Booze be gone
Raise glass to more sensible drinking habits of young rugby players
Booze and rugby in New Zealand used to be conjoined twins but that has grown less true by the year, writes Phil Gifford.
Booze and rugby in New Zealand used to be conjoined twins. The first time sponsors’ labels went on the All Blacks playing uniform was in 1993. Steinlager had a logo on the shorts, and the next year, the beer moved up. In ’94, it was the silver fern over the left breast on the jersey and Steinlager over the right.
Beer firms wrestled over pouring rights in clubs, when on Saturday afternoons, the busiest bar in many towns and suburbs was at the local footy club.
But that was then, and this is now, and the old trope of “boozy rugby players” trotted out by social media critics whenever claims emerge of misbehaviour by professional players, from the Chiefs’ Strippergate, to the Crusaders in South Africa, to the heartbreaking story of Fijian Rupeni Caucaunibuca’s alcoholism, is an ingrained, kneejerk reaction that grows less true by the year.
Today’s professional players, from All Blacks to Super Rugby to Mitre 10 Cup level, are virtually teetotallers compared with the people who came before them.
Not much more than a decade ago, that’s a paragraph that would have been impossible to write with any integrity, and impossible to read and keep a straight face.
But the fact is, as Rob Nichol, the head of the Professional Players’ Association told me this week: “Professional players now don’t drink during a campaign because they can’t afford the damage to their reputation. There are too many eyes and too many cellphones, and today they’re basically working. Whatever your job, you don’t drink at work.”
In a startlingly frank section of his 2015 biography, Jerome Kaino talks about how he tried to buck that idea early in his career, drinking with mates and then sometimes turning up hungover for training at the Blues.
“I felt the drinking went along with my success, and was a perk of being an All Black. I was in my own little bubble, thinking that what I was doing was normal,” he says.
A drink driving conviction in 2008 snapped him back to reality. So did a talk with the All Blacks coaches when the team assembled in Wellington.
Kaino apologised and said if he was given the chance, he’d pay them back with performances. Head coach Graham Henry replied: “Jerome, we don’t want to be paid back. But there are a lot of guys in New Zealand rugby who would kill for that shirt we’ve given you. They’re the guys you have to pay back.”
It’s instructive that Kaino’s major fall from grace (he’d been out drinking until 5am, then was driving with a mate on Dominion Rd when he rear ended a car that had stopped at a pedestrian crossing) came on a week
off during the 2008 Tri Nations series.
Nichol says the players’ association has support in place with counselling for those struggling with alcohol, just as they do with any addiction, or mental health issues. Among the people Kaino says he was grateful to for their support as he got his drinking under control was the players’ association and New Zealand Rugby.
It’s thankfully a far cry from the dark days of one of the saddest stories in rugby, the secret banning of All Black Ron Rangi in 1966, which would see him then struggle with alcohol for the rest of his life, until he died aged just 47 in 1988.
Rangi, rugby historian Paul Neazor established, was a teetotaller before he made the New Zealand Maori team for a tour of Fiji in 1964, and then the All Blacks in 1965. From then on, he was on the road to alcoholism.
At the higher levels of rugby, alcoholism was then generally believed (as it was by much of New Zealand society at the time) to not be a disease but a character flaw.
Rangi was banned from the All Blacks in ’66 at a closed meeting of the NZRFU after it was claimed he had fled an after-match function at the Papakura military base with a bottle of whisky. Eventually the ban was withdrawn. But the damage to Rangi had been done.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Sunday on an All Blacks tour was an off-limits day for training, because the party after the Saturday game into the early hours of the next morning was a rite that was always observed.
When the game was amateur, drinking was sometimes used as the glue to bind a team. In 1988, after a scratchy 19-19 draw with Australia in Brisbane, coach Alex Wyllie told his players to have their training gear with them on the plane when they flew to Sydney.
“We’ll have training as soon as we get off, and you won’t have time to get it out of your suitcases.”
Ferried by bus to a club ground in Terrigal on the New South Wales Central Coast, they nervously changed, when Wyllie suddenly barked at them to leave their jerseys on, but to put on long trousers.
When they re-emerged, a massive number of beers were lined up at the bar.
“We basically,” Mike Brewer would recall in 1995, “kept drinking until we fell over.”
At the time, the session received glowing reviews from the players, as a way to blow away any bad memories of Brisbane. In the third test 12 days later, they trashed the Wallabies 30-9.
Even when professionalism arrived in 1996, there wasn’t a great sea change in attitudes inside the All Blacks until 2004, when, as has been well recorded, Wayne Smith was so horrified at an old school drinking session after a test in Pretoria (“It looked,” Dan Carter would say, “like a stag do gone wrong”), Smith offered his resignation to head coach Henry if the culture wasn’t changed.
It did, to the point where Nichol says one of the behaviours his association, and professional teams, work on is helping young men and women playing the game to work out how to go out with friends or family, and not feel awkward socially by not drinking.
“Ironically,” he says, “it’s sometimes easier for elite payers to avoid drinking when they’re with the team, because all of them are in the same boat. They can’t drink too much because they’re too damn busy during a campaign. We work to give them the tools to say ‘no’ when they’re out without causing offence, so they can stay on the straight and narrow.”
In some ways, the cementing of the new era in off-field behaviour came in 2005, after the All Blacks had arrived in Cardiff at the start of what would be a Grand Slam tour of Britain and Ireland.
Told they could go out for a few drinks in town, but to keep the volume down, a group of six, including Carter, decided it’d be a good idea to go by taxi to London, 240km away, to have some drinks at a famous bar, The Church.
“Eventually we found a cabbie mad enough to take us,” Carter said in his 2015 biography. “We gave him £300, grabbed some mix CDs, and a box of beers, and were soon speeding towards London.”
Like a black Will Farrell comedy, everything started to go wrong as the sun came up. The Church was closed when they arrived at 10am, and on the train they frantically caught back to Cardiff, their phones started pinging with angry messages from team management. That evening, they were summoned to a meeting, just with the other players.
“It was as low as I’d felt as an All Black,” says Carter. “We’d let our peers and our friends down. Tana [Umaga, the captain] absolutely ripped into us. ‘You should be sent home’.”
It was the start, as Carter notes, of a new time, when players impose discipline on themselves.
Despite the odd shock, horror, headline, and young men being young men, there will be more headlines in the future but it’s a system that works surprisingly well.