Peter Fitzsimons: 'I do not define myself as a rugby player'

Peter Fitzsimons, erstwhile rugby player, teller of stories and a consummate Aussie. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

On Thursday, Peter Fitzsimons, the former Wallaby turned biographer and mouth for hire, was at Eden Park, speaking at a University Rugby Club do.

He was sitting in the lobby having a jolly time flogging his new tome, shouting, "Buy my book, you mongrel!" I was supposed to be taking him away. He had a bottle of wine on his book-signing table. At four o'clock he was one glass in. It was just possible this wasn't his first bottle.

I knew we weren't going far. I managed to get him to a couch by grabbing the bottle and waving it in front of him. I know how to wrangle an Australian but that would be my only point of the day.

He is a multi-talented fellow. He managed to talk to fans, sign books and talk at me without once losing his train of thought. He said: "I'm probably more pissed right now than you think I am. And I'm not slurring my words!"

He said, in response to one of his own lines of investigation - about his political views; "broadly left of centre" since you asked - "I'm hardly a chardonnay socialist." I said I'd read that he was. "I think," he said, gesturing at the by-now-almost-empty bottle, "that's cabernet sauvignon."

"Is it?" I said. "I wouldn't know. You haven't offered me a glass. Bloody Australians."

He gestured at the bottle again, vaguely, as though it had nothing to do with him, said "thank you" to yet another fan congratulating him on his wonderful speech, then continued where he'd left off. "No, but my point is ..."

I was too busy sulking about not having been offered a drop to remember what he'd been going on about when I so rudely interrupted. But the great thing about him is that he always remembers where he's up to in his speechifying, down to the commas.

He said, when I arrived, "It'll be interesting to be on the other side of the microphone". Ha, ha. I later asked if he was a comedian and he said he wasn't. But because he's always coming over here to slag us off, and taking our money for doing it, I thought an interview with him might involve a bit of banter. I'd forgotten the thing about people who talk for a living: An audience of one is still an audience.

He told me a bad joke. "Did you hear the price of New Zealand lamb went up today? It's $2.49 an hour."

I recited an old one from Andy Haden about how tragic it was when Fitzy's library burned down and he lost all of his books: "And the tragedy is, he hadn't finished colouring in one of them."

Is that funny? "Not bad. I've heard it 100 times before and it hasn't been told until I've told it."

He is being funny but, like most performers, he likes to be the one to tell the jokes. People must expect him to be a larger- than-life character, all the time, which might be difficult.

"No, it's not." Because he is like that all of the time? "I tell stories." I suspect, though, that he's not really as blokey as he pretends to be. "No, I'm not." He plays it up to oblige an audience? "Yeah, probably. It's an interesting question. I do not define myself as a rugby player. The truth of it is that I've used my rugby background to leverage myself up in many fields, okay?"

An old joke: He's manufactured a career from "playing seven stinking tests for Australia ... and I haven't stopped talking about it ever since".

He is fond of literary quotes and historical references and can supply one (or many) for every occasion. We had Kipling and Maupassant and either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, he wasn't sure. We had Winston Churchill: "It was said of him that he spent much of his time writing impromptu speeches. And my speeches, to the audience ... may well look like I just thought of them the other day. But the stories I told today, most of them I've told at least 300 times before ..."

I had asked about whether he gets the pip because some people might think it an unlikely career move for a former Wallaby to become a writer of historical books. I'd asked because he told me that he gets attacked for his political views; because he's supposed to be a thicko rugby player.

Some poor fool wrote to him last week: "You've had your head in too many scrums."

Really, do not do this. He always replies, and he gets 60 to 70 emails every day. He wrote back: "Please. You're an intelligent man. I can tell from your letter. When you wrote that line, did you chortle to yourself? Or did you realise that I've heard that 10,000 f***ing times."

The answer to my question was: "I don't even necessarily define myself as a writer."

