He battled for the World Cup – and won. He suffered terrible injuries – and overcame them. But Jonny Wilkinson's toughest fight has been with his own mind
Stephen Moss, The Guardian, Monday 10 May 2010
Jonny Wilkinson. Photograph: Tom Jenkins
It's surprisingly difficult to interview someone who has a black eye and gashes on his nose and neck, especially when you're sitting two feet away from him on a sofa. Jonny Wilkinson, England rugby legend, hasn't been in a fight on the way to the Rosslyn Park rugby ground (we meet in a messy backroom full of balls he has to sign for some unspecified promotional purpose). He got knocked about the night before playing for his new French club Toulon against Connacht, has flown from Ireland to London to spend a day coaching competition winners for his sponsor Volvic, and is heading back to Nice this evening.
We are not going to get long together, which is frustrating because Wilkinson – England's starriest rugby player in the past decade, but also one of its most injury-prone – is just about the most cerebral, intense, self-questioning sportsman I've ever met; as complex as the choreography of his famous place-kicking routine. He looks like a Californian surfer, and there are times when he talks like one too, trying to explain his philosophy of sport and life.
I had intended a softish opening – "You must be knackered after last night's match" – but immediately, in his gentle, earnest, slightly nasal voice, he is telling me why he could never be a rugby commentator in a sporting afterlife that is now not far away. "I'd be the commentator that TV stations would want rid of straightaway – I would be so non-committal with regard to players' performances."
When I ask him to explain why, the Californian surfer-thinker (he dabbles in Buddhism and reads lots of pop philosophy) starts to emerge. "My view of perfection, which was once totally outcome-based, got me into so much trouble," he says. "I spent so much time trying to influence things that couldn't be changed. But now I've retracted it one step into intention, and that's given me the peace of mind to know I'm doing all I can do. And I am comfortable with that view of what it means to be a perfectionist."
Wilkinson is applauded off the pitch after winning the World Cup, 2003. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
We have, rather earlier in the game than I had intended, reached the key to Wilkinson's character. The obsessive who had achieved everything – including scoring the last-minute drop-goal that won England the 2003 World Cup – by the age of 24, yet found it hard to enjoy the success. His reaction to kicking that goal against Australia was more relief than rapture, because he had failed with several other attempts earlier in the final. Rather than celebrating the success, he found himself dwelling on the failure.
This destabilising pursuit of perfection seems to have started young. "When I was growing up, I had a deep fear of things not going right," Wilkinson says, blaming an "overactive mind". That fear of failure and desire to impress others carried over into his career. "There was a time when I needed to be perfect in everyone else's eyes. I needed people to write the right things in the papers. If I was in the cinema and thought people recognised me, I'd try to behave in a way that would make them think I was the best thing in their mind. It was just so tiring."
The interview is beginning to feel like a therapy session. Mr Wilkinson, tell me about your background; where does this desire for perfection come from? Pushy parents? He insists not, describing his upbringing in suburban Surrey as "well supported, normal, happy". His father was a financial adviser, his mother a secretary in his father's company; one elder brother; went to sporty public school nearby; was "blessed in terms of the opportunities I had". Sounds great. What was the problem?
"I just attached so much importance to everything, because in my head I felt that if I didn't get it right, there was an incredible doom looming behind it. It was a case of succeeding at everything, and I guess that came into the rugby."
Whatever the root cause, Wilkinson's unusually fraught fear of failure drove him to become rugby's leading international points scorer of all time. Now, though, he claims he has overcome his obsessionalism, a liberation he attributes to the string of injuries that have dogged him since the 2003 triumph.
"The trick was learning, through all those injuries, to see that everything is impermanent, so if you get used to that now, you'll get more fulfilment out of what you're doing. But it took me a long time to get the point. During those injury periods, I tried to hang on for several years to where I was during the World Cup. I would picture myself with a video of the World Cup final in my pocket, so anyone I spoke to I could say: 'Hey, do you want to come and watch this video?' I wanted to hang on to what people thought of me."
Injury prevented Wilkinson from playing for England for more than three years, an agonising period that, inevitably, led this introverted soul to put more pressure on himself when he returned.
"I'd go into games trying not to make mistakes, and it made life hell. There was no enjoyment in anything. If it went well it was a relief; if it went badly it was crisis time. Now, though, I don't try to live up to those expectations." These days, Wilkinson says, only he is the judge of how he is playing and what he wants out of his career, not other people. The therapy is paying off.
"I'm working out what I really want, both as a player and a person," he says. "I still haven't got quite what I'm searching for, but I know roughly what it is. When I was younger, all I wanted to do was drop the goal that won the World Cup. At the age of eight, I wrote down that that was what I wanted to do. But I came to realise it wasn't enough, so my life's become more about internal fulfilment than an external tick in a box, or a cup to hold up, or a player of the year award. I came to understand my real self and then use rugby as a way to express that, rather than using rugby as a method of trying to succeed in life."
