"My name’s Steve Black. I was a coach at Newcastle Falcons when he first came to the club. He was a kid, just out of school. It was the summer of 1997. Good morals, good values, you could see he came from a good family. The difference with him was he executed. Most of us know what to do, but doing it is what makes the difference.

“I helped to coach him; we became close friends. He was always a fine young man and I’m proud of him. As the years passed, we discussed everything. Though he understood his purpose in life, he didn’t find it easy to embrace and enjoy what he had. He was so desperate to be considered worthy.

“Let me tell you about Sunday, April 11, 1999, one of the rare occasions he and I were on opposite sides. I was conditioning and preparation coach to the Wales team, he was England’s No 10, and if they beat us at Wembley that afternoon, the Grand Slam was theirs. They were the better team, we won 32-31 and even though I’ve forgotten where the postmatch banquet was held, I haven’t forgotten the evening.

“I was sitting at a table with [Wales coach] Graham Henry and when the meal was over, Jonny came and sat down. He was distraught and I was moved by what I saw. We spoke for more than an hour. I tried to be as compassionate as I could.”

JW: ‘Blackie, this should have been our day. I can’t believe it’s ended like this. You put in all the work and then, this. What’s the point?’

SB: ‘Progress in life, Jonny, isn’t linear. You didn’t deserve to be on the losing team today but what you’re experiencing now is part of the journey.’

JW: ‘No Blackie, I’ve let people down. If I’d kicked the conversion to Steve Hanley’s try we’d have won. When it came down to it, I didn’t deliver.’

SB : ‘You kicked six out of seven.’

JW: ‘Jenkins kicked eight out of eight.’

SB: ‘In my eyes, you are no less of a player, no less of a man just because you lost a rugby match by one point.’

JW: ‘But Blackie, your team won. You can say that. Winning is everything.’

SB: ‘Lombardi never said that. He said, “Trying to win is everything”. And Jonny, even if you had kicked that conversion and England had won, you would still have found fault with your performance.’

DURING a benefit dinner for Jason Robinson at St James’ Park in Newcastle on Wednesday evening, Jonny Wilkinson was called onto the stage to speak about his former England teammate. Among other things, Wilkinson told a story from a long-forgotten game between his club, Newcastle, and Robinson’s old club, Sale.

“We put up a box kick, most of our guys chased it; I dropped deep in case it was kicked back but it was Jason who caught it. He started running and beat virtually every member of the Newcastle team until, suddenly, he was running towards me. On my left, there was 40 yards of open field, on my right another 40 yards of open field, and the thought running through my head was, ‘Jonny, you’re not very quick. You’re in trouble’. For that moment, I felt like I was completely naked. The sense of dread was unbearable, but then Jason lost his footing, slipped and I jumped all over him. Still in a state of panic, I thought, ‘I’m going to push his face into the muck’. But you couldn’t do that to Jason.”

The crowd laughed, Robinson laughed, and Wilkinson grinned. Somehow, encapsulated in that simple story, was the freedom, the peace that a once tortured sportsman has finally discovered. Earlier in the evening we had met in a quiet room at the stadium, our fourth such interview, but this one was different. He has changed.

There can only be one question now, he understands that. What happened? How did he do it? “It came about as a result of the fact that I was always getting bogged down by things. I knew it wasn’t supposed to be this way but it was the way I set it up. I had set out to play for England, to be the best fly-half, and at the end of my career to have no regrets.

“My quest was to achieve things; the World Cup, Six Nations titles, as many England appearances as possible. Recognition. It was also a search for a happy ending. But when you achieve your first major goal, you realise there is no happy ending, only the next goal. I thought, ‘If all I am doing is trying to get to the end of my career without any regrets, how am I going to judge that career? Am I going to think everything is alright because I have so many England shirts in the closet, so many medals in the safe, some video tapes on a shelf? Wouldn’t it be a lot better to say, ‘That was great fun but I’ve no need to go back over it’?’

“I started out with a warped sense of why I was in the game. It was to achieve things and I did that by surviving, avoiding failure week after week. Having started with a misconstrued idea of what it was about, it just got worse and worse. The pressure grew, the fear of failure became greater. I deluded myself that the next big win would release a sustained peace but, of course, the opposite happened.”

From the beginning, he was emotionally shackled. The boy who dreamed of playing for England and practised for hours day after day was the same boy who felt sick before mini-rugby tournaments and who would wake on the morning of a match for his school and feel nothing but dread about what was to come. Fear of letting people down propelled him. He was just 18 when he became the youngest Englishman to play rugby for his county and over the five years that followed, he won most of what there was to win: World Cup, Grand Slam, Player of the Year, Sports Personality of the Year, most admired sportsman in England, most eligible bachelor. He had everything, except if you looked at it through his eyes.

“When I looked back, I saw numerous Saturday mornings sitting in the team hotel in agony, thinking, ‘Why am I doing this?’ If somebody had said two days before the 2003 World Cup final, ‘Here’s two tickets to Spain, you don’t have to go through this’, it would have been a tough decision. It wouldn’t have been a straightforward, ‘What are you talking about?’”