It was silly of me to try to get him to define himself. He is "sort of" writing his memoirs and I asked how good he was at self-examination. He said: "I'm not interested in self-examination. I'm interested in telling stories."

I wondered whether a memoir might involve some degree of looking within. "I know who I am and I know what I am."

He is, to me, and I suspect to most New Zealanders, jaw-droppingly confident. When he was 7, he decided he wanted to be the President of the United States. He knew you had to be born in America but he thought, "Well, I could just change the constitution."

I asked if he was very interested in money and he said, "Does the bear shit in the woods?"

He told me he once gave up booze for five months, and "it was very interesting because suddenly I was totally sober while all around me people were a little bit pissed. And I felt wonderfully superior".

I said: "For the first time in your life, Peter?"

He said, "Oh. No, no, no. I do not feel superior. You know, I am built up sometimes to be an egotistical monster. And I am not." But why might people think that he is? "I don't know. Because I don't take it [his profile] that seriously."

Goodness, he might even have been a bit hurt at the idea people thought he had a huge ego. But you can easily cheer him up, by quoting him. I said, "Well, you have been known to say, 'I couldn't agree with me more'."

"I love that line!" he said. "And I've used it often!" Which might just be the reason some people have this idea about him. "So", he said, "the other line I like is: 'I'm sorry. On this one I'm going to have to go with me!"'

He did volunteer that academic critics tend to "hold their noses" at his sort of popular history. Does that piss him off? "No. Look, a bit." Does he aspire to some academic appreciation ? "No. I'd sooner have 200,000 sales."

He can reel off the sales figures for all of his books. He saw a bloke carrying his new book at Sydney airport the other day. "I thought, 'I like that!' and I stopped and insisted on signing it. Ha, ha, ha. I'd signed it before he even realised I was the author!"

He is as generous an interviewee as he is a book signer. He spells names. As in "Gary Smith". I snorted at that and he said, aggrieved, "Well, you could spell it Garry".

He told me how to recycle jokes if you give a lot of speeches. I told him the taxi driver had told me to ask if he had any new stories yet. Was that funny? "Very." Anyway, you get a couple of new stories every year; change the order of the telling.

How to write readable history. He learned this from the American sports writer Gary Smith. You write it in the present tense and "get rid of those big slabs of quotes". He hastened to add, helpfully: "This is not for your interview." I fear I've failed that lesson.

I also, mostly, failed at getting questions asked. "Let me just give you some more of my political views ..." he said. If I'd been offered a drink, I wondered, would I have been brave enough to shout, "No! Please don't!" I doubt it, and I doubt it was courage that was required - more stamina, perhaps. He is, in short, passionately pro-Australian republic, anti-Iraq War, pro-drug law reform.

I shouldn't complain. He makes A$7000 on the celebrity speaking circuit. For an hour? "Half an hour, whatever. It's not just the half-hour. It's the half-hour plus the 10 years I've been learning."

He won't get that today. He says he doesn't even know how much he'll get but it's a rugby gig, so it's being nice, really, to the game that has given him such a lucrative career. Nobody professes to be more amazed by this than him.

Right at the end, our couch was gate-crashed by a magnificently pissed young woman who wanted to wind him up about Robbie Deans. Why hadn't I thought of that? Answer: "He's doing very well. We call him Aussie Rob."

He said, to her: "I'm just getting to the punch line. We're almost there."

I said: "Yep. This is the final line."

He said: "No." And continued talking. So you see who was in charge of the interview.

"Sell my book," he said as I was leaving. Oh, all right. I don't want one of his emails. It's called Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men. But he can do his own plug: "I absolutely love that book ... and it's a bloody great book."

I'm not saying he's bossy, but this instruction did come immediately after he'd pointed at his cheek to indicate that I should give him a peck. I gave him the peck. I know when I'm beaten.

He'll always get the last word. It was: "Make me look good."

Now that must have been a joke. I'm not getting into another competition with him. He always wins.