Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

FIRST EDITION

© James Haskell 2020

Cover layout design by Sim Greenaway © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Jacket photography © Jay Brooks

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

James Haskell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008403683

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008403713

Version: 2020-09-24

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008403683

Contents

1  Title Page

2  Copyright

3  Note to Readers

4  Contents

5  Epigraph

6  Forward

7  1 When Team Socials Go Wrong

8 2 Training Like a Lunatic

9  3 Playing the Game

10  4 Pain

11  5 Scandal

12  6 Changing Rooms

13  7 England

14  8 Beyond the Comfort Zone

15  9 Taking Flak

16  10 Celebrity

17  11 Retirement

18  12 Pride

19  Acknowledgements

20  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Epigraph

‘The best revenge is living well.’

Forward

When news broke that I was writing a book about my career, I felt a great disturbance in the rugby community, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror. But do not fear, I won’t be throwing anyone under the bus in the coming pages. Well, maybe a couple of people. But if this book fails and hundreds of unsold copies are pulped, I will atone by having the resulting porridge reconstituted as a trestle table in a home for battered rugby players.

What follows is not a blow-by-blow account of my life. You won’t find out where I was born (Windsor), the name of my first pet (Jet, as in Jet from TV’s Gladiators) or the name of my first school (Papplewick). But you will find out which bastard always skimmed the top off the fruit crumble before Wasps games, why props are still so fat (I’ve no idea to be honest, unacceptable) and what the hell went wrong at the 2015 World Cup. That’s right, there is some serious stuff as well.

I am well aware that I’ve always been marmite (‘Oh, for God’s sake, why him?’ Not my words but those of Ireland legend Rory Best on hearing that I’d been picked for the Lions). But I hope this book shows that I always gave my all for club and country, and just wanted to have a bit of fun on the side. I do hope you enjoy. And to the man who stuck a bottle of beer up his arse and did a handstand on a boat: thank your lucky stars I didn’t name you.

P.S. Yes, I know I spelt ‘foreword’ wrong at the top of the previous page. Needless to say, I will have the last laugh.

1
When Team Socials Go Wrong

The Boat Trip, Pt I

There’s no getting away from it: she’s lost control. Like that old Joy Division song: ‘Confusion in her eyes that says it all. She’s lost control. And she’s clinging to the nearest passer-by.’ When I say ‘she’, I mean me. Because I’m standing on a boat in a wig and a dress, a woman for the day. A skipper in drag witnessing a full-blown mutiny. And when I say ‘skipper’, I don’t mean skipper of the boat. He’s the 60-year-old bloke cowering behind the DJ decks, whose jam-jar glasses can’t hide the terror in his eyes. I mean skipper of Wasps, one of the proudest rugby union teams in England. So, in truth, I’ve got no passers-by to cling to. I’m meant to be the boss. The guv’nor. The rock. People are supposed to be clinging to me. Fat chance. We’ve only been drinking for a couple of hours and already I’m thinking, ‘You’re Captain Bligh and that bloke over there with his pants around his ankles doing a handstand on a chair with a bottle of lager up his arse is Fletcher Christian.’ This is going to get ugly.

That’s the problem with academy kids. They always get giddy and feel the need to impress their team-mates. There might have been a time (doubtful) when a young kid wanting to impress his team-mates quoted an inspiring passage from Shakespeare – ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends!’ – but not nowadays. Instead, they do handstands with bottles of lager up their arses. A week in Hell, with the Devil’s little All Black imps stamping all over my testicles, could not have prepared me for what happens next …

The academy kid flips off the chair and back onto his feet. The bottle of lager exits his arse like a bat out of hell. Closely followed by its former contents. Closely followed by a jet of excrement. The bar ladies below deck have a particularly good view of this literal shit show. They’re screaming and saucer-eyed and clinging to each other as if we’re 10 miles out at sea and under attack from the dreadful spindly killer fish. The vessel’s skipper is open-mouthed. I think I can detect a solitary tear running down his cheek. If this were a scene in a movie, he’d rip the needle off the record and silence would ensue. Instead, people are running in all directions and retching over the side of the boat.

Time to muster as much gravitas as a 6 ft 3 in, 19-stone man can while wearing a wig and a dress. I chuck several fucks into the arse-lager-shit magician and tell him to clean up his mess, before rushing below deck, apologising profusely to the bar ladies and grabbing a bucket, sponge and some Jif. As the academy kid is on his knees, scrubbing the deck clean of poo that should, by rights, still be up his backside, I think to myself, ‘What a tragic episode. But we must carry on.’

An essential release

I know what you’re thinking: how can professional sportsmen be so unprofessional? How can an England international allow such shenanigans to go on in his midst? I sometimes think the same. Then again, you try keeping control of a squad of professional rugby players let off the leash after a long, hard season. And, let’s face it, young men are known to be quite daft. Groups of young men even dafter. And groups of young sportsmen dafter still.

But perhaps a more compelling explanation for professional sportsmen’s occasional lapses in professionalism is because they spend so much time being professional. Being a professional rugby player is bloody hard work. It involves a lot of sacrifices. Getting battered and bruised in training and on match days. Repeated blows to the head, snapped and twisted muscles and broken bones. Eating the right things, drinking the right things, keeping strictly to the rota. Going to bed early and hardly ever going out. It’s not like working down a mine – we love it and we get paid well – but it takes its toll, physically and mentally. So the odd team social serves a purpose. It’s an essential release and bonding experience, not much different to a miner having a few pints in the pub with his mates on a Friday night.

There are two main ways a team bonds: by suffering on the field together, in training and on match days, and by sharing nights out together. I look at team socials as like a play or a film. Not that anyone else would want to watch it, but they are little pieces of human drama for those that take part. Team socials have their heroes (the team-mate – normally Danny Cipriani – who walks off with the most beautiful woman anyone has ever laid eyes on), their anti-heroes (the team-mate who sticks a bottle of lager up his arse, does a handstand and shits himself) and their villains (the team-mate who punches someone for no good reason). There are the jokers (the team-mate who can destroy a man with a single quip, while reducing the rest of his pals to eye-watering, stitch-inducing laughter), the fools (the team-mate who gets drunk, falls over and suffers a comedy injury), the foils (the team-mate who kneels behind a man who then gets pushed over, preferably into someone’s garden), the eternal victims (the team-mate who spends all night chatting up a woman only to get custard-pied – again), the stock characters and bit-part players (the team-mate who passes out in the toilets after a couple of tequilas or is found curled up under a table, mumbling about mummy). A great team social has comedy, farce, absurdity, cruelty and tragedy. And preferably some singing.

I hesitate to compare rugby players to soldiers. God knows those boys and girls do a more important job than we do, but there are similarities in the way we behave when we’re not on the front line or field of play. Team socials, for soldiers and sportspeople, are about building camaraderie. They are about creating communal history. Team socials top up the well of comedy, so that the lads can keep going back for laughs, time and time again.

Professional rugby players, like players in any team sport, are adults who never stop laughing like children. Because nothing in the world bonds a team better than laughter. I must have laughed 100 times every single day for 18 and a half seasons. Everything I did – and I did a lot of stupid things – I did for the story. It’s like that line delivered by Jeremy in Peep Show, after Mark has made a tit of himself again: ‘At least you’ve got a funny story to tell.’ All I ever wanted was to sit at the back of the coach, swap stupid tales and make people giggle.

