Cory Jane - Winging It: Random Tales from the Right Wing

by Cory Jane, Scotty Stevenson

Overview

Not since the legendary Eric Rush departed the scene have the All Blacks had a jokester/prankster quite like World Cup-winning winger Cory ‘CJ’ Jane. A Commonwealth Games Sevens gold medalist and frontline All Black since 2008, Jane is one of the funniest men in New Zealand rugby. He was one of the first All Blacks to embrace social media, in particular Twitter, as a means of connecting with his fans and supporters. His stint as host of the All Blacks online behind-the-scene features "Room Raiders" was extremely popular and he has also starred as a comments man for Sky Sport. Here Jane takes the mickey out of everything—and everyone!—rugby. No player or occasion is spared the sharp-witted Jane's tongue. Get all the goss from the usually fortress-like inner All Blacks sanctum and, most of all, find out all the stuff the players did not want you to know.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927262078
Publisher:	Upstart Press Ltd
Publication date:	11/15/2015
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Cory Jane has been a regular fixture in the All Blacks since making his debut for the national side in 2008. He was a star performer for the All Blacks at the 2011 Rugby World Cup, receiving the Man of the Match Award for his incredible performance against Wallabies in the Cup semi-final. Broadcaster and writer Scotty Stevenson joined SKY Sport in 2007 and has refused to leave. Rugby has been his passion and he continues to work as a commentator, reporter, and presenter for New Zealand’s national obsession. He has also covered the Olympic Games, Olympic Winter Games, and Commonwealth Games. Scotty was appointed Editor of SKY Sport—The Magazine in 2011, and was named New Zealand Magazine Sport Feature Writer of the Year in 2012. He is also a weekly columnist for The New Zealand Herald. 

Read an Excerpt

Cory Jane - Winging It

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By Cory Jane, Scotty Stevenson

Upstart Press Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Cory Jane
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-927262-50-4

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CHAPTER 1

MORE TARZAN THAN JANE

I WAS BORN in the Wellington suburb of Naenae — or as I like to call it, the suburb so nice they named it twice. I don't know why, but to this day, whenever I meet anyone from Wellington on my travels around the world, they are invariably from Naenae. As a kid, I didn't think the place was that bad, but judging by the number of Naenaeans I have met in other parts of the globe, I'd be bloody surprised if anyone's still living there.

I have one sister, Renee. She is two years older than me and the bully of the family. Growing up under her regime of torture was a nightmare, and I think my growth — physically and mentally — was stunted by her totalitarian rule. I don't think I hit puberty until I was 14 or 15, though there are still a few people who will tell you I haven't quite got there yet.

Renee always used to beat me up. She took seriously my comments about her being the sister I couldn't stand and became instead the big brother I never had. She also took seriously the notion that I was the little sister she had always wanted.

I learnt to be fast and nimble, simply to get away from her. It was a talent that would stand me in good stead later in life. The only real trick I had up my sleeve was that I could always make her laugh. I remember as an eight year old finding Dad's cigarette lighter in his desk drawer and, being too young to consider the consequences, I spent a good half an hour lighting sheets of paper under the desk — just because it looked cool. Unfortunately, I was never great at covering my tracks, and I left all the ashes lying under the desk. I have since discovered that it is a universal law that a boy will never clean up after himself, even when he knows this will get him into trouble.

As it was, I soon tired of trying to burn the house down and I went off to play with my GI Joe (that's not a code name, by the way; I am referring to the actual toy) and didn't think much of it.

Well, I didn't, that is, until Dad got home and hauled Renee and me into the kitchen. We knew we were in for a torrid time, but I had a plan. (I don't have a lot of advice to give, and trust me, you won't find an awful lot of it in this book, but this is something to remember: always sit next to your father when he's angry, and make sure your sibling is facing him directly.)

Renee may have been tougher than me, but she never had a plan.

Dad was midway through the interrogation and my constant and most stringent denials were only serving to wind him up. The pressure was beginning to show on Renee, who knew that with every denial from me, the blame was inching ever closer to her. I seized my opportunity. Just as Dad turned his full attention on Renee, I started pulling my best faces at her. Of course, she couldn't help but laugh. And once she laughed, it was over.

