Love him or hate him, Justin Marshall's a larrikin with an almost evangelical desire to prove that he's learned from his mistakes.
Justin Marshall, the famous and famously either much-loved or loathed former All Black, arrived to meet me carrying a copy of the Herald.
He'd decided to earn himself some advance points - and this scheme might have had some merit, had I noticed.
I didn't, so he had to point out not only that he had the paper but that he had it so as to grease me up.
I thought this was very funny - the plan, the botching of it and then the explaining of it was plain daft - and so did he. He didn't even pretend to be abashed, so I liked him straight away. He can come across as cocky - announcing a planned greasing-up is cocky - which is another word for arrogant, a word often used about him. Petulant is another.
I was going to have to ask about this, which was a bit of a worry. If he was petulant he might get the huff and sulk and not talk.
Not talk! He talks now for a living - his new job is as a rugby commentator on Sky TV and he is, I can assure you, supremely good at talking. But we knew that: it is his talking that has got him in trouble over the years.
His wife once said he was "an exclamation mark, not a comma". He says things other people might think, but not say. He said, "it's something that I think I've learnt as life goes on: when you start deceiving people and saying things that are quite evidently not true ... it becomes more frustrating for everybody." I think he means it's better to speak out. "But you've got to choose your moment."
I chose my moment, about five minutes after sitting down, because there's no point tip-toeing around an exclamation mark. Still, hardly anyone would enjoy being called arrogant. Is he? "You have to be arrogant! I don't take umbrage with anyone calling me arrogant when I was playing." He gave me the sort of look you wouldn't want to see on a rugby field. "Now I would take umbrage!"
He isn't petulant (and he doesn't become so if asked.) "No, definitely not. People see me stomping my feet because I've been substituted and it's not because ... I'm unhappy about the fact that something's gone wrong for me, it's more the fact that I just wanted to be involved."
Still, he might have been difficult to like. "Yeah, I think so." He thought about this. "No! I was borderline."
It is often said of him that, while all top sports blokes are competitive, he is fiercely so. You wonder what he's going to do with that competitiveness now he's no longer playing. I can tell you: he'll compete at cooking with his wife. He's the better cook. "Yes, I am!" I bet he doesn't let his kids (he has two boys, aged 8 and 6) win at games. "No. Sometimes. When I'm feeling they're suffering too much." He wants to be the best rugby commentator in the world. "Yeah, well, I do."
He said, redundantly, about his competitiveness, "I'm not entirely sure it's out of my system. I don't really know what it's like to be a non-rugby playing individual any more."
He still talks about himself as a player in the present tense. Not being a player is, he said, "a big mental shift", in part because he is now "more of an All Black fan than I ever was, because I don't think you appreciate, at the time, that side of rugby. A lot of personal emotions come into being an All Black. You know, when I was a young All Black, I was just thankful and grateful and so lucky to be playing out there. When things progressed in my career, I think I got a lot more anxious. I got more nervous about results." Being anxious and nervous about your job sounds awful but he says, no, it's not, "because it's also about motivation. Or, "arrogance with a slight tinge of petulance about it!"
He is thoughtful about, and no doubt mindful of, his public profile. He reckons rugby fans have always had a love/hate relationship with him and that the split is about 50/50. He knows some people think he's a dickhead, because they tell him so.
He does a bit of public speaking of the sort where people come along to have a gawk at a famous person, and to see whether he is arrogant and petulant. As this was pretty much what I'd done, I can hardly complain I got some of his standard speech. He likes to share his "valuable lessons in life" which are, to give a potted version: That you shouldn't be a "pre-judgment person of character. I was".
He is "really quite self-conscious" about being gawked at, still. When people look at him in restaurants he worries that he's got food on his face. So I wondered why he'd gone from one career in which every rugby fan in the country held an opinion about him, to another.
Perhaps, despite the self-consciousness, being recognised is to some extent addictive. "No. I don't know how far my profile would diminish anyway. Not in New Zealand. It's not so much profile or attention that I'm seeking, as having the ability to stay in rugby. It's probably all I know, apart from three or four years at the freezing works. While I had a good time, I'm not entirely comfortable with going back there."
