Part-way through his 13-year stint as All Blacks team doctor, John Mayhew gave up reading players’ autobiographies because “so much of what’s in them is patently untrue”.
I seriously doubt he’d have that problem with former All Black Carl Hayman’s memoir. You want the truth and nothing but? How about brain damage, alcoholism, rehab, relapse, spousal abuse resulting in a suspended jail sentence, marriage break-up, mental breakdown, suicidal impulses?
Head On is a bleak, unsparing rise-and-fall story of a superstar whose life has gone tragically wrong – from being one of the game’s highest-paid players, widely regarded as the best tighthead prop in the business, to an emotionally broken, fearful man who forgets his son’s name and can find himself driving on a road to nowhere, his destination and purpose lost in impenetrable brain fog.
Hayman has early-onset dementia and probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease. He’s one of almost 400 athletes, mainly ex-rugby players, engaged in a lawsuit asserting that the sporting authorities “were negligent in failing to take reasonable action in order to prevent players from permanent injury caused by repetitive concussive and sub-concussive blows”. Another high-profile litigant is former England hooker Steve Thompson, who has no recollection of winning the 2003 World Cup.
As far as he can recall, Hayman suffered only one big, symptomatic concussion in his professional career. However, he believes he copped close to 150,000 sub-concussive head rattlers, many of them from smashing into unyielding, often unfit-for-purpose scrum machines at training.
In 2013, American football’s governing body, the NFL, paid $US765 million to settle a lawsuit brought by thousands of ex-players who claimed they were suffering the after-effects of participating in a gladiatorial spectacle that generates colossal wealth for its owners. (In 2022, the average worth of the 22 privately owned franchises was estimated by Forbes magazine at $US4.47 billion.) The settlement spared the NFL a trial at which it would have had to address the charge that it suppressed evidence of a link between concussion and brain injuries.
Hayman’s experience at Toulon is a cautionary tale that should be required reading for Kiwi players weighing up juicy offers from France, which, unlike most of the rest of the rugby world, appears to be awash with money.
There was a difficult adjustment period during which Toulon’s mercurial owner, Mourad Boudjellal, would ask coaching staff, “Where’s the Carl Hayman we used to see on TV?” That was mild compared with Boudjellal’s withering reaction to the club’s modest return on investment in All Black wing Julian Savea: “I’m going to ask for a DNA test. They must’ve swapped him on the plane. If I were him, I would apologise and go back to my home country.”
Rugby and Toulon gave with one hand – Hayman became an adopted son, the cornerstone and eventually captain of a dominant team that filled the trophy cabinet at Stade Mayol – and took with the other: “Toulon broke me. I was a willing participant … If I could stand up, I played, and I did that week after week after week for 10 months of the year for five years straight. I was, in effect, a useful slab of meat.”
In an afterword, Hayman’s collaborator, Dylan Cleaver, expresses the hope that his subject’s “searing honesty” has made for “uncomfortable reading”. Mission accomplished. There’s a bit too much about Hayman’s labours to restore his 70-year-old boat, an overextended metaphor for his personal ongoing and uncertain salvage operation: “I might not have her good looks, but I’m dinged up, requiring a bit more work than I can imagine, but I think I’m worth persevering with.”
There are a couple of distracting detours, but otherwise precious little light relief, although we are treated to this vignette of former All Blacks and Highlanders coach and ray of sunshine Laurie Mains: “Laurie hated doors slamming and he hated people laughing. But of all the things he hated, and Laurie hated a lot of things, the thing he hated most was cheese.”
Forget about skipping over the rawness to get to the happy ending. There isn’t one. There is hope, but it’s tempered by the reality of irreversible brain damage: “I’m not the same person I was when I was younger. In five years’ time, it’s highly likely I won’t be the same person who wrote this book.”
Head On is a desperately sad self-portrait of a fallen giant, brought down by the very thing he excelled at and loved. A 43-year-old father whose children say “Daddy’s gone to Daddyland” when he lapses into vacant unresponsiveness. A sporting hero with a perfect life and perfect family who now dreads becoming a burden and has been reduced to this: “All I do is worry about the future.”
Head On: Rugby, Dementia and the Hidden cost of success, by Carl Hayman (HarperCollins, $39.99)
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