Little Shane – the player who madeWales’ heart beat faster
COLUMNIST
HE SPENT his rugby career warming our hearts – now Shane Williams is just as likely to be warming your home. Life after sport has brought many new challenges for the former wing wonder, not least delivering heating oil from the back of a lorry owned by Star Multifuels, his wife’s family business.
As you can imagine, customers are stunned and thrilled to see one of the greatest players of the early 21st century sticking a fuel nozzle into their oil tank. Unsurprisingly, he gets through a lot of coffee, cake, selfie requests and autograph-signing on his rounds.
This is just one aspect of the exinternational’s post-rugby career featured in an entertaining, feelgood documentary screened on BBC One Wales tomorrow night. Shane: For the Love of the Game follows the 40-year-old as he attempts to build a life beyond the oval ball. We see him keeping his competitive instinct intact and staying in physical shape as he throws himself into marathons and Ironmen competitions – with former team-mates Ryan Jones and Ian Gough in tow.
We watch the vicarious joy he takes in his children’s sporting talents, as daughter Georgie demonstrates her impressive equine skills at gymkhanas and young Carter proves himself a chip off the old block at the mini rugby.
We witness his first tentative forays into corporate entertainment as he makes his debut as master of ceremonies in a marquee in Merthyr Tydfil. And we see his growing confidence in the punditry arena.
But most of all we get an insight into just how agonising it is for an elite player of Shane’s calibre to relinquish the sport that defined him.
For Shane, the love of the game is an all-consuming passion. His dancing odyssey through Welsh and world rugby brought him a record tally of 87 tries, two Grand Slams, appearances on three consecutive Lions tours and the 2008 IRB World Player of the Year Award.
It also brought him a unique relationship with the Welsh public. And for us, of course, it was love at first sight. Tomorrow’s programme replays his debut season for Wales, in which he looks as cherubic as his son Carter.
Like a first-former whose mother has bought his uniform with built-in growing room, Shane wore a jersey large enough to accommodate himself and a Quinnell.
But the excess of red material didn’t impede his aerodynamics. He announced himself to international rugby with a stroll-over try and a cheeky young gun salute. As his team-mates smothered the new cap with paternal hugs, a smile spread across the face of the Welsh rugby faithful. They knew a classic Welsh jinker when they saw one and instantly took him to their bosom.
We loved him because he was a 5ft 7in metaphor for Wales itself. While England celebrated the beetlebrowed doggedness of a Johnson and New Zealand cherished the powerful back-row brawn of a McCaw, Little Shane was the player who made our hearts beat faster.
For when he shimmied around men twice his size and turned all the accepted wisdom of the modern professional game on its head, he took us to the core of why rugby matters to Wales. It gives a small nation the chance to be on top of the world. Punching way above his weight on the global stage, Shane’s international career embodied the message that size doesn’t matter if you’ve got enough talent.
By the time he bade farewell in that autumn test against Australia six years ago, roared to the rafters by a rapturous crowd and garlanded with accolades from the great and the good, it didn’t just feel like the close of a rugby chapter, it felt like a significant moment in Welsh life.
We were bereft as Shane exited the stage, so what on Earth must it have been like for him to leave all that behind – from the adulation to the intense physical and mental stimulation of competing at the highest level?
Brian Moore has called the transition to life after sport a “taboo” subject.
“All sportspeople are living their childhood dreams,” he explained.
“And they’re having to give them up not because they don’t want to do them anymore but because they physically can’t and they’re being forced to give that dream up. Anything that comes after that is not going to be quite the same. It’s one of the last taboos around sport, people won’t talk about it.”
Close to tears, Brian discussed his own reluctant retirement from the game during a series I made for several years called What Sport Stars Do Next. Presented by Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, it explored how some of the biggest names in British sport coped with creating a whole new identity.
The physical changes alone can be dramatic. Sir Steve Redgrave told us it took him two years to “de-train” the body that brought him five Olympic gold medals.
But it’s the psychological implications of life no longer revolving around the adrenaline rush of the big race or crucial game that are especially intriguing.
Olympic cyclist Chris Boardman said the new-found freedom could be terrifying.
“I imagine it’s akin to coming out of prison where you have a very set regime for what you do each part of your day and there’s a formula for what you do each part of the year,” he said. “And then somebody opens the door and says ‘Right, go and do whatever you want’. So there was quite a culture shock.
“I left on my own terms and thought ‘that’s great’, but when you’ve actually stopped and you’ve got what you wanted – the permanent holiday – I didn’t really know what to do.”
Duncan Goodhew revealed that even though he planned his retirement meticulously – deciding the day after his Moscow Olympic gold medal that he would quit while ahead – the immediate aftermath was unbearable.
He said: “When you step outside sport, there’s an abyss. You step over that abyss and life is horrid. The moment you leave sport, all the anchors of your life are gone – there’s no order, shape or structure. And you’ve got to have something in its place.”
Judging by the experience of those profiled, that “something” has to be more meaningful than the corporate speaking circuit and Strictly, for if the rest of us are a long time dead, sport stars are a long time retired.
So how is Shane coping? His stage exit from rugby has involved several curtain calls. After he ended his professional career with a two-year stint in Japan, he couldn’t resist returning to the club that shaped his youth – Amman United. As we see in the programme, it is a homecoming that gifted him an unlikely last hurrah at the Principality Stadium.
And it is this swansong in grassroots rugby that illustrates how hard it is to let go, but also how Shane is more equipped than most to thrive in sporting retirement.
Duncan Goodhew stressed the importance of the “anchors of your life” that may disappear with the close of your competitive career. But however high he has flown, Shane has always been anchored – rooted to the Amman since he pulled on his first oversized jersey. And that’s what has always kept those dancing feet on the ground. From the teasing of his lovely wife Gail to the camaraderie of his third division clubmates, the closeness of family and village kinship fills every frame of Shane: For the Love of the Game.
So if Shane was an embodiment of Wales itself when he played, now he has hung up his boots his attitude to life after sport symbolises one of our greatest traditional Welsh traits – the value of community.
Shane: For the Love of the Game is broadcast on BBC One Wales tomorrow at 9pm.