Читать книгу Open Side: The Official Autobiography - Sam Warburton - Страница 12

When people say that rugby went professional in 1995, what they mean is that from then on players could be paid openly rather than clandestinely, which had been the case under amateurism (or ‘shamateurism’, as it had long been known). This allowed players to devote themselves full-time to rugby rather than needing to hold down day jobs in other sectors.

But for me, and as Gwyn Morris pointed out back at Whitchurch, ‘professionalism’ doesn’t mean simply being paid to play rugby. In fact, professionalism has little or nothing to do with salary. Professionalism is about giving your very best, using your talent to the maximum and being highly competitive. Professionalism is about how you conduct yourself on and off the pitch: how you behave, how you train, how you prepare yourself. Professionalism is about making yourself not just the kind of player others respect, but the kind of person too. There were plenty of rugby players in the amateur era who behaved professionally, just as there are still some players nowadays who don’t, not properly at any rate.

As with other aspects of leadership, professionalism begins with the right mindset. You have to set yourself standards, but not limits; you have to hold yourself to minimum requirements rather than maximum ones. For example, Ben hasn’t framed and mounted his Wales Under-16 shirt, as for him it’s not a measure of success but of failure: it’s not how far he got, but how much further he still had to go. If I hadn’t got a Lions shirt, I wouldn’t have put up a Wales one.

Gats used to say that ‘we should be the best at everything that doesn’t require talent. Effort doesn’t require talent. Hard work doesn’t require talent. We should be the best at hard work.’ It’s never too early to start this. When I’d train at lunchtimes in Whitchurch, that was professional behaviour, what I needed to do to get better. Round about that time, Mr Morris gave me a referee’s rulebook. How many 16-year-old kids had even read one of those, let alone owned one? I turned straight to the sections that were most relevant to me, the ones that covered contact rules. I read these until I knew them off by heart, because they helped me work out how to compete, how to know where the offside line was, and so on. Why bother playing a sport unless you knew the rules inside out? But most people didn’t. I did, because it gave me an advantage; and if something gives you an advantage, then you’d be nuts not to take it.

Training was an obvious arena in which I could be professional. I was Mr Preseason: you’d have had to tie me down to stop me training. As Muhammad Ali said: ‘The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road – long before I dance under those lights.’

Michael Johnson described it well in his book Gold Rush. ‘The desire to succeed is extremely important, but it’s easy to want to be the best in the world. Drive is more important. It’s easy to commit to being the Olympic gold medallist, but not as easy to commit to training 50 per cent harder than you did the year before and to making sacrifices to achieve that goal. It is that drive that causes an individual to work for what he desires. Once I started training, my position was simply that every day was an opportunity for me to get better. So with that in mind, any day I missed training or any day I didn’t give 100 per cent of the effort I was capable of giving would have been a missed opportunity.’

And 100 per cent means just that. Professionalism means paying attention to the small things as well as the big ones. Sometimes the analysts would play us the voice of the referee for our next match as we did scrum-machine work, not just to add some match atmosphere to the session but so we could get used to his intonation and rhythm, how long he paused for when issuing instructions to set the scrum, and so on.

I hear academy kids asking how to get a Range Rover, how to get an adidas endorsement, that kind of thing. That’s topsy-turvy thinking, and a sign of a mindset and values that are all wrong: putting output above input. The true professional would never ask such questions, as the true professional knows that input comes first both in time and importance. Prepare properly, train properly, play properly, and the remainder will look after itself. I picked my endorsements carefully. I didn’t just sign with any company that turned up with a cheque and a photoshoot. I only signed with companies whose products I believed in and which I used anyway, or would have used, without being paid.

Rest is a big part of being a professional. You have to learn to say no. I get so many requests to do stuff, and people have no idea how much it all mounts up. I’ve got people I haven’t seen in years who’ll drop me a message out of the blue saying: ‘I was just wondering …’ Luckily Ben and I have largely the same group of friends, so I can say to him: ‘I got a message from X – are you in touch with them anyway?’ If he says yes, then maybe I’ll do it, but if he’s not, and they’re just chancing their arm, then I definitely won’t.

It’s hard, sometimes, because people think they own you. I was doing a Q&A up in Cwmbran once, and a bloke stood up and said: ‘What are you doing next Monday?’ I said I didn’t know off the top of my head. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we’ve got a presentation at our club that day, and I bet you don’t turn up, because you professional rugby players are all too big for your boots and have forgotten the grassroots game where you come from.’

His tone really took me aback. I explained that I had a certain amount of community work built into my contract, and on top of that I’d go to local clubs, kids’ camps and so on. But I also needed nights at home to rest and do nothing, because that was the professional, disciplined thing to do.

