Sir John Kirwan
Coaching minds
For a decade from the mid-1980s All Black wing John Kirwan would get inside the head of his would-be tackler with a body feint directed at running an inside line.
Then, taking advantage of their shift in weight or slight indecision, he’d power around them in a grimacing upright sprint.
Not all of his 35 international tries from 63 appearances – still hanging in at number 10 on the most All Black tries – were scored in this fashion, but JK swerving into and then outflanking the last defender is an enduring image for rugby-following New Zealanders of a certain age.
Now, of course, the 55-year-old Sir John Kirwan, KNZM, MBE, honoured for services to rugby and mental health, is interested in getting in people’s heads for reasons other than to contest on-field sporting prowess.
His aim is for all to see mental wellbeing as not just parallel to physical wellbeing, but intertwined with it.
His Mentemia app (‘‘my mind’’ in Italian), developed with tech entrepreneur Adam Clark and a team of medical advisers, provides tips and techniques so users can take control of their mental health and wellbeing.
Covid-19 has prompted him to make it free during the duration of the crisis.
‘‘The thing that we’ve been trying to get across with Mentemia is mental health and mental wellbeing is just like physical wellbeing. It’s the same deal and you’ve got a problem and you’ve got to be aware of it and you’ve got to have the tools and techniques to fix it.’’
Ten years is a pretty healthy international playing career for a back – the top five mostcapped All Blacks are forwards – though Kirwan was playing in a pre-Super Rugby amateur age when there weren’t so many test fixtures either.
While he was not without physical injury concerns – Achilles tendon, hamstring, dislocated shoulder, which the self-narrated
Running on Instinct video series does a fair job of showing him recovering from – the allencompassing blackness of depression also became a threat to his career.
Kirwan believes it’s important to see the condition as an illness, not a weakness. ‘‘Once I put it into that category I started working on my illness . . . most of mental health is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and so 25 years ago when I was wanting to jump out of a window, I reached out and got help.’’
He believes what he has learned over time means he is thriving now.
For example, he took antidepressants but tried three or four before he got the right one.
‘‘And then I went to my psychiatrist and she said to me ‘JK, the antidepressants will give you balance but you need to work on your illness’ and that’s really started this journey of finding out how people can stay well, every single day.’’
The Covid-19 crisis has added a lot of different stresses in people’s lives, he says: financial, employment, relationship, and the fact that they cause stress makes them a health issue.
‘‘Hopefully coming out of Covid everyone will realise how important their mental health is, so that would be one of the positives because I think it’s going to take us quite a long time to recover.
‘‘I don’t think rugby players are any different. I believe they probably have a lot more internal and external pressures and stresses. They might have or they might not have financial ones but we shouldn’t look at successful people and think that money can solve things or make you any different . . .
‘‘So if you’re a young rugby player just starting out and you’re living with mum and dad, it’s probably an inconvenience, but if you’re an older rugby player with a couple of kids and you haven’t quite made it and someone comes to you and says – and this would be no different in journalism, right – you’ve got to take a 20 per cent pay cut, that’s stressful.’’
The sporting examples are ‘‘famiglia’’ as much as familiar for Kirwan and his Italian-born wife, Fiorella. Their older son Nico, pursuing a professional football career in Reggio Emilia, Italy, has ‘‘been right in the thick of it’’ since a teammate tested positive for Covid-19.
‘‘So he’s actually been in lockdown, this is his sixth week but he’s managed to move from Reggio Emilia and a small apartment to our home in Treviso, which is a bit bigger so he can get outside and walk around a bit.
‘‘He doesn’t know what the future looks like either – he’s playing professional sport so whether that will carry on next year or not, y’know.’’
Kirwan shrugs. The sporting household has had a season of setbacks. Daughter Francesca’s Olympic qualifiers for beach volleyball have been cancelled, as has younger son Luca’s under-20 rowing world cup. ‘‘As far as sport goes it’s a pretty disappointed household.’’
But they’re in safe hands? ‘‘Family’s a big part of what we do. It’s pretty hard on my wife at the moment because
‘‘Hopefully coming out of Covid everyone will realise how important their mental health is.’’
she’s got elderly parents so she can’t get up to see them and we don’t know when that’s going to happen, but we’re very much family orientated. We’ve been in our bubble altogether [in Auckland], we talk to Nico every night to make sure that he’s travelling along.’’ So no signs of stress on the home front? ‘‘We [the family] have a pretty open relationship about mental wellbeing and what works and making sure that you’re putting it into your day like you do your other stuff, workouts and things.’’
Friends are important too – mentioned in dispatches are Joe Stanley, the bustling centre Kirwan played outside for both Auckland and the All Blacks, journalist Riccardo Salizzo, a former schoolmate, and flanker Sir Michael Jones.
Kirwan recounts in one documentary how a comment from Jones that he had a ‘‘good heart’’ helped him through that day and has been an anchor point he has hung on to at other challenging times.
‘‘I spoke to Michael the other day and we’re typical males – we’re mates but we probably don’t talk to each other enough . . . Michael did a little thing for Mentemia for us because it’s important that it’s for everybody, so that we’re just trying to reach out to all the communities.’’
The idea, he says, is to drive Mentemia down various cultural pathways and ensure there is content for everyone. ‘‘And that’s not an easy thing to do because often we look at things from the lens of our own eyes and environment. That’s why I wanted to get some different people involved.’’
While we end with a brief discussion on the enjoyable times he’s had coaching – he looks back on his time in Japan with particular fondness – any trainings he now runs are in the field of mental health.
After two seasons playing league at the fledgling Auckland Warriors, Kirwan was involved in provincial coaching in Japan before running the Japanese and Italian national teams – but finished five years ago when the Auckland Blues franchise he was running put in a string of forgettable performances. ‘‘Towards the end it got stressful and that’s why I got out.’’
As he demonstrates his trademark swerve with his hands on a sometimes gurgly Zoom connection – ‘‘You put your outside foot like that, when you drop your outside foot . . . your whole body . . . you sort of stumble but it works’’ – you get the sense that JK is balanced enough now that if there are any more stumbles he will cope.
But I suggest, to borrow from Shane Jones paraphrasing Niccolo Machiavelli, that we shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste.
‘‘I agree. I think that we need to be able to go ‘what are the positives?’, ‘what good change is going to come out of it?’ Go down that track, y’know.’’