What a Flanker

There were players who didn’t enjoy team socials. That was fine, to a point. But it could be a problem when certain players isolated themselves completely, because refusing to be a team man is not good for morale and not something most team-mates take kindly to. A player should never be pressured into doing something he doesn’t want to do. He should have his own mind. But sometimes you have to do things you might not want to do for the greater good. That doesn’t mean you have to be drinking dirty pints from a wellington boot. You don’t even have to drink. Just turn up for a couple of hours, have a chat and leave if it’s getting a bit tasty for your liking. Job done. Sadly, I can recall many players who wanted no part of it and became outcasts.

Whether it’s making a few tackles in a contact session or turning up to a team social, it’s about telling your team-mates that on match day, they can rely on you, you’ll be 100 per cent committed to the cause, be by their side when the flak is flying and never flinch. That’s why if a social was fancy dress, I expected everyone to go to every length to make their outfit as good as possible. And most of the time, the lads would go above and beyond the call of duty. One fancy dress social that springs to mind was after we won the Heineken Cup for the second time in 2007. Everyone except two lads pulled their fingers out, and the assembled squad would have given the costume department at Pinewood Studios a run for its money. We met at 11 am in Fulham, and the sight was a magnificent one. Pete Richards and Joe Mbu turned up as Björn Borg and Venus Williams respectively, and promptly started playing tennis in the middle of the road. Naturally, I was Lawrence Dallaglio (his mum supplied me with one of his old England kits and I even had a custom face-mask made). Alex King was a peeping Tom affectionally known as ‘The Pest’, wearing a trench coat and just an elephant’s trunk posing pouch underneath. Matt Dawson was the lead singer of The Darkness and Martin Purdy was our friend Frank the Tank from Old School. One of our props, whose blushes I will spare, came as a tumble dryer, with his head poking out of the top of the cardboard box. That related to another night he’d taken a woman back to his flat and the following morning she looked like she’d been through a tumble dryer. When they came down the stairs, she was clinging to him like a koala, her legs were shaking, her hair was all over the place and she kept telling him how much she loved him. That’s what I call doing a professional job in the bedroom. Everyone was someone or something else that day and it was magnificent to be a part of. When us old team-mates meet up today, it’s those stories we share, rather than stories of glorious victories.

Lady-pleasers

In rugby days of old, backs would be the main lady-pleasers on an evening out, with the forwards bumbling about in the shadows, hoping for a few scraps. The modern forward is paid to be in good shape and a lot of modern ladies like a bigger gentleman. Back in the day, I enjoyed my singledom like the rest. I wouldn’t describe myself as a lady’s man as I always had a body like Baywatch and face like Crimewatch. I was never one for getting incoherently drunk and being sick on myself, like some team-mates. My sole purpose on a night out was to get to know various members of the fairer sex better. I liked to have a nice chat with a girl and see how things progressed. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. As with most forwards, it was about putting in the graft and playing the numbers game.

I think it’s fair to say that certain backs operated on a different level altogether. Danny Care in his heyday was something to behold. Thom Evans, who once appeared full-frontal naked on a French ‘arthouse’ calendar called the Dieux du Stade (more of which later), dated Kelly Brook and was last seen on the red carpet with Nicole Scherzinger at the Golden Globes, would have women dripping off him. Presumably, Nicole bought him a shitty stick for Valentine’s Day. Then there was the man I don’t wish to embarrass but who I’ll call The Special One. The Special One was devastatingly handsome and in the habit of telling women he loved them after half an hour. You’d overhear the poor girl telling her mate, ‘I can’t believe he loves me!’ But The Special One’s chat, horrific as it was, wasn’t as bad as another one of my England team-mates’, who I’ll call Harry (in case you were wondering, his name isn’t actually Harry. I wouldn’t be that horrible). One time, Harry was chatting to this very attractive girl, and she broke off the conversation to tell me that while my mate was incredibly good looking, he was also extremely boring, and that if I told him to ‘shut the fuck up’, she’d sleep with him anyway.

