On certain beaches in some of the busier resorts, we used to have competitions between the group of us – Sparks, Mach, Ian Peel, the Newcastle captain, Pete Murphy and me – on the inflatable doughnut rings pulled along by a speedboat. We had to queue for the ride, and in 2002, it started to get a little awkward. Wearing just a pair of shorts, I felt self-conscious when a load of people I didn’t know started to stare. Worse still, I worried about what they thought of me. For some reason, their judgement of me really mattered.
Then, in 2003, pre-World Cup, the first of the cameras started turning up. Strangers stared more, alerting other people to me. I’d still stand in the doughnut queue, but I’d take off my shirt at the last minute, stand with my arms folded looking away from the crowd and then dive straight into the sea and hide as soon as the boat pulled up nearby.
Last year, I just didn’t bother to go.
Now I’m back, but we go to some other quieter beaches, really beautiful beaches that are frequented by Germans and Spanish, who are not so big on rugby. But we still need Machin’s patrol and, for me, the doughnutting is finished. If the boys want to go to the doughnut beach, they go without me.
Majorca has been great for me in many ways, one of those being that it provided me with the opportunity to meet Shelley. We’ve been in the same group of friends since 2003, but it’s now, on holiday in 2005, that we properly get to know each other. Sun, sea and sand provide the perfect setting in which to discover the truly best parts about someone, and it has become undoubtedly our favourite place to spend time.
During this particular trip, a group of us decided to venture out to a pretty town called Deia. Our aim was to find a brand new beach on which we could eat our freshly packed picnic. In the end, we found a beautiful but stony one with an enormous rock protruding from the sea for jumping off. The next day, Mach brings home a copy of the Sun and opens it up to find, clearly displayed in three photographs, snaps of Shelley, some of the boys and me. Although they managed to find us at our idyllic hideaway, they didn’t get a photo from the right angle to show the nasty Eighties ponytail I was sporting that day as a joke.
The Daily Mail went one better and there, on page 3, is a big picture of us all playing cricket in the shallow surf. Shelley, fielding at silly mid-on, I believe, seems to have acquired a speech bubble saying ‘Hands off him, he’s mine!’ Another of our group, Anette, also has a speech bubble, which says ‘No, he’s mine! I saw him first!’
This is a good early lesson for Shelley, allowing her to see the reality of life in the public eye. It was also a good one in collateral damage for Anette, who was simply offering up her own version of Norwegian left-arm medium pace.
I’m still not signing my name on England shirts, but progress has been made and Trading Standards officers have been round to my house to see me.
They have recently made a raid on Sporting Icons, a high-street shop in Chester. Apparently, so many items were seized, there was enough to fill two transit vans. And they found a bunch of photos of me signed, another batch unsigned and a felt-tip pen on the desk with the lid off.
They want to show me some of the stuff to verify whether the signatures are genuine and I am slightly concerned that, when I see them, I may not be able to tell. But I should not have worried. Unless I signed these while drunk, with my wrong hand and my eyes closed, then there’s very little chance of them being my handiwork. It is just ridiculous.
A new season approaches and, as with every new season, I go into it with fresh hope and the same uncontrollable ambition.
For our pre-season, Newcastle go on a mini-tour to Japan. Not long after arrival, I do a kicking session at the end of which I get my weirdest autograph request to date. I have, in the past, been sent pictures of some guy posing naked with my head superimposed onto his shoulders, and asked to sign them. I have been sent pictures of other people to sign – Iain Balshaw, Josh Lewsey and even Michael Owen. Here in Tokyo, though, at the end of this kicking session, I am asked to sign someone’s dog. I refuse to sign the dog. I don’t think I could ever sign a living creature, and anyway its hair is too long. I don’t see how I would ever get the writing to line up.
