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Heart of Gold

Robbie Fruean has become part of the furniture at the Crusaders, but as DYLAN CLEAVER discovered, the journey there has been far from smooth.

Monday, 03 May 2010

Dylan Cleaver

Every now and then Robbie Fruean catches sight of the scar that provides a neat line down the middle of his chest, from where the clavicle meets the sternum to the base of his breastbone.

He can hardly miss it.

If he runs his fingers across it he’ll feel its subtle ridges and contours, the way the scar tissue is smoother than the unblemished skin.

It marks the point of entry for the surgeons who cleaved him open to replace a faulty valve. But for Fruean it’s not so much a scar but a before-and-after line.

“I was just a young guy playing a bit of rugby,” the 21-year-old says with disarming matter-of-factness. “If I didn’t get sick I would have continued down that path, thinking everything would keep happening for me..

“It might sound strange, but getting sick allowed me settle down, to get my feet back on the ground. I wasn’t able to play rugby, but I was able to concentrate on my education, on my family. Everything had happened for me in a short space of time in rugby. The illness made me realise there is nothing predictable about a rugby career. A lot of things can happen.

“That was when I stopped taking anything for granted.”

To be fair to the then-teenage behemoth, he had every reason to take what everyone predicted would be his eventual rugby stardom for granted.

A virtual unknown during his early years at an unfashionable college, he was ‘discovered’ towards the end of his secondary schooling and a year later was officially the best Under 19 player in the world.

“When you’re at Porirua College, no-one really takes any notice,” Fruean, whose leadership qualities were recognised when he became head boy in his final year, says. “There didn’t seem to be anyone looking at me. Then one year that all changed. Suddenly everything was coming to me. Every team I went for I got picked.”

Including the New Zealand Under 19 team that headed off to the world championships in 2007.

The tournament was held in Ulster, Ireland, and New Zealand made it their own, cruising through pool play, crossovers and knockouts until they met South Africa in a lop-sided final.

New Zealand won that match 31-7. In a team full of exceptionally talented players, including Sam Whitelock, Luke Braid, Zac Guildford, Nasi Manu, Ryan Crotty and Sean Maitland, Fruean stood head, shoulders and massive thighs apart.

Already parallels were being seen between Fruean and Jonah Lomu. Comparisons might well be odious, but in this case it seemed justified. Like Lomu, Fruean was a man mountain blessed with exceptional speed. At pace and in space, he was next to impossible to stop.

Like Lomu, who battle with nephrotic syndrome led to an eventual kidney transplant, the biggest obstacle to Fruean would come not on the field, but from within himself.

Unlike Lomu, Fruean had not yet touched the stars.

Life was good for Fruean in 2008, or at least it should have been. After his tour de force performance at the under-19 world champs there was a seemingly uncomplicated path to a lucrative career in rugby mapped out in front of him.

The only problem was he wasn’t feeling that good.

He was in the Wellington NPC squad, confident of eventually winning a spot in the starting XV, but although they’d do that year what Wellington always seemed to do – make the final and lose (6-7 to Canterbury) – they’d do it without Fruean.

A simple sore throat had escalated. He felt tired, he was aching. His temperature was pushing the mercury well above the recommended 37 degrees.

“It was a gradual feeling. I felt sick, went to the doctor and was told I had a fever and to go home and rest,” Fruean recalls.

Though rest is not easy when Fruean’s “joints were so sore, I couldn’t move”.

Fruean was getting sicker by the day, but he had no idea just how sick. Thankfully “a prediction”, as Fruean calls it, by then Wellington team doctor Ian Murphy, set the medicos on the right path.

“He thought it might be rheumatic fever so I had a heap of blood tests and the specialists discovered my heart was not beating like it should.”

It was beating, instead, like a sick old man’s. The mitral valve was irreparably damaged, leading to the inflammation of the heart, a dangerous condition known as pancarditis.

The options: open-heart surgery or... well, there really was no other option.

Cannons Creek is a suburb of cul de sacs and crescents, state houses and large families.

The son of Samoan immigrants Nu’usila – or Robert snr – and Elisapeta, Fruean grew up in the East Porirua suburb. It was around the table of their home his family sat the night before his operation. Fruean has four sisters, “but it doesn’t stop there; there’s the uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces...”

There were tears, but not from Robbie.

“Being a man of faith, I put it in the hands of the Lord,” he says. “I just kept praying.

