sitting around McDonald’s waiting for our orders—my folks, my sister Joanna, my aunty and cousins. I was sitting next to Un
cle Bigsy and showed him the book I’d been given, with the training programme in it.

  He scrutinised it carefully. ‘You want to be in the New Zealand Under 19s,’ he said. ‘Do you want to be an All Black?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  He took out a pen, smoothed a table napkin. ‘Let’s map out how you become an All Black.’

  I was a bit fazed, felt lucky to be given a trial for the Under 19s, thought I was only there because our school First XV had had a great year. But with his encouragement, I told him that this coming year, when I was embarking on a Bachelor of Agricultural Science degree at Lincoln University in Christchurch, I wanted to make the New Zealand Under 19s, then the Canterbury Under 19s, then next year the New Zealand Colts.

  Uncle Bigsy on the charge for Mid Canterbury, 1982.

  Uncle Bigsy wrote it all down, kept prompting me. ‘Then what?’

  I listed the Canterbury Under 21s, the Canterbury team, and he insisted I put a target year beside each of the teams that I needed to make. We worked out that after the 2003 Rugby World Cup there’d be a bit of a clean-out in the All Blacks and there’d be guys going overseas, so I might make the Crusaders then and maybe the All Blacks after that, maybe 2004.

  ‘All Blacks 2004,’ wrote Uncle Bigsy.

  I was keeping my voice down, aware that this was all pie in the sky given that I hadn’t yet made a national age-group team, but Uncle Bigsy wasn’t finished. ‘You don’t just want to be an All Black,’ he said, ‘you want to be a great All Black.’

  What could I say? Who wouldn’t? So I nodded, and he wrote that down too, then pushed the napkin over and gave me the pen. ‘Sign it,’ he said. ‘Sign it Great All Black.’

  I was hoping no one could overhear him—Dad had already taken himself outside for a walk. I looked at the list Uncle Bigsy had constructed. It was a stairway to rugby heaven all right, but looked more like fantasy than a legitimate aspiration for someone like me. ‘Sign it,’ he said.

  I couldn’t bring myself to write the words Great All Black, so I wrote down G.A.B.

  ‘Put that up somewhere,’ he said.

  I quickly stuck it in my pocket.

  Back home on the farm there was a cupboard up high, so I pinned it in the back there, where I could be sure no one else could see it.

  I had no idea what the reality of becoming a G.A.B. might be, and despite Uncle Bigsy’s enthusiasm, I can’t say I ever really expected to find out. But the pictures I had in my head were amazing, of scoring fabulous tries in the black jersey and silver fern in front of huge roaring crowds at exotic places I’d read about, Eden Park, Ellis Park, Twickenham, Cardiff Arms Park . . .

  I’m not superstitious, but the portents aren’t that flash. We’re in the wrong dressing room. The team we always beat should be in this one. The words Undeb Rygbi Cymru are plastered on the wall above our cubicles over the symbol of Welsh rugby, a stylised scarlet-jerseyed player springing out of a yellow coronet, flanked by what look like scarlet claws. We’ve never lost at this stadium, which is the same as saying the Welsh have never won against us. But this week, we’re not playing Wales, we’re playing France. France is the host nation of the 2007 Rugby World Cup, but here we are playing them in a quarter-final in Cardiff.

  It’s all wrong. We feel like we’ve stepped out of the tournament temporarily for this game. If we win it, we get back to Paris next week for the real thing. If we lose, we’re on a plane home. That’s not a thought I want in my head. But we’ve lost the toss for our usual dressing room, lost the toss for our usual hotel in Cardiff, lost the toss for our black strip and lost the toss for kick-off . . .

  We thought there might be an upside to playing France in Cardiff rather than in front of their own at Paris or Marseilles, but before the game, we can hear the crowd above us singing, and it isn’t ‘Bread of Heaven’ or ‘God Defend New Zealand’. They’ve closed the roof on Millennium, and when we line up for the anthems and they launch into ‘La Marseillaise’, most of the crowd, it seems, join in, and the atmosphere is as charged as anything I’ve heard from a Welsh crowd.

  The haka confirms France are well and truly up for the game. They stand right in front of us, Caveman Sebastien Chabal, all flowing black locks, beard and eyebrows, giving us the evil eye.

  I’ve seen it all before in his TV ads: he’s usually a fitful presence in a game as an undersized lock or ungainly loosie, which is probably why he’s on the bench. But the way all his team-mates eyeball us like that . . . We go into the huddle before the kick-off thinking, Uh oh, they’re here to play.

  That isn’t always the case: we whacked this team 47–3 in Lyon last year, and followed that up with 23–11 in Paris, where, even though they got a lot closer to us, they hadn’t played that impressively. But they’re host nation for this RWC and they’ve been humiliated by Argentina in pool play, which is why they, rather than Argentina, are here playing us in Cardiff. They’re desperate. This is their last chance at redemption.

