Rugby great Sean Fitzpatrick, who headed home from London this month for a Kiwi summer by the beach, talks to Jane Phare about rugby and how sport is used by a global charity to bring about remarkable change in the lives of troubled youths.
Sean ‘Fitzy’ Fitzpatrick is barbecuing chicken in his shorts outside his Notting Hill home in west London when the Herald first calls.
“It’s -1C out here. It’s freezing.”
His neighbours - who probably think he’s “bloody mad” - must surely hear the customary bellow of Fitzy laughter that follows.
Why is he cooking dinner in the dark in sub-zero temperatures?
“Because it’s a Kiwi thing to do.” More laughter.
Fitzpatrick might have lived in England for the past 20 years but New Zealand is never far from his psyche.
Neither are the All Blacks. He watches all the games, often in person.
Last month he flew to Turin to watch the All Blacks beat Italy 29-11.
Commentators might have described it as a “scrappy” game amid criticism that the All Blacks should do better, but Fitzpatrick disagrees.
Of the current team he says, “I think they’re really good. I’m really impressed.”
Think of the team’s history, he says. In the past 25 years there’s been the unbroken coaching lineage of Graham Henry, Steve Hansen and Ian Foster with the same management team for more than 20 years.
This year there’s been a new management team, new coaches and new players, he says.
“It’s just taking time - for everyone, not just the players. But they’ve made real progress. I love what I’m seeing. I’m really proud of them. We’re building a team to run the World Cup in three years’ time basically.”
In September, Fitzpatrick, 61, flew to Johannesburg to watch the All Blacks lose 31-27 to Springboks in the Rugby Championship on what marked the 30th anniversary of the breakdown of apartheid.
The rugby ground is now called Emirates Airline Park but to Fitzpatrick it’s Ellis Park, and always will be.
It was there, in 1995, that he witnessed Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, appear in the stadium wearing a green Springboks jersey with captain Francois Pienaar’s number six on the back. The only black player in the team was winger Chester Williams.
Up in the stands, the vast majority of the crowd that watched the Springboks beat the All Blacks (many of whom were stricken with food poisoning), 15-12 in the Rugby World Cup final were white.
Only the year before, centuries of white rule had come to an end when black South Africans were allowed to vote for the first time. Their new president had been imprisoned for 27 years for challenging the apartheid system.
Thirty years later, in Fitzpatrick’s Ellis Park, 75% of the crowd watching the Springboks play the All Blacks this year were black or coloured. Fitzpatrick attributes that progress to Mandela and his belief that sport had the power to unite a divided country.
“And it was our sport, it was rugby that changed that country,” he says.
Five years after Mandela appeared in the green jersey, Fitzpatrick saw Mandela again, this time at a black-tie ceremony in Monaco for the Laureus World Sports Awards, celebrating excellence in sport. It was a meeting that would change Fitzpatrick’s relatively limited view of the world and the role sports could play in helping social change.
After retiring from rugby in 1997, the former All Black captain was invited to join the Laureus World Sports Academy, founded by South African billionaire and sports fan Johann Rupert, of the Swiss-based luxury goods company Richemont that owns brands like Cartier and Montblanc.
In 2000, Rupert hand-picked 35 of the people he considered the greatest sportspeople in the world, inviting them to become foundation members of Laureus.
Joining Fitzpatrick in that group was the late Sir Peter Blake who formed Team New Zealand, won the America’s Cup twice, and won the 1989/1990 Whitbread Round the World race on Steinlager 2.
The Laureus academy awards honour inspirational sporting achievements across seven categories, from a list drawn up by more than 1000 sports journalists from 70 countries. The resulting shortlist is then voted on by the academy sporting legends.
Sport is a language youth can understand
At that inaugural award ceremony Mandela, the founding patron, told the audience that sport had the power to change the world, to create hope and unite people in a way that little else did.
“It speaks to youth in a language they understand,” he said. “It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.”
Behind the scenes, Mandela urged the academy’s sporting legends to do more, challenging them to use their reputations and sport to help bring about social change, particularly with a young generation either heading for trouble, living in poverty or without hope of a decent future.
As a result of that challenge, the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation was formed, a London-based global charity that has since raised more than $447 million to support 300 projects in 45 countries, including New Zealand. Chaired by Fitzpatrick, who also chairs the sports academy, the foundation has changed the lives of 7 million children in the past 25 years.
“We live by [Mandela’s] words,” Fitzpatrick says of the academy’s elite sports members, now 69 in number, and its 200 ambassadors.
In New Zealand, Laureus helps support the Billy Graham Youth Foundation which runs the Naenae Boxing Academy in Wellington, now run by Graham’s son David.
Apart from boxing, the programme aims to teach young people life skills, discipline, respect and the importance of physical fitness.
Laureus also supports Springboard, a programme in north Rodney that former dairy farmer Gary Diprose started more than 20 years ago, to help at-risk youth escape a cycle of crime and minimal future prospects.
Through boxing and using mentors - some of whom have come through the programme themselves - kids learn life skills, are educated and helped into careers.
Fitzpatrick says the projects are examples of programmes that work, otherwise Laureus would not fund them. Those applying for grants need to pass a rigorous assessment process and regularly prove positive ongoing outcomes.
Chairing the foundation is a role that has changed Fitzpatrick’s life, widening the view of, by his own admission, the sheltered Catholic boy who went to Mt Carmel School and Sacred Heart College in Auckland where he made the 1st XV.
His work has taken him to places he never would have visited otherwise, and shown him horrors and struggles he never would have known about.
In West Africa’s Sierra Leone he met teenagers whose hands had been hacked off by rebels during the 11-year civil war that ended in 2002.