But however good looking a rugby player might be, he will never be able to compete with a footballer or elite boxer. Those boys are in a different stratosphere when it comes to wooing ladies, owing to their fame and worldly riches. Without mentioning his name, let me tell you about an evening I once spent with a famous boxer. He phoned me and said, ‘James, do you want to come to dinner at Stringfellows?’

‘Do they do food at Stringfellows?’

‘Yeah, including dessert …’

I was thinking, ‘Is he talking in code? Is dessert a euphemism?’

I didn’t even like strip clubs. I hated the fakery and pretence of it. All that foreplay and none of the fun was not my vibe. Plus, I didn’t need any more women in my life pretending they loved me. But, of course, I accepted his invitation anyway. On the night, we pulled up to the gate in his Mercedes, he lobbed the keys to the valet, and our entrance was like that scene out of Goodfellas, where Henry Hill leads his new girlfriend through the restaurant before being seated right at the front. Everyone knew him, people were winking, bowing and slapping him on the back. And the strippers were almost drooling, so that I thought my mate might be ravaged at any moment.

When we sat down – he had a golden throne at the head of the table, no word of a lie – he started going on about this amazing chocolate fudge cake they had on the menu, and again I was convinced he was speaking in metaphors. I was in a permanent state of confusion, not knowing if what came out of his mouth was real or a double entendre. Out of nowhere, some of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, none of them wearing much, started processing past. And my mate was passing comment on them, like a judge in a dog show. After a couple of minutes, he gave one of them the nod, like a holy seal of approval, and she sat on his lap, before one of her rivals, who had drawn the short straw, sat next to me. I said to her, ‘Listen, I’m going to be up front with you, you don’t have to talk to me because I don’t want a dance and I’ve got no money anyway. I’ll just eat my chocolate fudge cake and you can dance for someone else.’ She didn’t get the message and I spent a very uncomfortable few minutes spooning chocolate fudge cake into my gob while she hovered over my shoulder.

Eventually, one of the boxer’s mates said to me, ‘Can I buy you a dance?’

‘Nah, I’m all right. The fudge cake is very nice, though …’

‘Come on, let me buy you a dance.’

Meanwhile, the boxer had disappeared with the stripper who had been perched on his knee, so I agreed to a dance just to break the awkwardness.

By the time this stripper had led me to a booth, the boxer had returned to the table, where he was speaking to two random female punters. So the whole time this stripper was dancing, grinding against me and jiggling her breasts in my face, she was looking over my shoulder and saying, in this thick eastern European accent, ‘Who are those women he is talking to?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I mean, I don’t know. Please, can you just dance? Let’s get this over with.’

‘But who are they?’

‘They must be his friends.’

‘Friends? What friends? Friends how?’

As soon as my time was up, she jumped off me, put her bra and knickers back on – so hastily that she was stumbling all over the place on her eight-inch heels – and literally ran back to our table. Being interrogated while having a fanny thrust in your face might float some blokes’ boats, but I pitied the poor man who had paid so much on my behalf for such a distant, workmanlike performance.

When I got back to the table, the boxer asked me how it had gone. ‘Not great,’ I replied. ‘She was asking questions about you the whole time.’ Soon after, I left the club and headed home. The following morning, I had a text message from the boxer, sent at 4 am. ‘That stripper from last night who mugged you off. I put her on trial, found her guilty and punished her.’ Don’t worry, before you start digging up patios, that just meant he had sex with her. As I said, he liked speaking in code. There were also pictures. But don’t go flicking, you won’t find them in the middle of this book. That boxer was a horrible yet magnificent machine. He did more drilling than Shell and never went home alone.

On the 2017 Lions tour, I did have the misfortune of rooming from time to time with someone who ran this boxer close, shagging-wise. He’d say to me, ‘Hask, I need to borrow the room.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I need a bit of privacy for a couple of hours.’

‘For fuck’s sake. I’ve got a game tomorrow!’

Part of my preparation for the midweek game against the Hurricanes was sitting in the corridor for three hours while he was having his wicked way.

