Trevor Leota -- Legend and Liability

TREV AFTER PONTY
By Barney Burnham
February 19 2007

When someone finds the time to sit down and write a history of Wasps in the early professional years, one name, above all others, will be guaranteed to raise many a smile, a good few laughs and countless happy memories.

It was on Sunday, the 19th of September, 1997, that a 23-year-old New Zealand-born Samoan hooker named Trevor Leota shambled on to the Loftus Road pitch, to make his Wasps debut, as a replacement hooker against Saracens.

For the best part of the next eight years, this man mountain – more a force of nature than a mere rugby player – was to become one of the most loved, feared and respected figures the club game had ever seen.

The first thing that struck you about him was the fact that he looked quite unlike any player you’d come across before. His head was the sort of size you would expect to find on the body of a man who was nearer eight feet tall than seven – but he was just five foot eight in height. The virtual absence of a normal neck gave him the look of someone who’d been used as a makeshift battering ram in some arcane war game. Who can forget when Sky cameras followed him into a Savile Row tailor, as part of the buildup to one of our three successive Cup finals, between 1998 and 2000?

The camp attendant dutifully took the big man’s neck measurement, and visibly blanched, when he saw that it read 22 (maybe 23) inches. “I’m sorry, sir. We simply don’t have any collars that size!” he gasped.

Trevor was a back in a forward’s body. Anyone who was at Buster White’s testimonial game, at the end of the 1997/8 season, will recall with pleasure that Trevor played at 10 – and pretty damned good he was, too. His restarts were excellent, his passing and handling bore the marks of a master, and he scared the sh*t out of his opposite number – it had been meant to be one C.R.Andrew, but he sadly withdrew, ahead of the game. He’d obviously been warned!

Apart from his remarkable ball skills, two other things about Trevor stood out – his tackling, and his lineout throwing. His tackling was simply ferocious, probably as destructive as anything the modern game has ever witnessed. For a while, the finger was pointed at him, for his failure to use his arms, as he bulldozed his hapless victims into oblivion. The club pointed out – quite plausibly – in his defence, that a) he hit them so hard, and b) his arms were so short, that they hit the ground before he had a chance to wrap himself around them.

The furore soon died, and Trevor continued to wreak havoc on opposition players – usually legally. It’s fortunate that he never had an ounce of malice in his body, or he quite probably would have killed somebody. The worst we saw was when he knocked an unfortunate Bristol forward into the middle of the following week, then made some sort of hostile gesture towards him, as he lay, poleaxed, on the ground. He undoubtedly regretted it, and it was certainly out of character.

It says so much for the man, that despite his one-man wrecking missions, opposition supporters warmed to him every bit as much as the Wasps fan did, and he was never the target for the booboys at Welford Road, Kingsholm and the like.

He was only ever really savaged in the media once – when an ill-informed leading sports correspondent chose to castigate him, for deciding to stay with Wasps during the 2003 World Cup, rather than travel to Australia, to represent Samoa. He was accused of greedily putting cash before country. What this correspondent chose to ignore was that, for years, Trevor had been dutifully turning out for Samoa, while practically paying his own way for the privilege.

I've tried to delay this, but we finally have to look at his lineout throwing – there was an Achilles heel, if ever we saw one. There were far too many days when Trevor could not have hit neither a barn door, nor the proverbial cow’s arse with a banjo.

Rumour has it that, when Trevor was playing, one of the calls was “Good luck”.

I recall hearing the coaches discuss another abysmal lineout performance, in a mixture of bemusement and amusement. Warren Gatland could scarcely contain his laughter, when he revealed:”Trevor says he finds the new calls confusing.”

Perhaps the most memorable example of Trevor being off the radar with his throwing in came in the 2004 Premiership Final, against Bath. Time after time, we lost our own ball, before Ben Gotting came on, steadied the ship, and steered us to that epic and unforgettable double. It was during Trevor’s stay on the field that, ahead of another Wasps lineout, Fraser Waters asked Alex King what backs move he was calling. Kingy snapped back: ”Don’t be stupid. They’ll win the ball, and we’ll be defending!”

Even when his throwing was going through one of its all too frequent rocky periods, he'd spend most of the pre-match warmup practising his drop kicks. The back trying to escape from the forward's body again.

It’s everybody’s good fortune that much of Trevor’s time at Wasps coincided with the reign of Gats as Director of Rugby. As a New Zealander, he knew far more about the Islander mentality than any British coach did. He realised that Trevor was a one-off, a special case, who needed special treatment. While the stick worked on some players, it was indulgent use of the kid glove which got the best out of Trevor. It’s questionable whether any club would have had the patience with him that Wasps showed.

Gats would frequently joke about Trevor, at Wasps press conferences. “Trevor doesn’t have normal days like the rest of us.” he once laughingly revealed, a few days ahead of the epic Heineken Cup semfinal in Dublin. It was at that time that Trevor was billeted with one of the fitness staff, whose orders were to stop him raiding the fridge in the middle of the night.