Not with that hair. Everyone will have opinions on his hair, again. Today it's streaked blonde and sticking up in carefully careless tufts. When he retired, Will Carling, a good mate of his, tweeted: "Hair gel sales will be badly down in Saracens [the English club Marshall was playing for] area ..."
"Oh, ha, ha. Will Carling tries, doesn't he?" He suffered, with good grace, important questions about the hair. I ascertained that Sky doesn't give him a hairdresser but that they "do my make-up. I get teased about it, which is quite amusing. 'You don't need make-up, you've got your own on', they usually say."
He's been getting good feedback for his commentary (don't know about the hair and make-up) because he's not one-eyed. He said, "I just want to be honest." And, of last weekend's game, "I think the referee's got that wrong ... and that's not something Australia should be penalised for." Then he thought, "ooh. I wonder how that's going to come across to New Zealand people". He seems to have got away with it.
Goodness, maybe we like him now? "Hey! I was just about to say that so far I haven't had 50 per cent of people coming up to say: 'I think you're crap'."
I asked, possibly cynically, whether he thought this would last. "Positivity! I don't know. I think you're going to get to the point where you say a couple of things that are going to get on people's nerves."
I said, prissily, that I did hope he wasn't going to say rude things like that Murray Mexted. He said because he'd been out of the country he didn't know what these rude things were. Would he request, if the camera panned over a nice-looking girl in the crowd, a viewing of certain bits?
"No, I wouldn't! Sometimes your thoughts are better kept to yourself." He said this even more primly than I could manage, an effect rather ruined by a story he told about getting utterly pissed with Dan Carter at the Moet & Chandon chateau in France: an evening they began wearing suits and which he seems to remember ended with him removing his shirt and waving it above his head.
So there is that larrikinish side of him and there is his almost evangelical desire to prove that he's learned from his mistakes. He said, earnestly, "... I think if people read this article and learn the lessons that I've learnt ..." He said, perhaps hopefully, "sometimes people are going to say the wrong thing, but that doesn't mean they should be judged on it."
And sometimes people, if they are Justin Marshall, just can't help themselves. He was in the Herald recently saying how expensive New Zealand is - in response, although he says he had no idea, to UK rugby writer Peter Bills saying that New Zealand was a rip-off. So I said I'd better shout him a coffee. He immediately abandoned his greasing-up attempts, and began grumbling, loudly, that the Herald had stitched him up. He says he was asked a few questions and, "the next day there's a huge headline saying: New Zealand is a rip-off! I don't want to get embroiled in anything like that."
Now that really did make me laugh. Because, God forbid, he wouldn't get embroiled in things, would he? "No way! Well, I don't want to be! So, it was like, lesson learned. Don't even comment nowadays."
This is entirely his own fault, because, to put it mildly, he is known for having opinions. "I know!"
I was thinking of his very public outbursts about selection decisions made by John Hart and Graham Henry, and his fractious relationship with fellow former All Black Byron Kelleher. "Oh, there are instances throughout my entire career where I said things and instantly regretted them and wished I could have taken them back. And there are things that I thought, 'I'm comfortable with what I said and what I've done and I don't want to take that back'."
He is, by the way, now good friends with Hart and plays golf with him. "Not many people know that. They think we hate each other." He "regrets to this day" his outbursts towards Henry. "Oh, well and truly. Because I was embarrassed."
Henry has "been nothing but a gentleman every time I've seen him since". This has taught him another of his "valuable lessons", which I suppose is: Get over things and be nice.
That leaves Kelleher. They were intense rivals and, when Marshall left New Zealand to play club rugby in England, Kelleher said he was selfish. "I don't hate him - but he's not somebody I'd make a beeline towards to have a beer with."
I tried to wind him up about Kelleher when we were talking about whether you can be thick and be a great All Black (the answer was no.) I said, "that Kelleher's a bit thick, isn't he?"
He said, "Ha, ha. No comment. You see, I've learnt my lesson."
I was just testing. "You were," he said, grinning perhaps ever so slightly arrogantly. Passing a test is winning and he is, of course, competitive even about an interview. And that, along with either loving or loathing him, is part of his appeal.