Abominable visions

I’ve never really recovered from my first proper team social. I was a teenager playing for Maidenhead when we went on tour to France (the clubhouse coffers must have been a bit bare that year), taking in the exotic rugby outposts of Boulogne and Calais. I was just about old enough to have the odd shandy if I asked nicely, but the dads in our group, excited beyond belief at being away from their wives for a couple of days, were under no such restrictions. And when groups of middle-aged men are away from their wives and under no restrictions, things often go horribly and disturbingly wrong.

One traumatic evening, I was wandering around the hotel, no doubt bored and wanting a piece of some action, and heard an almighty racket coming from the bar. Curious but also slightly scared, I gingerly pushed the door open and was greeted by the sight of my father dancing on a table, as naked as the day he was born. The abominable vision shocked me to the very core. You can’t un-see something like that: your father, legs splayed, backside exposed for all to see, cock and balls swinging in time to some banging Europop. I caught his eye, then quietly closed the door, hoping no-one else had seen me, and sloped off to bed. We never spoke of this episode. But it’s why I haven’t been able to look him square in the eye for the best part of 20 years. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, having revisited the scene in my dreams. I’ll start muttering to myself, ‘The horror … the horror …’, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.

Such a disturbing experience might have left a more delicate soul scarred for life, but when I finally came of age and it was my time to get involved, I dived right in. No holds barred. Full tilt. Right in the thick of it. A psychologist might deduce that my unbridled enthusiasm for team socials was a coping mechanism, me trying to assert control and take ownership of chaotic situations. Or maybe they’d just say I was a bit of a dickhead. Not that I had much choice. Just like no-one had a choice back then. It was drummed into me from the very beginning that team socials are as integral to rugby as scrums, line-outs and filling a team-mate’s shoes with shaving cream.

I was still at school when I went on Wasps’ pre-season trip to Poland, a fresh-faced 17-year-old about to enter the upper sixth. And while I was a bit nervous about the training side of things, I was terrified of what might happen if we were allowed a night on the beers. I’d been told about some horrific initiations, including the time Lawrence Dallaglio was dangled by his ankles from a balcony by Dean Ryan and his captain Mark Rigby. It was only when one of the other back-rows, Francis Emeruwa, a softly spoken giant who put the fear of God into everyone, told them to stop, that they did so. I dread to think how hard Emeruwa was, because Ryan and Rigby were no shrinking violets. Lawrence would have been a teenager, like me, so I had sleepless nights thinking about all the things that might happen to me in the Polish boondocks.

We were in Poland for 10 days, training four times a day, with one evening off. But that’s all it takes. Some brainbox had organised a trip to Auschwitz the following day, so the plan was to go out for pizza and a few beers. I didn’t believe in drinking – when I was at school, I ran the school bar but never took advantage because I thought it would affect my fitness – so I told myself I was going to turn up at this restaurant and stay well out of the way. I hated hangovers with a passion. They killed me. And who wants to be hungover at Auschwitz? The last place in the world you want to be hungover is at Auschwitz. Are you even allowed to be hungover at Auschwitz? But I soon learned that trying to stay out of the way at a rugby team social is like trying to avoid punches from Mike Tyson while stuck with him in a phone box.

So there we were, a few of us younger players, tucked away in the corner of this open-air restaurant-cum-nightclub. And over swans first-team fly-half Alex King, holding two pints of lager. And the first thing ‘Kinger’ ever says to me is, ‘Haskell, Lawrence doesn’t think you can drink. Show him you can.’ Not only is Lawrence the current Wasps captain, he’s also the Godfather, not doing much apart from lurking menacingly and sending his foot soldiers on various errands with the message: ‘Make him an offer he can’t refuse.’

I think, ‘Let’s just get this over with,’ grab a pint and chin it in one. Five minutes later, Fraser Waters swans over and says, ‘Haskell, Lawrence doesn’t think you can drink …’ Another pint chinned. Five minutes later, Paul Volley swans over. Same chat, same outcome. Five minutes later, Josh Lewsey swans over. Five minutes later, Simon Shaw swans over. After about six pints, Lawrence finally deigns to swan over himself. ‘Good to see you drinking,’ he says, with an evil glint in his eye. ‘Have another one.’ Now I’m absolutely steaming and starting to panic. Do I make a tactical retreat? No, that’s not a good look. Just grin and bear it. But what about Auschwitz? ‘Never mind Auschwitz,’ says Mark Denney, all two of him, ‘have another drink …’

There followed a kangaroo court session, beloved of rugby teams all over the world, during which Peter Scrivener, forever injured, won the stealing a career award and Josh Lewsey the most likely to get shot by your own side award. But after about 10 pints, I was feeling very dusty indeed and had to be rescued by Shaun Edwards, chief deputy to Wasps head coach Warren Gatland. Shaun grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said to me, ‘Right, kid, I’m taking you home.’ But to get home, we had to walk through the woods in the dark, so now I was shitting myself because I found Shaun scary even when I was stone cold sober. Mercifully, I made it back to the barracks – which is what our accommodation was – located my room and found Rob Howley, the great Wales scrum-half, shirt off, shredded to the bone and eating jelly babies on his bed. I remember thinking, ‘I thought these people were elite professionals, and all this guy appears to eat are jelly babies and toasted cheese sandwiches.’ Rob, clearly not a fan of Polish food, had even brought his own Breville toastie-maker and a bag full of condiments. The room, which had no windows or air conditioning, was like a sauna, my mattress felt like a Jacob’s cream cracker and we’d run out of water. Well, I’d run out of water, was too scared to ask for any of Rob’s and too drunk to venture out of the room. As a result, and despite my colossal alcohol intake, I had the worst night’s sleep ever, a fitful few hours of tossing and turning punctuated by terrifying thoughts of how I might disgrace myself at Auschwitz and the odd beer-fuelled nightmare.

When I woke up the following morning, I could still taste cheap Polish lager and Rob Howley was on his second bag of jelly babies. All I could think was, ‘I can’t go to Auschwitz. I’d like to go to Auschwitz. Actually, that’s a lie. Auschwitz is not a place you ever want to go, but it’s somewhere I feel I should probably go.’ Whatever I was thinking, my immediate desire was to stay in bed for as long as possible. But realising that that probably wasn’t going to be an option, I dragged myself out and went in search of the only person more drunk than me the night before, Garth Chamberlain. Garth was the same age as me but even less experienced at drinking. In fact, before that trip, Garth had never touched a drop, so when the boys made him drink, it was like taking a wrecking ball to a temple. When I tracked him down, he was cowering in the shower, sobbing. Through bubbles of phlegm and snot, he explained that not only had he been made to drink 10 pints, he’d also drunk tap water, so was wrestling (not very well) with the twin demons of alcohol poisoning and dysentery. Apparently, when Garth’s room-mate found him crying and being sick, Garth had claimed he was dying and demanded an air ambulance be called. A few wise heads, by which I mean some senior players who were still quite drunk, comforted him by telling him that he wasn’t dying but now he had drunk the tap water he’d probably end up in a body bag. As you can imagine, this was music to Garth’s anxious ears. The details are hazy, although I do recall being very jealous, because Garth managed to dodge the trip. Bastard.