“I’d never really seen how horrible people are,” Fitzpatrick says.
The foundation launched a project called the Right to Play, to give the children of Sierra Leone a chance to be children.
He took rugby balls and another academy member, former American professional skateboarder Tony ‘Birdman’ Hawk, took skateboards.
“There were children running round with one hand. The rebels would come in at night, go into the bedrooms, wake the kids up and if they didn’t go with the rebels [as child soldiers] they would chop one of their hands off.”
The project’s aim was to give kids back the right to be children.
“They’d never heard of the All Blacks, they’d never heard of Sean Fitzpatrick or Tony Hawk but it put a smile on their faces. And that was purely through sport.”
In London, the foundation has funded Midnight Basketball, originally launched by academy member and former professional basketball player Michael Jordan in Chicago.
A rundown gymnasium in a closed-up school on the east side of London has been restored, opening at 11pm each night. Locals and street kids come to play basketball, have something to eat, get clothes and be guided by mentors until 5am each day.
“It keeps them off the streets and gets them involved in sport.”
Similar basketball projects were launched in Gaza before the war with Israel. “Just putting Palestinians and Israelis together through sport. They realise they actually quite like each other.”
In Belfast, too, sport has been used to bring Catholics and Protestants together.
“All of a sudden the 10-year-old finds that actually he likes Sean Fitzpatrick who’s a Catholic and ‘my Dad’s always taught me to hate you guys',” Fitzpatrick says.
He took his daughters Eva and Grace, now both living in Los Angeles, to see a project in Bonnievale in South Africa where the kids are taught rugby and boxing three times a week.
“You can see the difference from actually going to see the project. The difference in the kids who are involved in the rugby and boxing compared to the other kids is just mind-blowing.”
‘As girls in our village, we can now dream’
In rural Jharkhand in eastern India, hundreds of girls have had their lives turned around by the Yuwa project, another that Laureus funds.
In a state where female illiteracy is high, many girls don’t attend school and are destined to become child brides as young as 11, hundreds of girls have been taught to play football.
They attend the Yuwa School, learn English, leadership and employment skills, with several earning scholarships to top universities.
Now, says Fitzpatrick, child brides are a thing of the past and girls are educated.
When a group of the graduates attended the Laureus awards five years ago in Monaco, one of them told him, “As girls in our village, we can now dream. There was nothing to dream about before.”
In Mumbai, Laureus has supported the Magic Bus project in the slums since 2004, teaching kids to play football, and providing food, clothing and schooling in an effort to save them from child prostitution and sweatshop labour.
Laureus also supports the Play Academy programme in Tokyo, with Nike and tennis pro Naomi Osaka, encouraging girls to play sport.
Fitzpatrick admits he could talk forever about the various projects the foundation supports, limited only by how much money it can raise.
Laureus relies on corporate sponsorship, fundraising and donations from high net-worth individuals. Mercedes Benz dealerships and finance companies in the UK donate $6.70 to Laureus for every car sold.
And the academy uses its high-profile members - like Boris Becker, Ian Botham, Missy Franklin, Jack Nicklaus, Sachin Tendulkar, Lennox Lewis, Martina Navratilova, Brian O’Driscoll and Steve Waugh - to appear at fundraising events.
There is still much work to be done for the foundation, which now chews up a fair bit of Fitzpatrick’s time. Spreading the word to encourage donations and corporate sponsorship is part of his role.
But for now he and his wife Bronwyn are content to catch up with family and friends at their Manly holiday home in Whangaparaoa over a long Kiwi summer. Undoubtedly the talk will turn to rugby.
‘Fitzy’ sees many of his former teammates like Andrew Mertens, John Kirwan and Justin Marshall when they pass through London. He regularly catches up with Zinzan Brooke who still lives in Windsor where the Fitzpatrick family settled when they first arrived in the UK, and who last month performed a haka in a pub in Norwich before the All Black test against England at Twickenham.
Fitzpatrick tries not to miss an All Blacks game, describing the current squad as “lovely kids”.
He played rugby with some of their fathers including Wallace Sititi’s father Lemalu Semo Sititi, former captain of Manu Samoa, and Caleb Clarke’s father, Auckland, Blues and All Blacks midfielder Eroni Clarke.
“My God, I feel like an old man,” Fitzpatrick laughs.
Apart from rugby, the work of the Laureus foundation is never far from his mind. He sees projects similar to those he has witnessed oversees working well in New Zealand, using sport to give kids an alternative to ram raids, burglaries and tagging.
He has Christchurch in mind as a Sport for Good model city to join 10 others - including London, Chicago and Paris - in which Laureus partners with city authorities to launch community initiatives to improve the lives of young people through sport.
In Christchurch, for example, sport will help with what Fitzpatrick calls “post-disaster integration”.
After the Christchurch earthquakes, large numbers of labourers and tradespeople were brought in from other countries to help rebuild the stricken city.
Some of those workers have not easily integrated with the local community, an issue where getting people together to play sport can help, Fitzpatrick says.
‘I take my hat off to them for trying’
Fitzpatrick is aware of the Government’s boot-camp trial but says he doesn’t know enough detail to comment.
“I take my hat off to them for trying to do something because it’s needed.”
What he does know is the success that Laureus-funded, sports-oriented programmes have had in the lives of young people whose community had all but given up on them. He thinks there is huge potential in New Zealand for similar sports-focused programmes.
“It’s what we do all over the world, and it works. We wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t help change lives.”
Sport, he says, is a game-changer.
“We’ve got to try these things. We’ve got to do something because the kids of today, it’s a concern.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.