That night, though, is notable. We go out as a squad for an evening of exploring the city and end up in a trans-sexual bar. Interesting. Then, early the next morning, we are woken up by the sensation of our hotel shaking due to what we later discover is a full-on earthquake. And then, most significant for me, by breakfast time I am carrying a shocking stomach pain that I cannot shake off.
I shuffle down to the dining room half bent over, feeling terrible. That morning I just about struggle through a press conference with John Kirwan, the Japan national team coach, who is a hero of mine, but afterwards it is clear I need to get to the local hospital.
There they do a scan and the diagnosis is that I have ‘compacted stool’. I am fairly hesitant to explain to my teammates the news that this is what I have been making such a song and dance about.
However, the tablets I’ve been given don’t work. Two hours later I’m back in hospital asking for further help. They do a CT scan and then tell me look, we’re really sorry, we’ve misdiagnosed it completely. You’ve got appendicitis.
By the start of the league season, though, I am just about recovered. A course of antibiotics was deemed a preferable solution to surgery for my appendix and I am now ready to start the new season where we are away at Sale.
We play well, so well that the last play of the game is a kick from the left corner to win it. This is what all the training is for. These are the moments that will stick with me for the rest of my life. So the pain of missing is desperate. I hate missing it. I want to rewind time; I want to take it again. I stay outside on the field for as long as I can in silent protest, but the truth that I can never seem to accept is that it’s done and that’s it. Move on.
After the game, I travel down to London to meet Shelley. This is the first time I have seen her since Majorca, yet the thought of that final kick remains twisting and turning in my mind. As soon as I’m back in Newcastle, I’m outside at Kingston Park, putting myself through an impromptu, soul-purging kicking session, taking every single kick from the left-hand corner.
After that, I go straight to tell Martin Brewer that I’ve got that pain in my appendix again.
No messing about this time, the appendix is swiftly removed. A month of the season is lost, but I recover quickly and soon I’m starting again – again.
I feel so proud to be a part of this Newcastle team. We have developed a pattern – begin the season well, start to struggle as the winter weather kicks in, improve with the arrival of spring and the dry running conditions. When we are struggling, some snap decisions are made and some new signings arrive, and we get the impression that it isn’t always Rob Andrew who has the final say on who comes in. I start to wonder if it isn’t down to Dave Thompson, the owner, and whom he has been reading most about on the internet.
The issue is we never really have size in the forwards, so we have to find other ways to compete in the winter months. The result is a training regime run by Blackie that is about as impressive as any I’ve ever been a part of. All of us love the training. Speed, movement and skills are emphasised, and having a structure that means the number on your back becomes largely irrelevant.
When we get it right, it feels great. We play Leicester at Welford Road, a really tough place to go, and I just about survive a tackle from their scrum half, Harry Ellis, where he dives at me while I am taking a clearance kick and flies in at my planted leg. But the point is that we earn ourselves a draw yet we play so well we know we should have won.
Harry’s hit on me could easily have broken my leg but my studs released their grip on the turf, thank goodness, and I went flying instead. It’s nice to escape an injury for a change because there is an autumn international series on the horizon and I am determined to carry on this run of games. In fact, I am so determined that I choose to ignore the growing pain in my gr
oin.
I start to feel a wrench there whenever I begin my kicking, but I don’t want to get it checked, so I don’t tell Martin Brewer about it, or Blackie or Sparks. I don’t want them to tell me I need a rest. The way I see it, the problem might go away of its own accord. When I kick, especially on my right foot, the first few are really sore and then, after eight or nine, it’s not so bad.
We play Gloucester and then London Irish, but the groin pain isn’t easing. In fact, it has become permanent. Time to bite the bullet, and suddenly another entire autumn series disappears before my eyes. Mentally, I am finding this really hard.
The diagnosis is not great. I’ve retorn everything that was repaired in my first groin operation five years ago. On top of that, I have torn a big part of my adductor muscle. I need another hernia repair operation plus a tenotomy, which involves cutting the adductor cleanly so that it can reheal perfectly.
