Blindsided Read online

  I looked around Eden Park, felt the electric atmosphere. And the rain. There was a breeze too. The flags on top of the stand told me that. But because of the structure behind me, masking it at ground level, I couldn’t physically feel it.

  My right foot struck the seam of the ball exactly where I wanted it to. I was always a straight kicker—not a hooker or a slider of the ball like some other guys—and this one, despite the inconstancy of the ball, felt beautiful.

  The ball took off, heading straight for the middle of the posts.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said to myself as the ball continued on its path, ‘that looks good.’

  You could hear a pin drop—35,000 people were holding their breath. I was one of them.

  I was almost ready to turn away, as from a successful kick. Almost, but not quite.

  Something didn’t look right.

  The plan was unravelling.

  As the ball got closer to the goalposts and started to lose power—suddenly exposed to the elements as it passed from the shelter of the grandstand—a fresh gust of wind caught it at the last moment and pushed it just past the right upright.

  I heard the dull thud as the ball hit the wet turf before the roar went up.

  I had missed.

  I was distraught—‘How could that happen?’

  We lost the game. The Bledisloe Cup would stay in New Zealand. No matter how often teammates told me, ‘Mate, it’s not your fault’, or, ‘Nah, we had plenty of other opportunities to win the game, mate’, I didn’t want to hear any of it.

  BOB DWYER, FORMER AUSTRALIAN COACH: Foxy and Michael were great goal-kickers over a long period. When Foxy kicked the winning kick, he slipped and ended up flat on his back. That’s how difficult it was. My view was: kickers don’t lose you games. They can often win you them. To put it all on one guy is just too tough an assignment. We collectively were never of the opinion that he lost us that game. It’s up to everyone to win the game and it’s up to everyone to prevent the team from losing. But Michael had different standards that he imposed on himself.

  I was so disappointed with myself. I hated excuses. I’d had a kick to tie the game and had missed it. It was as simple as that. Of little consolation was the fact that I had at least made good contact with the ball under extreme pressure. That part I had executed pretty well. But I knew there was wind and I hadn’t factored it in. Poor planning. Rookie mistake.

  GRANT FOX: I didn’t really process the vagaries of a stadium as diligently as Michael did. And sometimes the odd stadium was just too hard to read. Then there’s also that theory of ‘A well-struck golf ball isn’t affected by the wind’, so sometimes you’ve got to trust that. Having said all that, I knew Eden Park like the back of my hand. I knew that there was a certain wind that might feel one way but it actually did something different. It was only through years of playing at Eden Park that I knew that. Michael would have probably had that relationship with places like Ballymore, or anywhere else he played a lot of games.

  I felt like I needed to go back to the drawing board.

  From that day on, I made a conscious decision to work far harder to improve the mechanics of my execution. But that was just half the commitment I made to myself. The other was to identify and, if possible, eliminate factors that might cause me to miss a kick, regardless of potential intangibles like the inconstancy of the ball. Wind, weather and all the various quirks a stadium might present—all needed to be accounted for. No two stadiums were the same, after all. Particularly in those days of low ends or sometimes even open ends. The wind would behave differently every time. You learn that from years of experience.

  I kept thinking about the concept of preparation and decided that my commitment to prepare better wasn’t something that should be exclusive to my rugby. It needed to apply to every part of my life: relationships and business as well as sport. I’d create small, attainable goals in life. Little milestones. I’d always look for a way to measure my progress.

  When I reflect now, I realise that I definitely needed to freshen things up back then anyway. That’s a natural response to a pivotal moment like missing a vital kick, I think: to change the routine. Alter something. I’d been doing the same thing for so long. It had been working. But suddenly it felt like it wasn’t.

  So though I retained the slow . . . rhythm . . . through aspect of my preparation, as that need to slow down would always apply, I found a slightly different way of getting to the same point in my pre-kick routine. It’s like a tennis player who, instead of bouncing the ball four times before each serve, decides to bounce it only twice. It doesn’t matter why—it’s the change that counts. It has something like a placebo effect. You think you’re getting a drug, but really you’re not, yet you tell yourself—‘That works. I feel better already!’

