No. 7: Adam Parore (Part Two)

In Part Two, we discuss Adam's exit from the game, reinvention, the similarities between cricket and mountaineering, near-death experiences, Mt Everest and maturity.

Hillary Step - Mt. Everest

I asked Adam about his transition out of the game.

Towards the end of my career, I just opted out. I wanted to do other things and nobody quite understood that. By that stage, cricket had been my entire life and everybody saw me as The Cricket Guy. But I never identified as that. Cricket was a really important part of my life, and the first thing I had done, but it wasn't my whole life. I never thought that playing cricket was something that would define me, but up until that point it had, because it was the only thing I had done. So when I grew out of it (I think that is how I would describe it), few understood my decision. I was at the peak of my powers and had finally - I think, largely - done justice to my talent after more than a decade of international cricket, and I suddenly went, “Great. This is awesome, guys. I love it. I'm done.” I was 31.

“What do you mean, You're done?”

“I’ve got other things to do now.”

“Like what?”

“Well, kind of everything.”

“I’ve played 400 games for New Zealand. I’ve done it all at least once. I could probably do the same stuff again over and over, but I'm tired. I've accumulated over 12 years of international cricket. I’ve accumulated so much baggage, and it's starting to feel pretty heavy. I wouldn't mind doing something else.”

I was very much of the time, a product of my environment. I've only realised in the last 10 years that the game turned me into somebody I wasn't. I became this person, this caricature, that the team needed, and at the time, I was very happy to fulfil that role. I became a highly competitive, very aggressive, combative player. And it just wasn't me. I'm just not like that. Since I left the game, I don't think I've had an argument with anybody I'm not married to. I don't like conflict, it doesn't make me feel good. It makes me anxious. But I played that role and developed into it over many years. I remember being told constantly, “You don't talk enough behind the stumps. You don't do this enough, you're not that, you're not this.” So being a young kid, I just did what I was told, right? And I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it - I did - but it just wasn't me. I became a caricature of myself. You talk to my friends now, people who have known me for the two decades since, and they don't recognize that guy. After a decade in the spotlight, it became a burden. It was heavy. I had come to the end of the road.

I remember the first day, the morning after I had retired. I’ll never forget it. I've never felt so liberated in my life. I didn't have to wear a certain set of clothes. I didn’t have to be anywhere at a certain time. I didn't have to behave in a certain way. I could literally do anything I wanted for the first time and it felt great. I’ll never forget that feeling. But two or three days later, it suddenly dawned on me. The feeling was great, but I had no income. I was unemployed, and I had no prospects. What are we going to do about this, mate?

How did you redefine yourself?

Well, that is a process. Each individual has to figure it out for themselves. You have to undo a lot of the things you’ve learned and that's not easy. One of my early lessons came when I couldn't understand why everybody, seemingly, wanted to stick it to me. I'd never really been exposed to it because I grew up in a professional sports team with my mates. It’s an insular life and you don't often interact with people in the outside world. All of a sudden, I'm out there on my own and the number of guys, people I’d never met, who would cross the road and stick their knife in me from behind. Who the hell are you? That was quite a shock. The big wide world was brutal, and it took me a while to adjust. I didn't expect it.

The public bought into that cricketing caricature?

They still do. People meet me and still think they're going to get that dude from the cricket field. They're … I’m not sure I’d say disappointed but … perplexed. Every person who knows me is constantly bombarded with, “I met Adam the other day. Oh, he's not what I expected.” So says everybody for 20 years. What were you expecting? Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not anything like that guy.

When I finished, I didn't play any sport, I didn't watch any sport. I had nothing to do with sport for a decade. And then interestingly, as I started to have troubles in my personal life, as I entered into periods of extreme stress through relationship breakups and business issues, I found that the more and more I came under pressure, I started to revert to type. It started with running and then I'd get in the gym. Then I started playing golf. I used to hate golf. Gradually, from the age of 40, after ten years without any involvement, I started watching sport again. The All Blacks, tennis, golf, even a bit of cricket on occasions. Although I find it quite boring because there’s no real element of surprise in it. I find it formulaic and after a lifetime inside it, I find I can predict the outcome with some level of certainty.

