The Man: Richie McCaw

He is the greatest rugby player of his generation — perhaps of all time.

He finally won that elusive World Cup in 2011, but has found a form resurgence in his mid-30s to enable one last tilt at the windmill. Marc Hinton on the man who’s ready to make history in this year’s Rugby World Cup in England.

IT WAS Uncle “Bigsy” who perhaps first recognised the qualities that would one day be apparent to not just a nation, but the entire rugby world. It was he, after all, who instructed a teenaged Richie McCaw to write down his goals, from national age-group sides all the way through to the Test arena, and then sign the document, “Great All Black”.

What did he know? What did he see? The man was positively prescient. McCaw being McCaw, even at 18, was too humble and self-conscious to even write those words. So instead he signed the impromptu rugby mission statement, simply, “G.A.B” and hid it away high in a cupboard in the family home, where only he could find it.

As author Greg McGee penned in McCaw’s celebrated autobiography, Richie McCaw: The Open Side, it was a set of goals, scrawled on a napkin from a fast-food restaurant, that the Canterbury, Crusaders and All Black No 7 would reference at various times throughout his meteoric rise through the grades.

Inevitably, too, McCaw would surpass those goals. Sometimes by some distance. He had calculated that, if the cards fell his way in Uncle Bigsy’s blue-sky world, he might become an All Black by 2004. We all know, of course, that Richard Hugh McCaw made his Test debut on the 2001 tour north against Ireland at Lansdowne Road where he produced a man-of-the-match performance in a stirring 40-29 New Zealand victory. Talk about starting out as you mean to go on.

Remarkably, McCaw has remained a fixture in the All Blacks ever since, and has been captain since inheriting the mantle permanently from Tana Umaga in 2006. He is a talismanic figure in the world’s best rugby team, a true warrior on the field and a classy ambassador off it. He is the face of the modern, post-professional game and the embodiment of the virtues of this gladiatorial sport. He knows no way but the hard way, and is also cunning, skilful, brave and powered by an engine the likes of which has been seen rarely in the history of the game.

He won the World Cup in 2011 in an emotional campaign on home soil, with not one, not two, but three fractures in his right foot. He lived that tournament with a constant companion called pain, but understood how important he was to his team-mates, to his country and, most importantly, to the All Blacks. He willed himself and his team over the line, then became just the second New Zealand captain ever to lift the Webb Ellis Trophy.

But he was not done, even though some doubted his ability to go four more years in a sport that saps the very lifeblood out of its participants: here he is about to have a fourth crack at the greatest prize of all. He has re-thought and reinvented himself with a constantly changing game, and tweaked his playing style and body shape effectively enough to remain a world-class open-side flanker well into his 30s. He finished 2014 with a series of standout performances that confirmed rumours of his decline were greatly exaggerated.

To evoke McCaw after a Test is to picture someone fresh from the battlefield — bruised, bloodied and battered. Sometimes it takes all his effort to climb to the podium to receive a trophy. He is spent; the juice sapped. Yet somehow he has cajoled his body through 14 seasons of professional rugby, and has at least one more left in the tank. Who knows if this is the end, but if it is, it will be a retirement richly earned.

His achievements, of course, are now legion. His 137 Tests are just four shy of Brian O’Driscoll‘s world-best mark of 141 which he will surely saunter past early in this year’s World Cup campaign. Pointedly, he has lost just 14 times in the black jersey of his country, which equates to once per season over his career. He has also played a record 100 of those international as skipper — winning 89 of them. Most of these numbers are expected to stand the test of time.

Back when a callow McCaw set down his goals under the urging of John ‘Bigsy’ McLay, his mother’s brother, Mid-Canterbury rugby legend and self-designated master motivator, he assuredly had no inkling of what was to unfold. But it speaks volumes for the drive, ambition and single-mindedness of this iconic New Zealander that it became a touchstone for him, and the process of writing down his goals turned into a habit. To this day, McCaw keeps a Warwick 2B4 notebook in which he records key thoughts, motivational catechisms and aspirations, and captures them in bullet points that become etched on his brain. Often he’ll add G.A.B. — if only to remind himself of the unerring requirement to stay being the very best.

IT’S PART of a process instilled in McCaw as a young man born and bred in New Zealand’s heartland in the South Island, raised on the family farm in the Hakataramea Valley, educated as a boarder at Otago Boys High School in Dunedin, and then refined on the rugby fields of Canterbury, that nothing worth achieving comes easy, and that you should always strive to be the best.

