Master and Commander

Good Weekend, Fairfax Media

11 July 2015

National coach Michael Cheika is the combustible outsider of Australian rugby:
suave yet hard, a working-class Lebanese Christian boy and unlikely
fashion entrepreneur.

In Australia's crowded sporting culture, rugby union stands apart for sheer concerted brutality. A gentleman's game played by some ungentlemanly brutes, rugby throws forward packs weighing more than 900 kilograms apiece together in a ceaseless contest for ball possession. It was at the bottom of one rugby ruck that Michael Cheika was almost scalped in his early 20s by an opposing player's studded boot. Rushed to hospital - his head was bloodier than a newborn's - Cheika needed 38 stitches under general anaesthetic to repair the wound.

I glimpse the scar as he speaks, a pale raised welt meandering beneath a light dusting of closely cropped dark hair. With the four-yearly Rugby World Cup contested from September this year on English soil, Cheika - appointed Wallabies coach last October (and NSW Waratahs coach until last month) - has agreed to chat about life and sport and their complex interweaving. Many of his abiding life lessons have been learnt at what the 48-year-old son of Lebanese migrants calls the "school of rugby".

In 1985, as an 18-year-old fresh out of school, he played the first of what would be 300 games over a 14-year-period with legendary Sydney club Randwick. An abrasive 190-centimetre-tall number eight, binding at the back of the scrum but always looking to wreak havoc in open play, he quickly earned the reputation as a hard player handy with his fists: an enforcer.

In 2012, after coaching stints with Randwick, as well as European clubs Padova, Stade Français and Leinster (he led the Irish team to a Heineken Cup trophy), he was appointed to head the Waratahs. Last year, he coached the team to their first Super Rugby title.

The gloss of that victory, along with his appointment soon afterwards to the Wallabies, has largely shifted the focus from a couple of much-publicised tantrums, one a verbal stoush with a South African sideline cameraman during a loss to the Durban-based Sharks.

The cameras catching his half-time rev-ups from inside the change rooms offer tantalising glimpses of the raging volcano, and there are Captain Cranky shots of him fulminating in the coaches' box. Though he looks at times like a walking anger-management problem, he insists that much of it is calculated. "Sometimes you've got to show the players you care," he says, "so that they begin to care. You need them to catch fire!" Remarks a former player close to Cheika: "He knows how to use anger."

That doesn't mean there weren't doubts in the rugby establishment about his combustible temperament. Cheika is sitting out a suspended sentence for that South African brain explosion; one more infraction would imperil his, and Australia's, World Cup participation.

"Talented, bright, streetwise and ruthless" is how former Australian Rugby Union (ARU) head John O'Neill, a sceptical admirer, describes him. "He pulls the players in tight around him and makes everyone else the enemy."

I meet Cheika, a fashion entrepreneur before he became a rugby coach, at a cafe next to ARU headquarters in the northern Sydney suburb of St Leonards. Despite his imposing height and heft, Cheika, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, walks with a loose, casual, rolling gait.

At the time of this first catch-up, he is getting to grips with his taxing, though temporary, dual role as both national and provincial coach. He's still immersed in the 2015 Super Rugby season before he steps away from the Waratahs to concentrate on the Wallabies. "There's not a lot of sleep," he concedes.

For the moment, though, I prompt memories of that day he nearly lost his scalp playing for Randwick. I've heard tell from a former Wallaby how Michael's older brother, Paul, a Randwick prop who happened to be watching from the sidelines that day, was so enraged that he burst into the opposition change room.

"It wasn't quite like that," Cheika recalls with a subtle smile and the rounded tones of mirth in his grainy voice. "They had to take me on a stretcher through the opposition change rooms. Of course, Paul came with me. There was certainly a lot of tension: put it this way, I was on my back and I was restraining him. The whole thing was very strange. I had my head in the ground and felt something. It didn't seem to hurt that much. But when I got up, my scalp flapped into my hands."

That incident's badge of honour is only visible if you know what to look for, though two others - a pair of terrifically cauliflowered ears - are hard to miss.

Michael Cheika is the rumbustious outsider of Australian rugby. When he and his brother Paul started playing, it was largely an establishment code, channelling players from private schools and universities. Notwithstanding the genius of the Ella brothers and a few others, it was still a toff's game.

The Cheika boys were from working-class Christian Lebanese stock. Rugby may be the proverbial "game they play in heaven", but for most of Sydney's Lebanese, it was a game only played in heaven, so remote was it from their own sporting passions. From the moment Paul and Michael Cheika trotted onto Randwick's Coogee oval, the brothers broke with two conventions - one ethnic and the other sporting. Michael has been breaking them ever since.

The next career sidestep came in 1989, when Michael left to play for the southern French side Castres as a 22-year-old. Young Australian rugby players regularly ply their trade in Europe today, but in the late 1980s it was a road rarely travelled. "It took me a good six or seven months of immersion in French but I learned the language," he recalls. "There weren't many foreign players in those days, and Castres wasn't the most cosmopolitan of places, so I had to. I really wanted to learn. I got to see how big the world is. And I grew."

