The Real McCaw: Richie McCaw: The Autobiography

by Richie McCaw

  Our fears aren’t helped when we transit at Japan and get news of Doug Howlett’s Heathrow high-jinks.

  Doug had been one of the team who’d got stuck in at the bar of the Vale Glamorgan after the game. I’d gone to bed early, exhausted, played out. I didn’t sleep well, but when I did, it was bliss. Escape. On Sunday morning, there was that moment between sleeping and waking, when the world was new, before the memory kicked in and hit me like a scrape on a raw nerve. It happened.

  When I went down for breakfast, there were several who’d clearly put in an all-nighter and were a bit second hand. Some of them hadn’t been selected to play and were, perhaps justifiably, pissed off. Maybe if we’d had the experience and composure of Doug and Aaron Mauger in that last 20, the result might have been different, but for me it was either way too late or way too early to be thinking about all that. I felt sorrier for guys like Ali and Rodney, who had played so well they deserved to be on the winning side.

  I got out of there. Vale Glamorgan had its own sports complex and golf course, so I played nine holes of golf with a couple of the guys. Not well. Golf’s one of those games that bites you if you’re preoccupied with something else.

  Later, Mum and Dad and Joanna called in. It was all pretty desultory. They did their best to cheer me up, and I did my best to make out I was okay. I must have already been looking ahead, though. Jo remembers me saying that I’d only be 30 by the time the next RWC rolled round.

  Later, we were told the first flight out of London was not until the next day, so a few of us shot into town Sunday night and ended up at the Walkabout bar. The All Black tour parties had moved on, so we were spared the embarrassment of encountering any of the fans who’d been wandering stunned and bewildered around the streets of Cardiff after the game.

  Letting go a bit seemed like a really good idea at the time, so we had a big night, and I was predictably as sick as a dog next morning. But I was still looking forward to the flight home as we bussed up to London. Through the hangover fog, I was thinking, I don’t want to be here, I just want to get home.

  But on the last leg home from Japan on Air New Zealand, the trepidation mounts. What’s waiting for us? We know it’s going to be very different from the send-off we got in August. Going on recent history, we can anticipate a harsh reception. It’s reported that we’re due in at midday and ‘no homecoming welcome has been arranged at Auckland Airport’.

  They’re obviously gutted, but . . .

  That might be because the only direct flight we can get out of Japan is to Christchurch, where to our huge surprise over a thousand people turn out to welcome us. They’re obviously gutted, but so good about it, so sympathetic, that I’m not sure whether I feel better for their unflagging support, or worse, for letting such great fans down so badly.

  When I get back to the townhouse, I realise that there’s no family and non-rugby friends around, they’re all in Europe. I only stay a couple of hours, repack my bag and head back to the airport.

  Flying north, I can’t help but see my face all over the front page of the New Zealand Herald. It’s the money shot I was worried about during the Cardiff press conference, under a headline ‘Déjà vu all over again . . . And again . . . And again . . . And again’. Underneath my photo, it says: ‘So much promise, only tears to show for it’. Well, I was just rubbing my face, but why spoil a good story. ‘The best team, the best players, the best coach, the most expensive and extensive preparation . . . A $50 million campaign . . . How did it come to this?’

  What I find in the rest of the paper is nothing less than I expect, maybe more moderate.

  There are opinion pieces from former All Blacks like John Drake and Richard Loe and coaches like Laurie Mains. They’re understandably disappointed but urge the public to go easy on us. There are psychologists waxing lyrical about the grieving process we and the nation are going through, and even the editorial is headed ‘No excuses, but keep a perspective’. Our GDP might have suffered from our loss, speculates James Ihaka ‘. . . judging by web traffic and office time and motion studies, the national product would have dipped substantially in the wake of the Cardiff calamity’.

  In the best tradition of national disasters, All Black jokes are quoted. Have you heard about the new All Black bra? All support and no cups. What’s the difference between the All Blacks and a tea bag? The tea bag stays in the cup longer.