  In the same way, a golfer might do something slightly different when addressing a putt, but would ultimately still strike the putt exactly the same way. Again, the details of the change don’t really matter—it’s the alteration in the routine that does. All of a sudden the putts start dropping again—‘I’ve found the secret!’

  So instead of taking the four steps back and three across, I made a mental note of where I would end up if I did that. Then I tried to find a new way of getting there, like walking backwards in an arc to that identical finishing point. It was such a simple thing. It initially felt alien, like writing with your weak hand. But it made a big difference in the place that mattered: my mind. It felt like I was doing something new, and goal-kicking, as much as it’s a technical act, is also a lot about feel.

  I’d have plenty of opportunity to put my new theories to the test.

  FOUR

  A RUGBY BAPTISM

  PEOPLE HAVE COMMENTED THAT my eldest son, Louis, is a very nice, kind child. As his father, that’s really nice to hear. Even though he’s only fourteen, he has always had the ability to speak to adults in a polite way. To be fair, I’ve always been reasonably tough on him, but in a good way, I think. If he does something wrong, he knows it. But, by the same token, if he does something right he knows it as well. I think there’s a balance to be found there. I don’t start shouting and cheering just because he runs onto a rugby field. He needs to do something more than that before I start applauding.

  You see far too much undeserved praise being heaped on kids these days—‘Oh, my son’s the best. You won’t believe what he did today: he opened a can of fruit, all on his own. And I didn’t have to help him. He’s just such a wonderful, coordinated kid.’

  I scratch my head and think, ‘Come on?!’

  That’s just an example, of course, but, without wishing to generalise too much, most kids do the same things, albeit at slightly different ages. Don’t give them praise for something that every kid can do, sooner or later. It’s not fair on them in the long run. When they get out there into the real world, they’ll find that they’re not as great as they’ve been told all their lives. I’m of the opinion that kids should be left to be kids. By all means give them some guidance and help them along the way. But kids, by and large, will figure things out on their own.

  I think my approach to parenting was inspired by my own dad, Ian. I’ve probably added a few tweaks of my own too. Dad was always extremely supportive of me when I was a child. He and my mother, Marie, were both invested in everything I did. It was definitely a loving relationship. But they didn’t spoil me. Dad, particularly, was always very fair with praise when it was deserved. It wasn’t given cheaply and I really respect that. You had to have done something well to get it, but in some ways that made life easier. You knew where you stood with Dad. If he praised you for something, you knew it was good. But on the other hand, he was always there to give me an encouraging talk or to help me with whatever it was that I was doing. He was certainly aware that, because I wasn’t particularly confident as a child, part of his parental role was to help bolster my self-esteem. Both he and Mum were wonderful from that perspective.

  Whatever I wanted to do, D
ad would happily introduce me to it. When we lived on the Gold Coast, surfing was something I just loved. It all started when Mum and Dad bought me a surfboard for Christmas one year. They still joke about why they bought it for me in the first place.

  Every Saturday and Sunday we used to go down to the beach. Mum and Dad would sit and relax and I’d swim out way beyond the breakers to try to catch a wave and bodysurf. A lot of times I’d get stuck out there and the lifeguards would come and rescue me. I was probably only six or seven at the time. The accepted signal for wanting to be rescued was to raise your hand, and I knew that. But sometimes I’d just raise my hand because I was waving to my parents on the beach. And then the lifeguards would come out. They probably thought, ‘Not you again . . .’

  To me it was all good fun. My parents, on the other hand, thought: ‘If he’s going to keep going out beyond the breakers, we’d better get him a surfboard to hold on to.’ So they bought me this terrible old thing. I remember it very clearly. It was orange underneath and green on top, with just a single fin. That was it for me, though. The board itself didn’t really matter; I was hooked on surfing from that moment on.