For the next seven northern winters he played for Castres, then Paris and Tuscan side Livorno - acquiring Italian, he says, in one month. But when each European season finished, he'd return to Sydney to play the season for Randwick's Galloping Greens, making him a de facto all-year professional in a code that was officially amateur until 1995. He played one season for the Tahs, on their 1997 spring tour of the UK, yet never made the Wallabies. "Wasn't good enough," is all he says.

When the time came to hang up his boots, it was this broadening European experience that helped, providentially, to shoehorn him into a profession. While working for a cousin in the rag trade, he spied a newspaper ad from fashion designer Collette Dinnigan, who was looking for a business manager. He got the job and has never looked back. "I worked for her for about four years," he says. "Still hear from her. I was lucky enough afterwards to start my own business, mainly representing brands coming out of the States when the denim boom hit Australia."

He's since sold out of the business, but doesn't rule out a return to the fashion world. His elder sister, Caroline, still owns a fashion boutique. He describes her as his "loudest" rugby fan.

For Michael Cheika, rugby has meant travel, growing up, making a living. He met his wife Stephanie, mother of his four children, all under the age of seven, while travelling for rugby; he learnt about food, wine, history and culture through rugby. There's scarcely a corner of his life that hasn't, in some way, been touched by the game. Asked to define his greatest strength as a businessman, he's, momentarily flummoxed: "I don't know ... Yes I do. It's the same as in rugby. I suppose my real talent is managing people, getting the best out of them."

Cheika clearly values the martial discipline of steadiness in battle. But there's a deeper sense of courage, something ingrained in the character, which he prizes above all. "When you're down, you've failed at something, you shouldn't play fearing failure, you shouldn't worry about the result, just play to the best of your ability, play to express who you are," he offers in an urgent tone.

This free-wheeling disposition, he believes, is part of his inheritance from his father, Joseph, who came to Australia in 1950 with barely a penny in his pocket. "He did a bit of everything; he had to. He worked on the railways, for Singer sewing machines, and in time became a community leader. I learnt from him not to be scared of failure, to get out there and get among them. I'm not afraid of risk - calculated risk. But I'm not a gambler."

And yet Joseph had one important attribute that would set him apart from other migrants and orient him towards his adopted culture: he was fluent in English. "When Dad came from the airport - it took him seven days to fly to Sydney - he told the cab driver he was Lebanese and he dropped him in Redfern,"says Cheika. "There were a lot of Lebs there in those days."

Cheika's mother, Therese, came from the same Lebanese village as her future husband, although the two had never met. She arrived in 1959, carrying an envelope addressed to Joseph from his own mother. The letter within, the family believes, informed Joe that the young woman bearing it would make a good wife. And so it proved.

Joseph and Therese had moved from gritty Redfern to cruisy Coogee by the time their three children were born; a sure sign of Joseph's passion for assimilation, for belonging. While Joseph was deeply involved in the Lebanese community - Cheika attributes his "political" talents to his father - he was thoroughly detached from the old world and never saw his village again. Meanwhile, it was to be a Sydney beachside upbringing for the Cheika children.

A hard blue sky hangs overhead on a late-April afternoon in Sydney's Moore Park, beside the raw-concrete lump of the Sydney Cricket Ground. I'm here to watch a Waratah's training session.

The coach cuts a lonely figure this morning. Dressed in synthetic blue and green sport shorts, he's just finished planting a set of red and white plastic cones on the lush field and he stands, head bowed over a sheet of paper, as the voices of 20 or so testosterone-charged young rugby players slowly rise against the swoosh of the traffic.

Eventually his defence coach, Nathan Grey, a former Wallaby remembered for his crunching tackles, joins him. The two chat earnestly as Israel Folau, rugby's latest code-hopping superstar, lopes into view, smiling broadly. Will Skelton, a 204-centimetre-tall monolith, lumbers along carrying a rugby ball. South African recruit Jacques Potgieter, with his Game of Thrones-style hair and beard, stands inert, arms crossed, his shoulders the width of a door-frame.

Cheika is now six months into his job as coach of the Waratahs and Wallabies. But the Tahs, despite their scintillating form last year, are only sputtering along. A former player describes them to me, worryingly, as "half asleep". Others, more sympathetic, note how all opponents instinctively "lift" against last year's victors. "They are marked," says one. (They will go on to contest the Super Rugby semi-final against the Otago Highlanders, and in that game somnolence will envelop them again. In a worrying sign for the Bledisloe Cup match on August 8, the Tahs will find themselves outplayed and out-thought by their Kiwi opponents, losing 35 to 17.)

Cheika blows on a whistle and claps his hands together rhythmically. Suddenly he is the ringmaster, the boss. "In ya come," he barks. "Let's go! On the job! Keep those balls! C'mon, let's get the dirty air out! You haven't done much these past few days. Let's push!"