  The real brickbats come, mostly, from overseas. Under a column headed ‘You’ve got to be choking’, Peter O’Reilly reports that the result confirms the All Blacks’ status as ‘world class chokers’. Dave James asks what the All Blacks have got in common with tennis player Jana Novotna, NFL’s Buffalo Bills and hosts of red-faced English soccer players. ‘When the pressure’s on, they all choked, and the meltdown has been public, painful and impossible to forget. Just ask New Zealand’s rugby players. They trample all before them, but when the RWC comes round every four years, the All Blacks are all a tremble.’

  And there’s at least one of our own who’s in that camp. Talkback host Murray Deaker says the result is a disaster. ‘Sadly,’ he says, ‘we are a dumb rugby nation. We don’t play the big matches well. We were a bunch of boof-heads. On the big occasions, we choke.’

  Deaker has a book ready to sell on the back of the RWC. Rumour has it he’s had to change the triumphant cover as a result of our loss. Perhaps to punish us for the inconvenience, he’s written a new last chapter. It finishes with the words, ‘The All Blacks choked.’

  I know it’s just tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper, but the constant ‘choking’ thing really chokes me up. It gives little credit to the French who, on the back of the right tactics, kicked brilliantly and put up a colossal defence, making 197 tackles to our 47. They played out of their skins and left everything they had on the field at Cardiff, which they were to prove the following weekend in the semi-final at Paris by losing abjectly to a very average England team.

  There’s a lot in the reports about France’s ability to win when it counts. And yet in a few days’ time, in that semi-final I won’t be able to bring myself to watch, France will have lost two RWC semi-finals and the only two RWC finals they’ve played in. Is anyone talking about Les ultimate chokeurs? Mais non! France is wonderfully, excitingly, unpredictable due to their Gallic flair and je ne sais quoi. Jesus wept. Would that we were so enigmatique!

  There’s a lot of criticism of Barnes too. We lost so narrowly. Either Barnes or Kaplan could have picked up Traille’s forward pass; we could have been awarded the penalties we’d earned. Could have, would have, should have.

  I don’t blame Barnes, but I do blame the people who appointed the most inexperienced referee on the roster to a RWC quarter-final between the hosts and the favourites. I thought both teams deserved a referee with experience. My beef isn’t with Barnes so much as with his inexperience. This was Barnes’ biggest game by far. On the big stage, an inexperienced referee is likely to become so afraid of making a mistake that he stops making any decisions at all. By the end of it, I thought Barnes was frozen with fear and wouldn’t make any big calls.

  That it’s all in the mind at this level is borne out by another columnist in that Monday’s Herald who is of particular interest to me: Crusaders coach Robbie Deans.

  Robbie makes the point that the RWC is a unique challenge, unlike anything else the players will encounter. ‘So how do you best prepare for a type of rugby that, as a team, you’ve never experienced?’ He offers two solutions, both of which could be seen as implicit criticisms of Ted’s selections. Pick players who have been there before and field established combinations.

  I have a feeling this might be the first salvo in a battle which I, as captain of both the Crusaders and the All Blacks, am going to be caught in the middle of. Anton’s no-man’s-land metaphor might yet be apposite.

  That looming conflict is borne out by the Herald headline in its sport section: ‘Now it’s off with their heads’, meaning Henry, Hansen and Smith. Right under the headline i
s a photo of Robbie.

  But when the flight arrives in Auckland, I put the newspaper down and decide to put all that out of my mind. The serious post-mortem will begin soon enough, and we’ve got tons of time—four more years. So has George Gregan, ironically—Australia got edged by England in one of the other quarter-finals.

  I realise that the question What went wrong? will consume me and everyone around me for the next several months at least, but right now I want to dump that and think about something else.

  It helps if you can swap one consuming passion for another. There’s a beautiful bird sitting in Auckland waiting for me. She was going to be a reward for RWC success, but will serve just as well as consolation. She’s been the stuff of fantasy for me, and I can’t wait to get my hands on her.

  The Discus 2C glider was brought down to Australia and New Zealand as a demo, and was about to be packed back to Germany when Gavin Wills, my mentor at the commercial gliding operation GlideOmarama, told me that the German manufacturer, Schempp-Hirth, might be persuaded to leave it here if they got the right price. He warned me that the Germans wouldn’t negotiate; they had their price and that was it. I thought, Oh, yeah, and while I was in Auckland for the final Tri Nations test, I went out to the airfield at Drury.

