What a Flanker

Because the skipper of the boat had got the tides wrong, he was an hour late, which should have rung alarm bells. How the hell does a skipper get the one thing wrong that a skipper is supposed to know? Had I not been drunk and trying to control a baying mob, I might have flagged this up with Captain Rum. Perhaps I would have grabbed his hands and said, ‘I’d wager those pinkies have never weighed anchor in a storm?’ But what with all the delays, which meant far too much pre-trip Prosecco, some of the lads ended up going feral (rugby players lose concentration very quickly if they’re not kept entertained). It was a steaming hot early summer’s day, the towpath was rammed and people were starting to recognise us. Especially me, despite – or, more likely, because of – the fact I looked like that bearded Austrian woman who won the Eurovision Song Contest (the dress I was wearing actually belonged to my now wife’s mum). One of the academy lads was caught trying to steal a bottle of vodka from a restaurant (I made him return it and apologise, like a good little schoolboy), and another almost got into a fight because he kept picking up passing dogs and pretending they were his, and people tend to get a bit funny about you touching their dogs. I was trying to calm everyone down and apologising to irate members of the public, everyone was digging out the social team for the lack of organisation and by the time the boat turned up, things were already descending into all-out carnage.

As we were piling on the boat, this middle-aged woman who looked suspiciously like a stripper turned up. At first, I thought she was one of the people whose dogs had been molested. When I asked one of the social secretaries who she was, they told me she was indeed a stripper. My immediate thought was, ‘Hmmm, I didn’t know they made strippers that old.’ My second thought, riding in on the coattails of the first, was, ‘That’s interesting, inviting a stripper onto a boat full of rugby players in the age of camera phones.’ One of the social secretaries assured me that all phones would be confiscated and locked away, and that there were actually supposed to be three strippers, so it was all I could do to thank God for small mercies that the other two hadn’t shown up. Perhaps they had missed their dial-a-bus from the old people’s home. Anyway, the boat pulled away, the lads started a singalong and I made sure the skipper, who was very apologetic about being late, had turned the CCTV off. It was not like I was planning anything untoward, but experience had told me that in a world of fact-twisting media and the easily offended, it was best not to have evidence of anything. About 30 seconds after leaving shore, with complimentary cocktails being passed around as an apology from Captain Rum, a graduate of the same maritime school as the skipper of the Costa Concordia, the antique stripper decides to drop her coat and start wandering around in her lingerie. Some of the lads start cheering like American frat boys, and I am thinking, ‘This has got all the hallmarks of a car crash.’

About half an hour later, we pull into this lock and the stripper is standing on the front of the boat with her tits out. It’s like that scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when the asylum inmates return from their fishing trip, all looking proud as punch. The families in the pub and on the towpath don’t look so happy. There are disgusted mums clasping hands over children’s eyes, ice cream cones falling from children’s hands, startled couples almost toppling sideways off tandems. I run to the other end of the boat, to put as much distance between me and the stripper as possible, while shouting, ‘Lads! You haven’t thought this through! Get her below deck! I repeat, get the woman below deck!’

We set sail again, and I discovered that the 800 quid we put behind the bar had already run out, which was impossible in my estimation, unless the lads were drinking Cristal. Which they weren’t, as we were on a stag-do boat on the Thames and the height of glamour was a warm can of Red Stripe. Due to the lateness, malleable accounting by the barmaids, and the fact that because the skipper got the tides wrong we could not get to the bar upriver where we were supposed to be going, we ended up just doing big circles of the Thames. So our relationship with the skipper went downhill pretty quickly. Back up on deck, I got a court session underway. We’d had a number of captains that season, so the boys laid down a challenge to all those who had worn the armband: who was the real skipper of Wasps? A ‘boat race’ was called and I chinned my pint quickest to settle the argument. My leadership rubber-stamped, my next port of call dictated by the fines committee was to punish two of the academy lads with three lashes on the arse with a riding crop. They knew what they’d done wrong. One had called me the worst word of all and the other had ignored team rules – both heinous offences, and without order we have chaos. As the lashes rained down on their bare buttocks, the rest of the lads cheered, knowing justice was being done.