About 20 minutes later, I was wedged into a seat at the back of this rickety old shitbox of a coach with no aircon. And who sat next to me? Prop Craig Dowd, All Blacks legend and the only man more hungover than me. Craig was very much an old-school Kiwi – ‘do not speak until you’re spoken to’ – who already hated me because I’d chipped his tooth in my first-ever Wasps training session, when we went head-to-head in some wrestling. Picture it: hardened, humble Kiwi and gobshite English public schoolboy, all aboard the coach trip to Hell. How could we not end up as best friends? The reality was, while this coach was rattling along, bunny-hopping through potholes, bouncing my head off the window, all I could think was, ‘Do not spew on Craig Dowd … do not spew on Craig Dowd.’

I was on that coach for four hours. And it’s not like we were on our way to a water park, where we could pass out on a sunbed for the afternoon, we were on our way to a place where over a million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. Craig fell asleep after about 10 minutes, having drunk all the water, and I wasn’t able to move him for the rest of the journey. And his legs were spread so wide that by the time we arrived, I’d lost all feeling in my thighs.

I got off the coach and retched a couple of times, before being taken on a guided tour with the rest of the lads. Each room was more horrible than the last, and my head was spinning the whole time. ‘I can’t be sick here. Not at Auschwitz. Never at Auschwitz.’ That might have been the most taxing and depressing two hours of my life. I managed not to puke and finally located some bottled water that at least eased my Hitler-shaped horror of a hangover. But just as the world was starting to feel a little bit normal again, I had to endure another four hours of Craig Dowd’s extravagant manspreading. The chat was non-existent, the heat unbearable and the smell most foul. Take it from me, Craig Dowd is not a man you’d ever want to sit next to on the Tube, or any mode of transport for that matter. But even though the next few days’ training were an appalling slog, I’d done what I had to do to be accepted: worked hard, played hard and fulfilled my off-field commitments.

Boys out of the barracks

My first proper team social at Wasps – as in when I was a fully paid-up member of the first-team squad, aged 19 – was after we did the Premiership–Heineken Cup double in 2004. That was never going to be a quiet one, and rightly so. The theme was Hawaiian, so I turned up at the Mitre pub in Fulham in a Hawaiian shirt, a pair of flip-flops and some expensive Burberry jeans I’d got for Christmas (but not Burberry check – my fashion sense has been questioned down the years, but even I’d balk at wearing Burberry check jeans). If I remember rightly, and there’s a lot I don’t remember rightly about that evening, it was the first time I’d worn them. It was a beautiful early summer’s day in London, I could smell the barbecue from across the street, and when I walked in with my mate James Wellwood the kitty cash was already flying. Any man who has been in a similar situation with his mates will recognise that these are classic ingredients for chaos.

The second Fraser Waters clocked my outfit, he said to me, ‘Mate, that outfit is not Hawaiian.’ Fraser is so posh it hurts. In fact, he’s a big posh sod with plums in his mouth. But he was also an unbelievable rugby player, a top team-mate, tough as nails and an animal on the piss. And now he sounded properly affronted. I felt like a recruit being shouted at by a sergeant major during uniform inspection, but I decided to fight my corner.

‘Everyone looks like this in Honolulu,’ I finally replied, indignantly.

Big mistake. I’d provoked the mob.

‘Haskell, you wanker!’ said someone.

‘That’s not fucking Hawaiian!’ hissed another.

‘Cut his jeans off!’ shouted someone else.

With that, Martin Purdy and Simon Shaw, who I always suspected were gorillas in human suits, grabbed my arms. There is young man strength and there is ‘dad strength’. Dad strength doesn’t come from lifting weights in the gym, it naturally develops with age and from doing battle in thousands of rucks and mauls. And Simon Shaw had ultimate dad strength, which made resistance futile. Fraser pulled out a pair of scissors – from where, I do not know – and started hacking away at my very expensive and beloved jeans. Trevor Leota and Phil Greening were scrabbling about on the floor, putting their big sausage fingers into the holes Fraser was cutting and pulling furiously, and about 30 seconds later I was wearing a pair of denim hot pants, so short that they had even cut the pockets off and my boxer shorts were hanging out of the bottom.

Fraser then turned on Wellwood. It was like a scene from a 1970s slasher flick – the assailant, fresh from a kill, a crazed expression on his face, brandishing a pair of scissors. Five minutes later, Fraser had fashioned Wellwood’s brogues – handmade, Church’s, probably cost him (or more likely his mum and dad) about 500 quid a shoe – into a pair of flip-flops. But because Fraser wasn’t a shoemaker, especially after 10 pints of Stella, the flip-flops soon disintegrated. So to save him from walking about barefoot for the rest of the day, the lads gaffer-taped the strips of leather to his feet and calves, so that Wellwood now looked vaguely like a posh Hawaiian in calipers.

Unprovoked mob attacks aside, I soon realised that drinking could be a good laugh. Chatting shit in the sun, swapping funny stories, taking the piss. Back then, there was no pretence of organised fun. It was a simple case of herding everyone into the same space, drinking as much as possible, seeing what panned out and hoping no-one died. Before that day in the Mitre, Tom Rees hadn’t been much of a drinker either. But Phil Greening spotted him hiding in a corner nursing a Coke, marched over, shoved a pint into his chest and roared, ‘Drink this, Robot Nause!’ (Reesy was nicknamed Robot Nause or Robot Wars or Rees Bot, all because I told everyone that his dad and him built robots in their garage and once appeared on Robot Wars with a machine called Thunder Claw. All lies, of course, and I probably wouldn’t have made it up if I’d known how big my team-mates’ appetites were for morsels of nonsense that painted anyone in an unflattering light.)

‘Sorry, Phil, I can’t,’ replied Reesy. ‘England Under-21 training tomorrow.’

It was like that scene from the screwball comedy Old School. Remember Will Ferrell as Frank the Tank? Phil was looking at Reesy in utter disbelief, as if Reesy had just told him he was going shopping at Home Depot in the morning for wallpaper and flooring. Maybe Bed Bath & Beyond, but only if he had time.

‘Haskell, why is your mate Rees bot not drinking?’ said Phil eventually.

A brave man, and a good friend, might have told Phil to piss off and leave Reesy alone. Instead, I smirked and shrugged, and suddenly Reesy was surrounded by baying team-mates.

‘Robot Wars! We’re gonna hit you ’til you drink!’

All these lads started piling into him, hitting his legs, around the back of the head, in the gut. Have you ever seen the film Scum? Well, it was a bit like that. Except with a load of big posh blokes. I half expected Fraser to come flying in, swinging a sock full of billiard balls. But still Reesy resisted. He was curled into a ball, shouting and screaming about England training, until he realised that the only way to stop them hitting him was to agree to drink. And the second Reesy took his first sip he was Frank the Tank, a straight-shooter transformed into a beer monster: ‘Fill it up again! Fill it up again! Once it hits your lips, it’s so good!’ The last I saw of Reesy that day, he wasn’t running down the middle of the road naked, he was spewing in a urinal. And in case you were wondering, Reesy did make it to England camp the following day – and trained the bloody house down. They’d never seen him play so well. Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe lager just agreed with him. But he never stopped drinking.

