Jonny: My Autobiography

by Wilkinson, Jonny

  Incredible though the reception is, I just need to get back playing. Most people might think it’d be nice to take it easy for a bit, but I don’t want to. I want the opposite. I don’t want to feel I am coming down the other side of this glorious mountain. It’s like I’m riding a very big and dangerous wave and to stop and take too much pleasure in it all will bring me crashing down too hard. I want to stay on that wave, and to do that I need to play.

  Four days after getting back, hidden away at the top of the clubhouse at Kingston Park, I watch Newcastle play Wasps. And I’m thinking I need to be on that field. I need to get back because I’ve got stuff to be getting on with. I’m scared. Time is going by and I’m already losing what I had and where I was.

  For the sake of a quick, easy exit, I leave the match just before the final whistle, but when I get home, I find I have company. It didn’t take the press long to discover where I live, and now I cannot go back to my house in Slaley without a reception of a car or three and some big paparazzi-type lenses waiting for me.

  To get to my house, you have to go over a cattle grid and up a private driveway. A couple of times, they’ve parked right in front of the house, and Sparks has explained nicely that it’s private property and they really ought to get moving. So now they park behind the cattle grid instead.

  Our mate Chris Machin is currently living with us, and the three of us put into play a carefully planned operation, although there is probably a lot more fun in the execution than in anything it actually achieves. The next day, I return home from training, wearing a distinctive beanie hat and coat. A little later, Sparks leaves the house with Chris, who is now wearing the beanie and pretty much the same clothes I arrived in. They turn right out of the drive in his car and are followed for a few kilometres. Meanwhile, I leave the house in my car, head in the opposite direction and set about getting on with my life unperturbed. Nice bit of teamwork.

  But on occasions, I do feel I’m being chased, which in a car isn’t too smart. Sparks tends to take the wheel and I duck down low in the passenger seat, insisting that he cuts corners and hides in country lane laybys or people’s driveways until the trouble passes. It’s not simply that I don’t want to have my picture taken; I don’t want to give them a victory over me.

  The aftermath of the World Cup continues long and hard and there are some truly amazing experiences.

  We have the open-topped bus tour through London. We go to Buckingham Palace. A reception is held in Downing Street. The Buckingham Palace trip is particularly special, even if my abiding memory of it may turn out to be the fact that Ronnie Regan took time out to lie on one of the Queen’s carpets in order to distract Simon Shaw into looking at his finger circle.

  From the Downing Street reception, I get a taxi back up the A1 to Newcastle and I am on the phone to my friend Mike Latter when the car suddenly starts fishtailing at 70mph. It’s only when I am looking up the middle of the motorway out of the backseat window that the panic really sets in. The car careers off the road and into a ditch. Both the driver and I are unhurt. The car is a write-off.

  Sorry, Mike, I explain, bit of a car-crash situation going on here, mate. I’ll probably have to phone you back.

  A few days later, out of the blue, I receive a letter from Elton Flatley. It’s a lovely note – congratulations on your victory in Sydney and well played, but we’ll get you next time. I treasure that.

  Everything right now seems a little surreal. It culminates at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, back in London.

  I know I have a chance of winning because I’m on the shortlist, but I don’t take it seriously. If it’s someone from our team, it simply has to be Johnno. They do the top-three countdown and name Paula Radcliffe in third. But then Johnno is announced in second.

  I don’t believe it, because then they announce the winner and it’s me. I make my way to the stage, terrified I’m going to trip over, and the first thing I say to Johnno is you should have won this, mate, not me. It shouldn’t be me.

  Just enjoy it, he says to me. Johnno, being Johnno, doesn’t give a toss.

  Of course, the award is an enormous honour. When I was a youngster, I craved adulation, but this experience here is not right. This is the ultimate example of me, an individual, being picked out from the team. To stand up here on stage beside my team captain, who led by example and took care of his entire squad and has just received second prize – it’s just not right.

  As the programme credits roll, this is what is going through my mind. I’m a fraud. This entire audience of hugely successful people are on their feet and the applause seems to go on for ever. I stare gormlessly at the camera, realising how tough it is to look cool and natural when you are really trying hard to do so. And there’s another question in my head. How the hell am I going to meet the eyes of all the other boys after this?

  AT last, five weeks after the World Cup final and three days after Christmas, the wait is over. Newcastle versus Northampton Saints at home. I am able to be a rugby player again.

  The pressure I put on myself is massive. My last game was a World Cup final and my performance here has to be at the same level. It’s what I feel everyone is expecting of me. The way I see it is this. If I don’t come up with the goods and prove myself to be worth all the praise, I’ll lose this perfect situation for which I’ve worked so hard. I have defined myself as the guy who helped England to win the World Cup. Now I have to hang on to that reputation.

  But then something else happens.

  We are in the second half of a tight game when their centre, Jon Clarke, dummies and breaks our defence down the shortside, giving them a simple two-on-one. I’ve already seen the danger and am hurtling across from the openside, thinking I can catch him blind, unload into him without him expecting it. Uncontrollable aggression surges through my veins. These are the kind of chances I’m driving myself hard to take. I want to make the sort of impact that will change the game.