Every club has a fines committee that marks down all the misdemeanours throughout the season. No-one is safe from their roving eye, and team socials/court sessions are where these crimes are brought to the team’s attention, tried and punished. This could range from crimes against fashion, lateness, breaking team rules, or in one player’s case consistently being put in the friend zone by women. His punishment for this was to spend the entire team social in his own paddling pool or friend zone, filled with beers to be drunk, and shamed. Being captain, I was often the executioner or had the final word on sentencing. However, when Captain Rum saw what was going on, his eyes were on stalks, because where there is rum and the lash, sodomy is sure to follow. And then it happened, that thing that no-one who witnessed it will ever be able to unsee. The handstand. The bottle of strong European lager. The Devil’s evacuation. The horror … the horror …

Having docked many hours later, and being more of a sprinter than a marathon man on team socials, I decided to skip the evening’s entertainment and get an early night. But the following morning, I phoned Sam Jones and said, ‘Any fallout from the boat trip?’

‘Yes. I’ve had a call from the owner. They’ve had to get the boat chemically cleaned. But he said as long as we leave a good review, he’s happy. Oh, and the stripper has been on to one of the lads. The idiot paid for the team show with his PayPal account, so she had his email. And she wants her blouse and petticoats back.’

‘Right. Tell the skipper we’ll pay for the chemical cleaning. But do not leave a review until it’s all sorted. Fuck knows who’s got the stripper’s blouse – probably one of the backs – but tell him to give her some money and we’ll take it out of the kitty.’

I thought it was all sorted until my dad got an email from some bloke claiming to be John Terry’s agent, saying that the boat staff had never seen such debauchery (do bear in mind that the boat was used solely for stag-dos, so the whiff of bullshit was strong from the off), and that the staff were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and were considering taking legal action. I told my dad and he suggested setting up a meeting, but the bloke was very cagey and kept threatening to tell our bosses at Wasps unless we paid him/them a satisfactory amount of compensation. They were on the make, because they thought we were all minted sportsmen with money to burn. I knew things were going to get far weirder when I phoned John Terry, told him what was going on and he told me he’d never heard of this ‘agent’.

Things quickly got worse. This so-called agent didn’t wait for a meeting, and with a big pay day on his mind he went ahead and told Wasps we’d had a gay sex orgy on the boat. Supposedly, we were all sucking each other off and shagging each other; we were all off our heads on drugs; one lad in a pig mask was being particularly sinister and intimidating all the staff; someone shat themselves; and ‘the big one in the wig and dress, James Haskett’ (who?) was the ringleader and had personally inserted bottles of lager up team-mates’ arses. This Walter Mitty of an agent produced affidavits from the crew that were a joke. The bit about someone shitting themselves was true, as was the bit about me hitting people on the arse with a riding crop. Nothing else was. But when I told the club that this bloke was a charlatan, and pleaded with them not to pay compensation, they were already in damage-limitation mode and arranging an investigation.

Wasps’ legal team arranged meetings with the lads and read them reports from the staff. It was frankly ridiculous. Players were asked if it was true that they’d dumped their girlfriends for the weekend to have a gay boat orgy. They were asked if it was true that I’d made them do all sorts of weird things.

‘Did James insert a bottle of lager up your bottom? Did James make you perform a sex act? And remember, it’s okay if you did … this is a safe place.’ The legal team’s mistrust of our version of events could only have been made clearer if they’d produced a doll and asked the lads to point to where I’d touched them.

I’d been on an England tour to Australia when the interviews took place and was now conducting conference calls with the club from Ibiza. None of the affidavits matched, and I told the club it was all bullshit and that they shouldn’t let this cat fish of an ‘agent’ bully them. But the club were panicking. As is almost always the case with sports teams, it was a case of manage reputational damage first and worry about personnel second. And then this lunatic played his trump card and asked for £8 million compensation. Yes, £8 million! He’d gone full-on Dr Evil. I imagined him sitting in a boardroom (his mum’s kitchen?) with the boat people, saying, ‘We will hold Wasps ransom for … eight million pounds!’ before raising his little finger to his lips and sniggering. One kid shat himself and cleaned it up himself, and they wanted £8 million. The survivors of the terrible Alton Towers rollercoaster accident didn’t get that much between them, and they tragically lost limbs. PTSD? That’s what soldiers get when they see their mates get blown up in battle, not when you see someone get hit on the arse with a riding crop.