“My family was more worried than I was. At one point I said, ‘hey, shouldn’t I be the one crying?’ ”

The procedure saw Fruean’s damaged valve replaced with one made out of pig tissue. That will eventually wear out and will need to be replaced again, but the more permanent option, a plastic valve, would have made playing rugby again impossible.

As it was Fruean spent eight “frustrating” months on the sideline. His passion for rugby never diminished, but his fitness did.

Miles behind the rest of Hurricanes squad mates in 2009 pre-season training, Fruean looked anything but a future star, even if he did end up making his Super Rugby debut that year. A miracle comeback, yes, but people were already starting to question whether there was much more to come.

Step forward Daryl Gibson and the Crusaders. The assistant coach had his eye on him a year earlier, but Fruean’s reluctance to entertain the thought of moving away from his Cannons Creek comfort zone made it a fruitless chase. Gibson admitted, with the illness and subsequent recuperation, that he had little to go on except positive reports from the players’ junior coaches.

Still, there was something about his talent that led him to pressure the Crusaders to keep chasing Fruean’s signature.

“It took a while to convince him the Crusaders were the right environment for him to reach his potential,” Gibson admits.

For his part, Fruean knew the Crusaders were a successful environment, he just didn’t know whether it was the right environment for him.

“All I knew about them was what I had seen on TV,” Fruean said. “They were a successful team, that was obvious, but I started to get a little bit of insight from a couple of my mates from Under 19 level who played down there.”

The reports he was getting back were having an effect, but, still, life at home with the folks was good, Porirua was in his veins and the Northern United Rugby Club was like a security blanket.

“In the end I decided I needed to build my independence,” Fruean says. “It was a hard move, but the right one.”

One thing he didn’t want, was to play his Super 14 in Christchurch, then return home to Wellington for the rest of the year, including the NPC.

“Once I decided to make the move, I didn’t want to be doing it in a half-hearted way.”

So he got an apartment, with room for the family to visit, and went about the business of creating a new life for himself.

Just to make sure he kept himself occupied away from rugby, Fruean is doing a marketing degree at Lincoln University.

“It was important to us that he settled in quickly and settled in well,” Gibson says. “His family can be proud of him. He’s a mature young man with good values.”

In focusing on Fruean’s remarkable return to health, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact he’s not just a feel-good story, but a bloody good rugby player too. You don’t establish yourself as a starter with the Crusaders unless you’ve got a bit about you.

And a good rugby player, too, let’s not forget. Gibson says the plan was to play him on the wing and gradually ease him into Super Rugby, but, at the time of writing, Fruean has emerged as the Crusaders first-choice centre. Just as pleasing, though, has been a rapid rise in his aerobic fitness.

Just like he had been at the Hurricanes, Fruean was a long way behind the rest of his team-mates but Gibson said the last lot of tests had seen him closing the gap considerably.

“His fitness was a concern when he first came here. It was his first real year of professional rugby. I would say he’s got a really young training age. Everything is new to him and it will take a while for that aerobic fitness to build up.

“He started way out the back when it came to running and certainly there was no-one dropping back to run at his pace.
 It’s not as if he wasn’t being encouraged, but it was a good incentive for him to catch up, and he’s gradually doing that – it’s like a rubber-band effect.”

He’s popular, too. His team-mates call him ‘Zumba’, after the fitness craze based on Latin rhythms. He dances on cue, always with a smile fixed on his dial.

Fruean has lofty goals and, thankfully, he’s not too shy, or too modest, to share them.

There are rugby goals, which we’ll get to, but perhaps the aims he has outside of rugby say more about the man.

Having experienced how much harder it was to get noticed when you played your rugby at an unfashionable school in an unfashionable suburb, Fruean wants to make kids realise that you don’t have to move out of Porirua to make it in the ‘outside’ world.

“There’s always been that mentality, but you don’t have to leave your home, your school, to be successful. I’ve got plans outside of rugby to come back to Porirua and do something to help the kids, something that will help them take those first steps towards success.”

With all due respect to the good folk of Porirua, they can wait. The Crusaders and, with a little luck and a lot of perspiration, the All Blacks have first dibs on him.

Gibson has no doubt he can make that step.

“He listens, he learns and he has raw potential that is quickly being molded into something that could make him quite special,” he says.

He wants to be an All Black, obviously. He wants to play in next year’s World Cup. But that’s not enough. “I want to be remembered as a rugby legend,” he says.

When you consider what he’s been through to get this far, you wouldn’t begrudge him that dream.

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