James Haskell

James Haskell isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He doesn’t deny it. His girlfriend Chloe doesn’t deny it either. In fact, she admits, she wanted to ‘punch him in the face’.

Haskell is a name that conjures up all kinds of thoughts. There isn’t a rugby fan without an opinion from one end of the spectrum to the other. They either love or loathe. Some first loathed because he had the audacity to leave Wasps for Paris as a 24-year-old, putting his England career in peril (what career couldn’t survive a three-hour Eurostar trip?). Others loathed when he realised earlier than most that he needed to have a career outside of rugby and dared to try and get brands on board. Depending on who’s following, his banter and social media japes can result in either loathing or love, it’s all a question of personal taste really. In recent times however, the love has been in much greater supply. Now back in the bosom of Wasps, his club fans love him once more. England fans love him too for smashing everything in sight. And, while perhaps not quite love, even British & Irish Lions fans will have enjoyed his tour, if only for his bromance with Sean O’Brien. 

Yes, when it comes to James Haskell, loathe to love is a journey many have travelled. Including his girlfriend Chloe, who’s decided to join us for our interview with James.  “To me, it’s night and day,” she says of when they met and now. “He’d been single for ages and was just like ‘banter man’. I kept him at arm’s length at first, but then the more I got to know him I realised he’s actually really articulate, funny and actually really smart – way smarter than me. Then we got really drunk together at a Wasps social and that was it.”

“How did you get involved in this?” jokes James. “You just wandered over into the kitchen and started talking…”

Chloe had joined us shortly after we arrived at their house in a village in the middle of nowhere. James is just back from training and immediately offers us a coffee, which is good because it’s far from a simple task. His kitchen shelf is full of bean-based paraphernalia and he truly pores over the detail of his pour. He tells us he’s trying to get the right flow time. Ideally the water would pour through the ground coffee at about 25-35 seconds. He’s aiming for 35, but, instead, the water is rushing through at 15 seconds. It’s because, he says, he’s ground the coffee beans too fine. Or vice versa. We’re not sure, we lose track. Losing track is an easy thing to do with the backrower, as he speaks at a rate of knots, often with different trains of thoughts colliding in the same sentence. He starts on one track, diverts to another, then another, and sometimes he even ends up where he was trying to get to.

As he explains the bean grinding process, he catches himself, reckoning all this talk of coffee and diggers (more of which later), has already made him seem a ‘bit weird’. It hasn’t, but he does quantify it nonetheless. Unlike some, he knows he’s never going to make money from coffee. “Rugby players do a lot of it,” he says, “you know, chat and go for coffees. Sadly, I had to point out to the youngsters that coffee isn’t a career outside of rugby. I ask them what else do they do? And, well, yeah, that’s it, that’s all they do.”

Nobody can ever accuse the Wasps and England flanker of not keeping himself busy. The multi-tonne JCB parked on his driveway is another hobby. Easy to think it’s a gimmick, but the boy loves to dig. “I’ve always been a fan of machinery,” he says, “especially JCBs, so I contacted them years ago, did a load of stuff on social media, drove a tractor to and from training – they gave me a massive Fastrac 8000, it was bigger than this house. 

“They got loads of good views and gave me this 4CX. A neighbour who owns a cider farm saw me driving it and asked if I could help out, so I removed 20 trees and dug a drainage ditch.

“It’s not the ideal machine for that specific job, you’re better off with a little excavator, but it worked out well. It goes through the soil like a knife through butter. You can’t fuck it up too much either, you can’t go through a gas main, electricity, there’s nothing overhead. You’re more likely to hurt yourself than anyone else.”

Is it relaxing? “A hundred per cent,” he says, “but because I’m a perfectionist I get stressed. The other day, I took all these reeds out of a pond and I was trying to level the edge of the pond and it was really muddy so I was trying to make it completely flat and tidy, and it pissed me off that I couldn’t do it. When I got back Chloe was saying ‘this is supposed to be fun, yet it’s stressing you out – it’s becoming like a job’.”

“Once a week he’ll go to that farm and do stuff,” chips in Chloe, “It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world, but it makes him so happy. He always says to me ‘if I retire from rugby, I’d like to become a digger’. I do tell him it won’t be enough for him, but he’s like ‘no, it will’. ‘Well, maybe one day baby’…”

His list of extra-curricular activities is enough to make the head spin. Aside from his fitness business, there’s two books (one fitness, one recipes – ‘one is great, one isn’t’, he says), DJing, motivational talks, various endorsement deals and endless emails to answer. 

He wants to be perfect in everything he does. Perfect coffee flow, flat pond edges, recipes, rugby, weight-lifting form. A sign of OCD? “OCD is me,” says Chloe, “James has got ADD because he can’t concentrate on one thing for very long, that why he has 17,000 hobbies – he’s need them to keep him busy. Plus, he’s not used to being in a monogamous relationship.”

“This is the best,” says James. “I told her this the other day. She asked ‘why have you got so many hobbies’?...”

 “I felt there was some psychological reasons about why you literally cannot sit still for any part of the day,” interjects Chloe, “and he was like ‘that’s because my life used to be about banging girls’.” 