A few months later, the agent who had promised the world and not even delivered a globe to his bosses decided to cut his losses and sell the story himself. I don’t know how much he got for it, but it was very, very far short of £8 million. They couldn’t report all the allegations because they had no concrete evidence. And the legal team had redacted so much that the article didn’t even make sense. But there was a lot of coded chat about ‘debauchery’ and ‘sex acts’ and people feeling overwhelmed and terrified. Of course, I was the only player mentioned, accompanied by a big photo of me with my top off. Meanwhile, the agent had written to the RFU, suggesting it would be a travesty if I ever played for England again. His letter read, ‘I am shocked and appalled that you have allowed James Haskell to go off to Australia and play for his country and gain cult status with his performances when he is a deviant. To make matters worse you allowed him to swan off to Ibiza with his pop star girlfriend.’ (I was livid, Chloe incandescent – a pop star, how dare they?)

The club spent something like 70 grand on legal fees and tried to take it out of the lads’ salaries, which we weren’t having. They then sacked me as captain, although they claim they didn’t. They made up some story about me needing time to recover from injury, and that I would be away a lot with England, so they gave the job to Joe Launchbury (who is a great captain). I told them, ‘I didn’t shit on the boat. If it wasn’t for me trying to keep some kind of order and turning off the CCTV, who knows what might have happened?’ They should have given me an award for bravery under fire, not sacked me. But I was never captain of Wasps again.

The moral of the story? If you’re ever at a party and someone asks if you want to see a beer fountain, just say no.

2

Training Like a Lunatic

Dedication works

The reason I made my debut for Wasps as a teenager was because I’d been training like a lunatic for years before then. But it took a dose of failure when I was 15 to make me realise how hard I needed to work. The night before regional trials I went to the cinema with my old mate Ted Cooper. After the film, we persuaded a bloke to buy us a six pack of Fosters, before pushing each other around an Asda car park in shopping trollies and doing a very bad job of chatting up girls in the bowling alley. When my dad turned up to collect us, he was not best pleased. We’d only had three cans of lager each but that will make you pretty drunk when you’re only 15. The following day, I played like a muppet. And even though I made it through to the next stage, the coaches told me I’d slipped from being a potential England starter to nearly missing out.

Before the final England Under-16s trial, I was given lots of extra work to do. But I just didn’t do it. My dad was pulling his hair out, but all I was interested in was girls and not much else. I didn’t understand the concepts of commitment and proper hard work – but then who does at 15? As a result, I played badly in the final trial weekend and ended up missing out on both the main and the second-string A team. I vividly remember getting the dreaded phone call from the chief selector, saying I hadn’t made it, and crying like a baby. My dad, ever the pragmatist, said, ‘Look, either you can play rugby for fun from now on or you can see this as a kick up the backside and a challenge to work harder.’ When you’re 15, it’s hard to hear that you failed at something because you didn’t give it your all, and it’s easy to be resentful and chuck it all in. But not making that England Under-16s team was one of the best things that happened to me.

If it wasn’t for my mum and dad, I wouldn’t have achieved half of what I have. They provided a loving home, gave me and my brother every opportunity in life, and almost bankrupted themselves putting us through a bloody expensive public school. They didn’t always do things by the book, but they weren’t stereotypically pushy parents. They just wanted me to make the most of my opportunities. My dad never missed a game when I was a kid. He’d often turn up late because his timekeeping was terrible and he was always so busy, working to pay the bills. But he’d always be there at the final whistle, when other dads weren’t. And they just cared so much. I was once part of an England Under-18s team that won a tournament, only to receive nothing for it. My dad wasn’t having that, so he paid for trophies to be made for the players and coaches. I would never have achieved what I have without them both.

