The Real McCaw: Richie McCaw: The Autobiography
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On the day, we’re not that convincing and have to come from behind again to pull it out of the fire. I think I’ve nailed Giteau, but he throws a miracle no-look pass to Drew Mitchell who goes over. We get home narrowly 19–14, partly through sheer stamina and partly because Dan gets back into first-five in the second half, after playing outside Stephen Donald in the first, and pulls the right strings.
The rest of the tests are pretty comfortable, at least on the scoreboard: 32–6 against Scotland, after a brave first 10 minutes, a much tougher battle against Ireland at Croke Park than 22–3 would indicate, 29–9 against Wales and a smashing of England, 32–6 again. Apart from Scotland, we have to play at tempo for 60 minutes to reap the rewards in the last quarter. We take enormous satisfaction that in those four tests we don’t concede one try.
The week after we beat Wales, they tip over Australia, which is an indication of our quality.
The toughest test turns out to be the one game that isn’t a test.
At Limerick, we’re taken to see a play about Munster’s 1978 defeat of the All Blacks. Our visit is reported in the Daily Telegraph.
‘The cast of Alone It Stands have performed their little masterpiece more than 1000 times on four continents but half an hour before “kick-off” at the Millennium Theatre at Limerick on Sunday night came a bombshell from playwright John Breen. On Monday the entire 50-strong All Black party would be in the audience.
‘It is one thing doing your version of the haka, not to mention your approximation of a New Zealand accent, among those of a Munster or neutral disposition, but quite another poking fun—albeit gentle—at the All Blacks when the modern day warriors are seated 10 yards away in the small and intimate auditorium.’
We get a standing ovation before the play begins, and we reciprocate when it ends. In between, though, it’s moving and a bit unnerving. As the actors do their best to mimic the All Blacks and Munster players of the time, I can’t help thinking that there’s no way I want some Irish actor playing Richie McCaw 30 years down the track to commemorate a victory!
Yet it damn near happens.
We’re there to help Munster celebrate the opening of their new ground, Thomond Park, and the atmosphere is festive, given the weather. Munster don’t have any of their internationals playing, apart from Dougie Howlett on the wing, so it should be one of those games you win easily. And that’s the way it’s shaping up when Stephen Donald scores an early try. I settle back and enjoy the atmosphere, and wait for us to really get going.
Trouble is, we don’t, and at halftime it’s still close. I’m sitting beside Jimmy Cowan up among some Munster Rugby Union guys and one of these guys says, ‘Oh well, you never know, that’s what dreams are made of.’
The game wears on and we can’t kick clear, it’s a complete bloody arm-wrestle and then Jimmy tells me he’s got a bad feeling.
‘No, no,’ I tell him, ‘we’ll be right.’
‘You don’t play for Southland,’ he says. ‘When you play for a team that shouldn’t win and you get this close, you grow another leg.’
Shit. At five minutes to go, the crowd is going crazy, willing them home, and I consider getting up and going down to the changing room so I don’t have to watch it. But with seconds on the clock Joe Rokocoko scores in the corner to win the game. The defender who Joe Rocks runs through to score is Doug Howlett. Good old Dougie!
It’s a great day in the end—beating them by 50 or 100 wouldn’t have been nearly as special, but Christ, we’re glad to sneak away to Cardiff with that one under our belt.
With roommate John Smit after the Baabaas game at the end of ’08.
Some of the old All Blacks lament the lack of midweek games, but they’re dreaming. It’s just too tough now. The playing XV need a full week’s preparation for a test match these days. We had a few guys from the test team against Wales on the bench against Munster, so they had to train with them and train with us. Doesn’t sound like a major, but it is.
The test against England isn’t my last for the year. Joe Rocks and I have been asked to play for the Barbarians. I’ve been asked a few times before and always said no, but this time I’m already in London and the game is at Wembley. How many chances does an All Black get to play at Wembley?
I’m carrying a bit of a hip spiker from the England game, but it frees up under the strict Barbarians training regime of beer and laughs, and I think I might be okay for 40 minutes, which is all they want. At halftime they ask if I can do another five minutes, then straight away in the second half a couple of their front-rowers get injured so they pull our props off also and go golden oldies, which means I have to play out the full 80. It seems like the game that never ends on top of the season that never ends. I’m out there thinking, Is this finished yet?
Eventually, it is over, the game and the season, and I’m glad I’ve done it, if only for the chance to mix with some of my fiercest competitors in a different context. I get to play with George Gregan and Schalk Burger and Jean de Villiers, and room with John Smit. There’s always a bit of intrigue as to how your opponents do things, and it’s great being able to sit and have a beer with them and be involved in a common endeavour, instead of being at each other’s throats. They impress me as being pretty good men—I reckon you have to be to stay in top-level rugby for any length of time. We’re not that different in outlook, and we play the game for much the same reasons. The Baabaas experience means that I might be able to start developing friendships with some of these guys that go beyond the standard post-game ‘How’s it going?’
