The Real McCaw: Richie McCaw: The Autobiography

by Richie McCaw

  18 February 2011: Playing the bagpipes at Jo’s wedding.

  On Saturday, 19 February in Auckland, the Blues beat the Crusaders 24–22 in an error-filled opening to the New Zealand conference. It’s Ali’s first game back in New Zealand after two ops on his Achilles and nearly two seasons on the sidelines doing the lonely rehab thing. I’m pleased for him. He does battle with Brad, who’s also been doing it hard. After enduring the earthquakes in Christchurch, Brad took his family back to Brisbane for the summer, just in time for the horrific floods which devastated Queensland during December and into January.

  On Monday, I get Mum to drop me off at Rugby Park on her way to work, relief teaching at St Mark’s Primary in Opawa, so I can spend the day with the boys and start doing some upper body work on the grinder. Toddy’s not happy with what happened in Auckland, when the Blues pack took us on in pick-and-gos and got over the top of us. It’s frustrating not being able to play. I try to help Kieran as much as I can behind the scenes.

  On Tuesday, 22 February, I get Mum to drop me off on her way to work again, and after morning training, Kieran and I head to Merivale Mall to have some sushi and talk about how the team are going.

  We’re sitting there with our sushi when we’re engulfed by a noise like thunder, or a train coming, just like the guys described back in September, and the floor starts heaving and shuddering and the lights go out and I slip to the floor down on one knee and grab the crutches. People start screaming, and trying to run, but you can’t even stand up. I’m thinking about trying to get under the table. From where I am I can see into the supermarket that opens into the mall, and everything’s being thrown off the shelves across the aisles. When is this going to end? I look up and there’s this big steel beam rocking and rolling above us. How is this going to end? When it stops heaving and shuddering enough to stand up, I grab the crutches, lever myself up and Kieran and I make for the Papanui Road exit, where Kieran’s parked the car.

  Outside, there are a couple of older women who’ve lost it, so Kieran and I give them a hug—as much as I can with the crutches—and look at the liquid starting to bubble up through cracks in the concrete. I know the guy who owns the camera shop at the entrance to the mall and he tells us there’s twice as much damage in his shop as there was in September. People stream past us, shocked, those glazed eyes, that Red Zone stare. I ask Kieran how that shock compares with September. ‘Seems way worse,’ he says. There’s another good aftershock and we decide to get out of there. we walk under the façade and over to Kieran’s car, parked against the kerb.

  23 February 2011: Part of Merivale Mall a day after the big one.

  There’s not a lot of traffic and we make it back to my place, which looks okay, and so we carry on back to Rugby Park. By the time Kieran drops me off and goes home to Bridget and the baby, the sirens are wailing all over the city and there’s a pancake cloud of smoke and dust rising over towards the CBD. A few of the boys had been under the grandstand in the changing rooms and one of them was in the shower and he was like, ‘Jesus, I got out of there in a hurry!’ Then I get a text from my sister: ‘Are you okay?’

  It’s only then that I think of trying to contact anyone, but all the lines are choked, you can’t get through, so we stand around outside for a while knowing some serious stuff has happened but not knowing what. I get Corey to drop me home and there’s nothing around my house at that stage, so I go inside to wait for Mum to come and pick me up. There’s no power or internet connection, so I pull out the Meridian Energy freebie transistor I was so dismissive of and start listening to the Civil Defence bulletins, which confirm that something massive and awful has happened.

  The mobile connection comes back and Dad eventually gets through to me and tells me to stay where I am until Mum gets there. She’s had to stay with the kids at school until their parents can get to them. There are all these text messages from people who’re watching television in Auckland and all over, asking ‘Are you okay?’ and ‘How bad is it?’ They’ve got more idea than me at that point, though the transistor is telling me that some buildings have collapsed and there’s been some loss of life, but it’s still pretty sketchy. Then people begin ringing in to the station, some really upset at what they’ve seen—eyewitness reports of dead bodies lying in Cashel Mall and crushed cars and buses. Smoke and dust blanketing the CBD, with choppers overhead, dumping monsoon buckets on smouldering buildings. People in sneakers and bike helmets combing through rubble, trying to help victims caught in collapsed buildings. People shocked, crying and injured, taking refuge in open spaces like Latimer Square and Hagley Park.

