Chris Cusiter

Within months of his rugby career ending with a little help from the hip of Tim Visser, Chris Cusiter moved to LA. Since then, he’s done everything you’re not supposed to do, all at the same time, including losing a $6,000 bottle of vintage Cognac.

In a whisky store in Los Angeles, California, a man walks in and starts perusing the shelves of assorted bottles of bourbon, blends and single malts.Brandy too has caught his eye. Occasionally, he subtly looks over his shoulder, checking down the aisles, scanning for people, glancing into the office, waiting for the right time. The store is busy and there’s only three members of staff, and only one visible, but fortunately he takes a call that’s clearly distracting.

Dressed in a pair of uniquely adapted trousers, he carefully slips bottle after bottle of rare whisky and brandy down each leg. Once full, he casually leaves, happy with his ‘shop’, in a car with a blacked-out number plate. 

When the phone call ends, and he returns to his desk in the centre of the store, former British & Irish Lion Chris Cusiter realises he’s been robbed. “He got away with a lot,” recalls Chris, “he took eight bottles, but the one that hurt the most was an expensive bottle of Cognac, it was a $6,000 bottle. We couldn’t sell it for love nor money to be fair, but as soon as I watched the tape, I was like, ‘ah, you motherfucker’.  He properly got away with it too, he was a professional, he’d taken expensive wine from another guy I knew too. 

“I reported it to the LAPD,” continues Chris, “but it was like talking to Chief Wiggum [from The Simpsons], he couldn’t care less, he was like, ‘sure, we can file a report, but we won’t catch him’.

“The insurance company, said, ‘you’ve been very negligent in security’, so much so they didn’t want to take me as a client anymore and dropped me – I was ‘come on guys, give me a break?’. But that was a lesson, not to trust people.”

Chris has been living in Los Angeles since 2016, when the Aberdeen-born scrum-half called time on a 70-cap career that started with Borders and took him to Perpignan and Glasgow Warriors before coming to an end with Sale. “When I was at Glasgow I started getting into whisky, doing an onine course and visiting as many distilleries as I could,” he says. “And I’d been to California quite a few times before I stopped playing and just really liked it, so just decided that, when I stopped playing rugby, I’d quite like living there.”

He moved with his wife Sarah and a then one-year-old daughter. “It seems crazy in retrospect, but in America they have this thing called the EB-5, a Green Card programme where  if you invest a certain amount of money and you create ten jobs, you get a Green Card.”

It was the year before Major League Rugby began, so that wasn’t an option, and so he bought a whisky shop. “It had the real estate, about 10,000 sq ft, it had a bit of substance, it had two members of staff, and it had some sales and it was something to work with. 

“It wasn’t a particularly nice part of Los Angeles, I think it used to be the distribution centre for all the porn, so not quite Beverly Hills, but because we had the space, it fitted the business model. 

“I arrived on day one and I was just sitting at my desk and I was like, ‘oh, shit, what have I done?’. I had two employees, and they asked ‘what do you want us to do?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, what do you normally do?’. I didn’t even know the coins they used in America, I felt a fraud, I had no experience, I was the boss just because I had the money from rugby. 

“I also felt a massive amount of pressure because I’d put a bunch of money in, and it was sink or swim,” he admits. “I had a mortgage, payments to make, and the business scraping by so I couldn’t afford to pay myself anything...

“I had four months before I had to make the first payment to the old owner and the day before it was due, I didn’t have the money. I was working out what I was going to tell her about not having the money.

“I had three bottles of vintage Balvenie, which the guy who ran the store before hadn’t been able to sell, and then out of nowhere someone bought all of them. They were expensive bottles, like three grand a pop! And things like this kept happening, I was so lucky.”

Chris put all his time into the business, working seven days a week, and took the antiquated set-up into the modern world, just in time for Covid. “The alcohol retail sector in America is quite old fashioned,” he says. “It wasn’t like the UK, for example, or Europe, where the e-commerce sites were miles ahead. 