  As I go in to smash him, at the very last moment, he steps in towards me. Basically, he catches me before I catch him and hits my head, compressing it hard against the top of my shoulder. After all the stingers over the years, after all the tests, the different diagnoses, the pinched nerves, trapped nerves and worn discs, it all finally gives out in one massive collision. The ultimate stinger. It’s like I can hear a siren going off in my head, a blaring alarm. I can’t hear a word anybody is saying to me. And with every ring of the alarm, a massive pulse of searing hot pain shoots down my right arm, which I cannot move at all.

  After 30 seconds, there is no lifting of the pain. Two or three minutes later, I still can’t get even a twitch from my fingers. I leave the field, but an hour later, still in the physio room, no strength has returned and I’m starting to panic. I’m suffering from a kind of paralysis. I’m told that in seven to ten days’ time the power will come back, and so I wait. But after ten days, two weeks, I’m no better. It’s lucky I drive an automatic car because to put my right arm on the steering wheel, I need to lift it up with the left arm. Then it just drops down again, completely lifeless.

  So we convene a meeting – the England physios, the Newcastle physios, my dad, a surgeon and me. We talk about the options. Option One is to leave it as it is and, with no guarantee, hope that the strength will come back. But the way it’s gone so far, that could possibly signal the end of my career. Option Two is surgery. Plenty can be done, but only when they see the damage to the nerve will they know the extent of the problem. At worst, the nerve is severed and that, for sure, is the end of my rugby career.

  The decision isn’t hard. I can’t not have the surgery. And not for a second do I believe that my career is finished.

  On Sunday, 15 February, England will play Italy in Rome and it will be the first game in the Five or Six Nations Championship that I have not started since February 1999.

  Three days earlier, Mum picks me up from Newcastle General Hospital and a sneaky member of the paparazzi in the car park snaps me hunche
d over in pain. Not without a touch of vanity, I had prepared for the off-chance of this happening and taken off my neck brace. I don’t want the whole thing to look too serious.

  The worst news is averted. The operation indicated that an old, undiscovered fracture of the C4 vertebra was the problem. I am convinced that this takes me back all the way to 1997 and that Under-21s game at Headingley, although it could also be the London Irish game in 2001. Then again, it could be any of the other fifty or sixty stingers of my career. The point is that where the fracture healed, a bony spur – an osteophyte – had grown out of that vertebra and was pushing firmly against the nerve. The stinger against Saints had jammed it so far into the nerve that no impulses could get through.

  So they took out the osteophyte and cleaned around it. Now it was a case of resting and waiting for the nerve to regenerate. No one can put a timescale on that – it’ll do it at its own speed.

  Later that day, I have had enough of this rest business. While making sure I am supporting my head, obviously, I have the brace off again and am doing a forty-minute aerobic session on an exercise bike at Slaley Hall. I can’t stand not doing anything and feeling like I’m losing fitness.

  Frustrated at the incredibly slow pace of recovery, I need to get away. Somewhere far away like Mauritius, but somehow word gets out. Paparazzi are everywhere and a picture duly appears in one of the English papers of me sat hunched over on a beach.

  To make a point, the Mauritius photograph is compared with another, taken two years previously in Majorca, and to give credence to this then-and-now story, a ‘specialist’ is quoted in the paper, declaring that this picture shows me to have around 29 per cent body fat. By definition therefore I have suddenly become clinically obese.

  I’ve been training hard since the day I was released from hospital, and am still pretty fit. I’m probably on about 10 per cent body fat, which is about 2 per cent higher than when I’m playing. The pictures focus mainly on my now withered right arm and shoulder and are a bit shocking even to me, but unless this is where I’m hiding the extra 19 per cent body fat, I think the ‘specialist’ nutritionist may have been having an off day.

  This incident shows how much things have changed. I have never sought publicity, never been to a premier of a film, a dinner or a public event with the intention of boosting my public profile. I’ve been meticulous about that. That is a world I find really quite intimidating. It seems to be an environment where you actually have no say in how you are portrayed. To someone who wants to control everything, that is a living hell. But even avoiding all that, privacy has become a massive challenge for me. Against my wishes, I have become the business of other people.

  So, back home, it’s easy to say no when Hello! magazine comes knocking. They want the full Jonny-at-home photoshoot, probably lying back on various bits of furniture while wearing leather trousers and an open white linen shirt with the cuffs undone under a nice waistcoat. I don’t even need to know what money is being offered. It’s just not my thing.

  Among the many other offers that come my way are the chance to endorse a range of Jonny dolls and the opportunity to appear with Keith Harris and Orville the duck, whom I used to watch as a boy, in a supermarket ad. These are not for me, either.

  Hello! are very keen and offer £1 million. The answer is still no – not my style, not how I want to live my life, I’m not going to change my mind. But I make the Hello! cover nevertheless. They run a stock picture of me and concoct a story out of a bunch of old interviews. I guess you discover sooner or later that you can try to compete on that territory, but you will never really win.