  At one point, I think I hear running water, which is odd because the water’s off. It’s coming from over by the front door, and when I hobble over and open it, I see liquid bubbling up through the concrete just outside in the little courtyard. I ignore it for a while, but when I come back and have another look about half an hour later it’s still coming and starting to bubble up quite a bit, so I grab a spade from the garage and I’m out there on one foot trying to dig a little trench to take it away from the house. An hour later it starts to come up everywhere. The neighbour’s arrived home and I ask him if he can give me a hand, and for the next half-hour he’s trying to scoop it away while I’m sticking boards in front of the door to stop it coming in. Then Dad arrives to pick me up, because Mum’s tied up.

  When we join the traffic heading west out of the city, Dad tells me that Jo’s had a narrow escape. She was in her building by the Cashel Street Mall at the Bridge of Remembrance end luckily, and someone managed to get one car out of the car park and eight or nine of them squeezed into it and fled.

  By the time we get home, Mum’s there too, and over the next few hours we’re joined by Jo and Sam and friends and relations, and there’s power on out there and we watch the television pictures coming in and realise the extent of the unfolding disaster. Those pictures of the CTV and PGG buildings, and the Cathedral. Streets with dead bodies and badly injured survivors. The death toll going up by the hour. The heroic rescue attempts. Hundreds of people setting up camp in Hagley Park, roads out of the city jammed with fleeing people. Dozens of vehicles abandoned in the liquefaction. Pictures I’ll never forget. We sit there mute with sadness watching our wrecked city, disbelieving really, though September has sort of prepared us for some version of this reality.

  Jo wasn’t the only lucky one. That evening, there’s a sequence shown on television of a miraculous escape by a woman with a dog, running into the street as the façade behind her collapses, just about ensnaring her under a huge wave of dust and debris. I recognise the façade of Merivale Mall, the one Kieran and I walked under to get to his car. Must have been moments before.

  Over the next few days, it’s the stories that get me. Sad. Tragic. Heroic. Lucky. I’ve always been a bit fatalistic—when your number’s up, that’s it. What I see and hear confirms it. The sheer luck, good or bad, that means death or survival. Where you were, when. The ones in the CTV building who found a pocket of air. Those poor Japanese students so far from home. The one texting rescuers on her mobile as they tried futilely to get to her before the texts stopped. The guy from the PGG building who went for a run that lunchtime. A woman who lost her son—he was usually in one of the buildings that survived but had gone for a walk down Cashel Mall to do something and it collapsed on him. Those crushed in cars and buses because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. My sister Jo who was at the right end of Cashel Street Mall. Me and Kieran at the Merivale Mall.

  What’s left of the CTV building.

  The death toll rises past 100 as rescue workers from around the country concentrate on the CTV and PGG buildings, and more are flown in from Australia and Japan and the States. The CTV building is still on fire. Sewers and water mains are severely damaged, flooding large areas of the city. The port of Lyttelton is closed, and the tunnel, and Evans Pass, the road connecting Lyttelton to Sumner. There’s huge damage to houses up in the hills and on the cliff edges
around Sumner. The Christchurch Hospital emergency department is still open but damaged, and four other triage centres are set up around the city . . .

  Over the next few days, people come and stay, friends from town with no sewers or power, many who’d been at Jo’s wedding just days before. That timing was lucky too.

  However bad the pictures on television, they don’t prepare me for the reality of what I eventually see in what becomes known as the Red Zone of the CBD. If I was underwhelmed in September, this is overwhelming. It’s actually worse than pictures can show. It’s worse than I can imagine.