It’s a Wednesday game, and after little or no sleep, Joe Rocks and I have to get on a flight first thing on Thursday morning and fly to Milan where we join the rest of the All Blacks for a day set up by adidas. We have a day floating around Milan doing promotional stuff with AC Milan and then have another big night out before we hop on the plane home. That’s one long, long day on top of a long, long season, but that’s finally the end of it. I don’t have to worry about the next game for a couple of months.
And I discover that number one in the world sounds even better in Italian—numero uno del mondo.
On the flight home, during the few hours I’m not asleep, I reflect on a hell of a year.
Both the Crusaders and the All Blacks have won pretty much everything they’ve been up for, despite hiccups in the middle of both campaigns: Super 14, Tri Nations, the Bledisloe Cup, the Grand Slam and the number-one ranking in the world.
Looking back, I’m happy with the way I played, and I can see that it’s taken me three years to really find my feet as captain, which isn’t a lot different from the experience of guys like Sean Fitzpatrick.
I’m knackered, but a hell of a lot better in body and in spirit than I was at this time last year. A year on from Cardiff, this is definitely a nicer place to be. Back on track.
After a season like we’ve just had, some guys talk of a summer with no stone under the beach towel. I prefer to think of no stone under my seat, the one in my carbon and Kevlar beauty, full harness locked, with the snow-tipped Southern Alps on one side and the wide brown Mackenzie Basin on the other.
Gavin Wills is right. Within 48 hours of touching down in Christchurch, I’m back at Omarama, unfolding the Discus from her winter hibernation, going through all the little rituals that culminate in the tow-rope release, then the big sky . . .
Gavin takes me on a lead-and-follow, which sounds easier than it is, because we see these veil clouds and a split cloud base, signs of a convergence of the two air masses, the moist cool sea air and the inland air which is being pushed to the western side of the Main Divide by light south-easterlies. These take us west of Mount Aspiring into wild rugged West Coast country and I hear Gavin’s voice telling me, ‘Don’t lose me, because you have no idea where the alternative landings are, and there aren’t many out here. It’s just riverbeds and beaches unless we go all the way over to Haast.’
We find little whiskers of clouds from not particularly high level
s—we’re at ridge-top, a little bit above—and we get inside them or on the edge of them and climb up and then move on to the next one.
‘Don’t lose it,’ Gavin tells me. ‘Don’t lose me.’
I don’t. I’m loving it.
A couple of times, we cross a valley, misread it on the other side and end up down in the wrong air mass, falling. The only way out is to go deeper back towards the Main Divide and try to find the other air mass and climb up on this side of it. Gavin’s making tough decisions. In some ways we’re putting our heads deeper into the lion’s jaws, and he’s trying to teach me just how far we can push it before the lion gags and shuts his mouth. That’s what we’re grappling with.
Gavin tells me later that at one stage, coming north up the West Coast, looking for a lift back across the Southern Alps, with not a lot of landing options if we don’t, he has this moment where he thinks, ‘Jesus, I’ve got the captain of the All Blacks out here. I bet his coaches have no idea where their boy is today!’
He’s able to put that out of his mind because, he tells me, I’ve earned his trust. He reckons I’ve got good ‘situational awareness’. Part of that is knowing I’m the newbie, and I do what I’d expect any newbie to do in the All Blacks. If I don’t understand something I’ll ask. If he tells me I’d better stick to his tail, I bloody well do.
Gliding mentor Gavin Wills and newbie . . .
Gavin’s right about something else too. He reckons he knows which girlfriends will last. He gives them the speech about my future as an ace glider pilot, and watches their eyes glaze over. He says that’s what happened with Hayley. I wish it was that easy to tell!
Turns out he’s right, though, and Hayley and I don’t last much longer. That’s just the way it goes, and it’s no one’s fault and no one else’s business.
Being available to media and sponsors is part of my contractual obligations to the NZRU, so a public profile or persona is an inevitable result of doing my job. I kind of trust the media to respect that, to know where the boundaries are. When Hayley or anyone else has a relationship with me, there’s no implied contract that the details have to be shared in the public forum. It’s the same when I’m with my mates from school or Lincoln—they’re not part of any deal I’ve made with the devil.
I’ve always been deliberately guarded in my public utterances, because whether I’m officially on duty or not, I’m talking as All Black captain and my words carry the weight and expectation of that position. I decided when I got the captaincy that I’d rather be seen as boring than say something that ends up as an embarrassing headline.
That pressure is not just on me. The All Blacks are given a wee book with all the protocols and expectations in it. One of the first things it says is that if you’re an All Black, you’re an All Black 24/7.
Whether you’re in an All Black environment or you’re at home, or out and about, you’re still an All Black and you’re representing the team and so you should act as if you are. That’s a tough one for a lot of the players to get their heads around. You’ve got downtime at home, you’re not in the All Black environment, you’re out with your mates, relaxing, switching off, winding down, chilling out . . . You’re still an All Black, because that’s what the headline will say if you stuff up.
I have trouble with the 24/7 thing too sometimes, knowing where the line in the sand is for instance, when you’re not with the All Blacks, not in that environment where you expect fans to want autographs and photos. If I’m by myself, okay, I try to manage it and still do what I need to do. As much as I appreciate that the attention and interest is a privilege that comes with being an All Black, some days it seems relentless and gets on top of me, and I either get a bit short with people or, worse, decide that going out is too much trouble. I wish it was written into my contract—10 autographs and photos is okay on one outing, 50 is too many!