  Uh oh, they’re here to play . . . Les Tricolores accept our challenge before kick-off in the 2007 World Cup quarter-final.

  Desperate winner-take-all knockouts between the All Blacks and France at the World Cup aren’t new. We beat France to take the very first Webb Ellis Cup in ’87, but that’s ancient history: the most recent clash wasn’t such a happy ending. In the semi-final at Twickenham in 1999, the All Blacks led 17–10 at halftime, then went out to 24–10 early in the second half. France had looked dead and buried, but had come back to mow the All Blacks down and win 43–31.

  I’d heard that ’99 match described by some people as the greatest in RWC history, but none of those people were All Blacks. Byron Kelleher and Anton Oliver, beside me in the huddle, had played that day.

  Plenty more of us were in Sydney in 2003, when Australia beat us in the semi-final, and George Gregan had yelled into Byron’s ear: ‘Four more years, boys! Four more years!’

  We’ve served our four-year sentence. Our time is up.

  The first half goes to plan in most respects, and yet . . . That Welsh symbol looming over us at halftime isn’t the only strangeness. I say something to assistant coach Steve Hansen that I can’t remember saying, but that he remembers, because he’s never heard me say anything like it before. I can’t get into this game. Don’t know why, but I can’t seem to catch hold of it.

  That’d be a worry for Steve, because that’s my job as openside flanker, not to mention captain. Be all over the game. Control the breakdowns, impose myself on their ball, slow it, read the ref, do whatever it takes to get into their heads. At my best, I live in that split second of time and space at the breakdown, a collision zone where 100-plus-kilogram bodies are hurtling from diverse points of the compass towards a small ovoid focus. Success or failure can be measured in microseconds. Openside flankers live or die in those slivers of time.

  But the French have picked a team to kick the ball at us, and that’s what they do through the first half. Their fullback Damien Traille makes their intentions known by drop-kicking for goal from a good attacking position after just six minutes—he misses, but everything we throw at them comes back to us in the air. For the first 10 minutes we get suckered into this aerial ping-pong, kicking long but keeping it in play, hoping they’ll run it back at us so we can attack the tackled ball in the breakdown. But there’s nothing to attack; they won’t bring the ball back to contact, and keep hoisting bombs.

  We don’t get a chance to counter until the 10-minute mark, when fullback Leon MacDonald takes a high ball, steps the chasers and initiates our first counter. We’re finally able to stretch them left and right and hit them with multiple phases for a full two minutes, which culminates in Luke McAlister stepping inside Yannick Jauzion, offloading to centre Mils Muliaina, who’s dragged down short. Fabien Pelous, one of two French players who’d also been there in ’99, gives away a desperation penalty in front of their posts. Dan Carter slots it: 3–nil.

  A couple of minutes later at a French lineout, Ali Williams slaps i
t out of Imanol Harinordoquy’s hands. The blond Basque has come on for Serge Betsen, who was KO’d after five minutes. To my mind that makes their loosies a much more potent mix, as Harinordoquy goes to No. 8 and gives them another big option at lineout, Julien Bonnaire switches to the bindside and, crucially, forces Thierry Dusautoir to play openside.

  The only similarities between Betsen and Dusautoir are that they’re both black and both brave. Betsen’s a classic fetcher, but Dusautoir is bigger, faster and completely indomitable. He can fetch, carry, dominate the tackle and clean out. And, worryingly, I’ve never seen a bead of sweat on the man.

  Luke breaks the French line again from that turnover. I’m clear inside him, but he doesn’t see me, flips it back to Byron and Ali goes over in the corner. Replays show that despite Ali’s celebrations, his size 14s are well out. Ali’s notoriously optimistic—part of his charm—but the first bad picture pops into my mind and probably the minds of several other players: of Mils seeming to score early in the Sydney semi-final in 2003, but being disallowed for the same reason. It didn’t seem that important at the time: we thought we had Australia on the rack, just as I think we’ve got France on the rack here.

  From the defensive lineout, France kicks out, Sitiveni Sivivatu takes a quick throw and Leon sets up the counter. From the ruck, Dan drifts wide and puts Luke through a hole inside David Marty and outside Jauzion. Dusautoir is sweeping, but can’t nail him. Luke straightens and this time finds Jerry Collins on his inside. When Jerry’s run down two metres out, he palms it up to Luke who goes over. I flop on the ball to make sure it’s grounded, but Luke has got it down under pressure. Dan converts: 10–nil after 18 minutes. We’ve had the ball for the last eight minutes, played the game our way and got the points on the board to prove it. So much for bad pictures.