  In the aftermath, the Crusaders have to make a decision about something as inconsequential as a game of rugby. The guys are all affected differently and you can’t tell the way any of them is going to react. Some of the toughest guys that you think will handle anything are the worst. Some of the guys who you think would be a basket case are strong. You have to be careful making any assumptions, what you say to who. It’s not a case of telling people to harden up. People deal with stuff in different ways. The most predictable reaction is that some of the guys who aren’t from Christchurch don’t want to stay, which is understandable, but not acceptable. They take some convincing to stay.

  On Wednesday we have to make a decision about whether the team should play on Saturday against the Hurricanes. Toddy says, ‘What do you reckon, do we just get on with it?’ But none of our boys is anywhere near in a state to play. The decision is made, and we’re told to go back to our homes and do what we need to do. We’ll get together next week.

  I feel a bit useless, but quite a few of the guys get out with shovels and wheelbarrows. I know Brad up his street spends a lot of time on the end of a shovel.

  There’s liquefaction all around my place, but I can’t do anything, so Mum and Dad and Jo and Sam and some mates come and dig all that out. Everyone around the place, all the neighbours, is doing the same. The upside is you get to know them and help each other out.

  That sort of spirit is seen right across the city, people just pitching in, doing what they can to help those around them.

  Ali, Dan and I have a water business and a few of us decide to put a couple of pallets on a trailer and drive round the bad areas, just knocking on doors, saying gidday and dropping off boxes of water. That’s an eye-opener—some really sad sights, like elderly people living in tents, no water, power or sewage. After the drama and tragedy of the CBD, you realise that it’s out here in the broken suburbs that the privations and suffering are going to go on for weeks and months. People living in terrible conditions, homes completely knackered, with winter coming in a month or two.

  News comes through that AMI Stadium is damaged. Liquefaction has swamped the field and there are rumours about serious structural damage to the stands, even the ones just completed for the RWC. No one says at that point that Christchurch has lost the Cup, but how can it still come? The stadium’s wrecked, but even if we play somewhere else, we’ve seen the pictures of the leaning Grand Chancellor Hotel and heard about the damage to others, and we know that the accommodation infrastructure is pretty much stuffed. And who’s going to want to come to a place where the aftershocks are still shuddering through like endless underground waves? But no one wants to say out loud that the RWC’s not coming, that we’ve lost the chance to show off the Garden City and have some fun and celebration to look forward to, because it’s almost too much to bear on top of everything else.

  All roads no longer lead to AMI Stadium . . .

  A week on, the Crusaders have to decide when and where to play. We can’t train at Rugby Park, as the old grandstand’s got to be properly assessed, so we shift out to Lincoln.

  There’s the question as to whether playing rugby is respectful to what’s going on, bodies still being retrieved from the rubble, people who’ve lost their homes camping out in terrible situations, is it right to get out there and play rugby? But if we don’t, what are we achieving by not doing it?

  If there was something else we could be doing to help, sure. But there’s not really anything we can do that makes a difference, other than play. It’s not going to help anyone if we sit at home wondering what the hell we do now. We decide it’s better that we get back on the horse, give people something other than their misery to look at.

  Playing rugby is what we do, it’s all we can do really, and in the end it’s also probably the most useful thing we can do—embrace the ‘new normal’ and show people that you’ve got to get on with things at some point, somehow.

  Round 3 is against the Waratahs and has been transferred to Nelson. I fly up from Dunedin, where All Black physio Pete Gallagher has been checking out the foot, giving me the okay to start on the bike.

  We’d already agreed to play in the red-and-white hoops of the West Coast union, part of the Crusaders’ catchment, in memory of the 29 miners lost at Pike River. I stand there in my moon boot with the team for a minute’s silence for the miners and for the dead in Christchurch, the toll still rising. That weekend, all the Super rugby teams do the same.

  When the whistle blows, we don’t look ready to play. The Waratahs score a couple of tries and I wonder whether we’ve come back too soon. But Dan keeps us in touch with a couple of penalties, then in the last 10 minutes of the first half, Sonny Bill, on debut, finds his feet with his big mate Robbie Fruean, who scores twice, and we’re away. In the second half, as we get out to 33 points, I almost feel sorry for the Tahs—it must be tough up against guys who aren’t playing just for themselves any more.

