Talk of the Toony: The Autobiography of Gregor Townsend

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in 2007 by HarperSport an imprint of HarperCollins London

© Gregor Townsend 2007

Gregor Townsend asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN 9780007251131

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780008140663

Version: 2015-03-13

Dedication

Dedicated to rugby in the Borders, and the hope that it can rise again.

Have you ever stopped and wondered why

Border rugby is so strong

I’ll tell you how it started, just listen to my song

How the Reivers wrought disorder

And the rule of law was lame

And the Bonnie Scottish Borders became

The Kingdom of the Game

Frae Gala, Hawick and Melrose

The Gospel quickly spread

The magic of its spell rose

Frae Selkirk don tae Jed

Frae Kelsae doon on Tweedside

Tae the muckle toon they came

And they fought tae find the best toon

In the Kingdom of the Game

Their features carved in granite

Their hearts as stout as stone

They won the ball and ran it

They made the game their own

Now many Border Callants

Bring honour and great fame

Tae the heartbeat of the Nation

Tae the Kingdom of the Game

‘The Kingdom of the game’ (Henry Douglas)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1. Borders Crossing

2. Odyssey

3. Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina

4. Breakthrough

5. Rebels with a Cause

6. Last Orders and First Steps

7. Pride of Lions

8. Recurving

9. Vive la différence!

10. Le beau jeu

11. Feeling Blue

12. Full Circle

13. Spirits Lifted: Rugby World Cup 2003 Diary Part 1

14. Breaking Point: Rugby World Cup 2003 Diary Part 2

15. Farewell to All That

16. Swimming with Sharks

17. State of the Union

Career Statistics

Acknowledgments

Photo section

About the Publisher

Preface

Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember.

Oscar Levant

15 September 2006

I suppose we are never angrier than when we feel ourselves to be at fault. In only the third game of this season – my final season – I played as badly as I’ve ever done in my career. I was playing for the Border Reivers down in Wales, and we succumbed to another defeat – this time against the Ospreys. However, my own disappointment was much greater than that of my team-mates. This wasn’t entirely to do with my error-strewn performance. The match also forced me to admit an undeniable truth – my rugby career was all but over.

Throughout my career, I would set myself goals of getting into club, Scotland or Lions teams, but my real focus was on trying to improve every time I got my hands on a rugby ball, trying to play the perfect game. A few months previously I had announced publicly – and set as a goal – that I was going to retire at the end of the season. It wasn’t the most positive of targets and for the first time in my career, I began to feel demotivated. Now, showing signs of being unable to reach the standards I had set for myself, I feared that I’d lose the respect of others, never mind my own self-respect.

Professional sportsmen never know when the best time is to retire. The preferred option is to ‘go out at the top’, when you are still at the height of your powers. I couldn’t see the logic in that – surely you would want to achieve as much as was possible? Another option is to wait until injuries force you out of the game. My body had been crying ‘enough’ for some time – a broken ankle, torn shoulder ligaments and a cortisone injection in my neck were some of the things I’d faced in the previous two years – but I couldn’t resist working myself back to some sort of match fitness and playing once more. In the weeks following the Ospreys game, I realized just when the right time to take your leave was – when you start to feel that rugby has become a job. When the exciting becomes mundane and challenges mere chores, then it is time to call it a day.

My last two years back in Scotland have had precious few highlights, as the overriding memories are of recovering from a stream of injuries and of striving to just make it through the day, whether it was a weights session, rugby training, video analysis or rehab work. At times I was getting by on the bare minimum, and I knew it. It’s not a sentiment I want to associate with the sport I love, especially as I’ve felt blessed at the opportunities that rugby has given me.

For the past seventeen years I have been playing, thinking and living rugby. It has taken me from the Scottish Borders to the great playing fields of the world: Twickenham, Stade de France, Lansdowne Road, Stadium Australia and Eden Park. I have crammed in eighty-two Tests for Scotland and two more for the British Lions and I have been in a privileged position to witness the incredible changes that have taken place in the game over the last two decades, as rugby has transformed into a fully professional sport. I have also been in the unique situation of playing club rugby in five different countries, and my experiences in France, South Africa, England, Australia and Scotland have not just helped my rugby but enriched my life.

Rugby has given me so much and has had a hold over me for over half of my life. I’ve found the game compelling and, if given a choice, I wouldn’t have wanted to play any other sport. I believe that, at its best, there isn’t another sport that comes close in terms of excitement, commitment and spectacle. Rugby demands bravery from its players and can contain unforgettable moments of individual brilliance and equally momentous passages of immense team effort. What is it that gives rugby its special qualities? For me it’s no single thing, but the sum of its wonderfully diverse parts – its history, its personalities and its camaraderie.