“We were already doing quite well but then 2020 it just went bananas with Covid. Everyone started ordering online. Everyone started drinking and I was in a good spot to take advantage of it.”

As the business grew, he was able to employ staff, enough to earn the Green Card, but it came at a cost. “We basically doubled the turnover every year. I think Covid was just absolutely bananas. Then I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m so exhausted’. 

 “I was so naive about what the challenge was,” admits Chris. “I didn’t even know how to use a cash register, it was so stressful.  I don’t regret it, but I was definitely putting myself under a lot a lot of pressure. 

“I wanted to provide an income for the family and to live and have a good time, the whole thing was supposed to be an adventure, it was supposed to be fun.”

That it was stressful shouldn’t have surprised Chris, as he admits. “We moved countries, obviously I was changing career, we had one kid and then two kids, it was a completely new life really, and doing it all without family support and friends,” he says. “So I would say that pretty much all the stressful things that you can do in life, we probably did all at once. And you know, although it kind of worked out in some ways, it did obviously cause a lot of stress.”

He sold his business last year – he still works in the industry, for Alexander Murray & Co – and for all the stress, he did get his Green Card, and to handle some of the finest bottles around. “We had one from Gordon & MacPhail, an independent bottler, it’s a 75-year-old single malt and one of the oldest releases. I think Macallan just released an 80 year old, but 75 is still ridiculously old.

“A guy bought it from us for $35,000 for this one bottle,” he continues. “He was a collector and he showed up in his fancy car and his friends came in with him and they were all, ‘okay, so what does he get for $35,000? Does it come with a car? It can’t just be the whisky.’ I think what he’s looking at is an good investment, it’s a good one. I can’t imagine drinking a bottle like that.”

He’s also met plenty of interesting characters. “I don’t know if you remember, but back in the day Madonna took a bagpiper on tour with her,” says Chris. We don’t. “Anyway, he’s called Lorne Cousin and he lives over here and he’s in the whisky business. I had lunch with him one day and he brought this 50-year-old Balvenie in a hipflask, and I got to try that.”

Aberdeen, the oil-rich Granite City, on Scotland’s bitterly cold north-east coast, was Chris’s starting point. Older brother Calum, eighteen months his senior, went into rugby first, and Chris followed, their playing careers converged both at Boroughmuir and, later, the Borders. “Calum was always more physically developed but I caught up a little bit through university,” explain Chris. “He had a good career with Boroughmuir, on the sevens circuit with Scotland and he got a contract with Borders but never really got an opportunity. I was there [as first-choice], but if I didn’t play, he never really got the chance.”

Studying law at university, Chris was initially able to combine rugby with Watsonians and Boroughmuir before he was offered a two-year contract with the Borders [reformed after the original Border Reivers were disbanded in 2002] during his third year. “I had no experience of professional rugby, this is 2003, so I didn’t really have anything to compare it to,” he explains. “We had Tony Gilbert, an experienced former All Blacks coach, we had some decent players, a couple of Samoans including Semo Sititi, some good Kiwis, Gregor [Townsend] was still playing for my first two years, but the facilities weren’t great, we played at Netherdale and the gym was very basic.

“It wasn’t amateur, it had one foot in both camps I’d say,” he says. “We trained quite hard but when I think back to maybe Glasgow under Gregor [Townsend], it was a different ball game. 

“It was tough to win a game to be honest. We had a couple of clauses in our contracts, including £200 for a win, but we didn’t earn much from that.

“I was on £25k though, and I was happy with that, and I was playing rugby.”

He was also starting for Scotland, from the 2004 Six Nations, he started sixteen consecutive Tests. “It was after the 2003 World Cup, and Matt Williams came in and liked me as a player,” he explains. “I started that whole Six Nations, then the summer tour, and through to the November series. A baptism of fire. 

“I probably wasn’t quite ready for it, to be honest,” says Chris, who made his debut aged 21. “But, you’re not going to turn down the opportunity. 

“Mike [Blair] was a year older and had been at the World Cup, and I started ahead of him, so I was pretty competitive. 