Gats would also make frequent reference to Trevor’s many, and varied, excuses for missing the dreaded training trips to Poland.. He used to receive plaintive phone calls, along the lines of “The plane’s broken.”, or “My ear hurts.” Trevor got away with it, because he was Trevor, and because his onfield performances usually justified his mollycoddling.

Wasps supporters loved Trevor as much off the field, as they did on it. What you saw was what you got. He was warm, friendly, approachable, kind and generous. He had a special affinity with kids – let’s face it, he was a big kid himself. He took an active role in the minis, for whom both his children played with distinction. They’ve since gone on to win rugby scholarships at a prestigious rugby school back in New Zealand.

Regardless of all his great achievements on the field, the thing for which he deserved the greatest recognition was the setting up of Trevor Leota’s School of Hard Knocks, in which he gave children – often dysfunctional children – from deprived backgrounds the chance to experience the joy of playing arguably the greatest team sport there is. Trevor identified with these kids, as he acknowledged that rugby had saved him from going down the wrong avenues in life – South Auckland is not the most salubrious of areas, to put it mildly. Those kids loved him, and he loved them, and his pride in seeing them acquit themselves well at the Rosslyn Park School Sevens was heartwarming.

All those admirers of Trevor who want to read nothing but a hagiography about their hero should now turn away. You cannot analyse such a complex character without looking at his weaknesses. He was an extraordinary character: but, like the more ordinary majority, he was flawed – perhaps fatally flawed. Ironically, examining those flaws, and then putting his great achievements in their context, makes you even more appreciative of what he did.

All good things come to an end. Sadly, the good thing that was Trevor’s mutual love affair with Wasps began to go sour, just as the club was approaching its greatest ever achievement, the Heineken Cup and Zurich Premiership double, in 2004.

It was early that year that his wife decided to leave him and take the two children back to New Zealand. For a man who loved kids like Trevor did, this must have been like having his heart ripped out. Not surprisingly, his performances began to suffer. Memorably, he held it together for the Munster epic, in which he scored that never-to-be-forgotten winning try, but he was never the same again.

It was at the beginning of the following season that things went completely off the rails, beginning with the passport fiasco. Words such as ‘Inexcusable.” were being regularly uttered, through clenched teeth, by management figures. When he finally returned to the UK, his fitness level had dropped so dramatically that he was effectively told:”F**k off, and don’t come back until you’re fit.” Things went from bad to worse, and he turned up for one game in such an ‘inappropriate’ condition that the referee saw fit to complain about his state. Many players would have been instantly dismissed, but Trevor wasn’t – perhaps because his contract was about to terminate, and the decision had probably already been made not to renew it.

It was sad to see that final season, when the legend became the liability. He hardly started a game, and spent most of his time terrorising A League players and making cameo appearances from the first team bench. By now, the vacuuming of boxes of KFC, the increased support for a Mr. Daniels, the less than enthusiastic approach to training, and the general attitude of this one-time lynchpin of the Wasps pack was no longer being treated with the indulgence he’d received when he was doing the business in such glorious fashion on the pitch.

Gats was so right when he once said something along the lines of: “Trevor can be the best hooker in the world.” For so many years, for Wasps, he lived up to that billing, but he lacked the application to go out and do all that was needed to stay at the top for as long as he could, and should, have done. Rugby needs characters, and it’s a crying shame that a character like Trevor is no longer being seen at rugby grounds across the country. The game is much the poorer for his departure.

Any retrospective of Trevor’s career has to be tinged with sadness and regret. More than anything, there’s pleasure and gratitude – pleasure at the recollection of so many barnstorming performances (and hairstyles) and gratitude for giving us so many great memories. But the sadness is that it all ended in such relatively ignominious fashion, and regret that he was probably his own worst enemy. It would be an understatement to say that he liked a drink – often, the night before a big game. Another big problem was his failiure to control his finances. If you had to choose between Trevor and Nick Leeson as your financial adviser, you’d probably reach for the cyanide pills.

Sadly, the move to the Free State Cheetahs didn’t provide the new start to his career, and he moved on – again. He’s now believed to be in Sydney. In true Trevor style, he’s probably doing his best to mix serious and social rugby. Even in his glory years with Wasps, he was regularly turning out for amateur sides, just for the hell of it. Since he was apparently indestructible, management chose to turn a blind eye.

Trevor was never really cut out for the life of a professional athlete. His ideal day went: get up, eat, play rugby, eat more, play more rugby, eat more, drink, go to bed – not necessarily in that order.

It’s hard not to fear for his future, if he can’t find something on which to focus his many great gifts as a human being, Without a careful hand to guide him, it’s all too easy to see him losing the plot altogether. My vision for Trevor involves him becoming some Island Chief, with about fifty nubile wives, countless children and grandchildren – but I fear reality may be more prosaic. Hopefully, he knows that, should he ever fall on hard times, there are many people in Britain who will queue up to help him.

In looking at Trevor’s colourful career, it’s inevitable that we think wistfully about what might have been, but it’s more appropriate to bask in the warm memories of the glorious things which did come to pass.

A much-loved legend, who became a much-lamented liability.