One of the best quotes I’ve heard about rugby was from a TV interview with Philippe Sella I saw when I was playing in France. He said that to be a true rugby player you have ‘to take the game, but not yourself seriously’. Most of the people I have met during my rugby career would fit this description, although it seems to be less of a prerequisite now that the sport has been chiselled down from a fun-loving amateur game to a hard-nosed, image-conscious professional sport.

Throughout the book you will see that I am an avid collector of quotes. I can only apologize for borrowing from others so much, but as Michel de Montaigne once said, ‘I quote others only the better to express myself.’

My rugby career has been a series of experiences and lessons and it has been the main source of my misery and joy. I’ve had highs and lows, triumphs and disappointments and through playing for Scotland and the Lions I have experienced the whole range of sporting emotions. The spine-tingling combination of fear and excitement before an international match is something you don’t experience in other walks of life. There is a sense of adrenaline and anticipation that is the equivalent of arriving at church on your wedding day; the moments before you turn over an exam paper; and attending a job interview – all rolled into one. It is something I will yearn for each year come the Six Nations.

There have been times when I’ve been able to step out of the moment and see that rugby has taken me to the pinnacle of sporting intensity and achievement. These are memories that stay with you forever, private recollections that make you realize how lucky you are. Standing facing an All Black ‘Haka’ with hundreds of camera flashes going off around the stadium made me aware how far-reaching the game had become. And I’ll never forget standing arm-in-arm with my Lions colleagues at Newlands Stadium in Cape Town as we approached kick-off time in the First Test. It was a balmy evening and there was a gentle breeze in the air. I was incredibly focused, but I felt myself become an onlooker as the crowd began to sing the new South African anthem ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. It is a beautiful, mesmerizing song and I couldn’t help but hum along with the thousands of proud supporters as I realized that this was going to be one of the most significant nights of my life.

In addition to the memories, it is the people you meet over your career that make it all the more special. There are too many to mention but rugby seems to have so many ‘good guys’ – people like Derek Stark, Neil Jenkins, Tabai Matson, Jason Leonard, Anthony Hill, Carl Hogg, Tony Stanger, Francois Duboisset, Lisandro Arbizu, Semo Sititi and A. J. Venter. This book is a tribute to these and the many others that have helped me over the years. In putting this book together, I’ve been reminded of just how many people have been involved in my journey, and I would like to thank those, especially my family, who have shared in and contributed to the many wonderful times I’ve experienced.

There will no doubt be many occasions in the future that I will be wishing I was still part of a squad on tour or preparing for a Test match somewhere, but the thing I’ll miss most is the vision of a scrum-half fizzing a pass through the air into my outstretched arms, and the thrill of running on to that ball with a world of possibilities stretched out in front of me.

CHAPTER 1

Borders Crossing

Inspiration starts with aspiration.

Mary Lyon

Craig, my brother, was inconsolable. He was trying hard to hold back the tears. I asked him what had happened.

‘Someone’s called off – I’m going to have to tell the others we can’t play.’

For the previous month he’d been organizing a team to enter the Ward Sevens – the highlight of the rugby calendar for any Gala youth. He had managed to recruit six of his mates from the ‘ward’ we lived in – a ward being a designated area of the town – but he had just found out on the morning of his big day that one of the team was down with the flu. He couldn’t enter a side with six players and so his hopes of winning the 1980 Under-10 trophy seemed lost.

I saw an opportunity and I wasn’t going to let it pass me by.

‘Dad, if I play then there would still be a team.’

‘No chance – you’ve never played a game of rugby before.’

‘But I’ve run about with Craig’s friends lots of times.’

‘No.’

Since the age of five I had been going to mini-rugby sessions on a Sunday morning and had joined in with the older boys who played touch rugby in the dead-ball area of Netherdale after Gala matches had ended. I knew I would be fine in my brother’s team. For the next ten minutes I pleaded with my parents to allow me to take part. I had just turned seven years old and they were obviously very reluctant to let me play. However, faced with two screaming kids, it wasn’t long before we persuaded them to change their minds. Craig was given instructions that I was to be picked as a winger and only involved in play as a last resort.