“But then it was pretty tough times for the team,” explains Chris, who won just three of those first sixteen Tests. “It was a bit of a transition from guys retiring from the World Cup, and Matt coming in, and not being particularly successful or popular.”

And your view? “You tend to like the guy who picks you,” he says.

“I was young though and had nothing to compare it to,” continues Chris, “it was my life’s ambition to play for Scotland. Even if I just got on for one minute off the bench, that would have been beyond my wildest dreams.

“I was travelling the world, playing professional rugby, playing for Scotland, that was a dream come true. In some ways, those are the best days, when you’re young and, while it feels like there’s pressure, it’s not really; you’re a young player so you’ve got a bit of leeway in terms of making mistakes.”

While Scotland propped up the Six Nations table, the Borders also struggled, meaning the taste of defeat was far from an unfamiliar one. “I got a lot of practice in defence to be honest,” he says. “Looking back, you’d get a lot of praise for how many tackles you’d made. I remember playing in Northampton and we never had the ball, we were defending the whole game and I made 25 tackles. How on earth does a scrum-half make 25 tackles? I’m scrum-half, I should  be untouched.  

“Look at Ali Price,” says Chris, referencing the current Scotland halfback, “he’s playing with a good team, on the front foot, he’s loving it, that’s what I wanted to be doing , attacking on the front foot, that’s the type of rugby I wanted to play, but I ended up doing a lot of defending.

“I think a lot of us now would look at the current Scotland team, and they’ve had their struggles but they’ve also won a lot of big games.  They’ve been more consistently winning, you know, beating France in Paris, England at Twickenham, Australia too ... I think a lot of us are jealous, that would have been amazing to experience those things, but I’m delighted that it’s happening.”

For his own 71-caps, ask him about his best times and there is no easy answer. He lost 45, drew two and won just 24. “That’s a tough one for anyone who played at the same time as I did,” he admits, “because there wasn’t any sustained period of success. There were no Triple Crowns, no Six Nations titles. I suppose there were one-offs, like beating England at Murrayfield in 2006 or beating Ireland at Croke Park in 2010. I think I’d probably have to go back to the early days, when it was all new and exciting.”

Bad games, though, there’s been a few. “There were some really bad games,” he admits. “Like Italy, 2007 [they lost 17-37], that was a shocker. I threw a couple of intercepted passes early, back to back, that was tough. 

“Wales 2015 in Cardiff was tough, we should’ve won the game, but they had that spectacular comeback.”

Winning 21-9, Scotland were on course to record a first victory in Wales since 2002, but with two yellow cards, they conceded 17 points in the last seven minutes. Even when the Welsh had clawed the game back to 24-24, with one play to go, a draw would have earnt the Scots credit due to the two-man advantage enjoyed by their hosts, but Shane Williams scored with the final play to condemn them to another defeat. “After the couple of yellows, the nightmare scenario unfolded,” he says. “That happened, but you take the rough with the smooth.

“Unless you play for New Zealand, if you play in that environment it is a rollercoaster,” continues Chris. “That’s maybe the one contrast with leaving professional rugby and going into the real world. You get off the rollercoaster and, initially, it’s a  relief, so you don’t have to have these extreme lows anymore.

“But,” he adds, “you don’t get the extreme highs and that’s what most
guys miss – those highs and that feeling and camaraderie is almost irreplaceable but you have to try.”

Chris felt the ultimate high when he was selected by Clive Woodward for the 2005 British & Irish Lions. “I think it was one of the best days in my life,” he says. “I remember they did the announcement on Sky Sports, but I got a heads up from someone at Murrayfield half an hour ahead.”

Although one of the liveliest of the tourists in his games, he never made it to the Test side. “I can’t look back on it with anything but affection because it was a dream come true to be on the tour. I think I was a wee bit miffed about not getting on the bench behind Dwayne Peel, but I still played a lot of games.

“Clive knew Matt Dawson and perhaps I wasn’t quite mature enough to be the personality or the kind of character that they wanted.”