But it suddenly dawned on me that I had tried too hard to recreate myself. I tried to create a business career, which was reasonably successful. I went and learned how to fly helicopters and did some high altitude mountaineering, and as I navigated all of those different journeys, I came full circle. I learned that the thing I love to do more than anything else is to play sport. Same as when I was five years old. Nowadays, my day revolves around being physically active. Mentally, it’s good for me. I spend at least three hours a day training and playing sport - seven hours a day if I play golf. It makes me happy. Now that I'm based in the city again, I walk along the waterfront and connect with the harbour, catch up with uni mates, play some touch rugby. Twenty years later, it’s almost exactly how I lived when I was a professional cricketer. I’ve got a great balance in my life right now.

Adam is the only international cricketer who has climbed Mt Everest. I asked him about his move into mountaineering. “Were you looking for an adrenaline substitute?”

Not really. My brother-in-law just happened to be a high-altitude mountain guide. When I separated from Sally [Ridge] - literally at the time it happened - he was in Auckland on his way to Everest. When he returned, I didn't have much to do and he said, “Come for a climb with me down in Queenstown.” We went away for a week, a boys’ trip. We climbed The Remarkables, went out the back to Wye Creek, did some ice climbing, and I simply caught the bug. I went back to the Southern Alps and climbed with them again, and then we came up with the idea to go to Everest together. Before that, he sent me off to the Himalaya to do an 8,000 metre peak called Manaslu. It’s the eighth highest mountain in the world, I think. There I met Russell Brice and Woody, who I still climb with to this day. I just fell in love with it.

It gets under your skin. I think it’s the physicality of it - it's the hardest thing you can do. I like a challenge but this was literally next level. That resonated with me, and also just the rhythm of it. There's a lot of similarities between the rhythm of a high altitude expedition and that of a cricket tour. They both take roughly the same amount of time. When you climb one of these mountains, it's five days to the summit, there's a lot of sitting around and then there’s the ten percent when you have to go for your life.

There’s also the rhythm of being part of a team. I found it very familiar and comforting, so consequently, I was good at it. I found a groove pretty quickly. A lot of the things I had learned playing elite level sport translated to elite level mountaineering. I found myself the junior in the team surrounded by the best players in the world again. These guys were superstars… and then there was me. That's a good place to be. I was looking at these guys and thinking, “I want to be like you.” And they were saying, “You can be. Just do this and do that.” Two years later, I'm on K2! 7,800 meters up, solo, in a T-shirt … on vertical rock and ice, just ripping into it. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had two elite level sporting careers. That was unexpected and a great thrill. I thought my days of playing pro sport were done, and next minute, I woke up on the side of a mountain at 8,000 metres one day and I was in the Big Show again.

How do you cope with the danger?

The human animal normalises. It's extraordinary. In a very short space of time, you become normalised to facing bowling at 150 km per hour. Suddenly you're there, you're doing it. You have to! The first couple scare the crap out of you and you wonder if you can ever possibly do this. But if you can manage to survive 15-20 minutes, it gets a little easier, and if you're still there an hour later, you're in the game. It’s the same with mountaineering.

I could show you photos of some of the things I've done, things mountaineers would consider ‘garden variety’, and you would probably flip out. But it becomes completely normal … and it has to. The Sky Tower is 350 metres high. Times that by six. Imagine you’re exposed two kilometres up, with your crampons jammed into the Sky Tower. That becomes standard. Even now when I look up at the tower and go, ‘Man, when I dropped that piece of kit on K2 and had a nightmare with that knot, I was 2000 meters above the glacier.” I would have fallen the whole way uninterrupted. It would have taken me 25 seconds to hit the bottom.

All that is considered ‘normal.’ But I lost it when I dropped that carabiner. I sat there and flipped out for about two minutes. In my harness, wedged between a couple of rocks and ice, with two inches of steel on each foot between oblivion and me. I figured out I was probably about 50 rappels (abseiling in layman’s terms) from home. That is a long day’s work. Basically, I had to jury rig knots out of my harness for each one - a real pain, because it takes ages. I was trying to figure out how I was going to do that with the kit that I had. I came up with an Italian hitch and a couple of other things I can’t remember. I set it all up, checked it and went, ‘OK. I think that’s going to work.’ I unclipped. I was just about to unclip the other knot. I used to run all my systems - as I said, I’m highly repetitive. For some reason, I looked down at it, and just as I was about to unclip again, I thought, ‘That doesn’t seem right. I don’t know what it is? I can’t say it’s wrong, but I know what right looks like.’ I went back through it, pulled it, and it came apart in my hands. I was a fraction of a second away from releasing. I would have just disappeared.