The rest of that day is pretty hazy. I do recall Purdy playing the guitar, making up a song about team-mates to the tune of Damien Rice’s ‘Cannonball’ (a song that is still sung at Wasps today, with lyrics tailored for current players), and someone creeping up behind him and setting his linen shirt on fire. Typical Purdy, he just carried on playing while people were putting him out. I also recall Purdy (who got a double first from Cambridge and now makes furniture in France), who had one of those early fitness watches that told him his heart-rate, running on the spot in the middle of the dancefloor – a massive second row, with a bottle of lager in one hand, properly sprinting, knees up to his chest. He actually did that quite often, way more than anyone else would think was normal. If someone asked him what he was doing, he’d say, ‘What the fuck does it look like? I’m doing a fat burner,’ and he’d carry on running for another 20 minutes.

It’s difficult to say whether Lawrence Dallaglio was there that day or not. It’s quite likely that he swanned in at some point, although Lawrence always had something else on and didn’t like to mix with the rabble – or what I like to call ‘bin juice’. Bin juice are those players who, when they turn up to pre-season training, get issued with a bib and a tackle bag, act as cannon fodder for the first team, have a lot of awkward conversations with coaches about selection that never happens, get roped into all the community commitments but come into their own at team socials, get steaming and cause lots of drama. Don’t get me wrong, bin juice players are integral to any successful team, essential for the group’s energy and morale. Because if the bin juice goes off the boil, they’ll bring the house down from the inside. Not that I blamed Lawrence for his reluctance to wade into the bin juice nonsense. He was the skipper, after all, a Wasps legend, an England World Cup winner, a British and Irish Lion. He couldn’t be seen slumming it with bin juice, not when they were cutting off clothes, making people drink and setting people on fire.

After hours of drinking in the sun, we all decided to move the party to Purple, this horrific nightclub attached to Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground. As we were strolling down the Fulham Palace Road in the lazy early evening, surrounded by roaring football fans and families heading to dinner, Kenny Logan grabbed me from behind and Paul Volley gripped the bottom of my exposed boxer shorts and gave me a horrific wedgie, which led to my boxers being torn in half. Paul chucked the two tattered pieces of cloth into a bin and with that, him and Kenny took off down the Fulham Palace Road, crying tears of maniacal laughter. I was left standing there, like Alan Partridge and his tiny shorts with the perished inner lining, my boys firmly out of the barracks. What to do? Going home wasn’t an option. I’d never hear the last of it, and I lived in the butt fuck of nowhere. So I made the best of a bad situation, balanced one testicle precariously on the gusset of my denim hot pants and left the other one hanging. One out of two ain’t bad. Although I do sometimes think, ‘If camera phones had been around back then, I might never have played for England, or been allowed near playgrounds.’

I walked into Purple, took one look at the bar and shuddered. Purple was a terrible mess of humanity, as always – and that was just my team-mates. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through the night without a girl accusing me of exposing myself and getting filled in by the bouncers, so I got a few pints of water down my neck, and me and a couple of other lads got a cab back to some girl’s house in Fulham. So there I was, wedged into this old-fashioned armchair, the kind of thing Scrooge would have sat in, trying to flirt with these girls. The boys were still out of the barracks (I’d given up trying to stop them making an appearance many hours earlier, and luckily I was still a young man – a senior player might have had to tuck them into his socks), and I was chatting away as nonchalantly as a man can with his testicles on display, when James Dunne, a fellow academy player, stormed into the living room and started doing a flamethrower with a can of hair mousse and a cigarette lighter. Clearly James had been spurned by a woman, so he did what any spurned and very drunk rugby player did back then – regressed to a childlike state and became hellbent on ruining everyone else’s chances of pulling. He became the true personification of a cock blocker: if he wasn’t getting any, then none of us were.

Dunney’s catchphrase was, ‘I’m not scared of it.’ And whatever it was, he wasn’t. That’s all the man used to say. Someone would say to him, ‘Dunney, there is no way you can fit your head in those railings.’ And he’d reply, ‘Yeah, why not, I’m not scared of it.’ Or they’d say, ‘Dunney, are you going to have a fight with that bloke over there?’ And he’d reply, ‘Yeah, why not, I’m not scared of it.’ Some nights, Dunney would go to bed, set his alarm for 1 am and drive down to the Oceana nightclub in Kingston, which was only 10 minutes from his academy digs. He’d enjoy the last two hours of partying, chat up a girl and take her home. He was like an early Uber service. We used to say, ‘Dunney, isn’t that a bit weird?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m not scared of it.’ Had I lived next door to a nightclub in London, I might not have been scared of it either.

Anyway, I was wedged into Scrooge’s armchair in some strange girl’s living room, my testicles were hanging out and there were flames whizzing past my face. Hair mousse, when flamed, turns into something resembling napalm, and this stuff was landing on the furniture and all over my exposed legs, so that the room smelled of burning hair. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in this strange living room with the worst hangover known to man. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and some imaginary being was smacking me over the head with an invisible lump hammer. I was half-standing, half-sitting in this armchair and my joints had seized up. I had terrible tendinitis in my knees at the time, so my bottom half had gone rigor mortis. As I tried to unfold myself, whimpering as I did so, ‘Help me! Someone please help me!’ this girl strolled in and asked, almost airily – as if it was the most normal thing in the world to see some 6 ft 3 in boy-man, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, hot pants and with his bollocks hanging out, trying to extricate himself from her armchair on a Sunday morning – if I was okay.

‘Not really,’ I replied meekly. ‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in Fulham. Would you like some breakfast?’

The smell of bacon started wafting in from the kitchen – such a beautiful aroma when you’re in the right mood, but a hellish aroma after a ferocious all-day booze-up and the realisation that your mother might see your pixelated testicles in tomorrow’s Sun – and I almost spewed. I had to get out of that place. So without bidding farewell, I fled the scene, leaving Dunney to mop up the mess that, to be fair, he’d made. Alas, I didn’t know London from Adam. I was a homebody from a small town in Berkshire. And I’d lost my phone, probably because that bastard Waters had cut my pockets off. So I begged for some change and called my mum from a payphone. The conversation that followed was a bit like that scene in Pulp Fiction, when Vince blows the kid’s head off in the car and gang boss Marsellus Wallace summons Winston Wolfe to clean things up. My mum didn’t tell me that she was on the motherfucker and to wait for The Wolf, but she did tell me that she was sending Mladen. Shit. That’s all you had to say! Mladen was this guy who worked for my parents, a kind of gardener/handyman/chauffeur/all-round hero and a person, like The Wolf, who could get you out of sticky situations.

I managed to find my way back to the Mitre, having asked directions from various perturbed early risers, and Mladen was there waiting for me, like the legend he was. Mladen had always been one of my biggest fans (still is) and thought I was destined for great things in rugby. But he was also a strict Seventh-day Adventist and had never touched a drop of drink. So when I fell sideways into the passenger seat, bleary eyed, stinking of sambuca, my Hawaiian shirt open to the waist, balls hanging out, he looked at me like I was the second coming of Beelzebub. But Mladen did what Mladen does best – drove fast and asked no questions – and I stuck my head out of the window all the way back to Berkshire. I didn’t say a word, even when Mladen wound the window up and slowly crushed my arm and head in the door.

