The House of Pain is looking grim. Clouds darken a sky too cold for colour. Carisbrook’s nature is unchanged by its new stands and corporate boxes goggling in the chill.
A little crowd of good old boys, coaches and kids send puffs of steam into the frigid air. They have the guarded look of people privileged to peek at the great.
On the green Dunedin grass, the All Blacks are training for their first test against England. Graham Henry, the coach, barks commands; the esoteric language of coaches sounds rather like stones bouncing off iron. The players warm up, split into groups, begin constructing and deconstructing moves. The mood is taut. Henry says later that preparing a test team in a week and taking on world champions is a big ask. And the welts from a hard Super 12 season are still fresh. From here, the roar of the crowd is no more than a distant drone.
Professional rugby is hard. It wore Andrew Mehrtens, the reborn first five-eighths, right down.
“It draws on your passion all the time,” he says. “You can’t relax. Every week is a massive game. You hit the Super 12 running and from the Crusaders’ point of view we’ve got everyone in Canterbury and throughout our region baying for us to be fully fizzing every week and every game is do or die.
“It does continually just draw on your passion,” he says again. “And if your week’s a grind, that’s drawing on it as well, you end up being ground down. Especially after the number of years that we’ve been involved.” Which in his case is 10. He has played 66 tests since his debut in 1995.
Oh, it’s not politically correct, Justin Marshall agrees, but you can get sick of rugby. Says the Crusaders and All Black half back, “It’s a full-on job, a huge amount of time away from home, especially with three different competitions running through the season. I went into the All Black trial with trepidation. Three days after playing the Super 12 final, we’re expected to front up for a brand-new team, new coaches, and be expected to be on the job ready to go with no time to wind down.
“I think there’s too much rugby at the moment. Not only us, but the spectators are getting an overload of it. We’re draining the life out of the game.
“All people outside the game see is the glamour. They see the crowds, the spotlight, the money, the car, the house, and they ask what you’re complaining about.”
Mehrtens was not complaining, but he was in bad trouble. “Rugby was it for me, really. And I was spending a lot of my time wanting to get away from rugby and just cruising.” His game was declining. Last year, he lost the No 10 jersey to Carlos Spencer. He spent much of this past Super 12 season on the bench. Even on sports pages that love the word “axed”, he created his own headlines. At 31, he seemed ready to be filed under former All Black and recalled fondly in pubs. “In rugby terms,” says TV rugby commentator Keith Quinn, “he was on the trash heap.” His fans’ faces grew as long as his sideburns.
Then came the miracles. Two of them.
The Crusaders were being trounced by the Brumbies in the Super 12 final. Mehrtens took over from the newcomer who had supplanted him, Cameron McIntyre. Mehrtens played superbly. The Crusaders rallied, caught up, lost honourably.
Then the All Black trials: Probables losing to Possibles, enter Mehrts. He ignites a dormant back line. A little gap opens up and Mehrtens nips through, oh, such a surprise, such a lovely move. The Probables score two tries, turn around and win.
A fairy-tale run, says Henry, and bungs Mehrtens back in the All Blacks, although his turned-down grin says he doesn’t believe in fables and he squints brimstone when I ask him about it: “I didn’t say he was lucky. I said he had a good ride. We were delighted for him. We thought he played very well. But the run of the game suited him.” And Crusaders coach Robbie Deans says Mehrtens rises to the occasion: “When you’ve played as much rugby as he has, pulling on the All Black jersey is going to excite him a lot more. It’s very difficult to sustain the same level of excitement.”
“I came on at good times in both those games,” Mehrtens says modestly.
But ask anyone else. Fairy-tale run? Rising to the occasion? Mehrts saved both games. He’s a pedigreed hero. His sideburns have retreated up his face again. The crowd love him. They roared for him when he came on in the trial. He even got a special round of applause when he appeared for training on a Dunedin ground earlier last week. Oh, if only he had been in the World Cup team. The Poms would have got theirs.
Henry, a little reluctantly it seems, left him out of the first test against England. But he signalled clearly enough, watch for him in the next.
Now Carlos Spencer, the Auckland interloper, is the young guy whose job is being chased by the old boy, instead of the usual vice versa. Spencer is feeling the heat despite his new role in the shade: “This situation with Mehrts has been around for years. But it makes me work hard. It’s all good, mate.”
All good for Mehrtens. And for the crowd. Fairy-tales, we love them.
So, what happened?
There’s no un-soppy way of saying it. Mehrtens found love. A woman brought him right.
“I just drifted,” he says. “I was aimless. Now my whole life’s a lot brighter. There’s suddenly something extra.”
A good woman? “That’s exactly right. Just in terms of having a passion for everything and that includes a passion for rugby. And you need that, especially given the hours you put into it, the amount of thinking about rugby you have to do, the amount of pushing yourself, and I’ve never been a good one for that.
“I’ve worked harder this last nine or 10 months than I’ve ever worked. And I’m still getting better at it. I’m really enjoying it and I think you can tell. I’m fully happy away from rugby, which gives you the energy to do your work, because it’s not your entire life. I didn’t have a lot of interest in talking rugby all week. After 10 years, you get a bit sick of it. I can get sick of it really easily. But everything is brighter now.