Back at club level, his career with the Borders came to an end when the SRU called time on the region in 2007. “There were rumours going around and they took two of our coaches away during the season, so that was probably a sign that things weren’t going to end well,” he recalls. “They wanted me to go to Glasgow, but I’d always had this thing about going to play in France.”

With his Scotland career stalling under Frank Hadden – “I got the impression, he probably preferred Mike,” says Chris –  he joined Perpignan. “It was a world away from  the Borders,” he says. “They are crazy there, there was one stand at the end where all the kind of nut-jobs sit, it’s just like constant noise and brass bands, it was a properly hostile, hostile place to go. So, playing at home was amazing. 

“It’s not really acceptable to lose a home game, and we had a bit of a rough patch and lost one or two at home,” admits Chris, “but that was the year we ended up winning the title.”

Under the abrasive Jacques Bruneil and with a squad that included Dan Carter, Perpignan won the Top 14 in his second season. “We had 40,000 come up to Stade de France for the final [against Clermont, which they won 22-13], everything was decked out in red and yellow, the trains were packed. 

“I was gutted because the day after I had go to Scotland because there was an A team tour to Romania, so I’d miss the open-topped bus tour.

“Andy Robinson had just come in, so this was an opportunity to spend some time with him and, yeah, I wanted to go on this tour, but the bus parade was once in a lifetime stuff. It was a tough call, but you can’t call the new Scotland coach up and say you can’t tour because you want to go and get on the beer with the boys for a couple of days.”

When Chris’s contract came to an end, the then Clermont coach Vern Cotter offered him a contract, but with his dad dealing with prostate cancer, he returned to Scotland and Glasgow Warriors.

The Glasgow Warriors he joined was a different side to the one he had turned down before,now with his former team-mate Gregor Townsend at the helm. “I really like Gregor, I’d overlapped for about a year when he was playing [at the Borders], and we were friends, we’d stayed in touch, then he became my coach.

“If you ask anyone in Glasgow about those first couple of years, Gregor was a very hard taskmaster, he was a workaholic. We trained a lot, everyone was exhausted most of the time, but he was trying to change the culture, he was trying to improve Glasgow from a mid-table team to one that won titles.

“There was a lot of tension in the early days,” says Chris, “and I had some injuries in those first couple of years he was there. I dislocated my shoulder, and I was trying to protect it a little bit; I’d say ‘can I limit the contact during the week so I can play over the weekend?’, and he’d say ‘no, no, I think you need to do more contact on it, you know, to really strengthen it’. 

“I remember saying to him, ‘Gregor when you had that bad neck at Borders, would it have helped to do more contact?’. I think that annoyed him, so we had a few battles about stuff like that, but he did a great job and I think everyone respected how hard he worked and how he changed the culture.”

Gregor’s methods did bring Glasgow to the fore, taking them to the Pro12 [as it was then] final, where they lost narrowly to Leinster 17-15 in Dublin “That last year was probably the most enjoyable year of professional rugby I had in my whole career to be honest,” says Chris. “We had a really good team and I had a good run free of injury finally. One more year would have probably been good at Glasgow though – to have been a part of that title-winning team [Glasgow won the final against Leinster 34–12].”

As one of the higher-paid players at Glasgow, and with almost the first year disrupted with injury, his three-year contract became two. “I started getting the impression I was becoming a burden, and I was asked to take a pay cut,” he says. “Looking back, I was a bit petulant, I can see their position, but I didn’t take it that well.”

Sensing he was on his way out, he left a year early to join Sale. Fortunately, his relationship with Gregor survived. “I caught up with Gregor in November,” he says. “Everything’s good, there’s no point looking back bitter and angry.” 

He called time on Scotland soon after. “I was on my way out before the 2015 World Cup,” he says. “Sometimes I wouldn’t even be in the training squad, and so I never felt I was going to play – every scrum-half was getting game time except me – so I just started to think, ‘do I want to do this anymore? Do I want to spend the whole summer in training, only to not get picked?’.