Being able to put a smile on some young kid’s face is pretty cool.
It can become really irritating if I’m with a friend or friends who are not All Blacks or anything to do with the public spotlight, and the attention starts inhibiting what I’m able to do with them, or whether they want to be with me. They haven’t bought into that. The worst case was when I was at a restaurant trying to get to know someone, as you do, have some sort of meaningful, engaged conversation, and a middle-aged woman I’d never seen before came screaming up and shoved her mobile in my face and asked me to say hello to someone on the other end. Hello? Quite apart from anything else, I like my food and, like your average farm dog, hate to be interrupted when I’m eating! But most people in New Zealand are courteous and appreciative of a photo or autograph, and being able to put a smile on some young kid’s face is pretty cool.
Once you’re in the All Black environment, it’s much more straightforward. There are only five key rules, non-negotiables. One of them is being on time—bang. The others are around dress code, recovery and post-match boundaries and expectations. We used to leave booze and women a bit grey, ask the guys to make good decisions. That’s too open to interpretation, and what looks like a good decision when you’ve had a few is not the same as when you’re sober.
So now we’re more explicit. We don’t say don’t drink, but we do give a time that you’ve got to be home after a game. We want everyone home at three o’clock, say. And the expectation is that you’re not bloody pissed and you don’t make an idiot of yourself. So if you’ve had a couple too many and you’re a little bit tiddly or whatever, no trouble with that. As long as you are home by three and you haven’t made a dick of yourself or compromised your recovery for next week’s training and playing.
We also say no women in our rooms or on our floors. That’s a non-negotiable—wives, partners, whoever. If your wife or partner is staying on another floor, that’s fine. Some days at the end of a campaign, we might relax the time thing and say, ‘Look, it’s up to you when you get back. Just remember you’re an All Black.’
There’s got to be some respite, of course. You’ve got to find ways of losing yourself, however temporarily. There aren’t many avenues. An intense conversation. Family. Friends. Reading something engrossing. Music, although I’m not the guy with the iPod growing out of his ears. Hauling out the bagpipes for a blast might get me out of myself but isn’t a great help to neighbourhood tranquillity. There’s the 80 minutes of the game itself, and there’s gliding, of course. But if you need alcohol to lose yourself, you’re in trouble.
There’s still always going to be the odd fall from grace, whatever you do. The team’s reaction to that probably depends on the character of the guy in the firing line. Because there’s so much pressure, it’s got to be a pricks-don’t-last environment, but sometimes a good bugger will fall over.
Jimmy Cowan, for instance, got charged with alcohol-related offences back before our first game of the Tri Nations and must have been close to getting the boot. I wasn’t there that week when it all came out, I was at home injured, but he went to ground and wouldn’t answer my phone calls, he wouldn’t answer anyone’s. He wouldn’t even come out of his room apparently, poor bugger. He was in a bad hole there and when he eventually surfaced and put his hand up, we all tried to help him, because we think Jimmy is a hell of a good man. If he hadn’t been like that, I think we would have just said, ‘Piss off.’
He went to Sydney the following week, was on the bench when we got beaten over there and then, as luck would have it, he was the only fit halfback for the next game at Eden Park, where he had an absolute blinder against the Aussies and became first choice.
Sometimes when things go wrong with someone, you have to also ask whether we could have done better to prevent the situation, rather than blame him one hundred per cent for stuffing up. You look at guys who aren’t performing and, yes, they have to do it themselves, but maybe also part of the problem is that we’re missing something, there’s something we can do to help them. I think that before you give anyone the heave-ho, you have to at least ask that question.
I don’t think there’s a huge difference between the public me and the private me: but—hopefully—there’s a hell of a lot more of me that doesn’t see the spotlight than does. I’ll always want to keep a lot of myself to myself. That’s just the way I am, where I’m from, the way I was brought up. I don’t want to share my every thought with everyone—I’d as soon eat my own entrails as tweet—and I don’t think there’s a public right to know everything about me, just because I’m an All Black. Maybe that huge gap between the public Tiger and the private Tiger was Woods’ downfall. If being promiscuous worked for him, that shouldn’t have been anyone’s concern, even in sanctimonious America. The problem was that he was also married and out there casting himself as Mister Family Values.
When Tiger Woods was single and winning majors by the handful every year, Greg Norman was asked what could possibly stop Tiger’s inexorable march to beating Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 majors. ‘Marriage,’ said Greg.
I don’t think even Greg imagined that his prediction would be quite that accurate!
Only those inside a relationship can know the truth of it, but by all accounts, Tiger had married well. It shows that you’ve not only got to be lucky in love, but also know it and respect it if you are.
Love isn’t something you can find by focusing harder or by crunching numbers or making radical changes to how you go about things. Public recognition doesn’t help: half the women run a mile and the ones who are attracted to that sort of thing are probably the ones I should avoid! Like everyone else, I’ve just got to wait until it happens, and like everyone else, I’ll need a bit of luck to meet the right person. And to know it when I do.