  At five-thirty or six every Saturday morning Dad would take me down to Burleigh Heads. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Can we go down to Greenmount, or Snapper Rocks, or Kirra, Dad, where the really good waves are?’ And he’d say, ‘Yep’, and off we’d go.

  People always ask me, ‘Did your Dad surf? Did he play rugby? Did he play cricket? Was he sporty?’ I say ‘No’, and Dad hates it, because he did play rugby, he did play cricket and he did surf. He hates it even more when I say to him, ‘Yeah, you were just a guy that played a bit of everything.’ That’s about the level that most people reach. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that either.

  But he was a better teacher than most. He understood the basics of most sports; he just couldn’t do them very well! He had a lot of patience with me, though. When I wanted to go to the cricket nets to practise, every single day, he was pretty good at doing that and he did exactly the same for my sister, Jane, with whatever she was interested in at the time.

  I should probably say that Jane and I are completely different types of people. We are poles apart. And that was sometimes a problem when we were growing up. I was always shy and reasonably introverted, without being anti-social. I had friends and got on with people, but I was quiet. Jane was loud and extroverted. She liked being the centre of attention, whereas I didn’t like being in the spotlight. Nothing much has changed. If someone said, ‘So you’re Michael’s sister?’ Jane would say, ‘No, he’s my brother!’ It was the same thing, of course, but with different emphasis.

  She and I just pulled in different directions. Whereas I liked rock bands like the Rolling Stones and punk rock generally, she liked Abba. I hated Abba, although I’ve come to realise that Abba did what they did very well. But back then, they were like the antichrist. I used to think, ‘If you like the stuff I like, you can’t also like Abba.’ We had different tastes in everything and that meant that we fought quite a lot.

  As adults we obviously learned to get along a bit better. She’s still outgoing and vivacious. Her industry is advertising and she’s very good at it. It suits her personality perfectly. Advertising isn’t my area—particularly when it relates to me. I’d always rather be in the background.

  YOU’D PROBABLY BE SURPRISED to learn that rugby was not my main sport as I was growing up. My childhood was spent on the Gold Coast and we moved up to Brisbane in 1974, where my dad had a new job. Until that point I’d been playing soccer and a bit of rugby league at school. In those days, school rugby league was played by weight. So the teachers would say, ‘Lynagh, you’re stocky and pretty strong so you can play for the year above.’ I was ten, playing with eleven- and twelve-year-olds. For me league was a pastime, nothing more.

  Cricket was my main sport, my real love. I loved league and soccer but they were really just things that I did in the winter while waiting for the cricket season to come around again. But when we arrived in Brisbane in 1974, I discovered this game called rugby union at the school I went to: St Joseph’s College.

  Even when I was playing in the A team, running around a bit, I didn’t really know the rules. I remember one day in particular. We were playing out at Nudgee College, our main rivals. Dad was there, as he was every Saturday for every sport I ever played. My parents supported—that’s what they were great at. And they did it above and beyond the call of duty. They willingly took me to all my sports commitments every weekend. I saw that and do the same for my kids now.

  ‘I want to play golf.’

  ‘Okay, let’s get you golf lessons.’

  ‘I’d like to play tennis.’

  ‘We’ll take you to the tennis courts.’

  It’s in my nature to want to make sports, and opportunities generally, available to my kids. My parents did it for me and it encouraged me. I, in turn, do it for mine.

  After this particular game at Nudgee, however, Dad was pretty quiet in the car on the way home. I didn’t know what the problem was.

  He said, ‘If you’re going to play this game, you’ve got to participate.’

  I think he was frustrated because I was running around aimlessly, in his opinion.

  ‘Either you get involved and learn the rules, or you go and do something else.’

  I said, ‘I want to play. I just don’t understand the game very well.’

  So I learned the rules, took the game more seriously and gradually rugby union became very important.