Wilkinson is now a veteran and has appeared in two World Cup finals – he shook off injury long enough to play in the 2007 World Cup in France – yet is only 31 this month. He first played for England at the age of 18 – an early elevation which led him to turn down a place at Durham University – and has won 78 caps, plus six for the British Lions. But he might have close to double that number, had it not been for all those injuries. "I've been around for ever," he says, "but not necessarily on the field."
His career has had a bizarre shape. Fame and glory in the first five years (in 2003, Wilkinson was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year; he and David Beckham appeared together in an advert for Adidas, with Jonny the hero and Beckham as stooge; and rugby briefly appeared to be challenging football for popularity); mostly pain and frustration since. But naturally, Jonny the philosopher offers a more positive – if slightly convoluted – spin on his rugby career.
Wilkinson playing for Farnham under 11s at Twickenham. Photograph:
Cassidy and Leigh
"It seems chaotic, but when you look at it, it falls into place. Having that rise to 2003, then to be hit by an immediate injury in the game afterwards, and then to have a string of five or six years' worth of injuries, some of them so far-fetched that you realised it was too random to be random . . . That made me realise there was a point, which was to get a better balance in life. The injuries forced me to deal with the identity-loss of not playing rugby, and to ask myself: 'Who are you if you're not playing rugby?' Everything you've built is about how people see you, but that's not who you are."
Last year, Wilkinson left his long-time club Newcastle Falcons (he had joined their academy as a teenager) for wealthy and ambitious Toulon. The deal was reported to be worth €700,000 a year, but he insists the move wasn't about money.
"I'd played about 25 games [for Newcastle] in six seasons, and it seemed as if there was a negative cycle there that I had to break free from. Maybe it was self-fulfilling, in terms of deep down what I might have been feeling. I couldn't get on the field; I didn't feel I was paying anything back to Newcastle any more; I felt I was hindering them. So I decided to give it a go in France. I was attracted by the beauty of so many new experiences – new team, new language, new region, living like that. I'd been in a comfort zone at Newcastle – it was all I'd ever known – and I realised it was the time in my life to push myself."
I suggest he probably finds French easier to understand than Geordie. "I really struggled with the Newcastle dialect when I went up there," he admits with a laugh. "I felt terrible because I kept asking people to repeat themselves. In France, at least I have an excuse for it."
His girlfriend, Shelley Jenkins, has moved to France with him, they're committed to learning the language, and he says they're loving French life. The rugby's going well, too. Despite the black eye and the gashes, he's in good shape, tanned and with the bulging muscularity that underlines his reputation as a fierce tackler. Traditionally, players who occupy his position – fly-half, the playmaker, the hinge of the team, akin to the quarterback in American football – are the artists, feeding off the hard slog of the artisans in the forwards, but Wilkinson has always relished the physical confrontation. It is one reason why his career has been so injury-plagued.
This season has, though, been less satisfactory internationally; he was dropped by England after a series of ineffectual performances. "It's been a turbulent time," Wilkinson admits. "There were so many things going through my head."
He says he couldn't understand why he was missing simple kicks, and was having trouble dealing with that in the course of the game. "When everything's flowing, you don't have to apply any real thought to it. But it's a very different thing when something's not quite there when you expect it to be. It's hard to make corrections under pressure."
This does not sound like a man who has entirely shaken free the demons of self-doubt. How, then, did it feel to be dropped from the England side he had formerly inspired to such heights?
"It's happened to me before. I'd given everything I could and you can't cheat in that kind of environment." So he deserved the chop? "I always think that in my next game, at my best, I can do anything, but I wouldn't say it was a huge surprise. I accepted that it was time for someone else to have a go."
What did his manager, the World Cup-winning captain Martin Johnson, say – take a rest? "Yeah," he responds quickly, "take a long, long rest." He stresses each of those "longs", and laughs, to emphasise this is not quite how the conversation went.
Then he surprises me. You would think getting back into the England team – especially with the next World Cup taking place in 2011 – would be crucial to him. Wilkinson says not. "My priority is not necessarily to say: 'I've got to win my place back.' There's a bigger plan to all this, which is to get the best from myself. That's more important than anything, and if I feel like I'm achieving that, and England never appears again for me, I'd rather go out that way." Wilkinson wants control of the judging process – not Johnson, the pundits, the fans, nor the people who spot him at the cinema.
Finally, the inevitable question for a sportsman on the wrong side of 30, in the most physically demanding of sports: when will he pack it in?
"There's going to come a point where you think: 'I've had enough,'" he says. "I'll feel that when, one, I don't feel I have any more to give; or two, I feel like I've given enough and don't want to give any more. I'm never going to be happy to close the book on rugby, but I need to know that when I do, I won't be one of those guys that says: 'I could have done that.' I'm waiting for the eureka moment that hits me, and makes me understand I've had enough.
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