Jonny: My Autobiography (9 page)

My problem is that I don’t drive yet. I share a house with three other young guys – Chris Simpson-Daniel, brother of James, Mark Bentley and Charles Yeoman – and they all drive. They give me a lift to the club when they can, but I hate the feeling of putting them out. I definitely don’t want them to hang around after training while I do my kicking. So it becomes a bit of a strain. I constantly don’t ask, because I don’t want to, and I hate the fact that they might feel they have to help, or they should do. It’s a bit awkward.

The result is that my earnings go to the local taxi firm. I’m constantly on the move. I need cabs back from training, and I get £15 taxis to the gym in the evening to chill with a swim and a Jacuzzi, and then £15 taxis back. In an average week, I can spend £100 just on going to the gym. It’s lucky our membership is free.

But I won’t give in to asking for lifts and affecting everyone else’s lives just because mine happens to be so obsessive. I start travelling on foot. If I
need to go somewhere, I’ll often walk or run there, even if it’s miles away. My most horrendous problem is the weekly shop. I run to the supermarket, a good mile and a half away, and I do my entire week’s shopping, six or seven full carrier bags’ worth, which I then carry back. The mile and a half home is torture – a quick burst of strongman walking for a hundred yards or so, then stop, put the bags down to save the tips of my fingers from falling off, get some feeling back in my hands, and then off again.

It is fairly clear – I need to pass my driving test.

My first impression of Steve Black comes from what I hear about him from the other players. Dean Ryan and Inga have such respect for him. But I’ve never heard of him. I’m surprised that a fitness conditioner is talked about like this. The message seems to be just do what the hell Blackie says and don’t piss him off.

My first sessions are on the exercise bikes. I train with the back-rowers and the nines and tens, and Blackie, this former boxer, sprinter, power-lifter and professional footballer with a big beard and a bigger Geordie accent, is in charge. Blackie says up the level on the bike and we do, but we don’t know for how long. Most fitness trainers would say for thirty seconds or a minute. He doesn’t do that; with Blackie you just get on with it. Mentally, it’s tough. People start muttering under their breath. It gets to the point where you’re looking for someone else to give up so that you can give up, too. But it’s inspirational. Blackie waits for everyone’s breaking point. He wants to know how we respond to challenges.

He chats during training, watching how we tick, how we train, how we prepare ourselves. He gets to know our bodies, but he also learns our hopes
and dreams. And while we are pedalling, he is constantly in rugby, forever creating visual images and making us play the game out in our heads.

Right, he says, take it up to the maximum level. I want you pedalling at 110 revs-per-minute, you’re now sprinting back to help out in defence, you’re driving your legs in a tackle, up off the floor, what’s happening in front of you? Stay in the game, keep your head in the game. What can you see? What can you hear? What’s the next move? How can you contribute? Where do you need to be? It’s like match practice on bikes.

But it’s not a dictatorship. When you arrive, he asks how you are, how you feel, how you slept and how you’re eating. And he adapts accordingly.

The deal is simple and I understand what Dean and Inga were saying. You come here to give 100 per cent. It’s not acceptable if you don’t, and he makes your life a living hell if that’s the case. When Blackie lets fly at someone, it’s aggressive. You keep your head down, but really, you just want to get out of the room.

Blackie, it becomes clear, gives everything for the team and I just don’t want to let him down. He’s available whenever we want, day or night. He’ll go as far as we want to go. And I like that. Here is a guy who is as obsessive as I am. And that seems a perfect opportunity.

On the pitch, I feel better about life. On arrival at Newcastle, I’d been told that the thinking was that, all being well, I could develop into the long-term replacement for Rob Andrew at number ten, so I wasn’t expecting much first-team rugby for a year at least. However, I am pretty much straight into the first-team squad, playing second-team rugby and keeping the bench warm for the big boys.

I get my debut off the bench against Edinburgh, and it could hardly have gone better. I am on with 15 minutes to go; my housemate Chris has come on, too, at scrum half. I have barely got on the pitch when the ball squirts out of the scrum, Chris picks it up and sets off through a gap, steps the full-back and pops up the ball to me, and I sprint the final 10 metres and dive in to score. That’s my first touch of the ball in a Newcastle shirt.

It’s not always going to go like that, of course it’s not, and when it doesn’t, I really feel it. In fact, I make sure I do. My full debut, a huge occasion for me, is at home in the Cup against Exeter, a division below us. Kingston Park can be subject to the most horrendous crosswinds, and as I will learn, those crosswinds can completely destroy a game. This is one of those days.

