Performance
Former All Black Carl Hayman recounts rugby success, repeated head impacts, alcohol dependence, early-onset dementia, and his family’s reckoning.
An alcohol problem need not mean craving a drink every morning. The author could go long stretches without wanting one, yet the moment something stirred bad feelings, drinking was the first thing he thought of. Each round ended where it began, in anger and self-loathing, which made the next round more likely.
Heavy drinking can be learned from the places a person grows up in, not just chosen alone. The author says that being rushed into the top team young, inside a hard-drinking local rugby culture, built his dangerous relationship with alcohol. He still owns the choices, but sees how the setting shaped them.
Anger tends to go toward whoever exposed the trouble rather than whoever caused it. When his court case reached the papers, the author was first furious at whoever leaked it. He then saw that the real source of the distress was himself and his drinking.
Brain decline can leave distant memories intact while wiping out recent ones. The author could recall each of his 45 international matches in detail but not what he did yesterday, or a conversation from five minutes earlier. A person who remembers the past clearly can still be losing the present.
A brain diagnosis can be welcome because it shows your mood swings come from a force bigger than you. The same diagnosis can be so frightening that not knowing feels safer. The author fixed on one technical label and avoided the word dementia until a news story forced him to face it.
The concussions that get recorded may be only the tip of the iceberg. The author estimates he took around 150,000 smaller blows to the head across 17 professional seasons, none of which counted as an injury at the time. This is his own estimate, not a clinical measurement.
The author pictured mental energy as a bucket of water everyone starts the day with. Most people lose a little to bumps along the way and still have enough to last the day. His bucket had holes, so on good days it drained slower and on bad days faster, but nothing could patch it.
When an authority can blame a person's struggles on an obvious life stress, it may never look for physical damage. The author kept being told he was depressed because of a bad divorce and would bounce back. He argued that depression does not turn a gentle man violent or erase five-minute-old memories, and he felt the rage of being powerless against the system.
Brain injury can show up at home as a parent who is there but not there. The author would stare out the window while his children talked to him, unable to answer, and they called it 'Daddy's gone off to Daddyland.' The cost of the sport landed on the family, not only on the player.
Where top athletic performance meets big money, players can become victims of their own success. The author reached the top of the game and was among its best-paid players. Afterward he was left to bear the hidden costs alone, which the book says should change how we protect the next generation.