Words: Dylan Cleaver
Design: Paul Slater

Sports reporting invites amateur psychology – it is an invitation fraught with hazards.

It is the great conceit of the sports writer – or any profile writer – that they believe they can sit opposite a fellow human for, if they’re lucky, an hour or so and encapsulate the essence of the subject.

The really good photographers often capture more of an athlete’s soul in a single still shot, than a writer can during the course of a 1500-word profile. This is a cliché but also a truism, especially in our national sport, where access is so contrived and artificial that it’s no surprise that its best practitioners often come across as, well, contrived and artificial.

This is mentioned not just to puff out the preamble, but as a qualifier. This list is not only the culmination of that conceit but is based on the flimsiest of evidence – an hour or two, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, spent in the company of various sporting figures.

It is also nebulous: after all, what makes for fascinating character?

I lean towards those on at least the periphery of sport who I’ve walked away thinking, “There’s more to this person than meets the eye.” Other journalists may have found some of these subjects empty vessels. Interest is in the eyes and ears of the beholder.

There is inherent bias in this list. I’ve always found flaws more interesting than perfection. I have nothing but deep respect and something bordering on awe for paragons like Richie McCaw and Hamish Bond but, to me, their unblemished excellence makes them borderline unrelatable.

The list also has a glaring gender imbalance. It seemed counterproductive to perform any mental contortions to include a quota. The uncomfortable truth is the overwhelming majority of sport I have covered is men’s.

The final caveat is probably the most important.

I don’t “know” these people in any real sense. It is interpretation solely through the journalist-subject lens.

While I’ve been writing about sports and sportspeople in earnest since 1996, I have rarely, if ever, befriended an elite athlete or coach.

This didn’t start as a conscious decision. As a callow reporter I might have had visions of entertaining cricketers and footy players with sparkling repartee over late-night pints at low-lit establishments, but distance became an increasingly important part of my armour as my responsibilities expanded from straight reportage to features and occasional criticism.

I am not saying my way is the best way; not at all. A good friend of mine who I happen to rate as the best chronicler of sport in modern New Zealand (well, if he’s not the best he’s in the top three), could pick up the phone and dial at least 100 elite athletes and start the conversation with a loud, “Gidday mate”. It works for him; it could never work for me.

With those qualifiers in mind, and in alphabetical order because ranking them would be truly crass, here are some of the most intriguing characters I have covered.

In the end Hansen did the very thing he most feared doing: he hung around too long and failed to heed the signs that the messages he was delivering to his team were either too predictable or they weren’t getting through.

“My gut feeling is [I won't carry on], but I won't know that until the time,” he said to me in the wake of the 2015 World Cup victory. “That's why I didn't sign on for the next four years. I don't expect the rugby union to have to pay me out if I leave. Let's get [to 2017] and talk about it then,”

I mention this not as a dig because what Hansen did as head coach between 2011-15, culminating in New Zealand’s only brilliant World Cup on northern soil, could stand up next to any coach’s work in any sport. Rugby was a puppet show and Hansen was pulling all the strings.

But deep down Hansen knew he had a shelf life and, well, he didn’t quite get out before he curdled.

As a man, Hansen had a lot of the qualities we look for in our rugby heroes, even if he was no more than a handy player himself. While his fabled gruffness, his strangled baritone and his pithy one-liners were an effective front and a nod to the past, he was actually a very modern coach.

A former cop and a lifelong rugby disciple, Hansen’s world view was small-‘c’ conservative but his leadership qualities were liberal. He was capable of reconstructing himself when it was required and this was particularly true when it came to his relationship with the media.

From his early days as a counterpuncher he’d learned to use journalists – some would even accuse him of manipulating them – to maximum advantage.

“Early on my mindset with the media was that I didn't trust them… As time goes on you work things out and realise that what they are is a conduit to the people you want to send messages to,” he would say.

By the time the Lions arrived on these shores in 2017, Hansen had been coaching the All Blacks for a decade-and-a-half and he’d been head coach for six. The mind games he seemed intent on playing with counterpart Warren Gatland seemed to be theatre for theatre’s sake rather than clever. His team drew a series they should have won comfortably.

I’m not sure if looking back with regret is ever something Hansen does, but in quiet moments he might ponder if that was the time to go.

There were whispers that never went far that he’d upset a few senior players with digs at expats Brad Shields and Bundee Aki, and that the annual end-of-year tours to the Europe had become a bit laboured.

In a full-circle moment, he got stuck into a reporter following an imagined slight after the All Blacks not-even-close loss to England in the World Cup semifinal. It could as easily have been a “You’re either with us or against us” moment from a decade earlier.

Still, it should never erase the good stuff. Hansen’s evolution from a straight-up-the-guts rugby man to an engaging and entertaining spokesman for his team and his sport was fascinating to watch.

His curious brand of charisma struck a chord with the public and he had the results to deserve deification.

To return to the opening point, after compiling the record he had, it was perfectly logical to assume he was the best man to lead New Zealand to Japan last year. It’s a very human foible to think you’ve always got one last great trick up your sleeve.

Turns out it wasn’t an ace.

I covered Kearney more as a player than I did as a coach but I believe the qualities that made him such a valuable chip on the field are the same ones that are holding him back as a coach.

You wouldn’t win many games with a team full of Stephen Kearneys, but equally every team is much better if it has a one or two of his ilk in the pack. An industrious, tough, smart second-rower, Kearney demanded high standards from himself and teammates.

His stock-in-trade was old-school, front-foot, mistake-free football with a few angular elbows and the occasional offload thrown in.

