Will Jonny finally be able to throw off the weight of history?
Still seeking answers 16 years on from kicking England to victory in Sydney. But now he’s handing the baton over to Owen Farrell...
TO get away from the hubbub i n his hotel l obby, Jonny Wilkinson and I walk through the streets of Shinjuku and into Chuo Park, a haven of greenery and tranquillity amid the skyscrapers and the streams of commuters hurrying away from the train station towards work. It is a beautiful morning and the sky is blue and it is peaceful and quiet there. We sit on a bench.
The man who begins to talk looks like Jonny Wilkinson and speaks like Jonny Wilkinson. But he says he is not the man who kicked the drop goal that won the Rugby World Cup for England for the first and only time 16 years ago. To Wilkinson’s relief, most of that man has gone. ‘There is not a huge amount of me left from before,’ he says.
For many, he is still frozen in time in that moment in Sydney in 2003 when he sealed England’s greatest rugby triumph, the triumph Eddie Jones’ team will try to emulate next week after yesterday’s stunning victory over the All Blacks.
Wilkinson is still the most vivid symbol of that triumph, an obsessive genius, an enduring symbol of dedication and sacrifice and selflessness. But if others have frozen him there, Wilkinson, finally, has escaped. In the last 10 years, he has reconstructed himself. He has, he says, thrown away the crutch of clinging to an identity as a former rugby player. Four years ago, the last time we spoke, he said he was in the process of ‘breaking apart’. Now, he has rebuilt himself psychologically with the same meticulous attention to detail that he devotes to everything in his life.
‘I’m not an ex-rugby player,’ he says, looking down at his t-shirt. ‘I don’t have this shirt over the top of an England shirt. Taking that England shirt off is the most challenging bit. It is very easy to put another shirt on over the top and split yourself in two and to be 50 per cent there and be 50 per cent somewhere else. To take the shirt off fully for a long time is a vulnerable experience. But that’s the letting go part.
‘Some of it, I was resisting. I didn’t want to break apart. I still wanted to walk into a room and for people still to give me that sense of “you could still play, we’d love to have you out there”.
‘Most of it was my own doing. But I was seeking to pull myself apart because I wanted to engage back in life. There is so much I had concluded about life and now I am furt her down t hat route.
‘It doesn’t mean I don’t have memories that I can call upon and talk about. I just don’t have that kind of self-importance I had before. And believe me, I was self-important. ‘ In 2003 and around that time, there was always a humility about the way I spoke but without wanting to be too ironic or jokey, it was almost as if I walked off from those interviews celebrating how I was just the most humble guy in the world. It was like, “Celebrate me for my humility”.’ Wilkinson ,40, still exudes humility and there is no sense now that it is an affectation. It is there, most obviously, in his willingness to be open about himself and the mental health issues he has dealt with since he was a child. It is there, too, in his determination to psychoanalyse himself exhaustively so he can better explain the stage of his development he has now reached.
He has always been prone to selfanalysis. It is part of what makes him, still, one of the most compelling figures in English sport. It can also make others, more used to clichés spilling from the lips of their sports heroes, a little uncomfortable. ‘Boy Bonkers’, the Observer called him in 2003. Another journalist labelled him ‘a basket case’. That language is outmoded now.
‘When I talked about breaking apart,’ he says, ‘it was meant on a deeper level. The only thing preventing me from engaging in life itself was the barrier that I had created. When I remove those barriers, there is no me and life because we are life. And it is just life in life. And it is beautiful.
‘You’re asking me if I miss playing rugby but I’m here wearing my interview kit which means I am plugged in to this interview. I relate it to a plug in a socket. This interview is the socket. If I can’t plug in, that’s on me. Not on the socket.
‘It’s not me talking about how rubbish this is sitting in a park on a beautiful day in Japan exploring concepts because you’re holding me back from being in the gym. I became a fixed plug. When the socket moves and another one appears, you are desperately trying to plug in but can’t so you don’t feel charged up or powerful or worthy and then you do everything you can to change the socket, which is stress and suffering because that socket is just perfect how it is. So I don’t miss it because I have it. Right now.’
He is still happy to talk about that drop goal in 2003 but it is as if he has disconnected himself from it. Someone else kicked it. Another person in another time. There is no sense that he regards it as a high point. His view of it, he says, depends on how he is feeling at any given moment. So in this park, I ask him, on this bench, on this day in Tokyo, how does he regard it?
‘I feel like it was nothing more than a…’ he says, before his voice trails off. ‘If we’re going to play the game that it was actually me doing it and not another version of me, I find that what interests me is that from such a young age, with such a clear devotion towards making something happen, a journey could find its way down so many different avenues and arrive at that point.
‘The number of times my career looked as if it was going off in a different direction but the way that suddenly it appeared here and then at school, and Newcastle and then
‘IT WAS LIKE I CELEBRATED BEING THIS HUMBLE GUY’
England junior things and Newcastle and Newcastle to England and ups and downs.