Rob plays number ten. I am at inside centre, but Rob hands me the kicking duties, and it is a tough, tough day to be kicking. I do my best but end up missing three goalkicks from three, and I miss touch with a penalty when the wind almost blows the ball out of my hands.

In open play, I actually do well. I put Tim Stimpson through a couple of times and I have a hand in a couple of tries, but my mind is on the other stuff. At half-time the message is that, with the wind in play, the game is a bit more edgy than we’d expected. So Inga is going to come on for me and basically sort it out. As a decision, it’s an absolute no-brainer. Inga dominates in contact, he intimidates people in defence, he goes forward, he is exactly what we need.

But it is not what I need. The expectations I have of myself are so high that I
cannot stop those missed kicks and my substitution from overshadowing everything else I have done. I just wasn’t good enough, obviously. On the bench, in the second half, everyone says well done to me, but I am convinced they are saying it more in consolation than encouragement, and are actually trying to hide the fact that it hasn’t really gone very well for me at all. I cannot stop myself thinking I’ve screwed everything up, I’ve let people down, I’ve let myself down.

In the changing room afterwards, I manage to hide my feelings, but just at the end, when almost everyone has changed and gone, and just George Graham and I are left, he notices that I’m trying not to cry. He gives me a look as if to say don’t you dare. You’ve done really well, he says. Don’t be stupid. This is what sport is like. It’s going to get a lot worse than this.

Yes, this is sport, but for me it’s part of the bigger goal. I want to be the best rugby player in the world. This is the thought that is lodged permanently in my head, the ultimate challenge. For now, I am standing at the foot of it; every new level is another small mountain. Can I get up and over this one? That is what I keep asking myself.

That is why, when I met Dave Alred, I thought I’m going to give this guy everything I’ve got. Hold nothing back. If I’m going to get to where I want to go, I need him, and I need to drain every last bit of ability out of my being.

That is also what I feel with Blackie. Blackie can get me over those mountains. In fact, he’ll climb them right alongside me.

Blackie knows that, at 12 and a bit stone, I am too light for professional rugby. He says that if Newcastle are going to play me at centre, my body will not stand up to it. He wants me nearer 14 stone and he starts pushing me in that direction quickly.

I feel the extent to which he is taking me under his wing, the way he talks to me and gets to know me. It hasn’t taken him long to see my intentions. With Blackie, it is not so much wanting to be the best; he understands that not being the best is just not good enough for me. I have to be the best in
the bike sessions, on the weights, in shuttle runs, at kicking, passing, tackling, professionalism. Everything.

Blackie knows us outside the club, as well as in it. From his early days working the doors as a bouncer in the Newcastle nightclubs, he has contacts thoughout the city. He knows where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to.

One Tuesday morning, I’m recovering from a night out on the town with Pat Lam. We are on the bikes again when Blackie gives us a random change, sending us outside to do shuttle runs on the grass, and my throat is burning. I’m in all kinds of trouble. In the Jacuzzi afterwards, I have to bolt and make a mad dash to vomit in the changing-room bin. It’s one of those bins with a swing-lid and as I vomit, it swings back and what I’ve unloaded finishes all down my own feet. Pat smiles as if to say you’ll learn one day, youngster. Blackie no doubt knows anyway.

But it is a lesson. Have I got the capacity to behave like this? I know, of course, that the answer is no. And if Blackie is going to help me fulfil my goals, it is not the life that is going to get me there with him.

Blackie never was and never will be just a fitness conditioner. He just happens to be the best in the world at understanding sport and the intricacies of the movement, how to get the best out of players, how to improve performance, how to get inside their heads. There is no comparison with anyone else. His knowledge and experience take him off the chart. I have no doubt that if I am to go anywhere, I need him with me.

I have long had an appetite for the big collisions, but one of the worst ever comes at Headingley. I will never know for sure, but I think this is the one
that will undo me several years from now. What is certain is that I am already sowing the seeds of future fitness problems.

Before arriving at Newcastle, selection for representative team rugby had been the be-all and end-all. However, when I’m invited for the North Under-21 squad trials, I feel quite relaxed. On a weekly basis, I’m trying to fit in with a team of full internationals, so it’s nice to feel the anxiety lift for once – if only a little.

And I’m straight into the team. James Lofthouse is in the squad, too, but this time I get the number-ten shirt.

We play Midlands at Headingley and the game starts brilliantly. The scrum half makes a break, he passes to me and pretty much my first touch is a 50 metre run-in. Almost straightaway, I’m part of a try down the right. And I knock over the conversion.