The redemption of Bad Norm

After being handed the shock of his life, Norm Hewitt says he's not scared of embarassment. Picture / Mark Mitchell

Once upon a time - and, because this is a fairy tale with a twist peculiar to modern times, we should start that way - a bloke called Norm Hewitt achieved the dream. Then he blew it. He was an All Black and then he bled in a gutter and cried on television. Then he was reborn as a most unlikely thing: a ballroom dancing star.

I don't think he'd argue with that potted history, although his version would be somewhat longer, much more angst-ridden and he would say the road to redemption took a lot more time than it does to don a pair of dancing shoes.

He almost definitely would not say that he has charmed the nation - that would be showing off - with his twinkling toes and his chiffon sleeves and his good-natured turn from footie player into what is almost a parody of the dancer.

He wouldn't say it was a parody at all - the commitment, the sweat, the weight loss is beyond parody. Anyway, he can really dance. He does say, sitting in a Wellington cafe with dancing partner Carol-Ann Hickmore, that it is all down to her. He can't say enough good things about her, but really, you have to think: "What on earth did she think when she found out she had to do the foxtrot with a bloke who looked as fleet-footed as a fridge?"

So I asked her while Hewitt was taking a phone call and she said she thought "how the hell" was she going to turn him into a dancer. She says she didn't know anything about him. "Only the headline things. I didn't know the real Norm Hewitt."

Theirs is one of those unlikely fairy tale-like pairings. When they started, they looked, says Carol-Ann, "like two beach balls dancing together".

"I said 'beached whales'," says Norm, and they giggle away as though they haven't told this story many times before.

I'd never met Hewitt before - although he tells me later, twice, that he knows we will meet again: he says vaguely mystical things like this pretty often - but there's nothing like watching a man weep on the telly to make a nation feel they know him. I also knew these things about him: that he'd once played on with a broken arm, the great he-man fool; that he liked a drink and quite often went bloody silly after a few; and that he was handy with his fists. But that was in a country far, far away.

And now here he is wearing a tunic with sheer sleeves on national television. I suggest that he must have a low embarrassment threshold and he says, "Look, I've been embarrassed a lot of times in my life. I'm not scared to challenge myself into a position where if people are going to judge me and make comments - that's cool." He wishes he'd saved some of the texts his rugby mates have sent. Those were the "good on ya" messages. He well knows what happens in locker rooms, though. "Yeah, I can imagine them taking the piss." The bad Norm, the miserable one, wouldn't have liked that much at all. The good Norm is pretty much impervious. This is not arrogance. It is a small example of humility and taking responsibility. Which is what he has devoted his life to since he stuck his arms through a glass door in Queenstown, half scaring a couple to death and almost bleeding to death himself.

But there are limits. He rejected last week's wardrobe offering of something sweet in pink. You have to draw the line somewhere, eh Norm? "No, pink wasn't going to cut it. Sorry."

He might well have faded from the public view, a name to be dragged out when another footie player went on the rampage and great, idiotic feats of rugby were listed.

But he published his biography (written by mentor Michael Laws, who also wrote the script for the "mea culpa" press call), which was a story of anger and misery and alcohol. And of what Hewitt calls, a la John Mitchell, "the journey".

It is an interesting phenomenon, that of the broken sports star rising from the ashes of a good career turned bad.

In Hewitt's case it is the phenomenon of the bad guy - he says he was "an arsehole, oh absolutely, I was a wanker" - turned good guy.

I WONDERED whether he was fed up with talking about the "headline things", but he isn't at all. Of course, it is the central irony of his strange life. That is my opinion; he doesn't see it that way. What he does for a living is go around the country giving talks, especially to kids, on making choices. This sounds like motivational speaking to me but he says it isn't because "you must understand that unless you're motivated enough first, then you'll never get motivated".

The irony bit is that the "the search I'm really searching for and the work I'm doing" is part of his great goal: "I want to discover what it means to be a good man." Yet accompanying him on that "journey" is the bad man because, in a funny way, I say, it's the bad one who gives the good one the authority of having been there, done that. His response to this is : "I think people want to be normalised ... in the respect that I'm just a normal person, just like them. I've made my mistakes."

And now look at him. "Isn't life funny?" I say. He says, yes, it is, but he believes that what happened in Queenstown was "meant to happen. I believe that somebody gave me a second chance." And, presumably, a big shock. "Of course. We all need those." Although perhaps not such a violent one. "No ... but I betcha everybody in their life has had a wake-up call somewhere along the line. Mine happened to be where I sat in a gutter and was bleeding to death. And ... I didn't care."

He isn't religious but he believes "that there is karma. That there is a design for each person and, ultimately, what I believe is, what you sow, you shall reap." I thought he might consider that he'd finished paying for the bad stuff but he says, "Oh, I will always pay."

He's not a different person, but wherever the hell-raiser has gone, he's not taking any chances that he might come back.

He is the most focused person I've interviewed. We'd asked for an hour with him; it ended up being over an hour and a half and his attention - and his eye contact - didn't waver. He tells me, somewhat disconcertingly, that "eyes are the windows of the soul; people believe through their souls".

He uses the language many people adopt when they've given up things and taken up therapy. But he says, "I wouldn't say it's therapy." It is part "of the journey that I'm on. I don't use it as an anchor; it's a tool."

He says he gives everything "110 per cent", and you can see that he does. I can see that when he set his mind to being a bad bugger - although he says he didn't know he was being one at the time - he was Grade A.

He says he's not a control freak, although I suggested he was. He's mostly controlling with himself. He has never had an agent, for example. I thought this might be a response to having been so out of control; he says it's about "taking responsibility back".

He's had to be in charge of himself. Who else could have rewritten the ending to make it a happy one.

I certainly would never have predicted that one day I'd sit down with Norm Hewitt and at the end of the interview say: "All right, Twinkle Toes, thank you very much." And leave in one piece.