Jimmy Gopperth

Aged nineteen, Jimmy Gopperth walked into a changing room with Jonah Lomu, Christian Cullen and Tana Umaga. All he had to do, he was told by the All Blacks’ captain, was ‘be loud and push us around the field’. That was the easy bit. What wasn’t so easy, was displacing Dan Carter.

“Everyone says, as you get older, you slow down as a player, you drop in strength … but it’s not happening,” Jimmy Gopperth tells the Rugby Journal, posing – at the request of our photographer, it has to be said – topless by a park bench, raising an eyebrow or two of passing local dog walkers. “My speed hasn’t dropped,” he continues, “my fitness hasn’t dropped, my strength hasn’t dropped. All those sorts of things – that’s where you get a gauge of where you are as a player.

“People do say to me, ‘why the Premiership?’. Because there are other leagues that would be better for a 38-year-old. But it’s the fiercest challenge and I’m a really competitive person.” 

In fairness, the man who will surely become – sometime in the latter months of 2023 – the oldest player ever to play a Premiership match, taking the crown from another Kiwi, Brad Thorn (who was aged 40 and 109 days), is in decent nick. 

When the photoshoot moves to his front garden, Jimmy is asked to strike a surfer pose, and his wife Sarah can’t resist poking fun. “Oh my God, you’re wet as well?!” she says – photographer James is armed with a water bottle to garnish Jimmy’s surfer look – while whisking the couple’s two children, Weston, eight, and Bayley, thirteen, into the house.

The photoshoot, at his home near Warwick, has lasted the best part of two hours and Jimmy’s only issues have been with a request to do keepie-uppies. “Can you do a few for me?” asks James. “What do you think? I’m a Kiwi,” is Jimmy’s response.

Kiwis clearly have a bad rep at Wasps when it comes to football. “Even today a few of us were playing football,” he explains, “and the trainer said, ‘if you get 30 [keepie-uppies] in a row you don’t have to do contact’ and one of the boys kicked it to [New Zealand prop] Jeff Toomaga-Allen and all of the boys shouted, ‘nooooo, don’t pass to the Kiwis!’”

For us, Jimmy makes it to five. 

As we return to the sanctuary of his kitchen, we pick up the topic of his post-rugby life and what it looks like. “And the answer is, ‘I don’t know’,” he admits. “It’s probably my undoing.

“I think it’s hard on my family because I won’t put a date on it [retirement]”, he continues. “As soon as you put a date on it, then you start planning properly for it. But because I’m quite stubborn and want to keep playing, I have never put a date on it. Which probably drives my wife insane. Well, it will [drive her insane].

“My family have sacrificed a lot,” he says. “We’ve been away from our families, for me, for my job, for thirteen years. 

“On top of that we haven’t been home since 2018 when I did my knee and we went home for Christmas. Being in New Zealand that summer, when everyone’s barbecuing, that made me think ‘aww, I miss this’. It was a great Christmas.”

Upping sticks in 2009, Jimmy moved his family from New Zealand to Newcastle, staying in the north-east for four happy years, even if “the rugby wasn’t great.” Jimmy had arrived to replace Jonny Wilkinson, who was heading for Toulon. And despite winning the Premiership’s Golden Boot award [as the division’s top points scorer] in both his first and second seasons, Newcastle were only just keeping their head above water and were relegated in Jimmy’s third season. However, they swept all before them in the Championship to bounce back, with Jimmy picking up another golden boot, and his performances attracted the eye of Leinster, who brought him to Dublin to replace the France-bound Johnny Sexton. At the time, Leinster had won three of the previous five Heineken Cups and counted Brian O’Driscoll, Rob Kearney, Jamie Heaslip, Cian Healy and Sean O’Brien in their ranks. After a successful two-year spell which included Jimmy winning a Pro 12 crown – scoring 14 points in the final – Wasps signed him and the Gopperths moved to the Midlands in 2015, where they’ve been ever since. 

And he’s on the move again this summer, with Leicester Tigers confirmed to be his next stop, literally on the day Rugby Journal goes to print. 

His employment contract is a familiar one: a ‘1+1’. A common contract type for any player over the age of 32. Essentially, a one-year contract, with an intention – but not a guarantee – to extend to a second year if the first year works out. It seems to significantly favour the needs of the club, rather than the player.