As I ran out on the Netherdale pitch on a sun-drenched afternoon, the day’s events flashed by. My mum said it was comical – it looked like everyone else was a foot taller than me. I only received two passes throughout the day, but she said I got a huge cheer both times I touched the ball. We went on to win the tournament and I remember spending the evening taking the trophy round the houses in our ward. And so, in the same weekend that Mount St Helens erupted in North America, my love affair with the game began.

I was brought up in the town of Galashiels (or ‘Gala’ as it is better known locally), which is situated right at the very heart of the Scottish Borders. It is a busy town on the A7 road from Edinburgh to Carlisle and lies in the bottom of the steep-sided valley of the Gala Water, a mile upstream from its confluence with the River Tweed. Other Borderers from rival towns sometimes disparagingly call Gala people ‘pail mercs’. This refers to us being – allegedly – the last town in the Borders to get indoor plumbing, thus leaving ‘pail mercs’ (local dialect for ‘bucket marks’) on the backsides of those using the outside toilets. I have myself been abused as a ‘pail merc’ – (amongst other things) at Mansfield Park in Hawick.

Gala folk much prefer to be known as ‘Braw Lads or Lasses’. The Braw Lads Gathering in late June is one of several summer festivals in the Borders and is the focal point of the local calendar, with hundreds of horse riders marking boundaries around the town. The day also commemorates the town’s history, notably an incident in 1337 when a party of English soldiers, resting nearby after picking and eating wild plums that had made them ill, were surprised and defeated by a band of locals. I’m amazed Mel Gibson hasn’t made the story into a film yet!

Borders history has long been closely tied to the fluctuating fortunes of the textile trade, which used to be far larger than it is today. There has been a steady decline since the Second World War and the many woollen mills that once proliferated in towns like Gala and Hawick have now all but disappeared. The local communities thrived during the nineteenth century, the height of textile boom. In Gala alone there was a population increase from 1,600 in 1825 to 18,000 by 1891 – nearly 4,000 more people than live in the town today.

Efforts at establishing a more balanced economy by introducing electronics factories in the town in the 1960s have also seen a reversal in fortunes over the last ten years, with most employers relocating to Asia. However, the area’s future now seems to be on more of an upward curve. The Waverley Line – the train link from Edinburgh that was lost in 1969 – will be reinstalled in 2011 and the trend for young people to leave the Borders to seek work and opportunities elsewhere in the UK is much less pronounced nowadays. This might be to do with house prices being much lower than in Edinburgh, but it has created a positive vibe about the Borders once again.

I suppose most people would describe their upbringing as ‘normal’. Looking back, there was nothing out of the ordinary with my childhood. Life was constructed around the pillars of family, school, church, work and sport. My personal beliefs come from my family. I believe that I formulated all my values from them. My parents stressed the importance of being humble, modest and never taking things for granted.

My dad has always been my rugby conscience. He will notice a missed tackle or a poor bit of play that others would not have seen and is quick to remind me that I can always make improvements to my game. Only hearing positive things about yourself might seem more pleasant, but avoiding the truth won’t make you a better player. I remember early on in my career that he hadn’t spoken to me about an upcoming international, which I thought was strange. But on match day, when I got my boots out of my bag, I found little notes just saying ‘concentration’.

From my mum I have inherited other qualities: a desire to please and not to let anyone down. She is an eternal optimist and has been incredibly supportive to my brother and me in everything we have done. Whilst I’ve realized that you can’t please everyone, I would still like to aim to reach her standards of being good natured and helpful with everyone she meets. Craig was a talented centre who played a few seasons for Gala and Exeter, although golf has always been his preferred sport. One of my proudest moments came when I caddied for him in the Scottish Amateur Championship, even though he went out in the quarter-finals. He’s also responsible for our family recently having to make the unusual adjustment of supporting the ‘Auld Enemy’ – after spending some time working for the RFU as an Academy Manager, Craig is now the manager of the England Sevens team.

My dad was a print setter for a local paper – The Southern Reporter – before becoming an estimator for a printing firm in Gala. My mum still works today as a library assistant at the Borders campus of Heriot-Watt University, less than 100 yards from Netherdale, home of Gala rugby club and the Border Reivers. Our house was on the west side of the town near the summit of Gala hill, which I’ve recently found out has a tenuous link to the film Braveheart. In 1296 William Wallace pursued the Earl of Dunbar – who had betrayed him to the English – to the top of the hill, where the Earl had taken refuge.

I am descended from rugby stock – my dad played in the centre for Gala and twice for the South. His father, John, was also a centre, but was forced to move from Gala to Melrose in the Thirties due to the presence at the time of Scotland international Doddie Wood in the side. My mum might not have such a direct rugby lineage, but it is impressive all the same. Her second cousin was the late Jock Turner, a classy midfielder for Gala and Scotland in the Sixties, and one of five players from the club to have played for the Lions.

