Chris Cairns, just being honest

Career's end, in the dressing room of memories. Picture / Greg Bowker

About the time I am sitting here at my computer writing about Chris Cairns, the cricketer is sitting in the dressing room at Eden Park. He's putting on his right sock, then his left sock, then his right boot, then his left. He puts his right pad on first, and "I always make sure I put my chest guard on a particular way." I can't, obviously, see him doing this but I'd put money on it.

This is not superstition, just "routine". Then he says, "I suppose they are a superstition."

So I say, "Hey, tomorrow, try it the other way around. Just to see what happens. Just for the last time."

He looks faintly horrified. "No, you see, I could never do that."

No, of course he couldn't. That would be tempting fate. We saw Cairns the day before that last game when he said of the park: "If she can just give me one more performance then I'll be happy, but if it's not to be, it's not to be."

It wasn't quite to be, but he'd have been happy enough with that mad win, of sorts, against the West Indies.

We have an hour with him, easily given despite the fact that he did media much of the previous day. He's doing the farewell circuit with good grace and impeccable manners. He says the story broke before he could announce his retirement so it has turned into a very long farewell. "My mates are sick of it. They said, 'Just bugger off, it's painful'."

He, though, is "not sick of it, no. Gosh, I mean, I'm just really humbled by it. You never expect these things, and the fact that people have taken the time to do stuff, it means you have had an impact and, umm, it's nice."

I do like that "gosh". I just don't believe it, or the ones that follow. But he is on his very best behaviour and he's not going to muck up his farewell interviews by swearing in front of the media, is he now? Although he will slip a tiny bit later and use a proper swear word, he manages to be incredibly controlled and completely open. And I do believe that sweet little "nice".

This being honest means we spend much of the hour talking about failure. Failure is his mantra. "See, that's the ironic thing, it's not success that teaches you how to do well, it's your ability to deal with failure. I've always said that failure is your biggest teacher but it depends how quickly you pick up on your lessons."

If this seems an odd topic in a valedictory interview, well, that's Cairns. He is odd, but no odder, probably, than many top athletes.

He's always off in some zone somewhere, and an interview is no different. So we are in Zone Cairns, in which he kindly removes the top of his head so we can have a poke around inside the intricate and arcane workings of his brain.

He needs only the slightest encouragement to do this. If he's doing an interview, that's his "optimal state of now" for now. This is what a batter is aiming for when he faces the near impossibility of playing a cricket ball. "It's quite funny, you try to control your state so you can be natural. Because if you can control your state you can allow your body to do what it has to do because your mind can function to allow your body to do what it's got to do. But if you're trying to control it, invariably you'll fail."

Later I say, "You're a funny lot, you sports people." He is not a bit offended. "I think people not in sport would go, 'What the hell's he on about?"' And besides, what a funny life he's lived for the 16 years of his cricketing career. "I think you go through a variety of different personas, you really do. I mean, you're flattered, you do get arrogant with it. You know, we live in a real bubble. We stay at very nice hotels, we have courtesy cars. You get an allowance, you get paid pretty well and you're pretty young when you get those things put upon you. And there's bugger all that we have to do that normal people have to do, and we're cocooned quite a lot."

So there's that and there is also the strangely schizophrenic state that is being the all-rounder. Cairns is an extrovert, "I think that's my character." Yet batters are inward-looking, so he is this odd mix of the natural and the imposed character.

One thing about extroverts: they need an audience. And if people don't like you much then you won't have a particularly appreciative audience.

We went through a time of not liking Cairns much. He can still recall, in painful detail, his appearance at a shopping mall in Riccarton in 1996. There was a decent crowd and the other celebrities got decent amounts of applause. He'd been out "till all hours of the night, during a test match". A few days later, at the mall, "when they read my name out there wouldn't have been six people who clapped".

This, he says, was "pretty much the turning point". From being - how to put this? - a bit of a difficult bugger. Because he was, wasn't he? "Oh, look, I was ... At that time I never really dealt with my sister's death you know." Louise was killed in 1993 when a truck hit the train she was on. Cairns is setting up a foundation in her name, something he now has the time to devote to. He didn't take time to grieve, "it was just good old-fashioned Kiwi male stuff, you know. When I look back it was almost a case of depression. In some respects I was just angry. A lot of my behaviour was so irrational."

This was beyond, he thinks, the peculiar demands of a game in which "you have to have a huge desire and drive that borders on selfishness - because it's only about you. And when you're younger that can often be misconstrued as arrogance."

He has spent a lot of time thinking about such things, seeking answers. "Oh, I'm not adverse. I'm very open-minded when it comes to exploring what will give me an edge." He's seen colour therapists, numerologists. "I've had people running crystals over my injuries and boiling dock leaves and ... witch doctors." Goodness, and did it work? "No. See, a big part of it is the placebo side of things."

I'm not sure that many other top athletes would be quite so open about seeing witch doctors, but he says he decided, around the time of the mall episode, that he'd "just try to be honest. If you are that way inclined you can't be caught out too much."

So if he is going to talk honestly about his difficult bugger days, there's no hint of being irritated. He does say that "I'm not the person I was 10 years ago. Look, I mean, you look back a decade ago to where you were ... " But because he has lived so long in the public eye, that person who no longer exists to him lives on. "Absolutely, because it's on the record."

And while he might not recognise the person he was a decade ago, anyone who knew him as a 6-year-old might not think he'd changed too much.

From that age he knew what he wanted to be: "The best all-rounder in the world." He agrees that he was a "single-minded, serious little boy. Yeah, and that was always the driver."

At the end of his career we will inevitably end up at the beginning of it: those father/son comparisons.

He says he's always been OK about them, that he has never felt he lived in his dad's shadow. These are the observations of others, "absolutely".

Anyway, I suppose he thinks his dad's the greatest cricketer and that his dad thinks he is. He finds this pretty amusing, although "Oh, I think statistically there's no comparison." On paper, "everything I've done has superseded my father. But I read Pavarotti's book, and Pavarotti said in his town in Italy they regard his father as being far superior. So regardless of what he's done, the memories of Pavarotti's father are that he was the best."

We haven't always loved Cairns - not the way we loved his dad, and whatever he says, that must have been hard to live with.

But what a nice answer. And what a generous interview. If I should see him in a shopping mall I'll make sure to give him a big round of applause.