When this type of contract doesn’t work out, which happens a lot, it can leave the player in a maelstrom of anxiety, furiously scrabbling around to get a new contract at a different club, and having to tell their family they have to move again. Newcastle’s Mike Brown has found himself in this exact scenario this season, a situation Jimmy has a lot of sympathy for, and one he says has “happened to hundreds of players”. “It’s sad,” expands Jimmy, “but he [Brown] is a good player and he’s still young enough to pick something up.”

Jimmy’s next employers have made an astute signing. Jimmy’s statistics this season place him as one of the most valuable players in the Premiership.

At the time of writing, he has made nineteen appearances from 22 rounds of action, averaging 64 minutes on the pitch per match, and contributing an average of 7.68 points per game – two points per game more than Wasps’ second top points scorer Jacob Umaga, who, at 23 years old, is fifteen years younger than Jimmy.

His haul of 146 points so far, is also the fourth highest in the league, behind Leicester’s George Ford (third), London Irish’s Paddy Jackson (second) and Saracens’ Alex Lozowski (first). When it comes to kick success percentage, Jimmy’s nailed 75 per cent of all his kicks from the tee – the same percentage as Ford and Lozowski and better than Jackson’s 70 per cent. 

Jimmy doesn’t reveal his next club, but only says they made him an offer, “too good to turn down”. “It’s one of those things in professional sport isn’t it? Another team came to me in December [2021], very interested in my services,” he says, picking up the story. “So, I went to have a chat with Wasps and said, ‘this is the situation, I’ve got an offer and I just want to sound out where you’re at’. They said, ‘look with the new salary cap and everything, we’d like to have you but we can’t give you anything for a few more months’. This other gig was too good to turn down.”

And so he had an end date for his life as a Wasp. “It’s always sad to be leaving a club when you’ve been there for seven years and have a lot of friends there,” he says. “But it’s a new challenge and I’m really looking forward to it.”

Even for a veteran, stepping into a new changing room will come with a degree of trepidation, but not as much as when he first entered a changing room as a rookie professional for Wellington in 2003. Born and raised in Taranaki, Jimmy joined the Wellington Academy straight from high school. “We used to train out in Upper Hutt [twenty miles outside of Wellington] so I drove out there, and I remember seeing Jonah’s [Lomu] big car there with his own sound system. 

“Then I walked into the changing rooms, and Jonah was there, and Christian Cullen. I was a little bit star-struck. You’re a young kid, you get thrown in there and you’ve got to learn. 

“Jonah was going through that period then [with a kidney disorder] so he didn’t actually play much,” explains Jimmy. “But he came back in the 2006/07 season and played for North Harbour. I’ve got a photo of me and him and there’s a five-metre scrum and he’s just taking the ball off the nine at the side of the scrum [laughs] in front of me! And I was just very thankful that he had lost all his pace, otherwise…

“I’m pretty sure we brought him down just short,” he reckons. “We knew exactly what was coming … and I was like ‘here we go, here’s contact with Jonah’. 

“He was a lot bigger then because he had gone through dialysis by that stage but it was just so nice to see him back on the field. He was such a nice man. Very softly spoken in the changing room.”

Despite his inexperience, the person they didn’t want to be softly spoken in that changing room was Jimmy. “Tana [Umaga – uncle of current team-mate Jacob] was really good; he said, ‘mate, we want to hear your voice, be loud, and really conduct, and pull us around the field’.

“Coming from the All Blacks captain, as he was then, that helped me start to become a leader.”

Once he’d found his feet, and his voice, Jimmy excelled and was soon part of Wellington’s Super 12 franchise, the Hurricanes. 

He made inroads in his first season in Super Rugby too, something he puts down to being an unknown quantity. “I was breaking the line the whole time because no analysis was done on me, no one knew me. It was easy,” he says.

“Off the back of that I had an All Blacks trial. But then I had an up and down season, playing some really good games, some really shit games. Real inconsistent. 

“That second season was hard. And New Zealand media do blow up on players. Even on Dan Carter, if he had a shit game, he would get drilled.”

Being a New Zealand fly-half whose career overlaps with Dan Carter’s is unfortunate timing, but to be one just fifteen months younger than him, as Jimmy is, feels almost cursed. “Everyone knew in 2005, he was unreal,” admits Jimmy. “It’s still probably the best game a fly-half has ever played, that Lions [second] Test. Nick Evans was floating around then. Then there were three of us young guys behind Nick: Luke McAlister, Stephen Donald and myself.”