Back in Berkshire, I tumbled out of Mladen’s car, staggered into the garden, fell flat on my face on the lawn and passed out. We were having some building work done at the time and a concerned builder rushed inside and said to my mum, ‘Mrs Haskell, we don’t mean to alarm you, but there appears to be a vagrant asleep on your lawn. Wearing hot pants.’ My mum, a very proud woman who liked to tell everyone everything about me (at least the good stuff) popped her head out of the kitchen window and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, that’s just my son.’ How proud she must have been that morning.

Dangerous people

There is a misunderstanding among the public that professional rugby players are the same as university rugby players, which is why a lot of people immediately take against us, because they assume that all we do is drink and play games involving biscuits. But university rugby players are mad bastards who do stuff we’d never do – drinking piss and sick, bullying the fringe members of the team into shaving various parts of their bodies, being louts and smashing things up. I’d go as far as to say that if I’d been made to do some of the initiations my schoolmates were made to do at university, I wouldn’t have been a professional rugby player. Luckily, I never went to university. When I hear those stories, I just think it’s odd. There’s nothing fun about it.

I’ve been made to drink seven raw eggs, vodka-soaked tampons and plenty of ‘dirty’ pints, consisting of a bar’s top shelf and various other bits and bobs. But nothing seriously weird. That’s not to say some serious drinking didn’t go on, and the thing you feared most was being caught trying to avoid it. Wasps and England prop Tim Payne was a hero of a man but a grimly determined drinker when he needed to be. While I was never a heavy drinker, even in my early days, Payner was a stickler for commitment, on and off the pitch, and never failed to notice a player’s absence from post-match festivities. He’d phone me after games and growl down the phone.

‘Haskell, it’s Payner. You coming on the piss tonight?’

‘Erm, no. I mean, yes. Maybe. Probably not. I’ve got something else to …’

‘Fuck off, you cunt!’

And the phone would go dead. I’d be sat there thinking, ‘Shit, maybe I should have gone out. Maybe this will be held against me.’ But on Monday, I’d rock up to training and all would be forgotten, as long as I worked my bollocks off. James Brooks, another lovely guy and a top player, was another strange one when it came to drink. One minute you’d be talking to him and he’d be his perfectly normal, calm and collected self. But after three pints he’d transform into his alter ego, who was this this unbearable nightmare of a human being called Hank. And once Hank was out of the box, he would just refuse to go away. When people saw Hank marching in their general direction in a bar or nightclub, they’d start running. And if you didn’t run fast enough, he’d pin you in a corner and start nausing your ear off.

‘You don’t understand, Haskell, you’re not tough enough [that’s hard to take from a 5 ft 4 in fly-half]. You need to be doing this, you need to be doing that …’

‘Sure Hank … what’s that over there?’

‘No! You’re not listening to me!’

Hank had this heavy lead (as in the metal) finger and he’d prod you in the chest with it for an hour, telling you how good you could be if only you stuck with him and wanted it enough. (I should note that Hank’s lead finger wasn’t as heavy as Craig Dowd’s lead finger after he’d put away a couple of bottles of red wine – after a few minutes of Dowd’s lead fingering, you were struggling to breathe.) Hank just loved having these horrific, steaming deep and meaningfuls. His intentions were pure and noble, but it was difficult to take. And if his victim was also steaming, these chats could go on for two or three hours. Hank also had two fights (two?!) with Shaun Edwards, which only a fully fledged madman would do. Seriously, who goes back for seconds with Shaun Edwards? Certainly not me, and I’m twice his size.

The players who presented most danger to life and limb on team socials tended to be boys from the South Pacific. Pacific Islanders are the loveliest people and unbelievable players, but they often have a huge amount of pressure on their shoulders because of the shoddy contracts they are cajoled into signing and the number of dependants they have. They’re often supporting big families and sometimes whole villages back home. One player told me he had 100 people relying on him, which must be tremendously stressful. People might go hungry based on the bad decisions they make, and imagine having to phone home and tell your folks your contract isn’t being renewed and no other clubs are interested. I also found the South Pacific boys, like most men, weren’t very good at communicating their problems. Whether any of that’s got anything to do with their wildness on the booze, I don’t know. But it was definitely a trend and something former Samoa international and my old Wasps team-mate Dan Leo spoke about eloquently and at length on the House of Rugby podcast.

Some know themselves well enough not to drink at all, but I’d often hear those that did drink say, ‘We’ll just have one beer,’ and I’d watch them chin it in one and know it was all going to go wrong. I’ll have to leave out some of the names because they got up to some seriously mad shit after a few beers, as we all have done, but there was the time two Fijians, a Samoan and an England international walked into a pub – yes, this is a joke, kind of – and the older Fijian ended up punching the younger Fijian in the face. And because of their strictly observed rules of social hierarchy, the younger Fijian couldn’t hit him back. This was a nice pub in Coventry, full of families trying to eat their Sunday lunches in peace, so the England international tried to calm things down. But the Samoan, who was normally quite an unassuming guy and was as confused by the Fijians’ disagreement as anyone else, started shouting, ‘Why are you fucking fighting? If you want to fight, fight me!’ before punching himself repeatedly in the face. I can only assume he felt left out. Unsurprisingly, the Fijians weren’t interested in fighting the Samoan, and the barman had to ask the Samoan to stop punching himself in the face, because he was scaring the customers. In the end, with the barman having failed to calm the Samoan down, the bouncer pepper-sprayed him. Bizarrely, it was the Samoan who ended up in the back of a police car, for fighting himself. How did he know if he’d won or not? As you can imagine, when we heard about it in the Monday morning changing-room debrief, we all found it hilarious, albeit a little bit shocking.

There is a lot of social hierarchy in the Pacific Island nations, stuff that is difficult for British people to get their heads around. But the basics are understanding your heritage, knowing your place and respecting your elders. For example, when it comes to England’s Mako and Billy Vunipola, whose heritage is Tongan, Mako rules the roost. And it’s the same with the Tuilagi brothers. Manu, the youngest, used to carry Alesana’s kit bag for him at Leicester, and up the chain it went. If I asked my younger brother to carry anything, he’d tell me to get fucked and walk off. After England won the Grand Slam in 2016, all the friends and family who had travelled over to Paris joined us in a nightclub to celebrate, including Henry Tuilagi, who is just about the biggest man I have ever met. A long table of drinks had been laid on and when I wandered over to wet my beak, big Henry was blocking my path. I’m not ashamed to say that I was too scared to serve myself, even though Henry wasn’t even in the team, because I knew that Samoans were quite strict about stuff like that. So I asked Henry’s permission to take a beverage and he said, ‘Of course, bro, they’re not my drinks.’ And I started stuttering like an idiot: ‘Thank you Henry, thank you sir, you are so, so generous …’

While I pride myself on being culturally aware, there was another reason for my reluctance to cut in front of Henry at the bar. I had been told about one Leicester team social where Henry made it clear, or thought he did, that he was the king of a particular table and therefore it was his job to serve the drinks. If you wanted one, you just had to ask and he’d pour it. So when a slightly addled physio forgot his place and served himself, he was given a stern warning by Henry not to do it again. Fast forward 20 minutes and the physio, even more drunk and forgetful, did it again, before Henry, without any hesitation, chinned him. There was some concern that the physio might be dead, but it having been decided that he was in fact still alive, the party continued around his lifeless body. And when the physio eventually came round and made the mistake of getting to his feet, Henry chinned him again, or so the story goes.

