The incorrigible Murray Mexted

Murray Mexted likes to put a limit on what he talks about but not how long he talks for. Picture / Mark Mitchell

The voice emanating from the speaker phone says, "greetings, dear lady. Shall I let you in?"

You'd recognise that voice anywhere. It belongs to the bloke who'll be in the Sky commentary box tonight when the Hurricanes play the Crusaders. If we get lucky, Murray Mexted will make a few gaffes; use a madly inappropriate word or two. Emanating is my little gift to him, should he be after a new big word to use, although it may not be rude enough for his liking. He can be very rude indeed, as I am about to find out.

This is when he is not being serious about how to get mentally tough by visualisation and other things I call "hippy dippy," and which he says, scathingly, is "completely the contrary". I don't know how the "dear lady" fits into any of this. I suspect it is just another of his little jokes. Whatever he's up to, it's as delightfully hammy as Christmas, and comes as something of a relief.

Earlier in the week, on the phone, he had sounded a bit growly. He had a few conditions (a few!) about the interview. So I thought he might be terribly strict and not talk very much. This will turn out to be another little joke. Muzza not talking much.

He's happy to talk about his public role but not his personal life. He says his telly profile and having been an All Black mean he lives a life where the windows are open and he likes to be able to close the door. This is one of his crazy metaphors. I repeat this back to him when we meet in Wellington and he says, "what's a metaphor?"

He likes to pretend he's not that clever, when he obviously is, just as he likes to pretend to be grumpier than he actually is. This pretending to be grumpy, and not being keen on being interviewed is a rugbyhead thing. It's about not wanting to be thought to be a showoff. Possibly not wanting to be seen to be brainy comes from the same instinct.

Although I am not, by the way, to call him a total rugbyhead just because his job is his International Rugby Academy and his "hobby" is the Sky gig: "I like to think of life as more than rugby." This is making assumptions, which, along with "trying to provoke me", he manages to tick me off for within minutes of walking in the door.

He has also laid down the law about the photographer. He says pictures taken while we're talking are fine but "I'm not posing. I'm not a poser".

And if I ask something he doesn't like, he just won't answer and I'm not to get "snakey".

But here I am in his office, which is like a very nice apartment and he makes coffee and says, "Where would you like to sit, dear lady?"

He says he's not performing when he's on the telly: "I'm just being me." Of course he is more complicated than he would like to appear. So on the telly he's in full-on bloke mode watching rugby with his mates. "It's just me talking, like me talking to you here in this conversation. When I'm doing a commentary I don't treat it any differently." If I was Mexted, commentating on Mexted, I'd be tempted to say he's a man of two halves.

He's into psychology of the sports sort although he applies it to life in general. He does a sort of meditation for 20 minutes every day. This is where we get into a spat about whether such a thing is hippy dippy. It's not: it is "a form of concentration. From what I understand [meditation] is preparing a sort of mantra and focusing on something that can move you into a position of pure consciousness". He thinks the "isolation of thoughts is very helpful". I am not allowed to call him hippy-minded even though he says early on, "when I was a hippy ... " He wears two silver bangles on his right wrist which are not hippy but finely crafted silver from Bali.

Oh all right, I won't call him a hippy, despite all that going on about "psychic energy" which he does on TV and which nobody understands. He did explain it and it has to do with the energy of the game being "psychological". and how one team goes from being in "the strong position and the other team is subservient" and how the energy can move.

Despite not wanting to talk about his personal life, he doesn't at all mind talking about his inner life - although he's adept at the joke which diffuses the question. He says that in 1986, the year his biography came out, he thought he was "bulletproof". He doesn't now; it's a young man's condition. "I'm definitely not bullet proof. I definitely think if someone shot me, I'd bloody die." This is flippant. "You're allowed flippancy. Flippancy is not a crime. It can actually lighten a serious situation quite nicely. It can soften it." Which is why he just used it. "Yeah, because it is a serious question."

I ask him about living with recognition which he's done since he was a famous All Black, then married to Miss Universe, Lorraine Downes, and now after having been on TV for 12 years. And when he realised the anonymity was gone and that he could never get it back. "Well, I never thought that till right this second that once it's gone you never get it back. So the answer to that is: now."

When I say he must be recognised in every pub in the land, he tells a story in the form of a joke. "In one of those bars near the Octagon ... this guy came up and said 'oh, Mex, I'd like to buy you a shot of tequila'. And I said, 'Oh that's bloody good of you, mate', because that's my drink. So, anyway, he got a couple of shots and we were leaning on the bar and he said, 'you know, you were a bloody great rugby player mate but you're the worst commentator I've ever heard in my life'. I just burst into laughter and he said, 'ooh, you took it better than Keith Quinn'." Which has to be the best response to a question about the vagaries of fame I've ever heard.

There is the Mexted on the telly whose love of the double entendre either makes you laugh or want to biff him. He thinks "it's okay to grow old as long as you don't grow up". There is little danger of this happening. I read him back some of his quotes. "He's looking for some meaningful penetration in the back line" is one of the cleaner ones. "Yeah, I mean, most of the expressions have rugby meanings, don't they? Jesus, if you're going to enter the backline you've got to have penetration." Good try, I say. "Hookers go down on the ball all the time, that's another rugby term." So is good try, I say. "Nah," he says, "good try's a bit passive. 'What a try! What a great try! Good try? Get outta here."

Somebody should tell him that if he's going to pretend he's attempting a serious defence of his dirty mind, he should not do so wearing the look of an 8-year-old caught writing filth on the blackboard.

I should have known better than to ask him what he thought he was up to the time he said "show us your chest" as the camera panned women in the crowd. He says, "show us your tits I think it was, wasn't it?" Well, I was being polite and what a waste of time that proved. He attempts to defend this by saying it was a very common expression. "It used to be used all the time. Didn't it?" he says to the photographer, seeking blokey assurance. I tell him I can't understand how he gets away with it and he says, "Well, the situation arose and I thought, 'oh, show us your tits' and I knew there were dozens of other people thinking exactly the same thing."

Right, so if the geezer we see on the telly is just Mexted being Mexted, this must mean he carries on like this when he's not on the telly? "No! Of course I wouldn't. I actually wasn't one of those guys but it was a common expression ... Has no one ever said to you 'show us your tits'? Truly?"

I've thought of another big word for him. It's incorrigible. And, Muzza, mate, don't even try to pretend you don't know what it means.