But most rugby players are strictly second division when it comes to attracting ladies. Usually, when I told a woman I played rugby, she’d ask me a couple of questions about the All Blacks – ‘Oh, did you ever play against that team that does the dance? Were you scared of the Haka?’ – and that would be the end of the conversation. For most of my career, I would just pretend I did something else when talking to women. Not only is rugby not interesting to anyone who isn’t properly into it, rugby players don’t earn anywhere near what most Premier League footballers earn, which certain women are quite attuned to. Also, when you do actually meet a woman who loves her rugby, that is a huge red flag in itself for a whole host of reasons.

Fan: ‘So what did you think of Bath’s performance this weekend?’

Me: ‘Oh, is that the time? I have to go and return some video tapes …’

I could fill another entire book with stories about demented fans, and why you need to run away as fast as your legs will carry you.

I’ve been in nightclubs with footballers – when I say ‘with’, they were usually behind a velvet rope, drinking Cristal champagne – and seen women literally fighting to get near them. I was in a club in Vegas once and women were treading all over me to reach some Chelsea bench-warmer I’d never heard of. Meanwhile, I was probably telling some poor girl I was a property developer or a plumber who specialised in laying heavy pipe. Funnily enough, they’d usually walk off after that gem.

A footballer’s level of spending and debauchery makes rugby players look like monks. However, we will have a good go at it when the time is right. I’ve seen rugby lads stick their credit cards behind a bar and get lumbered with an eight-grand bill, because all the lads pissed off and left them in the lurch. They’d spend the rest of the season desperately trying to claw the money back, from people who would do anything to avoid paying them. Not because they couldn’t afford it, but because it was funny or they were tighter than cramp and you’d need a crowbar to get anything out of them.

One of my favourite stitch-up stories involved a former team-mate and England captain, who stole a bottle of champagne from behind a bar, which the owner then claimed was worth 12 grand. Because this player didn’t have the necessary funds, he had to phone his mum and get her to pay for it. When I heard what had happened, I said to him, ‘No club leaves a 12-grand bottle of champagne sitting on the bar. You’ve been done over.’ It was probably a bottle of Lambrini worth three quid.

Interestingly, no record of this story seems to exist, so I think the England coach who made this guy captain must have got his forensic media team to erase it from the internet. I wish someone would do that for me.

Stop being muppets

Camera phones have put the kibosh on a lot of the rowdier stuff. I suppose you could argue that’s good in one way, because it means that no unsuspecting member of the public will ever have to see a rugby player’s testicles again. The downside is that no-one is safe on a night out anymore because people film everything. Nowadays, a player can get into trouble just for being snapped in a nightclub, let alone strolling down the Fulham Palace Road with his balls hanging out. Look at what happened to Danny Cipriani, who was dropped before he was meant to make his England debut, simply for being photographed dropping off tickets to some mates at a nightclub. Brian Ashton, the England head coach, overreacted in dropping Cips before getting the full facts. However, I have to be a little wary about leaping to Cips’s defence because he did once get run over by a bus on a team social.

It’s not just camera phones that make things difficult; it’s the fact that certain members of the public think they can gain something from seeing players a bit worse for wear. One time, one of the lads jumped off the team coach and had a wee behind a tree at around 2 o’clock in the afternoon. A couple of days later, Wasps received a letter from some irate woman claiming that her children were traumatised at seeing a rugby player ‘expose’ himself. This letter went on for ages and ended with the killer line, ‘If you could see fit to provide us with season tickets, we might be appeased.’ People see a bit of rowdy behaviour, discover it’s a rugby team, and their eyes suddenly widen and their ears prick up. They see it as an opportunity, an easy way of cashing in. Consequently, a lot of team socials nowadays take place behind closed doors, away from the general public. That’s sad, because rugby players don’t want to be kept separate from the rest of society, as if we’re exotic zoo animals and too dangerous to mix with.

But I can’t just blame camera phones for the tempering of behaviour. Players being hit by team-mates until they take a drink, for example, is a thing of the past because a player not wanting to drink is to be respected nowadays. It is not uncommon for younger players to be teetotal nowadays, because they want to keep themselves in as good nick as possible, while there are other players who know that drinking too much will turn them into out-of-control mutants. I certainly never put any pressure on anyone to drink when I was Wasps captain. As soon as they said they weren’t drinking, that was the end of it, unless they gave an unacceptable reason, like having to go shopping with their girlfriend the following morning. Then I’d maybe have a word. But the most important thing in any sports team is the players all being in it together.