When I told that story on the House of Rugby podcast, I got a direct message on Instagram from Henry the following day. When I saw his name, I shat myself. Henry is lovely, but he is also one of the scariest men I have ever met. And he is very clearly a stickler for the rules. But when I opened up the message it read, ‘Bro! Love that story, it’s not all true!’ If you listen intently on a quiet day, you may still be able to hear my sigh of relief.

Total commitment

While on the 2017 Lions tour, me and Rory Best got into a very deep discussion about team socials and he told me a strange story about his Ulster and Ireland team-mate Jared Payne. When Payne told his captain Rory he didn’t enjoy the socials that were being laid on, Rory asked him what he’d like to do instead. Payne, who was born and raised in New Zealand, replied, ‘We could do a hermit half-dozen.’

‘What the fuck is a hermit half-dozen?’

‘Well, each player gets six beers, they all find a tree, climb the tree and drink the beers on their own as quickly as possible. Before meeting up again.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much fun. It just sounds a bit weird.’

‘Well, we could do a house hermit half-dozen instead?’

‘What does that involve?’

‘Well, each player gets six beers, you all find a separate room in the house, sit in the room and drink the beers. As quickly as possible.’

‘I don’t think you understand, Jared. It’s a team social …’

Who in their right mind wants to sit in a room, or up a tree, drinking six beers on their own in silence when they could be out drinking with their team-mates? The answer to that question is Kiwis. Apparently, this hermit half-dozen is an actual thing, loved not only by Kiwis, but also by Trappist monks and serial killers. I recently spoke to one of the Northampton lads and they told me that, under pressure from their Kiwi cohort, they tried the hermit half-dozen. Having necked six beers in about half an hour, they reconvened for the main part of the evening and everyone was spewing in the bin by 11.

Clearly, different people have different interpretations of what a team social should be. I think a team social should be fun. I never liked the idea of being locked in a room with a load of lunatics and made to neck pints. I loved the socials which were planned to the letter, with almost military precision. Nowadays, they almost have to be like that, because if you think modern kids have short attention spans due to prolonged exposure to mobile devices, try keeping a rugby team amused, organised and focused for longer than 10 minutes. During my second stint at Wasps, Sam Jones was a meticulous social secretary and ran some of the best socials I was ever involved in (although, let’s be honest, the boat trip was a bit of a black mark against his name – I’d give him two stars on Tripadvisor for that one). One time, Sam organised for the whole team to go on a pub crawl round Leamington Spa before jumping on the train and heading down to London. We had to do daft things to win points, like presenting a random woman with flowers while she was walking along with her bloke. That didn’t always go down too well. There were quizzes, mandatory selfies in front of landmarks, and more points awarded for various challenges, ranging from 10 points for getting a fit girl’s number to 100 points for getting a tattoo. The assumption being that no-one was stupid enough to get a tattoo on a team social. They assumed wrong, as four lads came home with them. There were more points to be won if your team managed to make it home without breaking a precious golden egg that everyone was given at the start of the day. We’d do pretty much anything to break up the drinking. One of the challenges was to snog a celebrity for 200 points, so I snogged Danny Cipriani. Alas, the jury wouldn’t accept it, on the grounds that he wasn’t famous enough. However, I can reveal that Cips is a wonderful kisser, with lovely soft lips like velvet.

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.

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 …’

Whenever it’s a player’s first training session, he’ll go at it like it’s a Test match. You’ll sometimes hear some of the older players having a grumble as they traipse off the field at the end of the session. ‘Jesus, he’s a bit keen …’ In my first England training session, I tackled someone, got back to my feet and stole the ball, and as I was re-setting I heard someone call me ‘a fucking nause’ and got punched in the face. When I looked up to see who it was, Martin Corry and Louis Deacon were staring back at me. I think it was Louis, but to be honest it would have been a hell of a risk to hit him back, let alone punch an innocent party. If you think the Tigers boys grouping together for a coffee was bad, imagine what would happen if you decided to fight one of them. They would have been like a pack of hyenas. However, I refused to let them bully me. The next time I tackled someone, I stole the ball again. That was my way of saying, ‘Fuck you’, and hopefully earning their respect.

When Leicester legend John Wells was England forwards coach, he’d turn everything into full contact, even warm-ups. This is a man whose highlights reel as a player, discovered on YouTube, consisted of him diving into a ruck and getting shoed half to death. As far as Wellsy was concerned, if you got cut to ribbons but disrupted the other team while doing it, it was job well done. I am obviously doing him a disservice, but Wellsy was most happy when he was at the bottom of a ruck, getting kicked, while clinging onto the ball with his considerable farmer’s strength.

John would put you into groups of three at the start of a rugby session and get you to play a very simple game, which was for two of you to attempt to steal the ball off the other person. But he wouldn’t be happy unless you were hurting each other. He’d walk around shouting in his shrill, slightly camp Yorkshire accent, ‘James! What are you doing? Twist his wrists! Bend his fingers back! Pull them as hard as you can! Break them if you have to!’ Before one game against France, Wellsy wanted to know how we were going to get the ball off their prop Jean-Baptiste Poux at the back of the line-out, but he kept pronouncing his name as ‘poo’.

‘Right, how are we going to get poo off the ball?’

Cue lots of sniggering.

‘What’s so funny? Poo’s on the ball! How are we gonna get poo off it?’

Wellsy looked at Tom Wood, who was in his first England camp, and said, ‘Woody, how are we gonna get poo off the ball?’

‘Erm … twist his nuts off and snap his fingers?’

You could see Wellsy vibrating with sheer excitement.

‘That, Woody, is the best answer I’ve ever had! Now, all of you, go out and show me that in training.’

I turned to Woody and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Don’t fuel the madman. Never fuel the madman. And also, you’ve never tried to rip anyone’s balls off or snap anyone’s fingers in your life. If you did, you would get banned.’

‘Sorry, mate, I just got carried away.’

If you weren’t bleeding at the end of a warm-up, Wellsy wasn’t happy. I recall one warm-up before a game against Wales when I had to get stitches, and I’d never seen Wellsy so thrilled. As far as Wellsy was concerned, the blood was a sign that I was going to play a blinder. The Leicester boys even had a game called ‘maul touch’, which was the worst game ever invented and only popular at Welford Road. Everyone would be running around playing a fun game of touch and Wellsy (who always used to say to me, ‘Hask, less flash, more bash!’) would march over and start barking at you to set up a maul, which would often descend into a fight. And if Julian White hit you, you were lucky if your head didn’t fall off the back of your shoulders. Luckily, Julian found me quite amusing, however much he hated the fact. A recurring theme of my career was people desperately wanting to hate me but finding they couldn’t.

Liabilities

Lewis Moody was a good bloke but a liability to himself and his team-mates. Every time he made contact, he’d knock himself out or get kicked in the balls, and one or more tacklers would be writhing about on the floor in agony. Even if he had a tackle shield in his hands, he’d use it as a deadly weapon. We should have called Lewis the spine compressor instead of ‘Moodos’. Lewis was an incredible player and competitor, but he only had two settings: off or absolutely mental. The same went for anyone who played for Leicester. Moodos would get very upset if everyone else was only working at the prescribed 50 per cent and start telling everyone to buck up their ideas. And if you tried to explain that we’d been told to hold back, it wouldn’t make any difference. A few minutes later, he’d be trying to smoke everyone and then the lads would ramp things up to 100 per cent trying to smoke him back, which of course he absolutely loved.

