How can I miss you if you won’t go away?
It used to be Richie McCaw was heard and rarely seen. He was out there somewhere, under a heap of muddied bodies doing what Aussies, Brits and Safas labelled cheating, but Kiwi rugby fans knew as Godzone work.
He held the William Webb Ellis trophy high in 2011, then even higher in 2015. He mumbled a few words in his endearing way, then headed off into retirement.
And so ended a rugby career spanning 15 years, 148 tests, several thousand facial cuts, and chapters of helpful advice to referees.
What would life be without Richie, we wondered.
Well, we’re still wondering. We’ve seen more Richie than ever. Wall-to-wall Richie. Rugger to Richies. A flock of McCaws. Two books (one mostly pictures, one more words), and now out this week, his movie Chasing Great (spoiler alert) about how an ordinary Kiwi kid from Kurow turned into the Messiah who led us rugby’s Holy Grail.
‘‘He was an ordinary man, doing something extraordinary,’’ the trailer says.
A movie, about Richie, starring Richie? How much Richie is too much Richie? The guy who told us all he was looking for time out of the limelight has spent much of the year running from one media ruck to the next. On Wednesday, he’s holding a press conference to promote Chasing Great.
He says he’s surprised at his inability to vanish, telling journalists at his Government House investiture in April: ‘‘There’s been more [media conferences] than I would have thought when you finish playing rugby. But if you do idiot things like running around the hills [in adventure races] you get that sort of thing.’’
You’re thinking, it’s the media’s fault for giving him the news ball so often. Fair call; but most coverage has been when he appears in public, on his own terms. His phone number is inside an all black cone of silence.
Even if you are among those who are Richie replete and crying in your sleep ‘‘enough already, please’’ you have to admire the way he has reinvented himself.
If rugby is a tough, tough, life in which the peril of an injury or being dropped always lurks, then retirement from rugby is even tougher.
Rugby provides a structure, it dominates life, it is hellish exciting to be a good player and brings fame and fortune (to very few).
When the rugby’s all over, as it always must be, retirement can be a vast meaningless unstructured wasteland leading to former players clutching a pint in the corner of a bar, telling anyone in earshot ‘‘do you know who I used to be?’’
Not for McCaw. His first year away from the game has been a model of how to transit from has, to has been. Yet again he’s made the tough look easy. And like many an inside back, we are unable to avoid his clutches even if we want to.
There was his Kiwi great bugger gong -- one of the 20 greatest living New Zealanders and the youngest in history. He passed his helicopter flying test, survived an adventure race, got engaged to hockey star Gemma Flynn, visited the Rio Olympics.
His battered face stares out of book shop windows, he pays nightly visits on TV, where he strolls around farms in the dark and runs around energetically in the daylight.
He’s told us farmers get up early so we can have Fonterra milk on our Weetbix, in our Versatile homes, wearing Dr Dre headphones, right before driving to the airport in the Merc, to fly Air New Zealand (or even a helicopter).
Chasing Great proposes to introduce us to the Real McCaw, through ‘‘never-before-seen footage’’ of him, his friends and family, weaving his life story into his final season as an All Black, in his own words.
‘‘What emerges is a very personal insight into high level international sport and a psychological profile of the mind of a champion,’’ the blurb reads.
Sounds worthy, doesn’t it? But with the interest$ of $o many inve$ted in Ordinary Guy Richie, expect to learn nothing outside his controlled public image. Expect rugby negative topics, such as concussion, or what really happens at the bottom of a ruck to be redcarded. McCaw’s never put a public foot wrong, Chasing Great can only be more careful foot placing.
Ordinary bloke McCaw is a myth. No way is McCaw ordinary. Ordinary blokes get up on Monday pissed off they have to go to work. Life for them mostly does not involve flying helicopters, dressing up for celebrity engagements, or lining up endorsements worth hundreds of thousands.
Ordinary blokes work eight hours a day, and have to pay watch the All Blacks, whether on TV or live. An ordinary guy earns about $55,000 a year (the average wage). If Mr Average has an opinion on the flag, no one else cares what it is, until they tick a little box and their ordinary single vote is counted.
Movies are not made about ordinary guys. It’s Superman, not his boring bespectacled alter-ego Clark Kent; caped crusader Batman, not business dweeb Bruce Wayne, and James Bond.
So given the choice the unshaven superhero Crusader, All Black, greatest No 7 in history would win the ‘‘more interesting’’ award over his clean-shaven, product-endorsing, PM-backing, alterego every time.
But making that choice is no longer an option.
Kevin Norquay was at Lansdowne Rd in 2001 when Richie McCaw played his first test, and at Twickenham last year when he played his 148th.