  ‘Hopefully, we showed the region what we’re about,’ Kieran says after the game. ‘Everyone’s been showing it the last 10 days, everyone who’s been working around the city and in the suburbs. We just carried on the work that they’ve been doing.’

  On the sideline for the Crusaders against the Waratahs . . . the guys aren’t just playing for themselves any more.

  In Round 4 the guys trounce the Brumbies in Canberra, running in 46 straight points after trailing 10–6 at the end of the first quarter, and in Round 5 they cream the Highlanders 44–13 in Dunedin.

  Round 6 against the Sharks is a radical departure from anything we’ve done before. Although we’ve talked about taking the Crusaders roadshow to the northern hemisphere, it’s always been pie-in-the-sky stuff, but this seems like the ideal time to try it out. When it’s seriously touted by the Crusaders Board that we play the Sharks at Twickenham some of the guys are a bit less than enthusiastic. But given we can’t play at home and we’ve got to go somewhere, and this might be a big earner for the franchise and the Earthquake Appeal, they come round to getting excited about a trip to London and showcasing Super rugby in the northern hemisphere. For the Sharks, London’s in the same time zone as Durban and less of a hassle.

  The showpiece side of it certainly works—our scrum kills them and Dan and SBW and wingers Zac and Sean Maitland feature in a brand of high-scoring, fast-paced, high-intensity rugby that looks great on my television screen back home. Some of the English scribes are still lost in the Stone Age, though, and seem to equate pace with soft rugby—a funny equation, which isn’t actually supported by physics or by the injury toll caused by the big collisions in the game.

  As a fund-raiser for the Earthquake Appeal, it’s not as successful as hoped. A 35,000-odd crowd isn’t bad given the short lead-time, but it means the Crusaders barely break even, a tough result for the Board, not to mention the guys who travel right round the world and back in the space of a week, even if they do manage a 44–28 bonus point win.

  The guys get the bye to recover in Round 7, and then stomp all over the Bulls in Timaru. The following week in Tauranga, I finally get to play rugby in 2011, albeit 30 minutes off the bench. The day before the game the foot’s a bit sore, but it doesn’t worry me in the game. The Chiefs haven’t been going well, but, as usual, that doesn’t stop them giving us grief until the last quarter, when we ease away to 34–16 and a bonus point.

  My foot seems to come through the game okay, but
on Monday night after a bit of a light training, I’m woken by pain—my bloody foot’s just killing me. I take some painkillers, but come morning I can barely walk and have to get back on my crutches to make it to training. The head-space is not good. This is bloody ridiculous! What’s happening here? And for the first time, Shit, it’s all going wrong.

  It’s the same foot, but the pain seems to be on the inside, not where the screw is on the outside. I get an X-ray and, thank Christ, it’s just deep bruising on the bone, caused by an orthotic arch I’ve been wearing for extra support.

  I miss the next game and watch us go down 18–26 to a really committed Highlanders team. We come away with nothing.

  But the big news seems to be that I’ve turned down an invite to Prince William and Kate’s wedding. I was flattered to be asked and had I been playing Super rugby from the word go, I might have been due a rest about now. The team is off to Perth and then to South Africa, and I might have been able to scoot off to London, miss the Force game and rejoin the team in Cape Town. But once I got injured and missed so much rugby, it was never a goer—I’ve got other things on my mind that I need to get right.

  I don’t get everything right in Perth; in fact I get sin-binned for repeated infringements. Some people might regard that as a return to form! We get a bonus point win and the foot gives me no trouble. But something else does give me trouble. Head bang. Blurred vision.

  I might be okay to play against the Stormers, but I decide not to. They come in threes, I tell myself, I’ll be right now. And the one I told myself back in February when my foot went. Better now, than later. That one’s wearing thin, and something else is rising up instead, a bit of despair. Jesus, when am I going to get a break here?