Some players are dangerous simply because they’re ridiculously clumsy. At Wasps, whenever James Dunne jumped in a line-out, he’d elbow someone in the face, punch someone in the neck and land on someone’s foot. Pretty much every one of his team-mates suffered multiple DRIs – Dunney Related Injuries – so that there should have been a separate Dunney Related Insurance policy. Every training session, you’d get someone rolling around on the floor and shouting to the physio, ‘DRI! DRI!’, like a wounded soldier calling for a medic. But every player will tell you, whatever club they played for, that they had their very own Dunney, an injury trap running around like a maniac, waiting to ruin your day with his size 16 feet or massive cow head.

Peter Buxton was responsible for roughly 80 per cent of injuries at Gloucester and maybe 50 per cent of injuries in the Premiership. BRIs were a big problem. Pete would fly into a ruck at 100 mph, take out three people from his own side, three people from the other side, bounce straight up and carry on running. Players from both sides would be scattered all over the floor, groaning. Then there were players like Trevor Leota, who was so dangerous he was banned from tackling in training. He was so hard that I once saw him get off the floor after a tackle and his cauliflower ear was hanging on by a single thread (he simply had it strapped up and carried on, but it took 23 stitches to reattach after the game). Some poor kid would cut a line and Trevor would appear from nowhere and bury him. The kid would be folded up on the floor like a deckchair, struggling to breathe, and you’d hear a coach say, ‘Jesus, Trev, you’ve done it again’, and Trevor reply, ‘Sorry, bro.’

The Wigan Way

Rugby union may have gone professional in 1995, but some of those early pros never really stopped being amateurs in their attitudes to training. But no-one exemplified the new paid era more than Jonny Wilkinson. Jonny trained like a madman, to the extent that it was a miracle he ever turned up fit for a game. Jonny would do extra this and extra that and took things to a whole new level. By his own admission, his perfectionism wasn’t always a positive thing, because it stemmed from an almost morbid fear of failure and made him extremely unhappy. But if it was good enough for Jonny, it was good enough for me.

After my first day at Wasps, my dad took me aside and said, ‘Listen, son, you’ve never tackled properly, and you and I both know you don’t like doing it. You need to work on it, or you will never make it as a professional.’ It didn’t go down well, but he was right. So I asked Joe Worsley for help. ‘Joe, you’re an unbelievable tackler, the best I’ve ever seen, can you teach me?’ And he did. After every training session, I did 15 minutes extra tackling with Joe and Tom Rees. And I never stopped doing extras on every part of my game for the next 18 years. When me and James Wellwood went on holiday to Majorca during some time off from Wasps, we found a football pitch with a running track and trained every day until we were spewing, while everyone else was nursing a hangover. Even when I went on holiday to Las Vegas, I’d try to train every day. The lads would be walking along with some girls, the day after an all-day session, and see me through the window of the gym, sprinting on the treadmill. There’s no real secret to getting better, at whatever it is. It’s mainly about working your bollocks off and doing more than most other people are prepared to do.

Some of my older team-mates weren’t keen on lifting weights, drinking protein shakes or taking supplements. But Warren Gatland’s rugby philosophy was quite simple: be fitter, bigger and stronger than everyone else. Apparently, it stemmed from the 2002 Middlesex Sevens, when rugby league’s Bradford Bulls destroyed Wasps in the final (although we did better than most Premiership teams that weekend). After that game, Gats decided to completely overhaul the Wasps set-up and lured conditioning guru Craig White back to rugby from Bolton Wanderers. Craig and his assistants, Paul Stridgeon and Mark Bitcon, all went to the same school in Wigan, as did Shaun Edwards. Between them, they instilled rugby league levels of professionalism – ‘the Wigan Way’ – into Wasps.

Suddenly, there were conditioning coaches everywhere, which meant players couldn’t hide and had no choice but to work hard. Before Craig’s arrival, the backs and the forwards would do the same weights routines, which was madness because we were all different body shapes (nowadays, ironically, everyone looks the same, and in some cases backs are bigger than forwards). But Craig introduced intricate periodised weights and fitness programmes tailored to individuals, and taught us that good training was about intensity and rest, rather than volume. On pre-season trips to Poland, we’d have some mad scientist putting us in cryotherapy freezers, years before any other clubs were doing it. You’d be sitting in this thing, set at –170°C, shivering what was left of your bollocks off and thinking, ‘This is complete madness, but I’ll go along with it.’ Craig was a pioneer, years ahead of his time. And because Gats and Lawrence demanded that everyone buy into his culture, Wasps stole a march on their rivals.

Lifting cows

When you’re a young pro and keen to prove yourself, the weights room can be a very macho place. Wasps hooker Phil Greening used to say to me, ‘There’s no point in being able to lift a cow if you can’t catch one, outrun one or outthink one.’ Today, I tell kids something similar. ‘Concentrate on core skills rather than spending all your time in the gym shifting weights. The reason people miss tackles isn’t because they’re not big enough, it’s because they don’t know how to tackle properly or don’t have the right attitude.’ But I didn’t take much notice of Phil, just as kids today probably don’t take much notice of me.

Because they knew players were naturally competitive, Wasps’ coaches would stick players’ personal bests on the wall and you’d see boys eyeing them up, maybe checking what their rival for a starting spot was lifting. They had a bell in the weights room, and you’d ring it if you set a new PB. When I first joined Wasps, I was already 100 kg. But Gats locked me and Tom Rees in the weights room for six months with Mark Bitcon (aka Big Guns), and everything changed. Written on the gym wall in big letters was Big Gun’s motto, ‘Get big or die trying.’ I emerged weighing 110 kg, an absolute monster.

In the England set-up, Andrew Sheridan loved lifting weights, the heavier the better, stuff like 300 kg squats and 220 kg bench presses. Towards the end of my England career, Joe Marler took fellow prop Kyle Sinckler under his wing and their sessions were intense, like an episode of World’s Strongest Man. If you ever wanted to give Kyle a bit of a lift, all you had to say was, ‘Sinks, your back is looking massive’, and he’d be absolutely chuffed. ‘Do you really think so? Thanks, Hask, I’ve been working on it …’

Manu Tuilagi would do chin-ups with an 80 kg dumbbell hanging off him. Before the 2015 World Cup, they got this American guy in who created weights programmes based on something called force plate testing. You stood on this plate, jumped upwards, and it told you areas you were strong in and others you needed to work on. Maybe you needed to work on squats or build up your hamstrings. Manu did it and almost blew the machine up. The American guy had worked with countless NBA and NFL players but reckoned Manu was the most powerful vertical jumper he’d ever seen.

A lot of the Pacific Islanders had to be careful with weights because they got too big. I had a team-mate at Northampton, Taqele Naiyaravoro, who was told to stop doing weights altogether, after he blew up to 140 kg. He was a winger, by the way. I never got as big as that, but I prided myself on being really strong and spending a lot of time in the gym. During the 2011 World Cup, me and Tom Wood both box squatted 295 kg and I was bench pressing about 195 kg. I got a reputation as a meathead, which I was never able to shake off. But eventually I realised that Phil Greening had been right all along. Did being able to lift loads, or look great in the mirror, make you a better player? The honest answer was no, but what did was focusing on the technique of the individual areas of rugby, the core skills. Once I realised this, there was a huge sea change in my training and what I did. I moved away from gym work and focused on my mobility, carrying, tacking, passing, running lines, etc, all the elements that were actually going to make me a better player.

