McCaw role model for what he’s done — and not done
As Richie McCaw prepared to play his record 134th match for the All Blacks this morning, you could be forgiven for thinking he’s used New York Yankees luminary Derek Jeter as a mentor.
Jeter retired last week after clocking 20 seasons and 2747 games for the Major League Baseball franchise without a whisper of scandal.
The key seems to have been about keeping a careful leash on what you reveal about yourself. That’s not to label Jeter boring; it just appears American sports fans know little more about him outside baseball when he retired than when he debuted. To paraphrase Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, he learned ‘to be a rock and not to roll.’
Anyone with professional sporting aspirations should consider bottling Jeter’s mantra. It’s not like he’s led a monastic existence. He’s had cordial relations with singer Mariah Carey, actress Jessica Biel, Miss Universe 2000 Lara Dutta and, allegedly, female companions often received complimentary goodie bags from the gent when exiting his Manhattan apartment. Yet no-one Jeter’s dated has kissed and told.
Miraculously, the 40-year-old has avoided the media’s salacious tentacles his entire career when other American sporting luminaries of his generation, such as Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, have collided with calamity.
Andre Agassi’s biographer JR Moehringer put it aptly in a Jeter feature on espn.com last week: “How else do you write an appreciation of a man almost everyone already appreciates, a man who won’t let you appreciate him, won’t tell you squat even if you get him to sit for a 25-minute interview, and will somehow make you respect him for telling you squat?
“Jeter isn’t loved for what he’s said as much as for what he’s done, and above all for what he’s not done. Two decades without scandal? It’s a feat as impossible, as improbable, as [Joe] DiMaggio’s [consecutive hitting streak of] 56 games. And it wasn’t accomplished by some misanthropic agoraphobe who never left his crib in Trump Tower.”
Moehringer went on to list sins linked to those he shared a locker room with: domestic abuse, use of banned substances, drunken driving, assault, perjury and probation violation.
Jeter’s model behaviour has been emphasised by other high-profile athletes of late, such as the NFL’s Ray Rice assaulting his fiancee and swimmer Michael Phelps getting booked as a recidivist drunk driver.
Similarly to Jeter, what does the public know, outside rugby, about McCaw in 14 seasons as an All Black? A brief summary might read: ‘He likes gliding’. Much of his private world from wealth accumulation to companionship has been scrutinised and speculated on, yet his image remains pristine.
McCaw has seldom engaged in the flourishing world of faux celebrity. He’s worked to the simple
theory that if he keeps his world shrouded, people will respect his privacy. The only foot McCaw’s put wrong appears to be the one he fractured leading to the World Cup . . . and New Zealand still won.
There’s something to be saluted about McCaw having no Twitter account (at least in his name) and not selling stories to the women’s magazines. Cash those cheques and you become fair game, regardless of subsequent pleas for discretion. It’s also rare to see McCaw attending social functions unless it’s for charity or official purposes.
Expect McCaw prototypes to become rare in a social media age where gossip is queen. Given the attention All Blacks receive, which has intoxicated the likes of teammates Zac Guildford, Cory Jane, Israel Dagg and Aaron Cruden figuratively and literally, how did McCaw fend off the limelight?
The answer might be that he toiled hard at his job and didn’t shine any unnecessary torches on his existence, a scenario most average Kiwis can relate to.
A stream of apocryphal tales and urban legends have seeped through from alleged ‘mates-of-mates’ but the loyalty McCaw inspires in his inner circle means there’s never been a toxic public leak.
Thus, once his career closes, he should have every expectation of assuming a relatively normal life, albeit, if it’s anything like Jeter, with a diet of selfie and autograph requests at every turn. However, that’s a small price to pay for making the correct assessment he’s a talented sportsperson, not a wannabe deity.