It was exactly the same watching Daniel’s [Vettori] armball when I first started keeping to him. I used to be able to pick it, not because I could see it was an armball. I just knew it wasn't a spinner. I knew it wasn't right. After 20,000 deliveries I could pick it alright but initially … Same with Warney’s flipper. ‘I know what the leggie and the wrong’un looks like, but that thing there doesn’t look like anything, so it has to be the flipper.’ Same with the knot. I think that cricket saved my life. I looked at it and felt instinctively that something was wrong. Amateur mistake. The knot was tied under instead of over.

Was Everest ‘normal’?

I think the thing with Everest is that final day. Once you get above the South Summit, when you get above 8,500m on summit day, it really is a magical wonderland. It's a special place. It’s spectacular up there. In terms of the aesthetics of it - once you get up and around the Hillary Step and the summit ridge is laid out in front of you, the sky’s dark and you can see the curvature of the Earth. I haven't had that same feeling on the other big peaks. But I wonder if it's just the height, because at that altitude every hundred metres is material. My ability to function was deteriorating by the moment.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I was in such a big hurry. I wish I had my time again, and if I did, I would say, “Slow down. Grow up!” I wish I'd started playing test cricket at 23, 24, 25. I probably would have played until I was 35 if that was the case. If I look back, I spent my entire career playing against guys who were five years older than me. I gave away a huge advantage to my opponents - I was the 13 year old playing under 18s my whole career. I remember saying to Steve Waugh one day, “I can't wait until you, McGrath and Warne are all finished and we are going to come back here and kick your ass.” And you know what? I didn't last that long [he laughs]. It would have been really nice to go out there as a 35 year old and bully some 25 year old kids!

Being a man would also have been helpful. I was just a kid. If I'd been married, had a few kids and just grown up, it would have had a material impact on my performance. You can get to a certain level as a young single guy in his 20s, but I don’t think you can reach your peak. I was 28 and single at the height of my career. You’re still immature and often one-dimensional - a binary creature with a limited set of repetitive experiences. With a broader range, your own performance improves but you also start to contribute more to the group, to make the guys around you better. Being in a long-term relationship and having kids forces you to grow because we’re talking about highly complex, emotional and stressful circumstances. And when you hold your first child, you realise you’re not the most important thing in the world. You can look beyond yourself … and certainly cricket. Once your Steve Waughs, Laras and Tendulkars reach 30, they have probably reached the limit of their technical skills. In large part, they have mastered their environment and then there is a shift: there's more value in committing your time and energy into improving the younger guys than there is to improving yourself.

I never got there. In many ways, I cut myself short by quite a distance and I never really appreciated what I was doing. It was only ten years later that I looked back and felt like I might have missed a trick. I could have been a lot better. But we were still just boys. I feel we could have achieved a whole lot more if we had had a stronger structure where we could have been left to develop longer. I feel very strongly about that. In my business and climbing now, that is very much my focus - to lift the less experienced. In climbing, there’s an inherent contract. You’re in it together: if it goes wrong, you’re staying. We have to make peace with that commitment (the values and consequences) in our own way, but it takes a maturity that a man in his 20s just does not have. There’s no room for mavericks [laughs].

Has the current first-class game and player development structure improved?

It's definitely gone in the right direction. It's important because it breeds not only better performance but better people. I mean, we weren't great people … seriously. We had a lot to learn and a long way to go. I think most of us are pretty good people now. I wouldn't speak for the other boys, but I was not a great person. I pull that book of mine [The Wicked Keeper] out every couple of years, flick through it and go, “Was this me?” My mates read it and they say, “You need to write another book.” We had a lot of fun… in terms of young guys having an adventure. We pushed the boat out and had the time of our lives. We built some great friendships and played some great cricket, but I think with a little bit of maturity and a lot more humility, we could have added another dimension. We left plenty on the table.