Rugby boots to Red Bands
Shane Cleaver is a winner after quitting top-level rugby writes
Former Chiefs prop Shane Cleaver talks bluntly about the day his promising rugby career ended. ‘‘I walked off the field and chucked the boots in the bin,’’ he says. ‘‘I knew I was done after that.’’
Plagued by concussion throughout his six-year professional career, Cleaver was playing for Taranaki against Southland in 2013 when yet another knock to the head left him out cold.
‘‘Before that game I was already struggling. I’d had a knock the week before and I was in the toilet trying not to spew pre-game, I was dizzy, I was really battling,’’ he says.
‘‘I’d become so susceptible to any kind of knock, they weren’t even big ones any more. I’d go back and watch the video and I’d struggle to believe the way they had affected me.’’
The game in Invercargill would be his last and although calling time on his rugby career wasn’t easy, it did bring some relief.
‘‘At that stage, it’d been so frustrating for so long,’’ he says.
‘‘I’d cracked Super Rugby, I’d played 47 or 48 games for Taranaki and I really wanted to get that 50... but nothing was happening. I’d just been wasting time, hanging around training and watching.
‘‘When you know in the back of your mind that you’re done, it’s good to actually just be done.’’ At 26, when most props are coming into their own, his career was over.
Hundreds of hours spent working to improve his speed and scrummaging were ultimately for nothing and dreams of seeing out his playing days, ‘‘somewhere in the south of France,’’ suffered the same fate as his boots.
It would be easy to be bitter but Cleaver considers himself lucky. He has his health and a life on his family’s 290-hectare dairy farm near Hawera, in South Taranaki. It’s more than many players have at the end of their careers, he says.
‘‘You see some guys in that situation and they’ve got nothing. They’re looking at the reality of going from earning that Super money to being on the end of a processing line.
‘‘I was lucky to have this to come home to, to have something else to dig my heels into.’’
After binning his boots, Cleaver finished the 2013-14 dairy season working on the farm and the following year he and his sister Natasha took over as contract milkers.
While farming was always his longterm plan, the switch from professional sportsman to full-time farmer took some adjustment.
‘‘This was what life was going to be – just give the rugby thing a crack and if that didn’t work out, there was always the farm,’’ he says. ‘‘But it’s a different lifestyle living down in Hawera, getting up at four in the morning compared to when you’re a professional rugby player and you roll out of bed at eight or nine and go lift some weights.’’
The partnership with Natasha is already proving successful, with the pair picking up wins for best Taranaki farm performance and business resilience at
the recent Dairy Business of the Year Awards. Mulling over that success, Cleaver again says he has a lot to be thankful for.
‘‘A lot of guys have to really work hard managing someone’s farm to get into contract milking and then save up enough money to buy their herd,’’ he says.
‘‘I’m lucky that I’ve got this to come back to where dad’s put his whole life into it and it’s a well set-up, nice farm.’’
Having a good setup helps but running the 850-cow farm is a high-pressure job, especially during calving, he says.
‘‘It’s a different kind of pressure to rugby. With farming, especially at this time of year when it’s all happening, it’s just stress. You’ve only got so many hours in the day and you’ve got to get this and this and this done,’’ he says.
‘‘With something like the Ranfurly Shield, if you’ve got an important scrum, I used to really feel that pressure to not stuff it up. You don’t have that sort of worry with farming.’’
When he does have downtime, Cleaver tries to keep a hand in at Hawera’s Southern Rugby Club where his father, Vernon, is chairman.
‘‘I’ve been coaching the last couple of years but I stepped back a bit this year, I was just too busy,’’ he says.
‘‘But I still go in to training and do scrums and some of the technical stuff. And it sounds like I’m on the board this year, dad’s told me.’’
Although he would have liked that stint in southern France, he is philosophical about the way things worked out and grateful for the opportunities he’s had.
‘‘I wouldn’t have wanted to come straight out of school and into this lifestyle, it’s too restricting when you’re young,’’ he says. ‘‘So it was good to have that time playing rugby to have a bit more freedom and see a bit more of the place.’’