Rugby:The Hurricane who became a Lion

Riki Flutey says he still has a lot to learn from the masters of the game. Photo / Getty Images.

Pennyhill Park Hotel near Bagshot in Surrey evokes Te Aute College in the mind of Riki Flutey.

The 29-year-old is at the Pennyhill Park reception checking in as part of the Lions and feeling exactly the same mixture of excitement and apprehension that he remembers from his first day at Te Aute in Hawkes Bay, as a wide-eyed 12-year-old from Wairarapa.

Flutey's talents as a rugby player served him well at Te Aute, where the dream that had begun to develop when he was only 7, that one day he might play for the All Blacks, gathered momentum. He played for the North Island Under-16s against the South Island, after which a team to represent New Zealand was selected, and he still remembers his stomach flipping as he stood there while the coach read out names. His was one of the last to be announced, just when he was choking back his disappointment. "I was so excited. It was amazing. Wow, I was going to travel to a new country, to Australia, wearing the silver fern!"

His eyes glitter even now at the recollection; even as an England player about to visit South Africa with the Lions, he is too honest, or guileless, or both, to play down the passionate desire, that bubbled inside him for years, to play for the All Blacks.

Nor did it ever seem as if that desire would remain unrequited. He played for the national team at every age level, for New Zealand schools, and for New Zealand Maori. His schoolboy teammates included Aaron Mauger, Keven Mealamu and Richie McCaw, all destined to wear the silver fern at the highest level. But not Flutey.

He joined the Hurricanes where he was a victim of his versatility, wearing 9, 10, 12 and sometimes 15, never nailing down one position. In the end, like a Kiwi Dick Whittington, he decided to seek his fortune in London (first with London Irish and then Wasps, although next season he will play for Brive). And with his selection first for England and now the Lions, the decision to switch hemispheres, which took much soul-searching and the encouragement of his mentor, the former All Black hooker Norm Hewitt, is triumphantly vindicated.

So here he is at Pennyhill Park, the neatest of cases now deposited in what will remain the tidiest of rooms, for Flutey is by his own admission "anal" about tidiness.

He declares himself, again with shades of that 12-year-old on his first day at boarding school, "really excited, a bit nervous, but basically just happy the wait's over and I'm finally in camp".

In camp, moreover, with a distinctive asterisk by his name. For if all goes to plan and Flutey is picked at inside-centre in South Africa, he will become the first man to play for and against the Lions, having come on as a replacement halfback for Wellington on the Lions' ill-starred 2005 tour. He wasn't on the field for long that Wednesday evening, and his team lost 23-6, but it gave him a taste of what Lions tours were all about.

"I remember they shut down the main street afterwards so 35,000 supporters could party there," he says. "It was unreal."

And four short years later, having qualified as a UK resident, Flutey is now pulling on a Lions jersey himself. Even more unreal. But how can a New Zealander, whose representative rugby was fuelled by patriotism and pride, carry the same partisanship into a game for England or the Lions?

"I'm showing my talent against the best in the world on an international stage, which is something I've always wanted to do," says Flutey, sidestepping the question as nimbly as he might an opposition back.

I persevere. He might have learned the words to God Save the Queen, but it is not part of his identity. Playing for the Lions was never an ambition, simply because it was never an option. Obviously I'm not suggesting he is any less committed in the tackle or on the break than his teammates, but how does he reconcile his background - and its most obvious manifestation, his narrow Wairarapa vowels - with representing the British Isles?

"I'm as proud to represent England as all the guys next to me," he says, flatly. "And I'm proud to be in the Lions."

He pauses, aware that he is still not meeting the question head-on. "I've known for a long time that my mother was adopted at birth and that her birth father was English," he adds, softly. "I've always had that in the back of my mind, that I am part of this culture ..."

It is, nevertheless, a culture that seemed alien when he first arrived, both on the field and off. "In that first year I really missed the way we did things at the Hurricanes. The style of rugby there is a hell of a lot quicker. But after that I really started to enjoy playing for London Irish."