McAlister was also seen as a centre, leaving Jimmy to compete for the third out-and-out fly-half spot with Donald, who began to emerge as the preferred third in line to the number ten throne. So, Jimmy had to be content with life as a humble Hurricane – not that there was anything modest about backline iterations at the Hurricanes between 2004 and 2008. 

Cullen and Lomu may have left at the end of 2003, but Jimmy still found himself in charge of a backline which included the likes of Umaga, Conrad Smith, Ma’a Nonu, Piri Weepu, Cory Jane, Hosea Gear, and Lome Fa’atau. 

At the time, Super Rugby was next-level, Harlem Globetrotters-style rugby compared to the English Premiership. “From what I’ve seen, it had a lot to do with the pitches,” he says of the disparity between the two leagues at the time. “When I first came over here, Newcastle’s was sh… Okay, it got torn apart in the weather. Gloucester was terrible. Tigers was terrible. Bath was just horrendous. You look at all the pitches now and they have all got quicker, they’ve all spent money on their pitches. It has sped the game up so that’s been the big factor [in the improvement]. 

“Also, players don’t want to play boring games, they want to play exciting rugby, and I think the younger generation coming through have grown up watching Super Rugby as well as some of the Premiership teams who have been playing more expansively for a long time, and they [the players] have moulded themselves into being able to play an expansive game and running rugby.” 

Jimmy deserves to take some of the credit. It’s not far-fetched to say that, thanks to his time as a Hurricane and his thirteen years in Europe, he has helped develop the attacking talents of more northern hemisphere backs than any other southern hemisphere player. “My super strength is my organisation off the ball, putting people in places,” says Jimmy. “It’s a huge part of the way Wasps play. 

“My organisation off the ball needs energy and it needs communication and because that’s my super strength, I try and bring it every single time. And I suppose when I bring it, it energises myself as well.”

Watch Jimmy in the opening exchanges of any game, and you can see this organisational zeal, as he physically moves players around, claps, cajoles, encourages, runs over to team-mates to communicate something, and runs back into position, always in a hurry. 

Having drawn upon the likes of Umaga, Smith, Nonu, O’Driscoll, Gordan D’Arcy, Willie Le Roux, Danny Cipriani and Elliot Daly as team-mates during his club career, he’s absorbed the smartest brains in the room and applied his own considerable rugby IQ, which he passes on to team-mates every time he plays alongside them.

To the start: Pihama, Taranaki. The Gopperth family farm, 200 acres and 240 cows, in the foothills of Mount Taranaki, sandwiched in a slice of New Zealand countryside between a national park and the Tasman Sea. 

One of three – Amy and Lisa, his two sisters – he was often found acting as ball boy for Ōpunake Rugby Club under-21s, the side coached by his dad Gavin, who also played for the seniors. 

“I could not have had a better upbringing,” says Jimmy. “Milking cows, calving, every now and then helping cows give birth, ever since I was a little fellow.

“And it was right next to the beach,” adds our surfer.

Away from the farm, life was about rugby for Gavin and he moved in local rugby circles, even counting legendary All Blacks captain Graham Mourie (61 caps, 57 as captain) as a long-standing family friend. 

Jimmy played from a young age at Ōpunake Rugby Club, mostly barefoot until he was thirteen, and then at New Plymouth Boys’ High School where he was selected for New Zealand Schools, which would lead to Wellington and Lomu et al.

For the last ten years, the family farm has been run by his sister, Lisa, with Gavin helping her out when needed. 

Jimmy doesn’t rule out a return to the family business himself, admitting he, “loves the lifestyle”, although he’s also started branching out into the commercial world: selling kicking tees, specifically his own-brand, Jimmy G Kicking Tee.

It wasn’t a business Jimmy had any intention of starting, but the world had other plans. It started with a message on social media. “A man called George Simpkin randomly got in touch with me on Facebook, just before the first lockdown,” he says. “I did know the name because he’s done shit loads for rugby right throughout so I thought, ‘this will be interesting’ and I ended up having some great conversations with him.

“He started rugby in Hong Kong and all around that area,” explains Jimmy. “He made the law in sevens that when you score, you kick off again. That was him. He coached Fiji, Waikato, did a lot with smaller countries as well. He designed post protectors. They used to be small things, you know? He was very respected in the world of rugby.”

He also knew the name because of George’s kicking tee, known as the ‘Simpkin Tee’, and his tee of choice for as long as Jimmy can remember. 