I knew from that moment she was the one who was about to take the fall and I was going free.

I also knew from that moment that getting what you want in life is all about taking opportunities when they are presented.

After that, whatever I could do to blame her, I did. If nothing else, that alone fulfilled me as a child.

Dad was a builder so he would shoot off to work early most days. We had a little dog called Rusty who went everywhere with him. I think Rusty was the kid he wished he'd had. I may have resented that dog a fair bit. Every morning, off Dad would go to work, and every morning Rusty would go with him. I spent many an hour plotting my revenge on that canine interloper.

Mum was a postie, so we spent a fair chunk of our childhood riding in the sorting bin on the front of the mail bike. It would be a sackable offence to carry your kids, sans helmets, on your postie bike these days, but things were a little simpler back then.

Often dogs would come tearing out of driveways and Mum would swerve into a wall, or a fence, or a hedge. She was always okay. It was Renee or me who took the punishment. We'd come home with scratches and bruises after each and every run. I think back now and wonder how many times the residents of Upper Hutt went to the mailbox to find power bills and bank statements soaked in the blood of the Jane children.

I even recall once having to stanch the flow of claret from a particularly nasty forearm gash, suffered in a collision with a power pole, on a postcard from the Greek Islands. 'Hi Mum and Dad, Santorini is lovely, but hell it's violent!'

Mum and Dad were hard-working people, and Renee and I were typical hard-playing kids. I may have been a bit more hyper-active than most (and being dad now to a son who actually has ADHD I guess he must have got it from someone) but when Dad has a tool belt and an endless supply of four-by-twos at the ready, and Mum takes you to work on the front of a two-wheeled death trap, you can't help but get a little bit tough.

I didn't get in a lot of trouble as a kid, but there was always potential.

Unlike now it was standard practice for five and six year olds to have a certain amount of roaming freedom in our neighbourhood. Maybe the community was stronger back then, maybe the freedom we enjoyed was just an illusion, and even when we thought no one was watching us, someone actually was. Regardless, there was always someone to make mischief with and my cousin Kurt and I certainly made our fair share.

Our favourite game was to throw stones at people's houses until the owner came to the window to figure out what was going on. As soon as we saw the curtains shift we'd tear around the other side of their house and start all over again. It must have driven them insane.

We soon tired of throwing stones and upgraded to throwing lemons. We also upgraded from houses to moving cars. I've always prided myself on good hand–eye coordination and maybe that was when I first started to hone the skill. We would see the cars coming through the gap between the houses on the corner, and time our throw so as they drove past the end of our street they were hammered with a barrage of citrus. I'm amazed we didn't cause a pile up.

I was a naughty kid, but loveable, really. I was a cute kid, too, until I was at school. Then I was ugly. I think a lot of that had to do with Mum dressing me.

Later in my school life I also made the mistake of using Dad's Brylcreem and wearing his Brut 33 aftershave. I laid a great burley trail down the school corridors, but I didn't lay much else.

I was a hyper little kid but, fortunately, I loved anything that involved running, catching, kicking, hitting or throwing. I was five when I first ventured into the world of organised sport. My sister played in a T-ball team and one day they were a player short. I stepped in, with my parents' blessing (if not my sister's) and started cracking hits all over the park. I thought it was the best thing ever, but then Renee must have got jealous so she started teasing me. What I hadn't realised at the time was that it was an all-girl team. And I was the only fella.

Renee's taunting continued without pause. It got so intense that when we arrived for the big tournament of the year, I refused to step out of the van. The coaches begged and pleaded but the damage was done; I was traumatised. Still it brought new meaning to the phrase 'You're the man'. Even if it's not quite the same when it's used in a literal sense. I was, after all, the only man.

I was so typical of Kiwi kids. If it involved running around and acting crazy, I was into it. Soon enough I found my way into rugby, not that I really had any choice.