He paces around the paddock, hands behind his back, as loosely relaxed as he was on the day we first met, relishing the hard physical bustle of it and the beauty of speed, power, precision. When he moves to the centre of the field, all I pick up is: "Work hard! Keep going forward! No f...ing around!"

The team goes through some backline drills - "Let's see some shape in attack" - before hunkering down to defence. "Going into a low skid, I want you to visualise that opposition player coming in over the top of our ball and bang" - Cheika slams a fist into his palm.

After a few hours of this, the boys are flagging. With the end of training in sight, they start to fool around. Israel takes a drop goal from the sidelines and nails it. A cheer goes up. Big Will Skelton goes barging into a layer cake of mats, dislodging a skinny training assistant lying on top. Prop Benn Robinson is sprawled out on the ground like a beached minke whale. "Come in under this palm tree," he says from this supine position, offering a good impersonation of an islander accent, to his fellow prop Sekope Kepu.

As I leave, the players carry the training gear lazily on their heads as they amble back to the stadium, looking like outsized slaves who could easily usurp their masters. And I remember something Cheika said over coffee: "In life, there's a small period of time to enjoy yourself and be passionate about what you do. There are a lot of people working harder than we rugby players. Rugby is not work - it's a passion."

If Cheika's words carry special resonance during the matches against the Springboks (July 18) and All Blacks (August 8) they will be put to the real test in the upcoming World Cup, which begins on September 18. Cheika's job will depend on the Wallabies' performance on those international rugby paddocks.

There is no doubt that Cheika's passions are broader and more complex than rugby. They extend to music: he listens to everything from hip-hop artist Guru to Daft Punk and the occasional opera. Former Waratah Matt Bowman, who hooked up with Cheika when the two were in Leinster, remembers how they "used to connect over food, regularly trialling the fine-dining establishments around town. The last thing we would think about discussing would be rugby. It was more about life, politics, food and wine. His time spent in Europe had given him an exposure to the finer things in life."

Cheika's personality seems as contradictory and many-faceted as that of American poet Walt ("I am large, I contain multitudes") Whitman. Something of this is captured in a remark made by his former boss, Collette Dinnigan. "It was as though he lived a duplicitous life from an international fashion brand manager to a rugby coach," she tells me. "He didn't tolerate any bullshit and would be firm with business associates that were not delivering, yet he was the man that would very elegantly greet all our international fashion buyers in Paris and address them in various languages."

Michael Cheika is suave and hard, combustible and calculated, unpretentious yet multilingual. He's an implacable individualist who goes his own way and, at the same time, a man fiercely loyal to family and clan, with a strong belief in sport's ability to nurture community. He's also a fashion guy comfortable dressing down. And for a working-class outsider to the white-collar world of rugby, he's become, in the words of one high-placed observer, "the single most powerful figure in the Australian game. He is the master and commander. In Cheika we trust."

I meet older brother Paul Cheika in midwinter at his inner-city cafe, Two Governors, at the foot of an office tower. Outside, the sky is as grey as stone and Sydney is enduring its fourth straight day of rain. The sleek, contemporary interior is crowded with suits and a few rugby officials: it is still, at heart, an establishment code.

Older than Michael by five years, Paul is a Sydney property adviser. He recalls the clear impact of those years in Europe on Michael's formation. As the stay-at-home brother who watched Michael return every year with a new string to his bow, Paul was both proud and a touch jealous. "I would see his capabilities growing. He was back for a couple of months here and there and always developing."

The influence of extended family was also integral to the breadth of Michael's success, Paul says. Aside from father Joseph, who took the new world on with little more than the clothes he arrived in, there was a cousin, Simon Cheika, who worked in the fashion business. "He gave a number of us a start, including me and Michael, for a while. He was a catalyst. I guess there's an entrepreneurial spirit in the Cheika DNA."

Later that day I get a call through to Cheika, and ask him about the concerns of some wise heads in the rugby world that charismatic, volatile coaches - and he definitely falls into this category - are short-term propositions. "Their abrasiveness tends to become a liability over the long haul," Australia's most experienced rugby writer, Spiro Zavos, tells me.

"I think that's a moot point," Cheika replies. He notes his successful five years at Leinster. His coaching job after that, at Stade Français, lasted only 2 1/2 years after a dispute with the owner, though he stresses that the rift was "about how I saw the future of the team, about what I had to do to coach".

Asked if the game has ever disappointed him, he responds without equivocation: "Most definitely. When I feel like things are running against me, or I feel like maybe I don't fit the mould and I've been made to see that - it's made public - and I'm made to feel I'm not the normal type of character. I lose a bit of faith, but I always come back."

And then he clams up. "Ahh f...," he sighs.

"I don't know how to say this."

But it's clear he's referring to his confrontations with the rugby judiciary, the suspended sentence hanging over his head like a sword, the hot-head reputation that precedes him and sometimes threatens to overrun him. He may be Australian rugby's rumbustious inside-outsider, but he is not immune from the pain of alien status. A near-scalping is not the big man's only rugby wound. *