At the end, I was signing autographs and stuff – I never left any of those events until I’d signed for anyone who asked – when this same bloke came up. ‘Which rugby club are you from?’ I asked him. When he told me, I said: ‘Just so you know, I’m never going to come up there, purely because of the way you spoke to me.’

A significant aspect of professionalism is honesty: not making excuses, and owning your mistakes. If everyone in a team does that, the environment is healthy and the team has the best chance of improving. Everyone makes mistakes. The only way not to make a mistake is not to try something in the first place. Making a mistake isn’t wrong or unprofessional. What is wrong and unprofessional is trying to sweep that mistake under the carpet, because by pretending it never happened you deny yourself the opportunity to learn from it next time round.

When other people see you being honest, it inspires them to follow suit. In one training camp, we had a whole load of protein bars brought in, boxes and boxes of them, which were kept in the gym for the boys to take them when they needed.

At one team meeting, the nutritionist said that we had a problem. He’d catered for each person having two bars per day for the duration of the camp, but now there weren’t enough anymore, so someone must have been taking more than their fair share. And he knew who the guilty parties were, as there was a CCTV in the gym and it had all been caught on camera. So if whoever had done it didn’t own up right now, they’d be exposed as liars and not team players. A few of the younger guys in the squad immediately fessed up, to gales of laughter from the senior boys.

Yes, the young guys had been taking more than their share, but of course there was no CCTV and we could have got more bars delivered at the drop of a hat. The point was to encourage blokes to be honest with each other and with the team as a whole, and it worked. Own up to something before you get called out on it.

Being professional extends to life outside rugby too; indeed, when you’re in the public eye it extends pretty much to everything you say or do, 24/7. You represent the club you play for, you represent your country, and you represent the hopes of all the supporters who’d give anything to do what you’re doing. These aren’t things to take lightly, and if they involve a certain amount of sacrifice here and there, well, that’s just the way it is, and it’s a small price to pay.

I haven’t been on a night out in Cardiff since 2012. The last time I did, it was with Lyds; we’d been to a wedding, and inevitably we came across someone who’d had too much to drink and who wanted to pick a fight, probably just to prove to his mates what a hard man he was.

On another occasion, I was on a stag night and we were in a pub. There was a group of guys there who wanted to chat, and I was being friendly to them, but then it was time for us to leave and to go on to the next venue. One of the men I’d been talking to became aggressive and started manhandling me in an attempt to get me to stay, and I had to grab his hands and yank them off me so I could leave.

It doesn’t take much for these kinds of situation to spiral out of control, and then suddenly you’re dealing with negative headlines and distractions, which neither the team nor you need.

Take the case of the England cricketer Ben Stokes, who was charged with affray following a fight outside a Bristol nightclub. He was acquitted, but not before he’d missed an Ashes series and lost a sponsorship deal, and following his acquittal he was fined for bringing the game into disrepute.

Now I don’t know him from a bar of soap, I’ve got no axe to grind with him personally and I mention his case for one reason only: that it could all have been avoided if he hadn’t put himself there in the first place. Don’t give people the opportunity to make you look bad.

People remember you and judge you as they see you. It doesn’t matter what kind of day you’re having; the professional thing to do is to smile and make time for people. What’s a few seconds for you might mean a whole lot to them. As Ben always reminds me, an autograph or a selfie might be my 100th of the day, but for them it’s their first. That’s why I always made time for autographs; they don’t take up much time and they mean a lot to the person receiving them.

Having been on the other side of the fence, trust me, you remember these things. In the summer of 1999, Mum and Dad took us to Copenhagen. Spurs had won the League Cup a few months before with a 1–0 victory over Leicester City, and Allan Nielsen had scored the winning goal.

In my 10-year-old mind, the logic was clear. Nielsen was Danish, we were in Denmark, therefore we were definitely going to see him. Dad tried to explain that Denmark was a big place with millions of people, so we weren’t going to see Allan Nielsen.

But one day, in the Tivoli Gardens, there he was! I plucked up the courage to go over and ask him for an autograph, and to this day I remember how nice he was: asking my name, where I was from, that kind of stuff. I was so thrilled that Mum laminated the piece of paper with his autograph, and for years it was my pride and joy. So when a kid asks for my autograph, I always remember that I could be their Allan Nielsen.

As Alan Phillips said to me: ‘People are looking at you and they’re dreaming, aren’t they? When they look at you, these people, when they see you, they’re seeing their dreams.’ That was my responsibility as a professional: to be worthy of their dreams.