The tenotomy is the most painful operation I have ever had. When I come round from the anaesthetic, I literally fight off the nurses because I am half-conscious and in complete agony.
What do I do now? Focus on the Six Nations. That is my target, but even that will be tough. Maybe not the start of the Six Nations; maybe I can get back halfway through. My goals are slipping. Everything is slipping.
I have the operation in mid-November and, in the new year, start training with Newcastle again, but it’s a case of one step forward, two steps back. As soon as I try any sideways or unpredictable movements, I feel the groin tear slightly and have to wait for that to heal before I can train again.
This starts to form a cycle and is desperately frustrating. One day, when I’m back training with the team at Darsley, I break the line with just scrum half Lee Dixon to beat, but as soon as I side-step I feel it go. I just hand the ball to Dicko and walk to the end of the hall, sit down next to the ice bucket, grab a load of ice and start icing it. It’s no longer a surprise. It’s not even anything to make a song and dance about. It’s just a case of there it goes again, that’s another two- or three-week step backwards. The Six Nations slip out of the frame of possibility.
So I go for more scans and discover a big hole in my adductor muscle. The best hope I have of playing any rugby before the end of the season is to undergo an intensive course of herbal injections – three at a time, every other day, high up on the inside of the groin. Painful and unpleasant. Plus another occasional injection to draw out blood from the hole in the adductor.
Improvement is negligible and it’s getting to the stage where I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s now clear that I might never find my way back to where I want to be.
When I am fit enough to kick, I go for sessions on my own at Darsley and I am so desperate to get it right, so driven by the annoyance and fear of not getting it perfect, that the anger I feel inside begins to express itself physically.
I don’t know what it is, but my frustration is so intense I start shouting at the walls, screaming obscenities. But I punish myself for my mistakes too. When my left foot lets me down, I stamp down hard on it. At one stage, I am so livid that, before I know it, I am sinking my teeth into my hand, trying to bite right through the skin between my thumb and index finger. It immediately starts bruising, the pain is intense.
Imperfection, knowing that I still can’t master what I am doing after all the time I’ve spent on it, all the effort, all the sacrifices and the heartache – it just makes me so angry at myself. In my mind, I have visualised perfect outcomes of every kick, but when my practice doesn’t match that, I have to take it out on something, so I start tearing my T-shirt apart. This becomes habitual; I start getting through way too many T-shirts. I’ll be alone in Darsley, wearing half a T-shirt, my voice either hoarse or completely gone because of all the yelling, and a bruised left foot – all purely because I have let frustration get the better of me again.
By the end of a long kicking session, I will invariably have found my way back to an acceptable skill level, and with my sanity thus restored, I look at myself and wonder: what the hell am I doing?
I have now been injured pretty much solidly for two years, and could hardly be further from fulfilling my life goals. Everything feels so far away now. Toby Flood is playing ten at Newcastle, Charlie Hodgson for England, and they are good players playing good rugby. I could not feel farther from the field. I no longer feel needed or valued. Everything I have done and become is fading and I am failing in every way. My natural instinct is always to attack the situation, but the enjoyment and desire just isn’t there any more. My mind is fighting me.
The frustration is finally starting to take a serious toll. Sleeping is a problem. Graeme Wilkes, the Newcastle doctor, gives me the sleeping tablets I ask for but they don’t seem to work.
For the first time ever, I seem to have lost the drive. Motivation has fizzled out. My fiercely obsessive mind, which has always given me the upper hand on the pitch, has latched on to this negativity and turned on me in a bad way. The negative thoughts won’t stop. My obsessiveness, my most powerful asset, has become my undoing.
My mind is way too active to allow me to sleep, but then I don’t feel I can get up and face the day. I don’t want to face the pressures I put on myself, or the expectations that I feel are constantly placed on me, which I know I can’t meet. I feel torn in half.