“I’d been named in a training squad before the World Cup, but I’d barely played the year before, so I called Vern [Cotter, then Scotland coach] and said I wasn’t going to come [to the training camp], as I didn’t think I’d got a chance. 

“He was pretty angry, but I didn’t really care, I should’ve done it earlier really.”

Chris played his last professional game against Harlequins in 2016. “I got knocked out by Tim Visser,” he recalls. “He did his classic left-foot step and his hip hit the top of my head, it was the worst concussion I’ve had, and it took me a long time to recover from it, like months and months. 

“To be honest, I think that although I’m fine, and I function fine, my short-term memory is not fantastic. So I have to try and manage that.

“There’s no doubt that I did some damage to my brain in some way,” he continues, “but I think that in some ways, it was kind of the price to pay. It’s such a physical sport, that of course you’re going to jeopardise some of your physical health. 

“I would do it all again,” he admits, “it was so fulfilling in so many ways, but it’s naive to go into a sport like that and think that you’re not going to be physically hurt. I was always managed well by the medics, I was never forced to play, although I forced myself to play at times. I look back and think that was idiotic, but you know, you have pressures as a player, you don’t want to miss too many games, you don’t want to lose your place.

“And if the coaches think you might be ducking out, then it’s quite hard to have the maturity to say, ‘no. I’m just actually not right. I definitely played a few times where it wasn’t right.”

He believes the impact from injuries in his rugby days still affects him today. “It’s more like a kind of haziness, a lack of clarity,” he says. “If you saw my desk at work, it just has Post-it notes everywhere, I have to write everything down.

“I definitely don’t have the same recall,” he reiterates. “I used to study law and you have to remember a lot of stuff and I had no problem with that, but I couldn’t do that now.”

He then recounts how he got knocked out in the Pro12 final against Leinster, and there had been a Scotland tour at the same time. “They wanted me to go on the second leg of the tour,” he says. “But I pulled out because I was getting married actually, and I think they were really annoyed, but I’m glad I didn’t go because there was no way I was recovered from that concussion. But that was the culture then, pass the test and get back on the pitch. I think it’s probably changed now.

“I did consider trying to come back and play one last game [after the concussion against Harlequins] but I just thought, ‘this is madness’, although it would have been nice to finish with a lap of honour like some players get.”

Chris is in a good place now. He’s settled in California, he’s a successful businessman, his family are settled, although he would like, one day, to perhaps spend summers in Scotland, to help ‘round off’ his children’s American accents. And even though, like the rest of the world, he’s been shocked by the school shootings in America, the last in Texas, he can put things into perspective.  “I dropped my kids at school [after the Robb Elementary shooting] and it was kind of poignant, thinking about, you know, the fact that it could happen. It definitely makes you think twice. 

“The only thing is we’re in California, and while there’s obviously guns
here, all the crazy laws that are getting passed right now – the abortion restrictions, the gun laws they’re trying to deregulate – are down in the south, or in Texas.

“Maybe that’s the only way I can live with it. It’s always easier to think of America as 50 separate countries, like the EU or something and, okay, there’s some commonalities, but you know, life in Los Angeles is nothing like life in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

When he looks back now on his rugby life, he can see the positives, which he should, given his achievements, but it hasn’t always been the case. “My tendency was always to look back at the career and dwell on the negatives and the missed opportunities and the lowlights,” he admits. “But honestly, if that was the price to pay for having a long career as a professional and international rugby player then I would pay that price because I grew up in Aberdeen, and I never would have imagined that I could have done any of those things. 

“I’m forty this year, and, yeah, I made some mistakes in games, there were situations I should have handled better, but you can’t really have one without the other, and I’m very, very proud of it.

“It took me a long time [to think like that],” he says. “I’ve had to remind myself not to try to qualify everything. It was a great adventure, thirteen years, playing all over the world, living in France, playing for Scotland, the British Lions. If you’d told me that at eighteen, it would have been a done deal.

“Yeah I lost a lot of games,” he concludes, “but I can celebrate the good times now; that’s life.”

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Mark Read

This extract was taken from issue 19 of Rugby.
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