Mike
By Andrew Taylor. Portraits by Matt Shelley
11 Months Ago
But there was another incident in that match which might sum up why rugby fans love the game, and why mothers of small boys often hate it. The Australian captain and scrum half George Gregan collects the ball on the half volley and makes a threatening break down the touch line. For a moment, things look dangerous for England, but then a grim man-mountain in a white shirt appears in front of him like a very solid brick wall. Gregan is driven backwards off his feet, his legs still cycling in mid-air like a cartoon character, and carried back bodily five or six yards, still wondering what’s happened to him. And then he hits the ground like a sack of concrete dropped from a five-storey rooftop, and mothers of young rugby players all over the world shudder at the thud. In fact, Gregan’s fine, and the man-mountain simply turns and jogs away ready for the next big hit. But what a monster he must be to dump an international rugby player on his backside with such violence. Well yes, up to a point. At a very fit 6’1” and 220 lb, Mike Tindall isn’t often going to have sand kicked in his face, except by extraordinarily stupid people. His once spectacularly broken nose gave him the prize-fighter look that suggested nothing was going to get past him on the rugby field. And yet, after 75 appearances for England between 2000 and 2011, including that World Cup medal, practically everyone who knows him will acknowledge that he has a secret. He’s one of the most easygoing, gentlest of men that you’ll meet.
We’re sitting in The American Bar at The Stafford London hotel, one of his favourite retreats when he’s in the capital, and looking very relaxed. When I ask if he can remember the last time he got angry, he looks vaguely puzzled and then a bit embarrassed. “Well, around rugby, I’m pretty laid back. Nothing really bothers me. I don’t hold grudges, life’s too short. But the last time…” There’s a long pause. “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever had a proper barney with anyone that’s lasted.” (In fact, there’s one exception that crops up later in our conversation. But even then, he’s so good-tempered about having been bad-tempered that it’s hard to believe he really meant it). He’s played rugby all his life, ever since his first memories of toddling around his parents’ garden in the West Yorkshire town of Otley when he was not much more than two, throwing a ball around with his older brother. His father was captain of the local rugby club. Then he followed the classic England player’s route of school games, and then county and eventually international schoolboy sides, until he left Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wakefield at the age of 19. That was in 1996, just as rugby union was turning professional, and he went off to join Bath, then one of the most successful teams in the country. Four years later, he was playing for England against Ireland at Twickenham, and by the time of the 2003 World Cup, he had cemented his place in the side alongside Will Greenwood. “It was a partnership. You learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses, get a sense of what the other person’s going to do. Will’s a very clever player with a sharp rugby brain, so he’d size up a situation and know when he could make a difference. “When he did, I was normally buried at the bottom of a ruck, having done my job.” There’s a kernel of truth in that image of Greenwood as the magician and Tindall as the honest journeyman thundering into a pack of players, but it’s a typically modest assessment. He had his own very lively sense of what was going on across the pitch and where the weak spots in the opposition defence might be opening up. And, as George Gregan will tell you, he was a crashing and destructive tackler. He still remembers that hit on Gregan in the World Cup Final — although memories of the day are rather spoiled by the fact that he came off two minutes before the end of normal time with a hamstring injury. He had to watch the twenty minutes of extra time, which culminated in the Wilkinson dropped goal, from the substitutes’ bench. “I’d felt a twinge in my hamstring two minutes from the end. We were winning then by three points, and it wasn’t worth the chance of it giving out on me and missing a crucial tackle. It was the right choice — but then when they drew level and it went to extra time, I was desperate to be back on,” he recalls. “It was a great team, filled with the confidence that comes from winning. I’d played more than thirty games for England by then, and only lost four times. People called it arrogance, but it wasn’t — it was an inner belief in yourself and the other guys. You knew the guy next to you was going to do his job, and you could get on and do yours.” It was a few days before that Final that he first met Zara Phillips, Princess Anne’s daughter and the 20th in line to the throne — the woman who was to become Mrs Mike Tindall, and make him a most unlikely member of the Royal Family. “It was after I’d been dropped for the semi-final against France. Two other players had taken me out for a drink to cheer me up, and we bumped into her in a bar in Sydney. They’d met her before in a horseracing pub in England.” He adds, maybe rather ungallantly, that he wasn’t thinking about her when he won his place back for the Final a few days later — it was nearly a year later before they became an item. Their marriage in July 2011 transformed his life, although he determinedly plays that down. Certainly it hasn’t changed him, as his former international mates testify. “Well, I would hope it wouldn’t,” he scoffs, sounding rather shocked at the idea. “There are a lot more black-tie events, and I certainly never thought I’d have been going to meet the Queen, or experiencing things like the Diamond Jubilee and so on.” It’s clear that Zara’s prowess as an equestrian — she competed in the London Olympics in 2012, winning a silver medal — is much more important to him than her place in the line of succession. “It was a very good thing that we were both sports people, because from the start we understood the commitment that there has to be — we couldn’t go to loads of parties and so on, because we were grafting every day.” There is another side to sport than the hard graft, of course — though he laughs off the story that he just failed to beat the Australian cricketer David Boon’s record of drinking 52 cans of beer during the flight back from the 2003 World Cup. He quite enjoys the story, but insists, “We had a lot of beer, but nowhere near 52 cans!” Boon’s record is safe.