Melted wheelie bins

Rugby isn’t as professional as it’s made out to be, in many respects. For a long time, clubs were very backwards in terms of nutrition. At Wasps, I’d get advice on what to eat and what not to, but I was never given a specific nutritional plan or encouraged to track my food intake. Eventually, I went and paid for advice out of my own pocket and started weighing my food out, so I could change my body when I needed to and maximise my performance. Trying to look like a cover model is not going to make you a good player, or help you perform well in games. Some might say my commitment to eating properly was obsessive. When I was 26 or 27, I moved back in with my mum and dad for a bit. I was on a mad diet at the time – six meals a day, consisting of 200 g of a protein source, 380 g of a carbohydrate source and 30 g of fats – but all pretty bland and regimented. When I came down for breakfast every morning, there would already be chicken and potatoes boiling and salmon cooking on the grill. As I was eating, my mum and dad would be systematically filling Tupperware, like robots on a car assembly. Once filled, they would be put in my super 1980s Jane Fonda-style coolbox that I would carry around for the whole day. This was extreme, and you would often find me staring at a huge portion of cold white fish and brown rice, wishing it would disappear. Reflecting back, I can see it actually affected how I looked at food. I did get into mental shape and performed well on the field, but I realise now that food is meant to be fun and flavourful. Cold fish, boiled chicken, cold butternut squash and broccoli is no fun at all, especially not for the eighth day in a row.

The rise of professionalism and sports nutrition certainly didn’t eradicate fat props and hookers. The changing room would be packed with brick shithouses but there would always be a couple of melted wheelie bins. Apparently, before the 2003 World Cup, Clive Woodward got Josh Lewsey to take his top off, pointed at him and said, ‘Everyone in this squad needs to have a body like that.’ Jason Leonard put his hand up and said, ‘Boss, that ain’t gonna happen.’ Jason had an excuse – he’d been playing since the 1950s – but there’s no reason for props and hookers to have guts nowadays. They need to be a certain weight, they need a low centre of gravity and they might have an excuse to have higher body fat than the rest of us, but they don’t need to be blubbery. In fact, there’s no reason for any professional sportsperson to be fat. The excuse that you just love your food is not valid. It’s just poor nutrition.

Andrew Sheridan was one of the first props who was built like a tank, with hardly any fat on him, while my best pal and Wasps and England team-mate Paul Doran Jones had a six pack (his nickname was BLT, as in big, lean and tanned, although I suspect he made that up himself). But not everyone got the memo. One Wasps prop who shall remain nameless had probably the worst body of any professional rugby player I ever saw. It looked like a cross between a burst beanbag and a fire-damaged Portakabin. The nutritionist tried to fix it, but there’s only so much a nutritionist can do when the player’s excuse is that everything tastes good.

When a season finished, Trevor Leota would be in unbelievable shape. But he’d return for pre-season about 40 kg overweight and get out of breath walking from the car park to the changing room. They’d get Paul Stridgeon to live with him and try to stop him eating KFC and drinking bourbon and Coke every night, and a couple of months later he’d be one of the best hookers in the world again. But then the cycle would start from the beginning again. Even when he was in decent nick, Trevor was always a hair’s breadth away from an all-dayer in the Redback in Acton. During one exhibition game between Wasps and South Africa’s Sharks, the referee called Lawrence Dallaglio over and said, ‘I’m worried about your hooker, I can smell Jack Daniels coming off him.’ Lawrence quick as a flash replied, ‘Oh, he always smells like that, that’s just his aftershave,’ and gave the ref a wink.

The Rope

Aside from one emphatic victory over the All Blacks, Stuart Lancaster’s reign as England head coach will sadly and unfairly be remembered for the disastrous 2015 World Cup. But one thing I did enjoy about his stint in charge were the heated trousers we wore on the bench. You’d press a button and a minute later you’d feel like you’d pissed yourself. Other fads I came across I wasn’t entirely sold on. For example, I never worked out whether ice baths worked, even though there was a time when just about every professional sportsperson in the country was using them. I recall someone shitting in the communal ice bath at Wasps, so there was at least one person in the rugby community who was even less convinced by their benefits than me.

When I joined Stade Français in Paris in 2009, the medical staff were very machine orientated. That’s if they could fit you in. You’d pop along to see them and they’d be on their one-hour lunch break. And because the unions are so strong in France, you’d just have to wait. The hour would pass and they’d go straight into a 20-minute fag break, before strolling back into the treatment room stinking of Gauloises. One time, I had a dead leg and one of the lads pulled out a pair of women’s tights. I was thinking, ‘Jesus, I know things can get a bit fruity in Paris, but I’m not into this. Well, not on a school night.’ I thought he wanted to paint me like one of his French ladies. He persuaded me to put them on, before pulling out what looked like a Henry hoover (an Henri hoover, perchance?) and vacuuming my legs. And you wonder why I spent my one day off a week travelling back to London to visit my personal physio Kevin Lidlow, out of my own pocket, before returning to Paris for training the following morning.

Talking of eccentric, Paul ‘Bobby’ Stridgeon, Wasps’ former strength and conditioning coach, was completely off the charts for all the best reasons. Bobby is one of those unknown heroes of professional rugby, a legend of a man in every way. Anyone who has worked with him, either with Wasps, Wales or the Lions, will tell you he is an indispensable part of any team. Brian O’Driscoll once said that Bobby would be his first pick for any coaching staff, and I’d completely agree. A former GB wrestler who once took on eight Lions forwards in New Zealand, and beat them all, Bobby is one of the biggest characters in rugby, brilliant at his job, always wired off his tits on caffeine and has the biggest cock I’ve ever seen, which he nicknames ‘The Rope’.

Bobby’s party trick would be to put a full can of Red Bull on the edge of a table, pull out The Rope and use it to slap the can across the room, like he was playing a game of human pinball. He was also a master of the penis windmill and penis puppetry. If you’re ever lucky enough to meet Bobby and ask him nicely, I’m sure he’d be happy to teach you everything he knows. The Rope also has magic powers, in that it can inspire people to do great things. I would be lying on my back, about to do a bench press, and Bobby would stroll past and say in his broad Wigan accent, ‘Mate, you ready to lift big? Do you need Rope?’

If nervous about the lift, I’d say, ‘Yes, Bob, I need Rope.’

As quick as a flash he would slap The Rope on me, to psyche me up. And you know what? Being anointed by The Rope would mean that I would go right ahead and bench press a personal best. Don’t ask me how or why, some things in this world just aren’t meant to be explained, but if I could pack The Rope in my kit bag for the dark times when I was searching for motivation, then I would. Sadly for me, Bobby needs it, and it wouldn’t fit into any known kit bag anyway.

The Rope also healed injuries. Bobby would say to me, ‘Hask, mate, how’s the elbow?’

‘Not great, Bobby.’

‘Rope will sort it out …’

And he’d lop The Rope out and hit my elbow with it. Strangely it worked, and I would be back training straight after.

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