KEY POINTS:
He's unemployed, has no income and his only mode of transport he very dubiously describes as a bike.
He shares a house with six others, his room is tiny and he calls his bed probably the best form of contraception you would ever find. No woman, he reasons,
would ever stay the night once she took one look at his room and that bed.
Fast reverse 12 months to Anton Oliver's life with wealthy French rugby club Toulon. The former All Black hooker was living in a large house beside the Mediterranean, he drove a smooth, luxury car and he was busy tasting the delights of foie gras and fine wines. He was, as he puts it, among people with all the accoutrements for a very good life. Then came the bombshell that changed his life. Toulon made him a financial offer to stay for another year which astounded him. It was in the region of ¬250,000-¬300,000 for a single season. "My mother is a nurse and I worked out that she would have to work for several years to earn that kind of income."
It was a huge decision to make and Oliver was still mulling it over as he left with Toulon for a brief training camp somewhere out in the country near Dax, close to the Pyrenees, in January. He had a problem. He loathed life at Toulon. The club was a shambles, the standard of rugby was poor (Toulon were still in Division 2 at that time) and he alleges, even to this day, the club still owes him a few thousand euros in unpaid salary. He admits "I was desperately unhappy".
The facilities at the training camp were dire and he became depressed. Until one morning at the camp, when he opened his computer to find an email from Oxford University. He had been accepted for a one-year course, to do an MSc in bio-domestic conservation management at Worcester College.
"I hadn't enjoyed my time at Toulon at all. In fact, it had been thoroughly unpleasant until I suddenly got that message from Oxford and then all the clouds went away."
Thus, Oliver, the former All Blacks hooker, turned his back on a whopping pay bonanza and chose a year at Oxford, for whom he will play in next month's famous Varsity match at Twickenham.
So at 33, Oliver is a student again, wobbling around Oxford on his rusting old bike, cycling through the rain to training just as he had as a 15-year-old back home in Blenheim, where his extraordinary rugby journey began.
Today, his world consists of an intimidatingly large pile of books, his two guitars and just enough money to feed a hungry young man. Memories of foie gras, slick cars and bulging wage packets are gone. Yet Oliver says "I can't remember being this happy for God knows how long. You can't put a price on your happiness."
The truth is, he went through years of unhappiness, long unbroken spells of deep cloud before emerging into the sunlight of an English autumn at Oxford. "I had been really unhappy in New Zealand for three or four years so it wasn't just one year of unhappiness at Toulon. It was a cumulative process since 2003.
"I was happy playing for New Zealand; that was why I stayed. The only reason I remained was to be an All Black. But there was a big trade off. All my friends had left Dunedin, there were a lot of new guys and it just wasn't the same for me any more. So the depths of despair I was in, in France, just capped it off and I couldn't face anymore of it. When Oxford came along as a serious option, I just grabbed it. But I was going to put a line through the rugby because my experience at Toulon had been so unpleasant."
Oliver jokes that he was desperate to get to Oxford so that he could pack up playing professional rugby. It's true, he has given sterling service to the professional game: 14 years with Otago, 12 years with the Highlanders and 12 years with the All Blacks. But this is no formulaic, cauliflower eared front row citizen whose horizons extend only as far as a pack of rugby forwards.
He concedes he's never felt the same way about the game since the day he stopped playing for the All Blacks. "That was the day the music died, someone put the candle out. After that nothing really mattered. When I put on the Toulon jersey for the first time it felt odd, really alien. They just weren't my colours."
Oliver is the thinking bloke's rugby man. He managed to acquire degrees in finance and physical education during his playing career but he concedes his concern at a rugby world devoid of the brainy young men who once represented universities like Oxford and Cambridge and then went on to become respected doctors, lawyers, academics, leaders in finance and such like.
"All that has gone now, you don't have the opportunity to do that anymore. And I think that the player at the end of it, although he will be richer in rugby experience, will be the poorer as a person overall. But it was always going to happen once rugby went professional.
"You are not going to get any more All Blacks who are Rhodes scholars in the future. My feeling is that if you are reasonably intelligent and you have got an inquiring mind, a professional rugby life is not enough now. It's a very uncertain path because of all sorts of things like injuries that you can't control. Fine, if a young man is a good player and feels he wants to have a go, I'd say 'OK, give it your best'. But weigh up your options. Because to me, the game still hasn't sorted out what it is going to do with all the 32-year-olds that will get spewed out the other end of the system, emerging without any qualifications or any real life experience.
"It was only when I applied to Oxford that I had to create a CV. I had never had a CV because I'd never had a job interview in my life."
Why has the All Blacks' aura remained, I asked him? "It's the connection with the past, we have never lost that. It runs deep within every All Black team I've ever been with. A big part of that is the black jersey and silver fern, nothing else on it. Those two things have always been there and are real earthing rods.
"But what Graham Henry and the senior players managed to do was have a real look at our history. We were being strangled and dictated to by our past; it was like, All Blacks do this and that. There was a fear of failure and expectation which became very inhibiting. We knew this issue was holding back our performances so we decided that although we should take forward a big chunk of our past, we couldn't be ruled by it. We had to create our own history."
But Oliver warns of the dangers of allowing commercialism to dilute the power of the All Blacks' jersey. "New Zealand could lose that aura, everything can change. Every international team has sold some portion on its jersey to a sponsor. I would imagine there's a hefty price tag attached to the All Blacks one and it must be tempting to the commercial people to cash in.
"But if that goes, to me it is the beginning of the end. We would lose that exclusivity and the effect of it would be diluted. It would be a short term gain for long term damage which would be irrevocable."
And the All Blacks are still setting the benchmark, he insists. "I suppose if you judge solely on World Cups, they're not," he grimaces. "But if you're talking about sustained excellence in the world game, then they are. Four years Tri-Nations champions is a fair record. Part of it is because they have a very smart coaching triumvirate." But there's another reason. "Richie McCaw is getting better all the time as a captain. And I think not having a whole layer of senior players staying around has helped him develop as a leader ... "
New Zealand rugby, he firmly believes, keeps bubbling up with new players, like some Rotorua geyser. But maybe not forever. "I suspect we can't have too many more go away, otherwise we will start to have some difficult times."
Coming to Oxford has enabled Anton Oliver to reflect upon his life.
"After Toulon, I've been trying to live my life more according to philosophies than actual goals. It's a case of just trying to be engaged in things as opposed to 'I want to do this by next May'. I am trying to follow some beliefs and philosophies and see where they take me.
" ... Now, I just try to live my life and see what comes of it. And I am so enjoying it all."
Peter Bills is a rugby writer for Independent News & Media in London