  As soon as I saw this stark white bird with its huge wings, snug cockpit and slick, streamlined body, I knew I was in trouble. The guy out there let me sit in it, and as soon as I slipped in there behind the controls, I knew. Oh shit, you’ve got me buggered.

  Gavin tried to negotiate on my behalf, told the Germans it would be a great advertisement for Schempp-Hirth to have the first model of its type in the country being flown on a regular basis out of Omarama. He did well, got them to knock a couple of thousand euro off it, which meant I had to make a big decision. I made a phone call to the old man, and he agreed to put a bit in, so I did the deal.

  I saw this stark white bird with huge wings . . .

  It’s only when I get to Auckland that I realise getting a rental with a tow-bar might be a problem, so I ring All Black sponsor Ford and ask them if they have anything with a tow-bar they want delivered to Wellington. Getting an XR8 is a bit of a bonus!

  I pick up Hayley and we head out to Drury. The Discus is de-rigged and packed into its trailer, and a couple of hours later, I’m back to being a 26 year old with a girlfriend and a new toy, cruising south through heartland New Zealand in an XR8 in early summer.

  Hayley isn’t interested in talking about the RWC and neither am I.

  On the plane home, the boys had joked about false beards and sunglasses, but the reception we got in Christchurch seems to be indicative of the mood out there. The rugby community is hurting, but wherever and whenever I’m recognised on the trip south, they tend to say ‘Hard luck’ rather than ‘You suck’, and I get the feeling they’ve developed a fairly mature and phlegmatic attitude to it all. Perhaps it’s just the practice they’ve had at living with RWC disappointment. I learn not to duck my head at the prospect of recognition.

  We stay overnight with an old mate at Palmerston North and next day get to the Wellington wharves and put the Discus on the interisland freight to Lyttelton.

  I know there are black clouds on the horizon. The NZRU has already called for an official review of RWC 2007, and have announced that applications will be called for All Black coach, and a decision will be made before Christmas. I can see there’s a shit-fight of epic proportions coming.

  But every time I look at the Discus, I see clouds of a different kind, sweeping eastwards, rolling like waves across the Main Divide, crashing down on to the basin country.

  The clues are in the clouds. The wee puffy ones tell you there’s thermal lift underneath, from the sun heating the earth and the earth heating the air, which rises. If the sun is on an angle to the side of the hill, it’ll heat the ground more quickly. The air will keep heating as it rises up the hill and then shoot right off the top. That lift might take you up on to the mountain ridges that run along the western edge of the Mackenzie Country and from the foothills to the Main Divide, the Southern Alps. You get ridge lift if there’s 10 knots or more blowing straight up, or convergences where different air masses meet, creating lift, and once you get up there, you can fly along the ridges, getting higher and higher . . .

  When there’s a nor’wester, you might see a big layered lenticular, a clue that the perfect wave might be on its way. The nor’wester hits the Southern Alps, drops its rain as it rises up and over, then creates a foehn effect as it crashes down the other side on to the hot basin country, which shoots it up into the air again. Underneath, you can use unstable rotary air to climb up through the stable inversion layer, where it’s as smooth as silk, and then you can glide along the leading edge of this giant, invisible wave, like a surfer . . .

  Flying along the wave, you can climb to 20,000 feet, zooming along at 160 kilometres an hour. You have to pick your path, because if you fall off the wave you descend at huge speeds too, and then you’ve got to get out. But if you do it right, you might take off at sunrise and not land till sunset.

  I’ve heard the stories about the gun glider pilots who’ve been all the way over to the Landsborough and Mount Aspiring, right on the Main Divide. You can work on the converging east and west air masses if you’re game enough, but if you fall into the cold sea air coming off the west coast, you won’t get enough height to get home.

  Getting home, that’s always the challenge.

  The Mackenzie Country is great for gliding because it’s sheltered from the west and from the cold easterly coming off the other coast. The land heats up in the morning, allowing you to get up on top of the ridges before that easterly arrives. By the end of the day, the mountains are still hot, but the easterly has cooled Omarama and you’re battling to get back. That’s the intrigue of it, to be able to plot and pick your way around.