“I didn’t put it like that.” 

“You said ‘well now I’ve got you I need to keep myself occupied’.”

“I didn’t quite word it like that, I was just insinuating that when you’re single, there are more things on the agenda.”

His thoughts come quicker than he can talk. It’s as if once he starts on one topic, there’s another that’s far more exciting and he heads to that instead. It’s hard to keep up as the thoughts tumble over one another in a bid to reach the end. He’s 32, yet for all he’s done, he should be 52. The rugby life he’s led should be an inspiration to others: winning titles and plaudits from the offset with Wasps; playing in France, Japan and even following a barely-trodden path by Europeans and taking on Super Rugby with the Highlanders. Rattling through his travels, he covers some tens of thousands of miles and about four years of his rugby life in about a minute. France: “love their rugby… attritional… lack of professionalism… naked calendar…”. Japan: “lived in little pink house… no Christmas… cold fish and rice for breakfast…”. New Zealand: “back-door passing… play touch rather than weights… individually better than us…”

This is abridged, but not by much. He even brings us up to recent times – all in the same time it takes for the water to flow through ground coffee for the perfect cup.

“… then back at Wasps, rebirth of  Wasps, ten minutes from going down the toilet to buying its own stadium and moving to the Midlands. It’s been a rollercoaster.”

For us too. “My plan in life is to make the most of everything, I want to maximise every opportunity – that’s why you are here today. It’s why yesterday I was in Northampton doing a bloke’s podcast – although in retrospect I actually think it was just for him and his mates. But it’s why I’ve always done lots of things. 

“You get one opportunity with life and there’s no way I can look back on my career and say I could’ve done more, I could’ve tried harder, or sacrificed more, or done anything different. The only thing I regret is not having more confidence in myself. Not off the field with my extrovert personality – that’s enough confidence for any man. But in terms of my playing ability, believing in myself, playing the way I want to play.” 

When he ticks off topics to cover on his mind’s list, James does reflect. He reflects on the last time we met, filming him and his then flat-mate Ollie Phillips when they played for Stade Francais. “When you came to France [in 2010]  it was a difficult time, because I got so much hate for it [leaving Wasps]. I wanted to keep playing for England but I was aware that appearing naked in calendar [something of a Stade Francais tradition a the time] and doing and saying certain things in France wasn’t ideal. I don’t have a huge amount of trust in the media or for people in general.”

There were no rules to stop him playing for England, yet for all the vilification he received, Paris – closer by train to London than parts of northern and western England – might as well have been Antarctica.  “They say once a Wasp, always a Wasp, until you leave…”

It wasn’t just the Wasps’ move that helped single him out from the beginning. “The RPA are spending all their time telling players to have a career outside of rugby, to do more. I did that and absolutely got hammered for it,” he says. “‘Spend more time on rugby’, ‘focus on rugby’, ‘if you did this you weren’t doing that’... I’m not going to name him, but one coach, made up that I’d described myself as ‘the brand’, it’s absolute bollocks. But now funnily enough every player is told to create a brand.

“One pundit who’s still around now wrote that they didn’t know much about this James Haskell but they’d looked at his website and saw he had commercial this and commercial that and he’s obviously a bit mercenary. Now everybody is doing it.”

What was meant as an insult, is now perhaps the best compliment. Of all the rugby players you meet, few are as ready for their post-rugby life than James. His social media followings are into six figures whichever platform he’s on, he’s comfortable in front of the camera, he’s got endorsements left, right and centre. Like him or not, he was a pioneer. “I tell you what, I don’t worry about public perception, but my parents do. What I worry about is people sitting in offices doing business and making decisions about what they believe and read. I don’t worry about normal people in the street, because we all judge. You read an interview with Kim Kardashian and you’re like ‘oh my God’. 

“I’ve been lucky enough to play around the world and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I was a nightmare or difficult to be around. I’ve shared lot of my life on social media, because I enjoy doing it and it’s a business tool to be completely honest.”

Which brings us to Chloe. Surname Madeley. A fitness guru in her own right, she’s the perfect foil. “I feel like we’re really well-suited,” she says. “I don’t think you think we are,” she says to James, “you think we are ying and yang.”

“I think we’re lovely,” he says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly – given Chloe’s also considerable following – they met via social media. “She bullshits this story every time,” cuts in James, “she’ll lie but this is the truth. Somebody tagged me and Chloe in the same Tweet. She followed me, I clicked on her and DM’d her. I had a female supplement range, I didn’t recognise her name, I just thought ‘she was hot’ and would be good to send a fitness supplement to. She was having none of it, so I wore her down – persistence beats resistance.”

Three years on, with perhaps those punches to the face, out of the system, Chloe isn’t the only James Haskell convert in her family, so too are Richard and Judy. “My mum loves him, he can do no wrong, I can be pissed off with him and they’ll tell me I’m the one being dramatic,” she says. “My dad hates banter and bravado, so I did get nervous when James started digging him but he gave as good as he got.”