It has worked beautifully for McCaw, now in the twilight of possibly the finest rugby career there has been. At 34, he’s a veteran presence in an awesome All Blacks outfit seeking to carve their place in history. They have lost twice in three seasons since Steve Hansen assumed control post-2011. In 2013, they won all 14 Tests — the first perfect year by a top-tier nation in the professional era. No team has ever won back-to-back World Cups and no New Zealand side has prevailed on foreign soil. The skip has his eye on twin holy grails.

McCaw’s place in the pantheon of the sport’s immortals is assured. He is a three-time winner of the IRB’s supreme individual award and is universally recognised as the finest of his generation, and its greatest “cheat”. Even that is a badge of honour for a player who has always excelled in the “dark arts” which define the very essence of rugby.

Hansen has no doubts about the quality of a fellow he first tagged as a schoolboy tearaway his then Canterbury boss “had to sign”. “There was something about him from day one where he had the courage to go into the dark places,” Hansen recalls. “He was a great thief over the ball and had the ability to keep bouncing up no matter what happened.”

As Hansen told a Welsh rugby writer recently, McCaw then was not the most natural of footballers, but possessed qualities that transcended mere skills. “He had four feet and couldn’t catch a cold. But what he had was a massive capacity to learn and he always wanted to be better. He was very, very good over the ball. You could run him over with a tractor and he would still get up and have another go.

“There was courage there, but [what’s] made him the great player he is outside of his mental strength, is the ability to want to get better. Even now... he’s still knocking on the door asking how can I be better and that’s phenomenal for an athlete who has been around as long as he has.”

Hansen calls McCaw “probably the greatest player we’ve ever had” and almost wells up when he recalls the lengths his skip went through in 2011. “To do what he did with his foot broken just showed the courage of the man and the mental strength he had to play as well as he did. We’d already lost Dan Carter [to injury] ... his ability to stay in the fight and get all the way through to the end of that tournament was massive.”

Those sort of endorsements ring out wherever you go. Jerome Kaino says he feels “privileged” just to be in the same team as the great man, and young All Blacks now speak of the awe they feel at just being in his presence. It cannot be underestimated the power he wields when he asks his players to find an ounce of extra effort or energy.

“I’ve played my whole career under him, and I just love playing next to him,” says fellow Crusaders and All Blacks loose forward Kieran Read. “You know he ‘s going to be right there till the very end, and as a leader he’s immense. At some point, especially in big games, you’ll see him fly into a ruck or come out the other side with the ball. He’s got no regard for his body, and when you see that from your skipper you certainly have to follow.”

McCaw, for his part, just loves doing what he does. He’s never shown the interest of his contemporaries in heading offshore to play and seems at his happiest in the skies of the South Island where he loves to fly his glider in the summer months. He is also in the finishing stages of his commercial fixed wing pilot’s licence and wants to add a commercial helicopter licence. He’s a high-flyer, with serious business interests and commercial relationships that mean he need never worry where the next pay cheque is coming from.

He’s a smart man, and that’s helped both on and off the rugby field. He was an A-student who it’s said could have been a Rhodes scholar and in his book he talks of the frustration he felt when he once scored 99.4% in a sixth-form maths exam. The only answer he got wrong came because he miscalculated an equation he had otherwise right. “I missed one bloody mark,” he wrote. “The very last question on the paper. It was the only one I didn’t check. If I hadn’t known the answer, I could accept that. I could forget it. The reason I still remember every detail is because I did know it, but I lost concentration.”

That’s McCaw. He sets high standards, and likes to live up to them. It was something he reflected on as he passed some significant milestones in 2014. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been around five minutes, five years, or longer, you’re still there to contribute to the All Black legacy. That’s what keeps your feet on the ground. When you get to my stage of career you realise you’ve got to make the most of every time you play because they start running out. “Each time you play you want to earn your place and have a performance that you’re happy with. It’s nice to have these milestones but it’s what you do when you’re on the track that counts. When you look back one day, if you’ve done that then you’ll be proud to have done it as long as I have.”

Midway through 2014, doubts were expressed about the venerable skipper after a mistake or two crept into his game. Hansen was even moved to talk it through with him because it was such a new experience for a player largely immune to criticism.

“You’ve got to keep backing yourself,” McCaw reflects. “You can do 20 good things and one bad and you get yourself in a hole. That’s not going to help. You miss one tackle... that doesn’t all of a sudden mean you’re a bad player. You don’t want to make mistakes, but it happens. You’ve got to keep them to a minimum and work out why. If there’s a reason, then fix it.

“It’s about being balanced and seeing the whole picture. People from outside often don’t have that context. Deep down I knew the bits I needed to be better at.”

He knew because he’d written them down. That’s what Great All Blacks Do.

Especially the Greatest Of Them All.