  I like the fact that fans write to me, and I am so keen to respect the effort they make and the support they give that, for some time now, I have had my mum helping me deal with the post. I try to answer genuine letters, enclosing a signed photo with a personalised message. What I do not appreciate so much is seeing the signed photo then being flogged on eBay. Sometimes you can even see that the personalised message has been scrubbed out in order to make it more widely marketable.

  I am just getting my head round the whole eBay phenomenon. I’ve seen shirts on offer with the Jonny Wilkinson signature so badly forged; they haven’t even tried to copy the genuine article. ‘Johnny’ spelled with an ‘h’ is a bit of a giveaway. I’m starting to receive letters from people who have bought a signed Wilkinson shirt at an auction, but found the signature wasn’t mine.

  How do you police this? How do you get a grip on it?

  The problem is twofold. One, honest people find they are buying signed photos and shirts that aren’t genuine. Two, I support five children’s charities, which I care about passionately, and if the marketplace is being flooded with fakes, the value of the genuine items will go down and my ability to raise money for these charities is reduced with it.

  Sometimes, when I’m signing autographs, someone will give me a photograph of myself to sign, and then hand me a whole lot more and ask me to sign those, too. I suspect I know where those are going, so I say yes to just the one. A minute later, I’ll have a kid standing there holding out a load of the same pictures, and I’ll say who d’you want me to sign these to? And he’ll say I don’t know. That guy over there just asked me to do this.

  So, reluctantly, I’ve decided to stop signing England shirts. As a result, I get letters from people who are disappointed. One even threatened to take the story to the media. I say to them all I’ll sign anything else, a Newcastle shirt, a Lions shirt, a ball, anything. I just need to be in a position to work out what signed shirts are out there and where they are coming from. That’s why I won’t sign.

  The answer comes from Bren, my godfather, who has offered to help with this. Bren found a company in Chester called Sporting Icons, which was selling fakes of my signature. He got in touch with the police, who put him on to the Trading Standards department at Chester Council. They were interested in the case but progress was slow, so Bren played a masterstroke. He told them that there appears to be a considerable amount of fake Manchester United memorabilia for sale there, too. The case suddenly became more important and kicked into action. Watch this space.

  I decide to address formally the process of re-evaluation. In a new notebook, under the title ‘Onwards and Upwards [Blackie’s favourite phrase] the next step’, I write down my new goals.

  First, under Goals – Personal:

  Come back physically stronger, more powerful and in better shape than ever before.

  Become the fittest player in world rugby, and continue to increase the gap between me and the next fittest player.

  Lead the world of sport in use of speed and movement.

  Improve all skills to lead world by a ridiculously inappropriate amount.

  Continue to ENJOY playing more and more.

  The next subtitle is Goals – Sparks:

  Play alongside Sparks on a consistent basis.

  Help Sparks to be the player and success that he wants to be.

  Create a successful business environment or company together.

  Then Long-term Goals – Personal:

  Win the World Cup again.

  Be selected for the British Lions 2005 tour and return as part of a successful team.

  Continue to be the best-prepared rugby player in the world at any time.

  Maintain a consistency of world-leading performance.

  Reach the 100 Test mark.

  Be the world’s highest Test and points scorer.

  Win more Grand Slams.

  Then Team Goals – Newcastle Falcons:

  Win the League.

  Win it again.

  Win the domestic Cup.

  Win the European Cup.

  Lead and effectively be the force of the club, along with Steve Black.

  Then Other Goals Personal To Me:

  Always be able to sign off the video from 24 hour surveillance camera.

  Become a better, more developed, more mature person.

  Learn fully the guitar
and piano.

  Become fluent in French.

  Maintain all my values regardless.

  I may now have goals. Naturally, I also have an intense anxiety about whether I can get to where I want to go. And as is my way, I decide to tackle that anxiety, to contain my fears, by working hard and inviting obsession to kick in.

  I manage to construct a daily schedule whereby I’m in the gym for rehab at 9am. I’ll also do a fitness session with Blackie and, from the end of February, when I find I can just about kick well enough, I fit in a separate kicking session, too. Basically, I train pretty much non-stop from nine till five every day.

  My pledge is to come back better and I won’t let it go, even if it means being distinctly economical with the truth with the people who are trying to help me. Blackie doesn’t know that besides his fitness sessions, I am doing a whole lot more. And when he asks how long I’ve been kicking, I give him a number that might be missing a digit or so in a key place. Likewise, the physios don’t know how much I’m doing with Blackie, and when my schedule dictates that I have a day off to take it easy, I go and kick at Darsley Hall, Newcastle United’s indoor facility, so no one has a clue where I am.

  The medics at Newcastle all tell me take it easy, don’t do too much. And I say OK and then carry on doing the opposite.

  The results aren’t good. I get chronic tennis elbow in both arms and I have trouble with diet. The food I eat never seems to suffice. I eat and eat and eat but nothing fills me up. And I cannot sleep. If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at four or five in the morning. If I stay up later and go to bed about one, I’m awake at five or six.