“I have a passion for life again and almost all of that is attributable to my private life being really happy. But my partner is a very private person and doesn’t like that sort of angle.”
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ehrtens always did seem a strange All Black. Greg Somerville, for example, brings to mind Peter Blake’s story about a distraught Grant Dalton: “He’d hang himself, but he can’t find his neck.” They don’t make ladders big enough to scale Chris Jack. Jerry Collins’s benign smile and “it must have been the other bloke” look belies his lethal skills. Joe Rokocoko seems to move like a flash even when he’s standing still. And most All Blacks are like farm animals. They look normal on the paddock, inside they’re huge.
Mehrtens seems tiny by comparison. He is in fact average size, ordinary weight. Perhaps that is why people love him. He looks like they do. The little Kiwi battler. And he has scored more points in test matches than any other All Black, ever.
“He’s impish,” says Keith Quinn. “The TVNZ archives have this footage of a famous game at Jade Stadium, can’t remember which one, and the crowd is moving onto the field at the end of the game and there’s a small boy jumping up and down in front of the camera and getting in the way, and the small boy is easily recognisable as a 10-year-old Andrew Mehrtens. That kind of impish behaviour hasn’t changed.”
And irreverent, as Quinn was reminded when he and John McBeth were interviewing Mehrtens and Marshall on television. The two players had just published their book, A Season of Two Halves. “So there were four people in the studio,” says Quinn, “and all of a sudden we were shocked to hear one of us break wind. We all heard it. It was short and sharp and it was Mehrtens. Because Marshall complained about it in the commercial break.”
Back in 1995 when Mehrtens made his debut on the national stage, he seemed so … young. “He was frail, sort of boyish in his young years, often a target for the big monsters on the other team, who came at him,” says Quinn. “He played a game that stayed away from the physical stuff. Don’t get me wrong. He was quickly identified as a brilliant player, quick-thinking, able to be a good general, as they say in rugby.”
He still is, according to Deans: “Mehrtens is a rare individual. He’s possibly the greatest five-eighths there ever was, and the really exciting thing is that he’s showing signs that he wants to be better yet. That’s fantastic.”
Which raises the question: if he’s the greatest, if he’s fantastic, if he’s good enough to be selected for the All Blacks again, why wasn’t he good enough for the Crusaders?
“He was good enough,” says Deans. “But we make our decisions based on what we’ve seen, our experience to that point. Before the final, Andrew’s most recent start had been the Sharks game. He didn’t have a good performance. We opted to run with Cameron McIntyre in the final. If I had my time again, would I have made the same decision? Yes. But if I’d seen Mehrtens’s last two performances in the final and the trial – if he’d done that prior – I would have changed the starting line-up. In the last two games he’s shown a desire. That’s the best word.”
But any one-eyed Cantabrian will tell you different. They believe that Deans has got it in for Mehrtens. They will give you the reasons why, stories so defamatory that they cannot be repeated. They will swear to so much inside knowledge that you can guarantee that the stories are as untrue as Mehrtens says they are. Deans: “Andrew has conceded that he has had challenges, issues with fitness and form. It’s difficult for the public to come to grips with the fact that someone like him, one in a lifetime, is no longer what he was, perhaps. So they justify it in whatever way they can. They surmise that there has to be something more than is obvious. But I spent so much time working with him, trying to get him to reach his full potential. That’s my responsibility and my wish. There’s nothing that gives a coach more satisfaction. So to suggest that I am against him is ridiculous.”
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nusually in sport, no one has a word to say against Andrew Mehrtens. Deans: “He makes me laugh. He’s hugely capable, stimulating, analytical.” Says All Blacks bag manager and masseur Errol Collins, who has known Mehrtens throughout his rugby career: “He’s a real quick-witted character, very clever. Never a dull moment. He’s one of the funniest guys. Doesn’t matter what, Mehrts comes up with it quick, just like that.” When Mehrtens cracks a joke, his face fills with little smiley lumps, like a bowl of cherries.
Dean Brownie has special reason to like him. He heads a South Island firm called Brownies Mattress Direct. Mehrtens does commercials for the firm. Also unusually, for a leading professional, it is Mehrtens’s only enduring commercial contract.
So it has to be a goodie, right? “It’s a very loose arrangement,” says Mehrtens. Brownie lets on how loose: “I don’t pay him. We just get on well. What I’m saying is, that’s the sort of guy he is.”
These days, every celebrity has their price. Mehrtens’s seems quite low. Otherwise, he has only one business interest: he is a partner in the Lone Star restaurant in Nelson.
Life after rugby is the truly tricky business.
When Marshall talks about finishing, it sounds a little like death. “When it’s time for me to finish, I’ll know that and I’ll be ready to move on,” he says. “I look forward to that day, actually.”
“He’s right,” says Mehrtens. “I got to the point where I didn’t have expectations and that was nice, too, because everything that came was a bonus. I felt like I was 19 again and everything was new. Things fell into place for me.
“Luck and timing – a lot of life is about opportunity. But you have to be in a position to take it.”
But you get the feeling that next time Mehrts is wearing his All Black jersey and waiting for the ref to blow his whistle, he’ll be thinking along the lines of O E Middleton’s short story: thank God, the game at last.