David Pocock On Being Better, Not Bitter

Pocock’s faced far worse than heavy barbells, throat-slitting hakas and bone-rattling tackles.

The Zimbabwean accent has almost disappeared.

Twelve years in Australia has culled the thick Afrikaans vowels from David Pocock’s voice. And so, if you were to bump into him on the street (a feasible scenario given the breadth of his shoulders), you might assume he was your garden-variety sportsman: a muscular bloke who’s maximised the physical gifts he was fortunate enough to be born with. And, up to a point, you’d be right.

Pocock has certainly been blessed with some serious physical gifts. Shake his hand, which has the heft of a cast-iron saucepan, and you realise he has one hell of a frame on him. More than that, he’s spent countless hours knocking this frame into shape, preparing it for the brutality of professional rugby. Throw in a huge motor and an impeccable skillset and it’s little wonder he made his Wallabies debut in 2008 as a 19-year-old. The teenager promptly established himself as one of the game’s leading turn-over merchants; a forager who was willing to dig around in the dark recesses of rucks and mauls to prise the ball loose and shovel it the way of his backs. It’s a dirty, thankless job that requires a fine blend of speed and strength, muscularity and mobility.

By the 2011 World Cup, he was challenging New Zealand’s Richie McCaw as the best turn-over man in the game. But to focus on the physical stuff is to sell this story short, because Pocock’s faced far worse than heavy barbells, throat-slitting hakas and bone-rattling tackles. He’s packed more into his 26 years than most sportsmen manage in a lifetime. He’s been driven from his home by armed thugs. He’s been cast from his country of birth by a corrupt government. He’s built a new life from scratch in a foreign land. And now that his career and reputation are established, he’s facing the real prospect that injury may cut it all horribly short.

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But ask him about these trials and he shrugs his shoulders. He figures that the tough moments have given him a greater appreciation for life. “Besides, everyone has adversity to overcome in life,” he says. “It’s part of the human condition. It’s unfair to compare one person’s adversity to another’s because we all deal with it in different ways.”

True, but some deal with it better than others. Some are broken and embittered, others are burnished and empowered. Pocock’s one of the latter. He hasn’t just overcome – he’s thrived. He’s a deep thinker who’s both interested and interesting; a man so committed to his principles he’ll chain himslf to an earth mover – as he did at the Maules Creek coal mine in December last year – and happily cop the handcuffs of the local police. And all this hasn’t come about despite his trials – it’s come about because of them.

Better, Not Bitter

The story begins on the family farm outside Gweru, in the midlands of Zimbabwe. Pocock looks back on those early years as a golden period in his life. Constant sport, crowds of friends, space to burn off youthful energy. His father set up rugby goalposts in the backyard and he wiled away his afternoons kicking the footy, the gardener chasing it down and booting it back to him. “I was incredibly lucky to grow up in Zimbabwe,” he says.

But the halcyon days ended in 2000 when the Zimbabwean government announced plans to forcibly “acquire” white-owned farms. Letters were sent to the farmers, informing them they had 90 days to get off their land. Gangs of angry young men began terrorising those who stayed. They would arrive en masse, brandishing guns, hurling threats. The Pococks laid low and waited, bunkering down in friends’ houses when the atmosphere grew unbearable.

Finally, the threats became real. A farmer who lived 15 kilometres down the road – a close friend of the family’s – was ambushed and shot dead. His son took nine bullets but survived. The murder hit the family like a fist to the jaw. They decided to flee. As they were packing their bags, they received word that their neighbour had been throttled to death. Pocock was only 12 when all this played out before him. His memories are patchy. Oddly, as he talks about that time, there’s no bitterness in his voice. Rather than gnawing over the bones of his family’s plight, he chooses to take a broader view. He admits that white farmers owned a disproportionate amount of land; he concedes that it needed to be handed back to its original owners. But he shakes his head at the hateful politics that saw productive farms crippled and towns deprived of food. “It was incredibly complex,” he says. But surely there’s some simmering resentment at the way his neighbours were murdered, his family driven from their home? “Look, growing up, Dad’s mantra was, ‘You reap what you sow’. You get out what you put in. Dad would tell us that all the time.”

It’s a mantra that stood him in good stead: sow seeds of bitterness in the face of hate and aggression and that’s the harvest you’ll reap as the years roll on. Instead, Pocock chose to sow understanding and compassion. Fourteen years later, he can talk about those days without clenching his fists and gritting his teeth.

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Winning Isn’t Everything

After spending nine months across the border in South Africa, the family migrated to Australia in 2002. They arrived with their suitcases and nothing else. They rented a tiny apartment in Brisbane and slept on blow-up mattresses. The couch was a row of camping chairs, airconditioning an opened window.