James picks up the thread: “I was over for lunch on Boxing Day and Richard was cooking so I went into the kitchen and offered to help but he told me to ‘fuck off’.”

“That was just my dad,” interjects Chloe, “he gets stressed.” 

“I thought he must be some professional chef, but it was all from M&S! It was a bit too early in the relationship  to give him grief, but now I’d have been like ‘fucking hell Richard – dry your eyes, mate, these are readymeals’.”

Stories come thick and fast, including Richard keeping him in the hallway for 20 minutes until James had mastered the art of ringing a ‘Disney bell’. And also the time he passed out drunk on their lawn. “You showed up drunk looking like Andy Goode and fell asleep in the front garden,” says Chloe. “It was a rugby social and the theme was Andy Goode,” adds James.

Chloe continues: “I dropped you off and went for a family lunch and then only a couple of hours later I got a call saying you were on your back. You were asleep, snoring, starfished in the garden, resting your head on the pillow you’d had up your jumper.”

As for James’s parents, over to Chloe. “His dad is like him but older and bigger if you can believe it,” she says. “Like James he banters everyone in the room, makes everyone feel really uncomfortable, thinks he’s funny, but in actual fact is just driving everyone out – absolutely James.”

Mum? “So sweet,” she says. “She’s this pretty little blonde thing that’s just bouncing off the walls and about to melt in puddle of pride for James.”

Even with so many words to play with, there’s so much to James Haskell that you need a novel. Fitness talk is prevalent, the couple talk about how they’ve driven each other on, helping with diets, form, carbs, macro-this and starches that. His attitude to training? “In the real world everything is ‘I’m okay, if you’re okay, and we’re okay just being who we are, and everything’s okay and I’m really happy even though I haven’t seen my feet in three weeks’. Whereas I’m like ‘no, no, shut the fuck up and work’. ‘When do I get a cheat day?’ When you look like you want to. I’m being a bit tongue in cheek, but it is essentially like that.”

Returning to rugby, he was a passionate Wasps fan from the age of 12 and would badger the team’s stars like Joe Worsley and Lawrence Dallaglio for tips whenever he invaded the pitch after games. His dad and brother were hardcore fans too, so much so that when he eventually joined the club as a player, Worsley would call him ‘Jonathan’ – his dad’s name.

He made schoolboy errors from the off. “I got in a fight with Trevor Leota and he must be the worse person to get in a fight with,” he admits. “He hit me back and cut my eye and my head but we made up afterwards.”

In Samoan hooker Leota, he saw one of the best he’s played with. “On his day he was the best hooker, in fact probably one of best  players in the world. For his size, he was incredible, he would bury people, and he had the footwork and handling skills – he was incredible.”

But he admits, Leota wasn’t perfect. “He had to have a conditioner live with him for a year to stop him going off the rails, because if you left him unattended, he would go off for KFC and get on the JDs and cokes. He was an unbelievable player though.” 

Other thoughts fall out: he doesn’t like 4G pitches; Dunedin is the perfect stadium; he wants to meet the Rock; Jamie Joseph, Michael Cheika and Eddie Jones are some of the best coaches he’s had. Ah, Eddie Jones. We’re meeting James on the Tuesday before the England squad is announced. Eddie has already paid him and his JCB a visit. He doesn’t tell us, but you know he’s not in. “He’s a great guy, a great man manager, he’s made the England environment what it should have been when I first started playing,” he says of Jones, “People look forward to going there and train. He doesn’t have any weird axe to grind, I have so much time for Eddie.”

“People have asked ‘do coaches struggle to get you?’,” he continues, “If I struggled with people I wouldn’t be able to do stuff. Does Eddie know how to motivate me? Yes. Does he treat me with respect and listen to me like an adult? Yes. I finally feel welcome in the England team, he got what I was about. He likes personality, he wanted character, he didn’t try and get vanilla people and banish people and make them robots.” There’s little need for prompts. “You’re interviewing me at a funny time in my career,” he continues. “My contract is up with Wasps, my England career up in the air, I’m still trying to play every day and trying to be the best. I’m never going to give in [trying to play for England] until I’m finished in the Premiership, whenever that is, I’ll never draw a line before then. I respect my competition, but I believe I can still compete.”

More thoughts. The Lions? “Can I still call myself a Lion without playing a Test? I don’t think so.”

Rugby ambitions? “I’d like to play for the Barbarians, that’s one box I’ve never ticked.” 

Children? “Not ready yet, we’re both too selfish right now, we have big career goals.”

Retirement? “I’ve spoken to about five players who have retired in the last five years and they all say the real world is just shit, so I’m going to play long as I can.”

And then? “Depending on my body, I would love to take up ju jitsu,” he says. “I’ve done some of that in the past. I’d like do some amateur competitions – as a fitness thing that would be great.”

For work? “Maybe some motivational talking, DJing, going on TV… … I’d like to be in good shape, couple of cars on the driveway, couple of houses in different places. I don’t have a specific goal really. DJ, digger driver, motivational talker, TV presenter, author – that’s what I’d like to do.”

Easy. 

“Easy.” 

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Rick Guest

This article was from issue one of Rugby, published in 2017.