My dad had a friend called Henry Abrahamian, who was a personal trainer and took me under his wing. I started to train with him at weekends and during school holidays before he started coming to my boarding school twice a week during term time. I’d finish my homework at 9 pm, run down to the school gym and work with him for an hour before bedtime, running up hills in the dark, sprinting up and down fields, proper Rocky stuff. I started going to this meathead gym in Bracknell, full of mutant bodybuilders wearing fluorescent leggings and stripy string vests. (One guy told me he was so big because he ate 15 chicken breasts a day. Being a naïve 15-year-old I believed him, and I even persuaded my mum to buy 30 chicken breasts at a time, which must have cost her a fortune. What I didn’t know was that Chicken George was roided out of his mind and could have exploded at any moment.) When I first started lifting weights, I could barely lift the bar on its own. It was obviously a bit embarrassing for a teenage kid, but I conquered my self-consciousness and gradually got bigger and stronger.

Some of my behaviour became borderline obsessive. Henry got me in such good shape that people thought I was on drugs. He must have been a disciple of Chicken George as he would bring me three chickens he’d bought reduced from Tesco and I’d eat one and a half of them before bed and give the rest to other senior boys. That was the solids taken care of. As for the liquids, I was in charge of the school bar but didn’t really drink. I look back now and think, ‘Jesus, you had access to unlimited beer and you hardly touched a drop. A few pints here and there wouldn’t have made much difference.’ Even on the rare occasions I went on the piss, I’d wake up the following morning full of guilt and train all day.

One summer, Henry joined us in Bahrain and trained with me and another mate – Stuart Mackie – for a week. It’s no exaggeration to say that Henry was the person most responsible for moulding me into a professional rugby player. My schoolmates probably thought I was weird, because it was cooler to get drunk and smoke in the bushes. But when I made the England Under-18s team as captain, that was the proof I needed that dedication worked. The other great spur was the fact that I thought I wasn’t very talented. Having natural talent is a curse for some kids, because it tricks them into believing hard work is optional. At that England Under-16s trial, I was a streak of piss with poor fitness. But a year and a half later, I was 10 kg heavier and as fit as a butcher’s dog. It was a stark and simple lesson: if you put the necessary work in, and work smart, anything is possible.

That’s my boy

On that first pre-season trip to Poland, I was desperate to find out what it meant to be a professional rugby player, even though I’d be going back to school to do my A levels at the end of it. I was now 17 and I may have bulked up, but the coaches wanted to wrap me in cotton wool. That was understandable, because I was used to playing against kids my own age from Eton and Harrow, and now I was training with grown men and seasoned internationals, players like Lawrence Dallaglio, Phil Greening and Simon Shaw. But I kept nagging the coaches, until eventually they caved in and threw me into full-contact training and full-on fitness drills.

I’d already pissed a few players off by beating them in fitness tests and saying a few things I shouldn’t. And then I made a far bigger mistake, which was making an enemy of Trevor Leota. Trevor was 5 ft 9 in, 20 stone, played for Samoa, was related to former heavyweight world title contender David Tua and probably hit harder. In my first full-contact training session, we were practising mauls and Trevor kept coming in at the side. I got all fired up and thought, ‘If this bloke does that again, I’m going to bang him out.’ A few minutes later, he did it again. So I hit him, fell on top of him and hit him again. Panic set in when I realised I hadn’t put a dent in Trevor and he was very angry, before he countered with a short, chopping punch that split my face open. But rather than it being a negative thing, everyone seemed to love it. Warren Gatland shouted, ‘Lads, did you see that? He’s only 17 and he’s dishing it out to Trevor!’ Then Trevor came over and gave me a big hug. Gats spent the rest of the trip coming up behind me, massaging my shoulders and growling in my ear, ‘That’s my boy.’ I earned respect, and everyone now thought I was a very fiery competitor. That wasn’t true, but my team-mates thinking it did me no harm. Of course, I spent the rest of the trip not running anywhere near Trevor, as he may have hugged me but I knew given half the chance he would fold me up in a tackle like a travel map.

Gats was a clever coach. He gave his players a certain amount of freedom, but in exchange for that freedom he expected them to buy into the culture completely, work like maniacs and have a physical edge. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we’d have massive sessions, and every session was do or die for me. I’d always be in a tackle suit, putting big hits on people or grappling with someone. That was my thing, full-throttle physicality. And it never stopped being my thing, because I always had a chip on my shoulder about not being physical enough – probably because when I started training with Wasps, I was a 17-year-old schoolboy pitted against strong, hard men.

