DRIVEN: Ryan Caldwell in Heineken Cup action for Ulster against Stade Francais. Picture: Lorraine O'Sullivan, Inpho.
“Carefree,” says Ryan Caldwell when I ask him what word is tattooed across his fingers. He looks up from his hands on a rainy morning in Belfast. The former Ireland international, who played the role of enforcer for Ulster, Bath and Exeter, then laughs softly in acknowledgment of that incongruous word.
We have spoken for almost two hours about a wide range of dark and heavy subjects – from his addiction issues and imprisonment to his injury-riddled rugby career and the last big concussion that ended his playing days and sent him plunging into a deeper spiral of suicidal depression.
Caldwell has also explained how he slowly healed himself, after he went into the Amazon jungle and took the first of multiple doses of ayahuasca, the plant-based hallucinogenic, and how he now helps others as he listens to people’s problems while teaching breathwork and meditation.
“I know, I know,” Caldwell says wryly after I suggest that “carefree” is not the most obvious word when considering his troubling, if ultimately uplifting, story.
Caldwell is 6ft 7in and covered in tattoos but the big man, who turns 42 on Tuesday, is gentle and often amusing company. The former second-row is also about to publish a book, White Lines: a Rugby Life Broken and Rebuilt, which might just be the sporting autobiography of the year. It’s a gripping read, full of sobering insights into professional rugby and life.
But, near the end of an engrossing interview, I want to hear more about the blue ink that covers so much of his face and body. “The first tattoo came when I was 18,” Caldwell remembers. “It was Sanskrit for ‘strength’. My mum cried and I was like: ‘Och, Mummy, it’s only skin deep.’”
How many tattoos does he have? “They’re pretty much the one thing. A few wee gaps, here and there, but most of me is tattooed. I now don’t want to get more tattoos and haven’t in a few years. But they’re just part of me.”
The words “no love” are tattooed above one eyebrow which seems strange because Caldwell’s life has been full of love from his family. “When I did that tattoo I felt very low and had no love for myself. In that state, it’s hard to see the love other people have for you.”
As a boy, Caldwell fell for rugby union because it “felt wild and alive, and so did I”. He loved the game’s intense physicality and the freedom it gave him to smash into other players.
But during his rise as a schoolboy prodigy, and then while playing professionally for Ulster, rugby made Caldwell believe it was wrong to show any insecurity or vulnerability. He was a hard man who only lost his shyness when getting up to all kinds of drunken and ridiculous antics where trying to be loud and funny with his teammates was more important than being authentic and truthful.
Caldwell writes that, “despite the hard-man exterior, I was a sensitive soul. I felt things really deeply. Only looking back do I see that I had no language for feelings.”
He earned just two full international caps: not the shedload predicted when he was a powerful force in junior rugby. Caldwell is perhaps best known for the incident when, at a training session in the buildup to the 2007 World Cup, he upset Paul O’Connell and the future Ireland and Lions captain punched him so hard that, as he claims in his book, “I nearly died … I was out cold. The punch had burst my cheek open – one of my back teeth punctured straight through it. I was swallowing blood, gurgling, and then started fitting on the pitch. I stopped breathing. Almost gone. They had to resuscitate me right there on the grass. Gary O’Driscoll, the team doc, sprinted over and cut the jersey open. I remember flashes of his face – panic in his eyes – his hands pressing on my chest as I came around. Someone roared for an ambulance. It was carnage.”
Caldwell bears no ill-will towards O’Connell, who was horrified by what he had done, and described it years later as his worst moment in rugby. Yet, at the time, Caldwell tried to pretend it was no big deal.
The psychological impact of other hurtful experiences with the national team are also detailed in his book. He writes of his joy when the head coach Declan Kidney told him he was in the squad to play New Zealand in November 2008. Caldwell scrunches up his face now as he claims that, two days later, Kidney called him to confess his name had been announced by mistake. He was out of the squad.
