It’s Rugby World Cup time again, and all the big names will be there, striving to get their name on the trophy, to hold it, to swing it in the air on the shoulders of his team-mates in a frenzy of celebration.

It is the pinnacle of rugby achievement.  It is one thing to be an international rugby player.  It is another altogether to win the World Cup as one.  Think of the true greats of the game who have never known the feeling of winning one.  Serge Blanco, Gavin Hastings and Jonah Lomu rank among some of the finest players to have ever graced the game, yet they have never lifted the Webb Ellis Cup. 

Being a great player and playing for a great team are two very different dynamics.  Blanco (France), Hastings (Scotland) and Lomu (New Zealand) all represented wonderful teams who lit up the World Cups of 1987, 1991 and 1995.  They would have been worthy champions, and they all came so very painfully close, but they didn’t quite have that last collective thrust to take them to the ultimate prize.

So to win a Rugby World Cup is a true honour, a once in a lifetime achievement.  And, four years on, Neil Back can no doubt instantly recall the moment when he got his hands on the trophy.  He is one of the lucky few who did it, with England at the last World Cup in 2003.

Back is a character that has made the headlines for all sorts of reasons in rugby, but this achievement is one that stood out above all others, and that includes winning a test series with the British Lions and winning the Heineken Cup with Leicester, completing the treble of Holy Grails for Northern Hemisphere rugby players.

In The Winning Zone wanted to get into the mind of such a man.  If anyone knows what it takes to win at the very highest level, it is Neil Back. 

“For me, the most important thing for success is creating an environment where people enjoy themselves.  I’m a great believer that if you enjoy what you do, you will give your best to it.”

Back, who’s senior rugby career spanned from 1988 to 2005, has seen it all in rugby terms.  He was one of the ‘middle men’ of the new professional era – his career was carved up between amateur and pro, as the game didn’t make the transition until 1995 by which point he was already playing for England. 

Neil didn’t become a full professional until 1997 with Leicester.  But even before it was the norm and he was being paid to do it, he trained like a full time athlete.

“I stated playing in ‘88 for Nottingham, and although when it was an amateur sport the clubs were only training twice a week, I was training 5 days a week - working as well, and also starting to pay attention to strength and conditioning, as well as nutrition to support that.”

Back was very much an innovator in his approach to rugby.  Until recently rugby was very much a social sport.

“In those days of pre professionalism, you had a few pints on a Friday night, then played on Saturday, had a few more pints on Saturday night and a few more for Sunday lunch.  I never was into that sort of life.”

In fact, Back was so serious in his ambitions to be the best, he took an approach that many top level professionals have only taken notice of in the past few years. 

“I felt I had to do a bit more than just an amateur player.  So I enlisted the help of a specific fitness coach, Rex Hazeldine of Loughborough University, who was England fitness advisor at the time.  He also gave me nutritional information and basic advice on hydration and recovery techniques, which meant that I could train more efficiently.”

And it paid off.  Even though he was younger and less experienced than his international contemporaries, he started to raise some eyebrows, and a few tempers to boot.

“At fitness testing at national levels I did pretty well, which pissed off people who were more established than me, seeing a guy coming through and achieving good athletic results.”

So staying off the beer and striving to be ever fitter wasn’t as much of an issue to Neil Back as it may have been to others.  He realised that if he didn’t put all his energy into rugby, professional or not, he wouldn’t be as good as he could be.  He is a firm believer that he would rather try his best and fail than not try hard enough and then regret it.  A message he passes on to young rugby players every day in his role as Head Coach of the Leicester Academy.

“The advice I give is that it’s all about attitude and preparation.  Really it’s what you’re willing to give or what you want to achieve.  If you’ve got an ambition, you’ve got to be prepared to give it your best shot.  You want be in a position where you can say ‘I did everything I can’.  That’s the philosophy I pass onto the guys now.”

Nonetheless, Back has had to make some pretty serious sacrifices to enable him to now look back on his career with no regrets; sacrifices infinitely more difficult than simply saying no to a pint on Friday night.

“My daughter, Olivia, was born the day before we met up for the 1999 World Cup and I was away from her for the first 5 weeks of her life.  Finlay, my son, was 14 months old at the 2003 World Cup final, and I’d been away for more than half of his life through the autumn internationals, summer tours and World Cup prep.  Olivia gladly came to my arms at the end of the final, but Finlay stayed in the crowd with his mum because he thought ‘Who’s this strange man taking me out of the crowd?’  That was a sacrifice.  The sacrifice I made was being as good a parent as I could be, I just wasn’t there.”

So Neil Back may have a trophy cabinet laden with shiny silverware, and a bank of memories that will never become overdrawn.  But it doesn’t mean that his life was always easy as a rugby player.

Thankfully for him, with club and country, he had the support of one of the most awesome individuals to have ever trodden the sporting field:  Martin Johnson. 

“I’m always going to mention Martin Johnston when talking about great leaders.  He had the ability to say very little but what he said meant a lot.  The best example I can give of that is, leading Leicester or England, he always used to say a few words before we went out.  Sometimes it was just “Come on” and that was it. 

“But before the World Cup final he looked round, and for the first time that I had ever known, he looked at the squad, turned round, and ran onto the pitch.  He just looked in their eyes and didn’t say anything. 

And they went on to win the World Cup.

“I picked him up on it after, and he said he knew he didn’t need to, he knew we were ready. That for me is great leadership.”

In an era where footballers are retiring from international competition in their late twenties to prolong their career, Back, playing a sport that takes a considerably heftier toll on the body than football, kept up playing for England until he was 34, and became the oldest ever player to represent the British Lions in a test series at 36 in 2005.

Asides from the fact that it was a miracle he could still walk at this age – he played a position where the majority of his opponents are well over six feet tall and sixteen stone in weight – Neil is 5’9’’ and weighs fourteen stone – what made him want to keep going, giving his body such a battering?

“Because I enjoyed doing it so much, the environment I worked in, the interaction with the guys, the competitiveness of it, the whole package really. 

“I enjoyed the training element of it, I enjoyed pushing myself to see what I could achieve.  Because I’d come through amateur and then professional, even at 36, in terms of speed I was as quick over 10 to 30 metres as I’d been through my career.  It was all new and I rode it through at the front the whole way.”

A true great with true grit, Neil Back has had a career that is the envy of the sporting world.  But it didn’t fall on his lap.  He is living proof that if you want something badly enough, and you work hard enough to get it, it will be yours.  No shortcuts.

RO

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