My folks have a strong work ethic – a common trait in Borders people. I suppose I must have inherited some of this, as my paper round was the toughest in Gala, reaching 102 papers a day at one point. On one occasion I was even waiting to pick up my papers before the shop owner had arrived.

As I sat outside the paper shop I saw my dad approach, looking slightly bedraggled.

‘What do you think you’re doing here?’

‘I was going to ask you the same question – I’m waiting for the shop to open.’

‘Have you seen what time it is?’

In my zombie-like state of semi-consciousness, I hadn’t checked my watch that morning. I looked up at the town clock, which loomed large over us. It was 3 a.m. I was four hours early. Fortunately my dad had been awoken by the noise of the door shutting as I’d set out on my very early shift. I made a mental note to check that I set my alarm properly before I went to bed.

I have two images of my young self. The first, prior to enrolling at Galashiels Academy, is of a manic, sports-mad, stubborn, attention-seeking lad prone to a tantrum or three – basically a parent’s nightmare. The second image is of a shy, solitary and curious boy uneasy with handling praise. Later I became more geared to using humour rather than bravado to get people’s attention. I still like to get the last word but this second description is much more in line with my present character.

My parents were a huge influence in helping me get involved in as many sports as I could squeeze into my days. At twelve years old, newly enrolled at Galashiels Academy, I played rugby on Saturday for the school first year team. Then, every Sunday, Mum and Dad ferried me up and down the A7 to play football for Hutchison Vale, a renowned boys club in Edinburgh. John Collins, another Gala lad, also turned out for Hutchie at the same time as me, but for their Under-18 side. He was a much more talented footballer and went on to captain Scotland – in the same month that I captained the Scotland rugby team – during an illustrious playing career. In the summer I shared my time between playing golf and cricket and competing for Melrose Athletics Club. At other times of the year Craig and I would turn to other sports – these ranged from marking out a chalk tennis court on the road outside our house to creating a jumping course (usually when The Horse of the Year Show was on TV) in the woods nearby.

Sometimes I didn’t need anyone else to keep my sporting obsession going. There would be many a night I’d kick a football against a wall beside our garage, or take my misshapen orange Mitre rugby ball and practise drop-kicks and up-and-unders. I must have been happy in my own company as this usually evolved into a match, passing to myself and side-stepping past some imaginary defenders. I became stand-off for Scotland against a world XV, honing my Bill McLaren-from-the-commentary-box impersonation as I scored yet another try. I did the same at golf, often playing the top nine holes at the local Ladhope course with four balls and commentating on each shot as I pitted myself against the likes of Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros and Sandy Lyle. Perhaps speaking to yourself on a regular basis isn’t that great an idea, but I’d choose it over today’s ‘PlayStation generation’ who spend an inordinate amount of time indoors watching television or playing video games.

I also have to thank my parents for making me attend the Boys Brigade. This created a foundation that was very worthwhile because of the discipline the BB instilled – like going for badges, keeping the uniform clean for weekly inspection and working as a team. During my teenage years when there were many other distractions, I hardly ever missed a Friday night parade or a Sunday Bible class and I went on to gain the Queen’s badge, the Brigade’s highest honour. I came under the influence of some excellent role models like Al Christie and Riddell Graham – people who had given up their time to help others. It wasn’t all hard work and for me, it was an excellent outlet for my competitive nature. We competed against other battalions in the Borders at things like drill, table tennis and cross-country. But my personal highlight was a game called ‘Murder Ball’, which we played each week. It was really just a raw form of rugby played indoors, but because of the confined space and hard floors it was sometimes more physical than the real thing.

I was, as you may have guessed, a fairly competitive youngster, although winning itself wasn’t the sole motivation for me. I just wanted a chance to be out there doing some sort of sport and I was forever organizing games of football during break time at school. Looking back I must have taken this just a little too seriously. As there was only one rugby tournament – the Ward Sevens – for primary school children at the time, I concentrated my efforts on getting teams together for the handful of football five-a-side competitions that were held during the year. I remember arranging trials and selection meetings and even doing a poll with everyone in the school – St Peter’s Primary – to decide what would be the best name for the side. I had obviously come up with the two or three names that were on the ballot sheet. For the record, ‘Liverpool Lads’, ‘Rangers Reserves’ and ‘Tottenham Toddlers’ were the options. Not the most inspiring of choices I must admit.