You suspect that is the sort of league he envisages his teams playing too, though he has rarely had the personnel, certainly at NRL club level, to engage successfully in those sorts of arm wrestles. Whenever his team’s strike adversity, the shackles come on (and it’s one thing to see your team lose, but it’s another to see them lose boringly).

He was such a heady player, and is such thoughtful company in the odd one-on-one chats I’ve enjoyed with him, that you wonder why he hasn’t been able to translate those smarts to consistent coaching success in the NRL.

Stephen Kearney's mission to transform the 'not-so-lovable losers'

Perhaps it's bad luck. He went into the sort of viper’s nest at Parramatta that has poisoned far more experienced campaigners and at the Warriors he will always be hamstrung by the inability to recruit the best Australians.

But I suspect he also holds the reins too firmly, and as a result his teams tighten up when the pressure comes on. He’s worked with “super” coaches like Craig Bellamy and Wayne Bennett who have built winning programmes through an extraordinarily disciplined approach. It just might not be what the Warriors need.

With another lost season looming (even before the NRL shutdown the Warriors looked like second-class citizens), you wonder how much patience owners Autex Industries will have, and you wonder how many more NRL head-coaching opportunities he will get.

I wouldn’t like to see him go. His default setting is a granite-like expression but when cracks appear and a smile spreads across that face, it’s a magnificent sight.

Kearney also has a great line in self-deprecating humour that is often used as a shield to deflect further attempts to probe for what makes him tick. The guy nearly died, probably should have, after falling from the upstairs balcony of a Carcassonne hotel when he was on tour with the Kiwis in 1993, landing on his head.

Ask him how it has affected his outlook on life, and this is the sort of thing you’ll get: “There's still bruising there but it’s a part of the brain which they say doesn’t get used. In my case, it could be all of it.”

Kearney’s got a big brain: as a coach, I’m yet to be convinced he has accessed the best parts of it.

Fouhy will occupy a footnote in New Zealand sporting history but he will go to his grave feeling with the right environment he should have been so much more than that.

He’d probably be right, too, though he was such a complex character I wonder if he was destined to be perpetually disappointed in his chase for the unattainable: perfection.

Fouhy had an excellent K1 1000m career. He won a world championship in 2003, Olympic silver the following year and finished on the podium more than he finished off it over the course of many world cup events.

There’s also a nagging feeling that it should have been more.

To say that Fouhy’s relationship with the godfather of New Zealand canoe racing, Ian Ferguson, was strained, would be an understatement. The problem was that Ferguson’s role as national coach, his status as untouchable icon and his son’s own place on the team meant that Fouhy was forced to orbit within that considerable that sphere of influence.

Kayaking: Fouhy ends silence over campaign against him

It would be wrong to place all the blame on Ferguson. Even Fouhy’s supporters in New Zealand’s small canoe-racing community could be taken aback by the Taumarunui paddler’s intensity and tunnel vision.

Some would claim that single-mindedness spilled into selfishness but Fouhy, for me, remains the gold-standard example of what happens when you try to create one-size-fits-all sports systems for human beings who have minds of their own.

It doesn’t work.

Fouhy’s battles with the Fergusons and Canoe Racing NZ eventually became battles with Government funding agency Sparc (now Sport NZ). Fouhy had funding pulled from him; he said he wanted to give it back anyway. It all became ugly and above all else tremendously sad.

The last time I saw Fouhy was the London Olympics. He’d spent a big chunk of the previous four years fighting officialdom. He looked beaten down by the one thing that should have elevated him – sport on the world’s biggest stage.

If there’s a quote from Fouhy that sums up the internal conflict that played out behind his high-profile battles, it’s this:

“When I won the world title I was in something like heaven for a week,” he said, “but after a while I realised there were plenty of people out there doing a lot of special things and winning a kayaking world championship was not right up there among them.”

It feels a bit fraudulent to include Oliver because I’m pretty certain I have never sat down in person and had a “one-on-one” interview with him. That is my loss, not his.

I was captivated by a “chat” we had in Marseille at the 2007 Rugby World Cup, but then again I’m guessing the 20-odd other journalists who were circled around him were equally enthralled by the way he gave pause after each question before giving honest, unflinching and, in some cases, elaborate answers. This is not what we had become used to at All Black press days.

Rugby: Anton enjoys his Cup valediction

His autobiography, Inside, was remarkable for how he opened up about his vulnerability. It also was groundbreaking for its portrayal of some of the less celebrated aspects of All Black culture, like excessive drinking and senior players going out of their way to make rookies uncomfortable.

He lanced a few boils too, particularly his fraught relationship with Highlanders coach Laurie Mains, and what he considered to be an unhealthy environment created by former All Blacks coaches John Mitchell and Robbie Deans.

In some quarters Oliver was seen as a fomenter of rebellion but he was really just ahead of his time.

He straddled the amateur-professional divide but found that although rugby had turned the cash taps on in 1996, many of the attitudes and team environments carried hangovers – literally at times – from the amateur era. He chafed at this.

I suspect he was also one of the first to realise that being defined as an “All Black” or even as a “rugby player” was not an altogether healthy way to go through life. Sure, it had amazing perks but it also came with consequences.

Saying he had a new-age mind in an old-school body might be a bit trite, but there’s probably some truth to it.

I once tried to recruit Oliver to be a columnist for the Herald on Sunday. I thought his command of introspection (and the English language) would provide a unique voice that the sport needed. In those days, columns were money for jam for retired players. He politely declined.

After all the conflicts he endured with coaching regimes, perhaps he felt it was time for his opinion to be best left unsaid.

It is an admirable sentiment, but wrong.

Rugby is still crying out for independent voices like his.