  Before you go out, you know what the weather’s likely to bring and you can look at terrain, sun and wind, and how those three will interact to enable you to plot a probable flight path. But it seldom works out exactly the way you planned it, so you have to know where you can bail out and land if you get low and can’t find any lift along the way. Your mind has always got to be way out in front of the glider. If I don’t get lift here, and I can’t get to that airstrip, is there another strip I can get to?

  It’s easy enough to learn how to fly the glider, particularly if you’ve already got a power licence. A power pilot’s training is heavily focused on managing the engine, so once you take the engine away and all you have is a stick and set of rudders and a few basic instruments, it’s relatively easy to fly, to learn to take off and land, how to get the tow right.

  Learning how to go places and to keep the glider in the air is the critical skill. That’s where you have to understand the weather and topography; you have to learn how the atmosphere works, where and how to position the glider, often close to terrain, to take advantage of the atmospheric energy. I’ve been lucky at Omarama to have people like Gavin Wills to tutor me.

  Gavin’s my father’s generation and has been part of the gliding scene at Omarama as long if not longer than my father and uncles. He’s a former Chief Alpine Guide at Mount Cook and still has that tall, fit, rangy, bearded look about him. I went to Gavin because I knew he was into cross-country gliding. That’s not true of all the instructors. Some glider pilots just want to get up and float around the local airfield and don’t want the stress and challenge of cutting the umbilical cord and going cross-country. Once you leave the home airfield far behind, you’re forced to rely on the decisions you make, based on the models you have in your head about how the atmosphere works. Some instructors put the fear of god into pilots who want to do that. Not Gavin.

  I’d done some gliding at the Canterbury club, but wanted more intense tuition so that I could make more rapid progress. In gliding there’s a clear gradation. Once you can take off and land, you go for your first solo and obtain your A Certificate, which is fo
llowed by the B Certificate. That means you stay up for short periods, soar around the airfield basically. Then you do some written tests, and finally you get your QGP, Qualified Glider Pilot licence. That gives you your passenger and cross-country ratings.

  Gavin had me soloing after three or four days, and took me through advanced training, doing all my early cross-country training in two-seaters, then in single-seater lead-and-follows. He’s a rigorous appraiser, so when he tells me he reckons I’ve got a real aptitude for it, I’m stoked, but I began with a big advantage: my family.

  Soaring over Lake Pukaki on the edge of the Mackenzie Country.

  Dad flies, his two brothers fly, a couple of my cousins fly, my aunty flies. We’ve got flying in common. When I go home to the old man, we sit and talk way more about flying than rugby. It’s something he knows a lot more about than I do. That seems always to have been the case.

  My father’s two uncles, John and Robert Trotter, my grandmother’s brothers, were foundation members of the North Otago Gliding Club. They got frustrated with the cold easterlies down at Oamaru, so they decided to base the club on my late grandfather’s farm, run in partnership with my uncles, John and Ian McCaw. They built a strip in the late 70s, early 80s.

  I was close to my grandfather before he died in 1996, so I grew up around it all. It might have been Grandad who inspired my father to get his power licence as soon as he left school. I never saw Grandad fly airplanes, only gliders, and then only very occasionally—I think my grandmother Cathie wouldn’t let him, which was understandable once I was old enough for Grandad to start telling me what he did in the war.

  Jim McCaw was a pilot with the Royal New Zealand Air Force 486 Squadron, based in England. The squadron’s motto was Hiwa hau maka—Beware the wild winds. He flew the Hawker Typhoon and its improved version, the Hawker Tempest, a single-seat fighter-bomber and low-altitude interceptor, and was credited with shooting down 19.5 V-1 flying bombs. He told me lots of stories about the war, and I wish I’d recorded them for posterity. I remember him telling me that many pilots died in training, trying to land the things. I haven’t seen a Tempest, but I’ve seen a Spitfire, which was slower than the Tempest, and I’m amazed at those guys. They were basically strapped on to the back of a huge engine with wings. Some of them were only aged 21, 22 and had less training than I got to fly a Cessna.