But during the 2011 competition, there were headlines and pictures of a newly-married and clearly drunk Tindall in a late-night bar with his arm around what the papers chose to call a “mystery blonde.” England were performing badly, and the press needed a scapegoat. “Rugby player gets drunk” is hardly a big headline, and the blonde later turned out to be an old friend — but the newspaper furore led to him being dropped from England’s Elite Player Squad and fined £25,000, later reduced to £15,000. It was, he said, “naivety” on his part, and didn’t affect his rugby. “I’ve no regrets about the evening. It was no different from what might have happened in 2003. In fact, all the bad press made me enjoy being on the pitch more. It was the first time things had been negative, but you have to deal with those things.” Now that he’s retired from professional sport — the last of the victorious 2003 World Cup squad to quit, in 2014 — he concentrates on Zara’s career. “I think I get more pleasure out of her achievements than I ever did out of mine — in my own career, I’d just think ‘Well, that’s done, now what’s next.’ Big matches never used to worry me, but with her, I’m very nervous indeed before she competes. There are such fine margins in show-jumping — a single pole can make the difference between a gold medal and nothing at all.” Retirement, too, “means I’m at home more,” so he can spend more time with their children — daughters Mia Grace and Lena Elizabeth, and son Lucas. It’s also meant less time in hospitals: his sporting career was marred by a series of injuries, including a foot injury that kept him out of the 2005 Six Nations and denied him a place in the Lions tour to New Zealand in the same year. He had barely recovered from another broken leg, which prevented him playing in the 2007 World Cup, when a chest injury playing against Wales led to another stay in hospital. He said later that he was happy just to be alive after that one. It wasn’t just rugby — the first break in that famous nose came from a French dodgem car when he was an accident-prone four-year-old, although it’s been broken seven more times since then. Since his retirement as a professional, he’s taken on an active role with several charities, including the On Course Foundation and Rugby for Heroes, which work to help sick and wounded servicemen and women and veterans; Midlands Air Ambulance; the Matt Hampson Foundation, set up by a young prop forward paralysed during an England Under 21 training session to help people suffering from similar catastrophic sports injuries; and the Cure Parkinson’s Trust. Tindall’s father suffers from Parkinson’s disease. “They’re all related to things that are close to me, things that I can understand and feel for. Take the Air Ambulance — road traffic accidents are their biggest call-out, then it’s rugby, and then equine sports.” Suddenly the easy smile and the ready laugh have vanished. Tindall plays now for the amateur club Minchinhampton RFC in Gloucester League 2, near Gatcombe Park, where he lives. “I just love running around. I love playing the game,” he says simply. But he keeps his fierce sense of commitment: slightly shamefacedly, he admits that the one time rugby made him angry in his whole career came during a game for the club. “I was angry for a good hour. For a start, we were losing very badly, and then this young centre dropped his knees into me when I’d fallen on the ball. All through the match, he was giving me verbals — ‘I thought you were better than that,’ or ‘I thought you used to play for England’ — and I let it get under my skin. We lost by fifty points or so, and I just went straight home. “Zara picked it up straight away, and she was very funny. She said, ‘Go back to the club, have a drink with everyone, and grow up,’ and I thought, ‘Well, she’s got a point.’ The opposition had left by then, but I mentioned it on Talksport later, and got a tweet from the lad saying, ‘I knew I had you!’” He laughs, and when he pumps his fist and says, “I was asking everyone when we were going to meet again,” it sounds much more like a joke than a threat. There isn’t a vindictive bone in his body — and certainly not in his nose.