“George said, ‘look, the reason I got in contact with you is because I’ve followed your career right throughout. Your success has been mine. I’ve loved watching how you still kick off my tee. I’ve been given several months to live, I’ve got terminal cancer, I want to gift you the opportunity to re-do the tee under your name, bring it back out, keep it going’.”

The global supply of Simpkin tees had been in decline for a decade before George contacted Jimmy in 2020. Ten years earlier, a truck carrying moulds of the Simpkin Tee crashed when the production line was being moved from one factory to another, destroying the entire supply of moulds. In his sixties at this stage, George took it as a sign to move on and stopped producing his much-loved tee. This was unbeknown to Jimmy, yet made sense given the trouble he experienced in sourcing his favourite kicking tee while in the UK. “When I moved over to Newcastle in 2009, I said to my agent that I needed to find a bulk of these tees in case I couldn’t get hold of them over here. We found a bunch but couldn’t get hold of any more from the end of 2010. We [he and his agent] were ringing around, and we did manage to find some more on a website.”

Knowing first-hand how hard they were to get hold of, Jimmy has had to be frugal with his tees, leading to him keeping one in an ice cream container within his kit bag so it doesn’t get bent, and even pleading with tee-carrying ball boys not to bend them. “I had to stop once in the middle of a game in Newcastle when I saw the ball boy bending it like this [Jimmy indicates folding the tee] and I was like, ‘oi, please, can you stop doing that!’ There’s a thin skirting on these and every now and then they will crack, so most of mine have glue and tape on the underside because I didn’t have many left.

“I was blown away by it [the offer of re-producing the tee under Jimmy’s name],” he continues. “I was like, ‘I really want to get it out before he passes’. But Covid hit and trying to get anything done was just a nightmare. 

“Unfortunately, George passed away not long after we first started talking and that just gave me the drive to get it done, even if it’s not successful. Because I wanted to say to his wife that I’d done it. 

“So, I got in touch with some 3D scanning guys, got my own tee scanned, then I got a company in China to make a mould of it. 

“George had told me all about the tee. It’s made from something called thermoplastic rubber, it’s a type of plastic that’s not really plastic. A lot of tees are quite hard but this is soft and as a kicker you generally hit the tee when you kick, but with this being a little bit softer, you don’t feel it.

“The company sent five or six types of thermoplastic rubber over so all I had to do was choose the right one.”

The only difference is that it’s now called the Jimmy G Kicking Tee, rather than the Simpkin Tee, at the direction of George. “For him [George] to say to me ‘I want you to re-produce it under your name’ was pretty cool.

“I would love to show him what I got done. It was such a shame. But I sent everything to his wife, every little write-up I’d done on the website, to make sure she was happy with it. 

“And now I’ve got tees to kick with!”

Kicking is, of course, Jimmy’s other super strength. It’s a potent and valuable combination that powered him to the English game’s most prestigious individual award: the Premiership Rugby Player of the Season award in the 2016/17 season (now sitting next to Jimmy’s TV). His 292 points that season won him the division’s Golden Boot, again, an accolade he has now won three times in all. 

Although Jimmy says he’s “never been one for sentimental things”, accolades do, evidently, mean something to him. “You don’t get these things the whole time, and it’s probably something to look back on once I’ve finished and think ‘pretty good, pretty good season’. It’s better than having it in the cupboard and is a reminder of why you do it and the enjoyment you get out of it.”

There’s one personal accolade however, that is missing, given the career Jimmy has had: a New Zealand cap. 

Jimmy is sanguine about it. “It was always my dream to play for the All Blacks. Lucky enough I got to play for New Zealand Schools, New Zealand U21s, and the Junior All Blacks in a couple of tests against Samoa and Tonga. And in an All Blacks trial.

“I knew I was there or there abouts,” he says. “Obviously not to play was ... I look back ... am I gutted I moved over? 

“It’s funny, because not long after I moved over here, there was the 2011 World Cup and everyone got injured, literally everyone got injured and people were saying to me, ‘ohh you could have played!’ but it’s, whatever.

“It would have been awesome to play for the All Blacks,” he admits, “but I’m still playing professional sport twenty-odd years later, and I’ve done pretty well over here and I hope I’m a respected player, and shown I can mix it with some of the best around.

“I’m not looking to hang in there,” he concludes as he looks to next season and beyond. “I want to keep playing. The game keeps my fire lit and I’m feeling good.” 

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by James McNaught

This extract was taken from issue 18 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.