At school, the 14-year-old David found himself adrift. In Gweru, school was a hidebound place of obedience and respect. In Brisbane, the anything-goes attitude jarred. He was stunned that his classmates had the nerve to call teachers by their nicknames. “It was a massive culture shock. And I guess the main way I tried to make that transition – to make friends and settle in – was through sport. I channelled all my energies into sport.”

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If the terror the family had experienced in Zimbabwe hadn’t filled the teenager with bitterness, it had left other marks. The powerlessness he felt in the face of the armed gangs in Zimbabwe spurred an obsession with control and achievement in Australia. He became compulsive about exercise, fanatical about his diet. He recalls bursting into tears in restaurants when he couldn’t find a healthy option on the menu. And coming home from school, doing his homework on the floor – the family
couldn’t afford a desk – then knocking out set after set of push-ups until the exhaustion drove him to sleep. “Sport was my coping mechanism,” he says. “I developed a mindset where I simply didn’t want to fail.”

The obsessions of that period may have laid the physical foundations for Pocock’s prodigious rise through the rugby ranks – he was still in Year 12 when the Western Force recruited him as a raw-boned 17-year-old. But as he scaled the heights of international rugby, assuming the Wallabies captaincy at the age of 22, he began to recognise that the consuming self-absorption of his school years had been a tumour in his life.

“After all, there’s a lot more to life than achievement, in sport or wherever,” he explains. Those words might trip off the tongue of a consoling dad after his son’s copped his first hiding on the footy field, but for a professional sportsman – a man whose existence is shaped by victory and performance – this is heresy. Pocock, however, couldn’t care less. He’s suffered the fever of obsession and tasted the sweet pill of achievement, and he knows that one is no cure for the other.

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Keep Your Eyes Open

In 2013, Pocock signed a three-year contract with the ACT Brumbies. The shift to Australia’s most successful Super franchise promised to elevate the flanker to even greater heights. Instead, it’s ushered in a period of disaster. In the fourth round of the 2013 season, he ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, putting him out for the season. He went under the knife, with a section of tendon sliced from his left hamstring and inserted into his knee.

After a year of solo grind in the gym – wading through the tedium of a recovery program while his mates made merry on the paddock – he hit the 2014 season in sparkling shape. But in the second match of the season his left knee buckled again. Again he went under the knife, this time the tendon cut from his right hamstring. “I was shattered,” he says. “I didn’t see it coming.” In desperation he called a wise old salt he’d befriended in Perth. “And he said to me, ‘Instead of asking: why me? ask: what can I make of this? What does this mean for me?’” For the bedridden Pocock it was a call to action.

His first move was to turn the microscope on himself, to examine his driving motivations. He saw a young man who was still driven by the fear of failure that had sunk its claws in during his school years in Brisbane. Instead of being limited by fear, he determined to broaden his horizons.

He quotes the author James Hollis: “Life brings us two gifts: a moment in time, and the consciousness of its brevity”. It’s a sentiment that resonates with the 26-year-old. Two years sidelined from the game have shown him that life is much more than success on the footy field. “We’re only here for a short time,” he reasons, “and we need to enjoy and make the most of every opportunity.”

Fired by this knowledge, Pocock has thrown himself into his Ecological Agricultural Systems degree – sustainable farming is a passion. He’s also poured his energies into his charity, EightyTwenty Vision, which aims to make farming communities in Zimbabwe self-sufficient.

For a man encased in the bubble of professional sport, these projects feed his mind and starve his ego. “I think it’s crucial to have something outside of rugby. By nature, sportsmen can be pretty selfish. And to a large extent you have to be; you have to be focused on what you’re doing to get results. But it gives you some perspective to have something that you’re passionateabout outside sport.”

How many hollow former sportsmen stand as testimony to the truth of these words? What might Ben Cousins be doing now if he’d tempered the inward gaze of professional sport with something larger than himself? For Pocock, it’s a no-brainer. “There’s so much interesting stuff out there,” he reasons. “It’s good to be engaged, to keep looking.”

Embrace Your Trials

Pocock cracks his knuckles and glances out the window. Off to the south, beyond the Brumbies’ training fields, an afternoon storm’s brewing, a dark plume of cloud sweeping away the midday heat. But as he stands to shake hands, I push him for his final thoughts on adversity.

He pauses. “Well, so often we think that the bad stuff we’re going through is unique to us. But all the struggles that you might be going through – a lot of other people are going through them too.” This is why he’s so quick to talk about his own trials and vulnerabilities. He believes that if one person talks about their struggles then it gives others permission to talk. In this way, loads are shared, problems thrashed out. He grins: “Too often we try to portray the image that we’ve got it together. But no-one’s got it together – we’re all just stumbling through life.”.