‘My kids didn’t know that I played for England’
Will Carling has found there is life – and love – after rugby. He tells Matthew Stadlen about where he went wrong off the pitch
You might expect there to be mountains of memorabilia in Will Carling’s home. He is, after all, one of the most successful England rugby captains, having led his country to three Grand Slams between 1991 and 1995. There’s certainly plenty of room for his medals to be displayed in his spacious old red brick house in Berkshire. But his focus has shifted since he hung up his rugby shirt, to the extent that his children knew nothing of his sporting fame until they learnt of it through their peers.
“People ask, ‘Do you wish your kids had seen you play for England?’ he says. “No, because I don’t want to be an England player to my kids, I want to be their dad.” The only visible evidence he was once an international sportsman is his body: an imposing man, his thighs remain so chunky he can’t cross them properly and his biceps bulge through his shirt. Aged 50, his cragged good looks, complete with that famous jutting, dimpled chin, have not deserted him either.
Yet for all his brawn, Carling, who bought himself out of the Army before being named England’s youngest captain at 22, seems a sensitive, reflective man. Born in Bradford on Avon to a Captain who would become a Lieutenant Colonel and a mother who set up an interior furnishing business, the young Carling and his family moved frequently. Aged six, he was deposited at Terra Nova, a boarding school in Cheshire – a seismically difficult experience.
“My mum took me and she was talking to someone so I walked off up the stairs,” he says. “My attitude was, ‘You’re taking me at this age? Right, f––– you then, I’ll look after myself ’. I didn’t say goodbye to her.” He wasn’t ever close to his late mother: “Probably too similar, sadly she and I were at loggerheads quite a lot. She was a pretty powerful lady.”
His father was his hero. As a dad, he’s more emotionally involved than his own ever was. With his second wife, Lisa, he has two children – Jack, 15, and Mimi, 12 – and a son Henry, 18, from a relationship with Ali Cockayne that ended in a blaze of tabloid headlines. He also counts Lisa’s son Tom, 26, and daughter Ali, 28, as part of his clan. “I have a massive emphasis on family,” he says. “Wanting to get that right is far more important than wanting to be a good captain. The kids didn’t know I played rugby until their friends – or friends’ dads – told them.” Indeed, when he and Lisa started a family, he was reluctant to talk about his former career. “Because you were such a focused, driven, selfish individual, you look back at bits of you and think, ‘maybe I could have been a bit softer’.”
Still, it’s hard to overestimate the impact he had on his sport. The Seventies and Eighties had been a bleak period for English rugby, but he won his first game in charge – against Australia in 1988. Although his side lost narrowly to the Australians in the 1991 World Cup final, he helped to establish England as the dominant force in the northern hemisphere and even beat the All Blacks in 1993.
After joining the Army as a second lieutenant when he was 19 and studying psychology at Durham University, he was forced to choose between a military or a sporting career. “Sadly I never got to be a soldier,” he says.
Out on the playing field, fear of injury soon gave way to a steely determination. “I used to get scared before every game. I didn’t want to get hurt,” he says. But more than this, he hated defeat, and when his side lost the Grand Slam to Scotland in 1990, he said to himself: “I don’t want to lose to these b––––––– ever again.” His muscles still flex at the memory. If his approach to the game was hard-nosed, it was matched by a degree of hard living, and he drank to excess after international matches. “You would drink until you basically couldn’t function and we thought that was a medicinal end to the Saturday night,” he laughs. Success came at the price of media attention, which was dominated by rumours of an affair with the Princess of Wales, whom he met at a Harbour Club gym. “I was a good friend to her for a period of time and that was it,” he says, repeating the denial he’s made countless times.
Much more damaging was him leaving Cockayne and their baby son in 1998. “I was so focused on playing rugby and wanting to do that well that my personal life was just a car crash,” he admits. “Not intentionally, not vindictively. It was a great story for [the tabloids], a horrific story for me and of course you’d got lots of things wrong but you weren’t quite this devil you’d been portrayed as. It affected me massively but the worst bit was it affected Tom and Ali as well. You feel horrible.”
So toxic had Carling become that his testimonial match was cancelled. “You’re thinking, ‘Christ! I wonder what I’m going to do to earn some money.’ ” The fall from hero to villain was of storybook proportions. Not that he saw it that way. “I was never the comic book hero. And I also wasn’t this devil love rat.” Even as captain he was constantly looking for acceptance from teammates he’d grown up admiring. “My whole drive was being acceptable to them,” he says. “If they thought I was OK, that was it.”
With middle age has come selfknowledge – and perhaps selfacceptance. It’s a process that started some years back: while captaining England in the mid-Nineties, he received a letter from John Cleese asking to meet him, and the Monty
Python star introduced him to his wife, the American psychotherapist Alyce Fay Eichelberger. Having therapy with her helped.
“I understand far more why I behave in certain ways,” he says. “The challenge is still trying to change them but at least you understand them, rather than just screwing things up on a regular basis. Understanding emotions, family; it was very helpful and I’m bloody glad I did it. I think lots of people don’t because they think it’s weak.”
After giving up the England captaincy in 1996, Carling had what he calls a “real moment of, ‘well, who am I then?’” since which he’s realised there is life after rugby. But while he and Lisa enjoy a low-key existence when not hosting events via their hospitality company WCM, his passion for the game seems undimmed. He will keep a keen eye on Murrayfield today when England take on Scotland. “England should stop worrying about PR,” he says. “The English team are never going to be likeable to the Welsh or the Scots. You connect with fans, with grassroots, through winning. End of.”
The words of a man still in love with the sport that defined him. As he says, with disarming understatement: “I put a huge amount of me into it.”
‘I was never the comic book hero – and I also wasn’t this devil love rat’