I don’t know what to do. I start turning up late for rehab sessions; some of them I miss entirely. I never would have stood for this sort of behaviour before.
And I can’t escape. There’s simply no way I can concentrate enough to read a book. The thought of the effort it would take I find depressing. And when I watch TV, I take nothing in. I can watch a two-hour DVD and all I see is the outside of the screen and some flashing images on it. I don’t even know what the storyline is.
My mind is totally preoccupied with anything it can find that is negative and destructive; and it causes me to feel panic and my heart to beat quicker. My obsessiveness has vacated rugby completely and started to drive my thoughts downwards, tossing endless dark, nasty images through my head.
To try a new tack with my groin problem, I go for a week’s residency at the Olympic Medical Institute, a specialist centre attached to Northwick Park Hospital in north London.
One of the exercises is to run against a strong current in the pool. The idea is to run for as long as you can, and if you don’t run hard, you just get swept to the back of the pool. This is the kind of a challenge I usually relish. The old me would be asking what the record was then flick on the Tunnel Vision switch and drop into that zone where pain and tiredness get blanked out – like training with Blackie, or the England cone test. It’s what I do, my way of showing the world that I’m too strong, too hungry and too proud ever to be beaten.
But I don’t really want to be here in this pool, and I am acutely aware of every kind of tiredness. On the side of the pool, the phyios and trainers bark all the usual motivational stuff at me. Come on! You can do it! That sort of thing. Who are these people? I don’t know these people. They don’t know what I’m going through. They don’t care.
I fight the current as hard as I can, but I get pushed to the back. I try again. Same thing.
This isn’t me. It’s like someone else is doing it. It’s like so many people I’ve watched over the years who have looked for excuses to give up. Here, I guess, I’m doing the same.
And I’m compounding the problem. Every time I try to fight the current, I say to myself come on, you can do this. But I know deep down that the message is an empty one and I do even worse, and that makes me feel even more pathetic.
Suddenly, I stop. I give up. I can’t do it. I have hit the wall – breaking point. I have barely completed one and a half days out of seven, and I’ve been late for pretty much every session. I can’t be here for another second.
I get out the pool. I apologise to the staff at the hospital. Sorry, it’s nothing to do with you guys, I just can’t do this. I get in the car and drive home.<
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On the way back up to Newcastle, I phone Graeme Wilkes and apologise to him, too. Besides all this inner turmoil, I still feel I have let people down.
I have a meeting with Graeme when I get back and he and the physios are positive with me. They say we’ll work on something else instead. We’ll give you some other rehab. But I’m not helping them. I don’t get out of bed in the morning. I sleep three or four hours and wake up with pounding-heartbeat panic attacks and a sense of urgency that something has gone badly wrong. But nothing has gone wrong. It’s just another day when I’m injured.
In one rehab session in the gym, I’m doing some lifting with the dumbbells on a Swiss ball. The dumbbells feel really, really heavy. Around me, the gym is full of jolly people, laughing and chatting, and I’m struggling with these dumbbells and questioning it all. What is it I am trying to achieve by lifting bits of iron in the air like this? How can all these other people be so happy?
I put down the dumbbells and walk out.
The next day, I go to see Graeme Wilkes again but this time I let it all go. I don’t talk to him about my groin. I tell him about my head.
Graeme is a fantastic guy, a very good doctor and the right person to be saying this to. He says what I realise I need to hear, that I have an illness. It’s like any other injury but this one is in my head rather than in my leg or my arm or anywhere else.
He is very, very good to me. He explains that my illness is controlling everything else and working on the groin injury is far secondary to sorting out my head. There is no point in my groin getting better if I don’t sort out my head anyway, because that issue is much more severe.
Merely to know that I have an illness that is not abnormal is like a first weight off my shoulders.
Graeme refers me to a specialist, but the connection isn’t quite right. I need to feel completely comfortable to deal with this.
Jonny: My Autobiography Page 22