We met on the roof top pool deck of the Heritage Hotel in Auckland. The traffic below throbbed and hummed and clogged up Fanshawe St at lunchtime. The low-slung winter sun bounced off the Harbour and back lit Dan Carter, poster child for the Quest for Greatness, male model for the Destiny Interrupted Club, All Black.
It was August then, a test match week in Auckland. Three days after we met, Carter would dazzle everyone in a brutal crushing of Australia at Eden Park, and Richie McCaw would become the most capped test player in history. Like Jordan and Pippin, or Russell and Cousy, or Bourbon and Coke, there is Carter and McCaw.
It was another week in the outwardly glorious and inwardly tumultuous life of Dan Carter. Beyond the upcoming weekend - the familiarity of Eden Park, the same old Wallaby foe - there stretched the eternal road of uncertainty, lined on either side by ghosts of World Cups past and the signposts which pointed to that personal fate towards which he knew he had to walk. Oh, The Places You'll Go!
He had brains in his head and feet in his shoes, did Dan Carter. He also had his doubts. They were self-doubts, the kind that players who are capable of extraordinary things always get when they play ordinary games. He didn't pay much attention to the critics, he told me. None of them came close to being as tough on him as he was on himself.
He spoke, as most All Blacks do, in the second and third person. There is no 'I' in team, only a 'me' - and then only occasionally. Somewhere along the way in rugby's professional era, the 'me' was somehow subjugated by that strangely formal reflexive personal pronoun, 'myself'.