At Wasps, they encouraged competition, even needle, between players. We used to have what they called power-endurance days, which involved all the players being split into pairs and going head-to-head in a variety of exercises in the gym, before heading outside and doing shuttles, down and ups, wrestling and tug of war. When I first turned pro, they’d pit me against Lawrence Dallaglio. Gats would spice things up by telling Lawrence that I’d been telling people that he was over the hill, and telling me that Lawrence had been telling people that I was never going to make it. So me and Lawrence would have these life and death tear-ups, until after about three weeks I let him win a single rep of wrestling. I saw a spark light up in his eyes and he let me win the next one. We still went hard at each other, but instead of engaging in insane battles, we put our egos on hold for the greater good. He even started taking me for breakfast. I’d offer to drive, but he didn’t fancy travelling in my nan’s Vauxhall Astra. So not only did I get to ride in his Range Rover, he always paid! Had I kept a diary, it would have read like this: ‘Dear Diary, today was a glorious day, my hero Lawrence paid for poached eggs on toast …’

Banging people out

As you can imagine, all that testosterone was bound to boil over on the training ground occasionally. One of the first training-ground fights I saw was between Lawrence and Joe Worsley, which might have scared me if Joe knew how to punch. Instead, he looked like an old woman trying to fend off a mugger with her handbag. Then there was the time I thought Josh Lewsey had killed Danny Cipriani. We were doing a defensive drill and Cips didn’t fancy it. Which was not a huge shock. Instead of putting the shoulder in, he was running up and touching the attacker with his fingertips. This didn’t go down well with Josh, who gave Cips a volley of abuse. Cips told Josh where to go, Josh told Cips never to speak to him like that again – before Cips spoke to him like that again. I heard a bang and when I turned around, Cips was on the floor snoring, with Josh standing over him shouting. It was like a shit version of that famous photograph of Cassius Clay towering over Sonny Liston. Josh reminded me of Nicky Santoro from the film Casino, in that if you fought him, you’d have to kill him. I later learned that Josh had knocked Cips cold with a sweet right hand. Cips finally came around and for the next five hours kept asking the same questions: ‘What happened? What day is it?’ Someone sold the story to a paper and the following week, after Cips set Josh up to score, they did a boxing celebration out on the pitch, showing they were still as always the best of friends.

Training-ground fights don’t happen as much as they used to, although I tried to bring them back into fashion in Japan, when I was playing for Tokyo’s Ricoh Black Rams in 2011–12. While I was always physical in training, I wasn’t normally one to start anything. But during my stint playing for the Rams, we were having a particularly intense training match when this prop squared up to me, feinted to punch me and I whacked him. All hell broke loose. It was like I’d murdered someone. I had about seven meetings, with lots of different people – coaches, managers, senior players, retired players – telling me that hitting people in training isn’t part of Japanese culture, and the head coach was utterly appalled. He kept saying, ‘If you did that in a game, you’d get a red card and a ban.’ But it wasn’t a game, so I couldn’t quite work out what the problem was. Someone squared up to me, I hit him and we shook hands afterwards. No-one died. As for the bloke I hit, the only mistake he made was not hitting me first, which is exactly what I told him once we hugged it out.

The Leicester Borg

We had a tough culture at Wasps – even one of our scrum-halves, Pete Richards, had a cauliflower ear – but the most aggressive trainers I played with were the Leicester boys, back in the day. Those Tigers only had two modes, ON or OFF, there was no in between. And when we joined up with England, all of a sudden we were in the Leicester world. The Leicester players were like the Borg from Star Trek, separate organisms with a shared hive mind. They’d change together, walk out to training together, shower together, eat together, drink together. If someone had told me they shared each other’s wives, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. To be honest, I and most other players found it a bit weird that the England coaches tolerated the Leicester clique, which is exactly what it was. Martin Corry, Julian White, Louis Deacon, George Chuter, Lewis Moody, Harry Ellis – don’t get me wrong, they were all excellent players and great blokes, it’s just not good for team bonding to have one club just hanging around together all the time. Things would get so bad that the non-Leicester boys would watch them from afar and do David Attenborough-style voiceovers: ‘Leicester Tigers are fiercely independent creatures. And because this prop is injured, he is even more dangerous than usual. On this morning, some poor bastard is going to get filled in …’