INTERVIEW:Jonny Wilkinson had the eyes of the world on him long before he kicked that winning drop goal in the 2003 Rugby World Cup final. Last week he attracted crowds of Dubliners during a fashion shoot. How does he manage the fame, the pressures, the injuries?, asks Johnny Watterson.
THE CLICKING SOUND is the noise of the girls leaping from the grass outside the Berkeley Library in Trinity College Dublin and running down the hard path in their kitten heels, squeaking: "It is him. It isn't him. It is friggin' him." In the old days, you may also have heard the grinding of Jonny Wilkinson's teeth. You would have sensed the fear and anxiety creep through him and you would have seen the furtive, haunted look of a rattled man close to nervous exhaustion.
Today, squired up beautifully and looking like a latter day JP Donleavy, replete with pink hanky foppishly peeking from his breast pocket, English rugby's boy wonder, English rugby's record-breaking kicking machine, English rugby's World Cup winning out-half is alright about it. It is only in the past two years that he has been able to live with the swarming attention he attracts in public spaces. Wilkinson's epiphany has made him well again. The revelation took some time. It was called "balance".
"Of course. No problem," he says to the girls, who shuffle in close. He smiles a perfect row of teeth.
"I used to find the attention troubling," he says. "I was struggling with the humility of it. I didn't know why people were doing it. I found it embarrassing to be picked out. I was self-conscious about what I was wearing. I wasn't a confident person. I was afraid to let anyone down.
"It was restrictive and it limited my life. I couldn't go out. I couldn't do anything. I was giving a message that I was hiding and people were trying to find me. When I was out, I'd hide behind people, sit in corners and keep my hat on. Now I see these things as a great lesson for me. I got to wear these clothes. I got to walk down that street. I got to meet people. You can't stop and explain 'oh sorry, I'm doing this photo shoot and I've got to wear this,' and it's brilliant. It's liberating."
Wilkinson's iconic status has dealt him a life at the top table of rugby for which he is both grateful and which also nearly destroyed him. Unable to separate the highs and lows of international rugby from a regular, detached life, he manically invited stress and heavy workloads into his front room, without ever closing the door.
One of the biggest names in world rugby had fallen into a cycle of physical and mental self-destruction. After the high of winning a club or international match, it was straight into the demands of the following week.
After the low of losing, he'd work harder, go to the gym on a Sunday morning, his day off, push himself to near exhaustion and eventually injure himself. Anxiety and worry were constants.
Respected as one of the mentally toughest and bravest of players for his selfless tackling of opponents who are often seven stone heavier, Wilkinson's body at one stage - after England's 2003 World Cup win - resembled the crash test dummy from BBC's spoof science programme, Brainiac. The best of British newspapers ran full-page photographs with arrows indicating the broken cartilage, the damaged shoulders, the bruised kidneys and torn ligaments. He looked every bit as though he had been tested by Brainiac's ever inventive team to see if he was harder than a garden ornament or engine casing after a ton of bricks was dropped from three storeys.
"I had a neck injury. That was nine months," he says. "The arm injury was eight weeks, and various knee ligament tears, a couple of months each. I'd a groin injury that was actually three months, an operation on a kidney that was three or four months. Each one was always not quite long enough for me to say 'I'll get away.'
"I'd always say if I can get through this first month, then I can get back into training. But I ended up never really getting away enough and lived the life of a competing rugby player, but I couldn't compete. I burnt energy. I messed my mind up."
Wilkinson now talks like an old sage whose emancipation has led him away from a life of uncertainty and daily trial. But he is not about to step off the stage, despite the aggressive advances on his position in the England team from the latest young tyro, Danny Cipriani. There is no doubt that he has, for the moment, been nudged aside in an English squad that has been playing chaotically. But, like walking down the street and discovering rewards in talking and interacting with everyday people, Cipriani's trespassing is seen by Wilkinson as an opportunity to reassess, improve, get better. If this threat on what was once the most strongly held position in world rugby had materialised four years ago, Wilkinson would have tried to fix it the old Jonny way and he would have injured himself. He is not on his knees pondering some kind of personal disaster.
"It is amazing how lost you can get when you are totally engulfed or surrounded and you are living in this intense bubble which is your rugby career," he says. "I always believe the next game is going to be the one for me. It's going to be special. It's going to be everything. These opportunities give you a poke in the ribs, not an unpleasant one but just enough to make you want to turn around and reassess where you are. It allows you to say, you know what, now is a great opportunity for what you've been thinking about. You say let's change."
In order to get away from what was happening on the pitch, Wilkinson took off on an intensely personal voyage of discovery. He learned to play the guitar, practising sometimes until his fingers bled. He learned foreign languages, spoke to family, friends and also sought professional help. The golden rugby player of his generation was corroding and breaking down, not because of who he was, rather what he had become. He had a strong inkling of what was happening, but couldn't fix it.
"In order to get away from it off the field, I learned to play the guitar. I learned French, I got into Spanish. I took a lot of time to look at where I was going, what it all meant," he explains. "The project that took most of the time was trying to find more enjoyment in what I was doing. I know I love rugby. I just wasn't finding that. It wasn't coming through.
"I spent all kinds of time in that period trying to look at things from different angles. Ultimately, a lot of it wasn't successful. I found myself immediately dropping back into the high pressure 'get-through-it-at-all-costs-enjoyment-can-be-sacrificed' mode, especially the Rugby World Cup 2007.
"I fell straight back into it, the pressure on kickers," he adds, almost recoiling at the oppressive load bearing that entails. "Straight away it was: 'This isn't here to be enjoyed. This is sacrifice. Take as much pain on your shoulders as you can and get through it and get on'. "
Wilkinson first played international rugby as an 18-year-old, when he came off the bench in a Six Nations match against Ireland in 1998 at Twickenham to become the youngest player to play for England. In the intervening 10 years, he has recreated the point-scoring landscape with kicking records.
But it was his imperious role in England's World Cup win in 2003 that defined him. Against South Africa in the pool game, he scored 20 of England's 25 points. In the quarter-finals against Wales in Brisbane, he kicked 23 points of England's 28. England met France in the semi-final and won 24-7. Wilkinson scored all of England's points. In the final against Australia, with the scores level at 17-17, Wilkinson kicked an extraordinarily pressurised winning drop goal with just 26 seconds remaining. That the left-footed player landed the extra-time kick with his right foot added greater poignancy. That year, he was voted the best rugby player in the world, and this year against Scotland, he overtook Wales's Neil Jenkins for the world test record for points scoring, with 1,090 points.
"I've sat there on match day mornings in bits, and I've played maybe 300-400 games. Why am I still like this?" he used ask himself. "It was tiring me. I wasn't enjoying it. I wasn't playing any better. I believed the more pain I went through in my head, the better I'd play. I made that real. I made that law real and what I also made real was an incredible lack of enjoyment.
"All I did was give myself more injuries, more heartache and more pain. I realised I couldn't play the game much longer like this and I also realised I didn't want to play the game much longer. Then I asked myself, 'what are you taking with you to the next stage of your life?' Maybe a couple of cups, a few awards or something. It was devastating in that respect."
Wilkinson's compulsive-obsessive gene, which he says he can now flip on and off, is what the pretender for the English out-half position, Cipriani, should fear. At 28 years old and radiantly fit looking, he can also walk down a crowded street without fear. In his training and his attitude, he no longer plays until his fingers bleed. He believes his step back is a leap forward.
"Can you imagine if this happened when I was still in my old frame of mind?" he asks rhetorically. He rips off the silk tie and pulls the pink cravat from his breast pocket, shakes his head smiling.