‘And then suddenly you find yourself in the World Cup and then suddenly you find yourself in the final and then suddenly you find yourself in extra time and then suddenly you find yourself in the last few seconds and suddenly you find yourself with the ball in your hand and then suddenly you find yourself with a drop goal.
‘I find that incredibly intriguing. I don’t know whether it was good or bad. It was a beautiful realisation of a goal. How could what started as imagination arrive as so close to what I imagined? Was it a great moment? I don’t really understand. I sometimes wish I hadn’t been on the field so I could have understood the gravity of what it meant.’
Wilkinson calls last night after he has worked on the England game for ITV. England in the final next Saturday raises the prospect of a new generation of players being affected by the same pressures and spotlight that assailed him.
‘ Their lives will have already started to change, just by beating the All Blacks at a World Cup,’ he says. ‘All the stuff that will be going on at home. Everything that will be in the papers. People will be contacting their families. Hopefully, it changes nothing about you. If you are grounded, it can be amazing. If your feet are not planted in something deeper, it can feel like, “what the hell is going on?”
‘It was one of the best England performances I have seen for a long, long time. It had intensity, accuracy and clarity of decisionmaking. I don’t remember that many games where you are going up against a team that is that exceptional. We are entering into a space of brand new. It was a battle where they put everything on the line.’
He is clear that neither winning the final in 2003 or losing it four years later brought him the freedom from pressure he longed for or the life outside the game he desired. Off the pitch, he says, he was only ever half there, trapped in regrets about kicks he had missed or i n obsessing about making amends in his next match.
He says that for maybe 5 per cent of the time during much of his rugby career, he was a fully-functioning person. The rest of the time, distracted by his strivings, crushed by the pressure, he was ‘a mess’. The agonies of waiting for a match were among the worst times.
‘In the 2007 World Cup,’ he says, ‘ we were playing France in the semi-finals and they used to put the newspapers outside the hotel room door and I remember coming back from breakfast on the day of the match and looking down at the paper and the headline said “Ayez peur, ayez tres peur” which means “Be afraid, be very afraid”. And it was my picture on the front of the paper. They were saying the French should be afraid of me. I sat there and couldn’t move. I was watching DVDs to try and relax in the afternoon and all I could see was the outside of the TV screen. My mind was blown with the idea that everything you do becomes who you are.
‘What I have realised now is that what happens sometimes changes the content of your life but it can’t do anything to you. Underneath, I am still the same. I still have the same potential to explore my life as I did in 2003 and 2007 but back then both tournaments became trigger points towards the idea that winning or losing defines who you are.
‘The liberation is moving away from that and realising that all you have is your performance now and when you perform fully, you fully engage and when you fully engage, there is no you any more. It is just what you do. It’s the part where everyone wants to be. Whether you go down the park with your mates or whether you are in front of 80,000, the only thing that matters is when you are fully engaged and everything falls away and that is when people perform well.’
He is free, he says, of the exhausting cycle of suffering and triumph that dominated his existence for so long and eventually wore him down psychologically. He had persuaded himself that there could not be one without the other but now he has been liberated from that.
‘There was always this idea that there was a pay-off coming, the idea that, “If we win the World Cup in 2003, life’s going to be like this.” But after 2003, I realised there was nothing there waiting for me. So I told myself that if we did it again in 2007, there would be. And if it wasn’t that, then I’d be saying “Let’s go to France and win everything in club rugby and in your last game, you could win a championship and then it’s going to be there”. The pay-off is now in that engagement in life. The only way to get to that engagement is to drop all the ideas that you are on your way to find your now in the future.’
Wilkinson, who retired in 2014, believes he has taken big strides to doing that. He still has a busy life. He is here combining his role as a kicking adviser for England with his job as an analyst for ITV. On the eve of the tournament, he launched a mental health campaign with the health insurer, Vitality. His Jonny Wilkinson Foundation also aims to help with mental health issues. I ask him what he gains fulfilment from now and he does not pause. ‘Everything, literally everything. I am so fully into what I am doing. You know when you find a film you love watching, the time flies and you stop thinking “it’s me watching a film” and you become the experience, there are no barriers left.
‘ I feel like I’m so much more engaged in what I’m doing. I see opportunity in everything. I just feel more connected. More than I ever feel I have been. I go to the gym where the England guys train and just kick a load of balls around myself for 40 minutes. but when I leave, it doesn’t mean I’m thinking, “Oh no, now I’ve got to go home now and do some washing up”.
‘I go home and I’m washing up and all of me is washing up. I feel pretty much all of me is where I am, here and now and engaged. That was the secret to my performance when I was at my best on the rugby field and now I feel like I am enjoying life again.’
‘TO TAKE THE SHIRT OFF IS A VULNERABLE EXPERIENCE, BUT THAT’S LETTING GO’
Jonny Wilkinson is a pundit for ITV Sport at the Rugby World Cup. ITV will show exclusive coverage of Wales v S Africa at 8.50am today.