  At my school, when you went from year seven into year eight (that is, primary school into high school), the class size doubled. New kids came in from the outside. We had rugby trial matches with all the new kids and I remember that I played in a reasonably weak trial team. I was playing flyhalf and spent most of the game in cover defence because we were getting beaten.

  After the game, the coach, Brother Edwards, said, ‘You’re playing number eight from now on.’ He was a good bloke, but he had obviously read somewhere that if you make a lot of cover tackles, you’d make a good number eight. I said, ‘Well, I don’t like playing number eight. I don’t like getting involved in the scrums either.’ But I got put in the under-13 B team anyway, playing number eight.

  The next year, the under-14 coach said, ‘You’re not a number eight, you’re playing flyhalf.’ The following year I got into the First XV as a flyhalf. That’s when it all happened. That’s when it went from being recreational. Not just that, but I went straight into a team that had won the GPS Premiership two years running. We had a lot to live up to. Fortunately, I was coached by a very good schoolboys coach called Lester Hampson, and it was he who taught me a lot about the game generally and some of the skills particular to playing at number ten. His coaching was vital to me at that stage of my development.

  While I mention this, it reminds me of a question I get asked a lot—‘Who’s your least favourite opposite number to play against?’ You might assume that I’d nominate guys like Grant Fox, Rob Andrew and Hugo Porta. Actually, my least favourite was a guy called Rod Wilton. You won’t have heard of him.

  I came up against him while playing for St Joseph’s at cricket and rugby at the under-13 level. He attended Nudgee. He was a batsman; I was a batsman. He was a flyhalf; I was a flyhalf. We both ended up in our respective First XVs and First XIs. He was a stocky country boy from Biloela in central Queensland and a smoker from the age of about fourteen, as I recall. I hated playing rugby against him because he was physically tough and very good. He remains my least favourite opponent.

  Even though I was doing well at rugby, cricket was still my sporting passion. I played First XI at the age of thirteen and if you’d asked me, or my parents, which sport I was more likely to play for my country, the answer would definitely have been cricket. My cricket was miles ahead of my rugby.

  Then circumstances intervened.

  What decided my life’s direction was that in 1981, my last year at school, an Aus
tralian Schools rugby team was selected to tour the UK in November and December. It would have been my first cricket season outside school. I went on tour instead. Life changed in an instant.

  BOB DWYER: I used to live in a Sydney beach suburb called Coogee. My house was maybe a kilometre from the rugby ground. I was driving past one Saturday morning and I saw some teams playing. A friend of mine was coaching one of them . . . the Australian Schoolboys. So I pulled over, watched the end of the game and when it was over I said to my friend, ‘Who’s the number ten?’ He said, ‘He’s the star.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve worked that out. What’s his name?’ And it was Michael. He stood out, even in a practice game when he was playing against nobodies. He had skill, balance, coordination and he was a very good kicker.

  When I came back to Australia in January, I was selected for the Queensland senior rugby team and that was it. I never played cricket again until 1996, when I was invited to play in a few charity matches in the UK. I loved it, playing with people I’d grown up watching, like Derek Underwood, Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock and more recent Test players like Mark Butcher, Ashley Giles and Gladstone Small. It was surreal to have players like that down the other end. I thought to myself, ‘I eventually made it as a cricketer—thirty years late!’

  Before I knew it, my rugby career had started. Life was rolling forwards. I played my fourth game out of school for Queensland against a New Zealand select XV for the centenary of the Queensland Rugby Union in 1982. It was just my second game for Queensland and it was essentially against the All Blacks in everything but name. I was just a kid. I’d never played anybody. Man, we got run over in our own centenary game at home. It wasn’t pretty.

  There was a fellow from Wellington called Tu Wyllie playing at ten for the New Zealanders. He was a Maori, five foot ten and about fifteen or sixteen stone. He loved the Maori sidestep: straight over the top—‘That’ll teach you, you young little superstar.’ He had huge thighs and charged over the top of me, all day long. That was the kind of flyhalf I didn’t like.