We moved to Upper Hutt when I was six. Upper Hutt gets a bad rap and I have no idea why. The people are great, the haircuts wonderful, and the full facial tattoos are optional. Upper Hutt is still my home and it's a great town, and the sister city to Mesa, Arizona, home of the amazingly named Olympic swimming champion, Misty Hyman. Mesa's population is 81 per cent white, but Upper Hutt still boasts the most bogans per capita.

I attended the local primary schools growing up. I don't know why, but in the suburbs it seems every primary school is named after the street it's on. The two I attended were Rata Street School and Fraser Crescent School (which for some reason we all called Fraser Street School). We wanted to feel like the flash kids so we put the Street first. I don't know if there is a Saint Rata or a Saint Fraser but it made us feel better about things!

I survived primary school and made my way to Heretaunga College. To be honest I was only there for rugby.

I just did not get school one bit. I was on the back foot from the moment I walked through the college gates, anyway — Renee had gone there ahead of me and needless to say she had created a pretty choice reputation for all Janes to follow. 'Are you Renee's brother?' the teachers would ask. As soon as I said 'yes' I would instantly regret it. And they would, too.

Despite not wanting to be there, I made a deal with myself to at least turn up. I don't think I ever passed a subject but at least I could say I had a good attendance record! Seriously, though, I just didn't get it. Teachers would write things on the board and I'd stare at their scribblings without understanding a single thing. It could have been Egyptian hieroglyphics for all I knew.

As for maths, well, I don't mind when it's just adding numbers together, but suddenly when everyone was trying to find the value of x and a and b I was done for. Pi was something I had for lunch.

You often had to get up and read extracts in front of the class and I would always put it in my own language. We'd be reading Lord of the Flies and I'd be up front 'reading' and it would always come out something like 'So, you know, there was these fullas, and they got stranded on an island, and then they all got spears and stuff and you know got straight up gangster on each other ...'

The teacher was never impressed.

It got to the point where I didn't even take a bag to school. I turned up knowing I would be getting detention for something (it didn't matter if I hadn't actually done anything, I always got the rap, and I soon discovered that the face-pulling trick only worked at home) and that was about it for the school day. The school bell would ring, I would get detention. The school bell would ring again, I would go home.

That was pretty much my school days. I was put in all the remedial classes because I was deemed to be not smart enough. I think I was the only English-speaking kid ever to be put into the 'English as a Second Language' class.

I didn't much enjoy that, so I would walk around to the gym and find the nearest PE class and ask the other students who wasn't there that day. When that kid's name was read out in roll call I'd call out 'Present' from the back. It was amazing how often this worked, even when I was a seventh former, and the class was for third formers. I may have set the record for the most PE classes attended in a single school year.

The only other thing about school that fulfilled me was hustling other kids outside the tuck shop. My mate Sebastian and I would beg our way through the recess in 10 and 20 cent increments. You would be amazed at how this adds up over the course of a lunchtime. And, better still, at the end of lunch everything was available at reduced prices. It was a great scheme.

We didn't consider ourselves to be beggars. We liked to think of ourselves as salesmen — and what we were selling was our own pitiful circumstances.

We also truly believed that this was the best kind of accounting class, as we would always be constantly calculating how much we needed for a cream bun, and how much we had.

The only bad thing was that everyone started to avoid us. That wasn't the kind of reputation we were after. Even today, when I walk through the Upper Hutt shops, someone will stop to remind me that I owe them $2.80.

Apart from endless PE and relieving other students of their coins, I just didn't want to be there. There are three things that I hated doing then, and still hate to this day: standing up in front of people to talk, and writing on a whiteboard for others to read.

I write like a three year old. My kids are always asking me to write something for them, but they have neater handwriting than me.

The final thing is trying to spell something. See, this is the problem with school: I would ask a teacher how to spell, for instance, 'hippopotamus', to which she would invariably reply, 'Look it up in the dictionary, Cory.' My response was always the same. 'Miss, if I don't know how to spell it, how the hell am I going to find it in a dictionary!'

Somehow I managed to get all the way through to the final year of high school, though how much of what I had been taught had managed to find a permanent home in my brain is debatable. Eventually, the teachers must have lost patience because one day I was corralled into a room where I was told that I may as well leave school. I didn't consider it an expulsion as such; it seemed far too polite for that.