The game has changed in terms of how professional it needs to be. The older I got, and the more responsibilities I had as a senior Wasps and England player, the more I realised that I had to look after my image as well. I’d rarely get steaming drunk, I just couldn’t afford to. It was tricky sometimes, because I wanted kids to have the same amount of fun as I did coming through and reap the benefits of off-field bonding, but it became abundantly clear that’s the way it had to be. Towards the end of my career, I spent a lot of time at team socials sharpening kids up, telling them to stop being muppets, calm down, just relax and enjoy themselves. It might have been the only time we’d all drunk together for six months, but with members of the public wanting to be offended, it only took one person to do something stupid.

Almost killing Rory Best

There aren’t many kids to sharpen up on Lions tours, which is maybe why players relax, have so much fun, and at times enjoy themselves a bit too much. While I don’t consider myself to be a proper Lion, because I didn’t play in any of the Tests, the 2017 tour of New Zealand was the best I ever went on. The midweek team had a job to do, which was to win those dirt-tracker games to keep the tour on track. And off the field on a Lions tour, a key part of team bin juice’s job description is to keep morale up. I think I played my part, because what I remember most about that tour was laughing hysterically every day and bonding with all my team-mates.

Rory Best and his fellow Ulsterman Iain Henderson were like Shrek and Donkey on that trip. They were inseparable and always cracking jokes, although I could only understand about half of what they were saying. I honestly thought Hendy was speaking Irish for the first few days. And while Rory is incredibly clever, I’ve never met a man who could drink so much without falling over. To be honest, both of them had hollow legs when it came to putting the drink away: if you tried to go head-to-head with either one of them, it would have been goodnight Vienna. So when I came down for breakfast the morning after the final Test, and Rory and Hendy wandered in steaming drunk, I knew there might be trouble ahead. The first thing Rory said was, ‘Want a drink, Hask?’ I didn’t really want a drink because it was only eight in the morning. But they persuaded me to have a cider with my eggs on toast, and once the bubbles hit my lips, that was it. We barely moved from that table for the next 15 hours. That’s not even hyperbole. We just sat there from 8.30 to 10 o’clock at night, shooting the shit, crying with laughter and ploughing through more drinks than George Best on a good day.

We were soon joined by Jack Nowell, who had been asleep on a portable hospital bed in the team room, as well as C. J. Stander from Ireland and England props Dan Cole and Joe Marler. It quickly became clear that despite Rory’s cleverness, his drinking games were rather rudimentary. One was called ‘toothpicks’, which involved sticking toothpicks in our faces. Nothing more complicated than that. I have photos somewhere of me looking like that bloke from Hellraiser, with blood dripping down my cheeks. Another was called ‘drink’, which involved necking whatever drink you had in front of you whenever Rory said ‘drink’. After a few hours, we all had beer boxes on our heads, with holes cut out for eyes and faces drawn on them. Because Dan Cole was so negative (more in appearance than demeanour), he had a big, sad mouth carved into his.

After about seven hours, I noticed that Rory was starting to drift off. To be fair to him, he had been drinking for about 20 hours. So I said to him, ‘Come on old fella, let’s have a little lie down.’ I wheeled in the hospital bed that had been Jack Nowell’s place of rest the night before, and we put Rory on it and tucked him in, so that he looked like a corpse. Arms folded across his chest, like he had been read the last rites, blanket up to chin, his little bald head poking out the top. He tried to fight it but because he was so dreadfully old and wonderfully comfortable, within about 30 seconds he was asleep and happily snoring away. Then I said, ‘Why don’t we wheel him outside and leave him on the street?’ We pushed him through the hotel, all still with boxes on our heads, sniggering like children and shushing each other, so that we were making even more noise than normal, while telling each other to quieten down. When we got him outside I said, ‘Why don’t we push him down that hill?’ Our Lions hotel was right on top of a huge hill in Auckland that sloped down for miles to the sea. Without waiting for a response, I kicked the back of his bed and off he went.