Off the field, it helps that he and his wife Sarah now have two young children and have put down roots, yet still there is foreign-ness all round. "I walk the streets of Twickenham and see kids with soccer balls. It's soccer, soccer, soccer. But growing up in New Zealand every kid had a rugby ball. At school in the winter the only options were netball for girls and rugby for boys ... and sport was compulsory."

Flutey doesn't remember having toys as a child. "Only bags and bags of rugby balls. And fishing nets. I used to wake up at five and go down to the lake whitebaiting for a few hours before school, catching my own breakfast. And after I'd set my nets I'd make some goalposts out of driftwood on the sand and kick goals."

His father was a shearing contractor, running several shearing gangs, and sometimes taking one or two of his seven children with him to chase errant sheep into the pens, which might just be where the Flutey sidestep was perfected. His hero was the great All Black centre Joe Stanley.

"In 1987 the World Cup squad came down to Lake Ferry, where we lived. They were billeted out for the weekend with different families and I was gutted we didn't get one, but I still got to play touch [rugby] with them. I was like, 'Yeah, that's who I want to be.' Joe Stanley especially. I loved the way he was, the way he played with his collar up ..."

He is now a role model himself, of course, and yet he remains engagingly impressionable. "I'm going to be playing alongside the best players in the world and I'll take a hell of a lot from it," he enthuses. "Rubbing shoulders with Brian O'Driscoll ... I'll be like a sponge, soaking up everything."

He has already soaked up plenty, he adds, from his former coaches at Wasps, Ian McGeechan and Shaun Edwards, who are now on the Lions payroll.

"They've helped me to understand patterns of play more, to think on my feet. People think that as professionals we should know everything, but I want to go to training and pick up something new every day, and that's what I get from Shaun and Geech. Their method is all about understanding a basic game plan, but having vision if the game plan goes out the window. They have faith in individual flair."

And yet the individual with perhaps the most flair, a Wasps teammate with whom Flutey made his England debut, is conspicuously absent from Pennyhill Park, and indeed from Martin Johnson's first-choice (and second-choice, and third-choice) England XV this summer. Would a player as precociously gifted as Danny Cipriani have been overlooked by the All Blacks, I wonder?

"Well, Danny's an amazing talent, and he's got stuff that no one else has really got, but he's still got a pin in his leg that bothers him a little bit, so maybe he's being honest with the coaches, I don't know."

As for the extra-curricular junk that has gained Cipriani some unwanted media attention, he could do worse than listen to some worldly advice from the man from Wairarapa. Flutey has been there, and some. On a December 2001 tour to Argentina, he even wound up in jail.

"I was a youngster coming into professional rugby," he recalls, "from earning nothing to earning a fair bit, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Christian Cullen, Jonah Lomu. And yeah, there was a big drinking and gambling culture, which I fell into."

Aged 21, in the Argentine town of Rosario while touring with Wellington Academy, Flutey had an altercation with a local teenager, breaking the lad's nose and fracturing his eye socket.

He spent four days in a police cell, where he resolved to change his lifestyle irrevocably, and duly did, but his epiphany cut no ice with the Argentine authorities. After coming out of jail he was placed under house arrest, until the Wellington rugby union stumped up the $85,000 bail.

"I remember hearing that I was the main item on on the news back home for a whole week, even ahead of Bin Laden, and that's when I thought 'Oh my God'. I knew I'd stuffed up, but I had a fantastic support network.

"Norm Hewitt was fantastic. He made me focus on rugby again. And my girlfriend, now my wife, went through it all with me. But it's been written up that I was a wild kid, the angriest kid in the world, and that was never the case."

He gazes at me, as if challenging me to contradict him. "What it came down to was a country boy moving to the big city ... and getting carried away."

Little did anyone know how much mileage remained in his journey.

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