I went home that night and told Mum and Dad, and decided to see the week out at least. The following day I got home and Mum looked a tad concerned. 'Your dad had a few drinks last night and went to see the principal,' she told me. I feared the worst. What on earth would he have said, I wondered. Turns out he had called them fulltime babysitters, and terrible ones at that. Suffice to say, the principal didn't change his mind, and my school days were officially over.

Let's be honest, they all knew I would rather be doing something else anyway so they were just expediting the process.

I wasn't a nasty kid — I never swore at teachers or spent lunchtimes tagging the bike sheds — I just had zero application. I would often be asked to leave class during the day, which I thought was great because I could then go and kick a rugby ball around.

Every teacher had asked me what I wanted to be when I left school and, from the age of six, I had the same answer: I wanted to be an All Black. Actually, that's not exactly true. I didn't want to be an All Black, I knew I was going to be an All Black.

That sounds cocky, and maybe it was, but from the age of six I had told anyone who cared to listen, 'I am going to be an All Black.'

CHAPTER 2

FALLING FOR THE GAME

I WAS ONLY FIVE YEARS OLD when Dad, who was always keen to find ways to tire me out, suggested I give rugby a go. I can't remember if he was wielding a piece of four by two at the time, but regardless of whether it was a suggestion or straight coercion, I went along and played my first game for the under-six team at the Rimutaka club with my neighbour Steven. He lasted all of half the first game until he got stood on, and then he was done. I don't know what happened to Steven, but I'm picking he never went into the shoe business.

While Steven's brief rugby career lasted all of 20 minutes, I couldn't get enough of it. I scored two tries that day, and loved every second being out there with the ball and the boys on the grass of Maoribank Park. And that's where I stayed and played, at the Rimutaka club, until I was 12 years old. I'm not entirely sure my teammates were ever grateful for that loyalty.

I don't think I was a bad teammate. I got along with everyone, was 'back of the year' every year, and always played my hardest. But the fact I played first-five and NEVER passed the ball may have led to some simmering resentment among the rest of the boys.

I scored 55 tries one year. Which I thought was pretty good but, again, it was only because I never passed the ball.

As soon as I had the ball in my hands I just tried to step my way through the opposing team. People ask, 'Where did you learn this or that?' The simple answer, and the truth, is that I don't know. Learning has never been a forte of mine! I just played rugby. I knew I couldn't bump people off — I got beaten up by my sister, remember? — so I guess in some ways it was survival instinct. I was a tiny kid, and avoiding people seemed the best way to avoid being hurt.

Dad coached me for one year and, gee, he was mean. He made a couple of kids cry, but mainly he took it out on me.

If anything went wrong he'd turn to me and bark, 'Cory, get off the field and go sit down.' It was always my fault. He may have been tough, but he has always been a big supporter of mine and while he is a massive footy fan he has never taken any credit for any of my talents. This actually led me to believe (a belief I held for some years as a child) that I was adopted.

Despite working long hours, Dad would always find a way to make time to come outside and kick a ball with me and, when he wasn't around, I designed my own practice field for goal-kicking out the front of my house. The goalposts were imaginary and consisted of uprights contrived from the chimney and the hip of the roof, with the guttering acting as the crossbar. It was almost perfect, apart from one major flaw: the lounge room window.

I cannot tell you how many times a potential game-winning kick went through that window, and it's probably no surprise that I haven't been handed the tee much in my professional career. Dad would explode every time he heard the glass shattering, but the anger would soon subside; I think he could deal with the glazier being on speed dial if it meant I was trying to get better.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cory Jane - Winging It by Cory Jane, Scotty Stevenson. Copyright © 2015 Cory Jane. Excerpted by permission of Upstart Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Writer's note,
Foreword By Israel Dagg,
More Tarzan than Jane,
Falling for the game,
Going Sevens & going Super,
Fulfilling a promise,
To test match rugby & beyond,
On with the job,
Winging it & the rise of the Bomb Squad,
Fashion & tans,
Roomies I have known,
A little tournament at home,
A night to regret,
Old foes & monkeys off backs,
A week of it,
Epilogue,