For the first 10 seconds or so, we all thought this was one of the funniest things we’d ever seen – Rory Best, a pale corpse, gently rolling down a hill in a hospital bed. People were literally on the floor, unable to breathe. But, quick as a flash, it turned into a scene from a Norman Wisdom film. As the hill became steeper, the bed picked up speed and panic set in. Now there were four or five of us chasing Rory in this bed, with beer boxes on our heads, shouting and screaming, as people in suits wandered past, on their way home from work.

For a few moments, I thought we’d killed Rory Best, one of Ireland’s great rugby heroes, the pride of Ulster. But we – and, more importantly, Rory – were saved by a fortuitous bend in the road, which sent him swerving into a bus stop, scattering commuters and depositing Rory onto the pavement. People were screaming because they thought he was a runaway corpse that had rolled out the back of some undertaker’s ambulance. Rory was just very confused. One minute he’d been playing toothpicks, the next he was sprawled in a bus stop, surrounded by people with boxes on their heads.

But almost killing Rory Best wasn’t a spectacular enough way to crown a series draw with the All Blacks. The day before we flew home, we got on it again. And this time I suggested a game of ‘fire pussy’. I learned fire pussy while at the 2011 World Cup in New Zealand. I was doing some filming in Dunedin, and one day me and a few of the lads visited the city’s student quarter, which is famous for being like a slum. There were burnt-out sofas in front yards, boarded-up windows and front doors hanging off hinges, and it soon became apparent that Dunedin students lived like crackheads in the 1980s Bronx.

We spent the afternoon sitting on the roof of a house waterbombing people, before being given a guided tour of the inside. It was like a Victorian hovel. There was a hole in a wall next to where a door should have been, a leaking roof and an outside toilet with no lightbulb, so that you had a choice of shitting with the door open or in the pitch dark. In the kitchen, some bloke was cooking what looked like a bit of dead person in a pan. These students appeared to have spent no money on anything. There were children in Africa living in better conditions. Yet, bizarrely, they were all wearing really expensive shoes. That confounds me to this day. Why would you shit in the dark and eat roadkill while being able to afford the naughtiest pair of trainers going?

But the most notable thing about this hovel was that the living room was covered in scorch marks, which started on the table and snaked across the floor, up the walls and halfway across the ceiling. Naturally, I asked, ‘What the hell has happened here?’

‘Oh, that’s just fire pussy.’

‘What the fuck is fire pussy?’ I thought it was some kind of very painful women’s STD.

‘It’s a game. You set something on fire and the first person to put it out is the fire pussy. As punishment, the fire pussy has to do all the chores. And he doesn’t stop being fire pussy until he plays another game and someone else puts the fire out.’

What. A. Game. Although maybe not one to play with the family on Christmas Day. And clearly no-one had been enforcing the rules in that house, because no-one had done any chores in there for at least a decade.

Anyway, back to Auckland in 2017. My suggestion of a game of fire pussy with my Lions team-mates was surprisingly well received (I say ‘surprisingly’, but most of the lads had been drinking for a day and a half), and someone immediately tore one of Johnny Sexton’s sleeves off and set it alight. Someone dropped a cardboard box on top and soon we had a small fire on our hands. Everyone stared at it for 30 seconds or so, with a mixture of excitement, awe and dread, and I could see people getting nervous, as in almost shitting themselves nervous, before Jack Nowell came out of nowhere and started stamping the flames out. It’s quite possible that Jack rescued a magnificent tour from a sour end, or he bottled it, but I’ll let you the reader decide. Common sense suggests he probably did the right thing. But because neither he nor any of us are ever likely to play another game, he will forever be known as ‘Fire Pussy’.

The Boat Trip, Pt II

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to the boat trip that went horribly wrong. How, you might have been thinking, did the entire Wasps squad end up on a stag-do boat on the Thames? Well, I thought we’d be able to contain things on a boat. And yes, I have seen Jaws. Blame the social secretaries, it was their idea. ‘Skipper, we’re going to hire a stag-do boat, sail up the Thames, have a few drinks, get dropped off at a bar. No problems.’ But within an hour of meeting in Richmond, we had problems. And quite a lot of them.