The picture of a troubled young man was drawn by his teammate Lawrence Dallaglio from a scene two days before the final. Dallaglio and his partner Alice were walking from the team hotel in Manly along the coast to a restaurant in Shelly Bay. “This guy went past us wearing a polo-neck, some kind of hat pulled down over his forehead and dark glasses so big they looked like ski-goggles,” wrote Dallaglio. “‘Shit, wasn’t that Jonny?’ Alice said. ‘Yeah, I think it was.’ I wanted to run after him, put my arms around him and say, ‘Jonny mate, are you alright?’”

Wilkinson is matter-of-fact. “I did use to disguise myself. God knows why, but I had this impending sense of doom about the fact that people would recognise me and I couldn’t relax. Part of me also wanted people to think life was hard for me. Maybe deep down I realised it wasn’t, but I functioned off people saying, ‘Ah, it must be terrible for you if that’s happening. You can’t go out? That’s terrible’. The more I tried to hide from people, the more I dragged onto myself. The more worried I got, the more attention I got.

“I’m not surprised Lawrence picked up on it. He had as much of it as I. But he was happy to walk on the beach during the World Cup, people would approach him and he would chat comfortably with them, and because he’s so open they moved on quickly enough. Nowadays, I walk around and don’t give a monkeys about who approaches me. No one bothers me and no one is bothered by me, as it should be.”

What he felt in the days before an important match related to his belief about what he had to do to perform. He had to prepare more thoroughly than everyone else because everything he did on the pitch related to how he had prepared in the week before the game. He felt like a student revising for an exam, convinced that if there was one question he neglected, that would be the one he was asked.

What he couldn‘t do was switch off and trust that his natural talent would see him through. “For the majority of my career, I saw myself as having very little natural talent. The sense that everything comes from what I do on the training ground has taken me years to overcome. I considered my natural talent as a part of me that couldn’t be accessed and I never went near it. I practised harder, sacrificed more.”

In those hotel rooms, he ached for someone to come from the future and tell him he had seen the match and that he would be just fine. “I needed to have more faith in my talent because it stops the endless anxieties for the two days beforehand. It’s the voice inside your head that says, ‘Look, whatever happens when the whistle goes, I will be me and I will be all right. My natural talent will take care of things’.”

The three years of injury that followed the 2003 World Cup offered him damning insights. Many of the injuries, he believes, were self-inflicted, brought on by training overload or, occasionally, a desperation not to get injured. In the same way his eagerness not to be noticed led to greater attention, his desire not to be injured made him more vulnerable to injury. The madness of the goal-setting went on unrelenting. “After the first injury, I got a new notebook and said, ‘Right, I’ve got to reset my goals’. I had this neck injury that almost ended my career and within a week of the operation, when I still couldn’t move my right arm, I was writing down the next 10 years of my life and how they were going to unfold.

“And everything I wrote was connected to everyone else’s expectations and my own view of what I had to achieve. A lot of my goals from the first notebook had come through because that’s how the world works. If you go about them in the right way, your intentions are rewarded. Realising my goals only reinforced the rocky path that I was on. Then the neck injury happened and I’m starting another notebook. I look back and think, ‘What was I doing?’ There were voices saying, ‘You’re not enjoying what you’re doing, you’re missing the point of life. You’ve been given this huge blessing of being able to play rugby and you’re messing it up’.”

After the injuries and the return to the game, he began the ascent towards the last summit - the challenge of reconstructing his psyche. To progress, he had to leave much of the old baggage at the bottom. “Before the French game last weekend, I sat in the hotel and thought, ‘I’ve done my preparation, I’ve done the best I can’. I wasn’t waiting for the result of the match to bring peace of mind. Previously, I had either lived in the past or lived in the future; the bit that I lost was the bit in the middle, which is the only important bit.

“I had trust in what I could do against the French and I thought, ‘Who cares if it’s windy tomorrow night? That’s the future and I can’t do anything about it. But isn’t it nice to be where I am now?’” He says he had become so attached to his old self it feels like he has lost someone. He admits too that in the build-up to England’s three matches in this Six Nations, there were times when he was tempted to reenact the things he did in the past, the tricks of preparation that produced the right result but brought no peace. As much as the winner in him is tempted, the human need for something more than medals triumphs in the end.

I read to him what Danie from Pretoria has written in response to one of his newspaper columns. “I believe Jonny is older now and more mature, but I do not buy this casual, free-spirited behaviour he is trying to sell. How do you change your personality overnight? Jonny achieved what he did because of his mindset and his character and he cannot change that no matter how hard he tries to convince us.”

Does he have a point? “It backs up what I’ve thought for a huge part of my life - you can’t be what you want to be because your mind dominates everything in the end. But for me that meant the denial of natural talent, the natural me. That drove me for 10 years and I needed to do something about it because no matter how many times I said, ‘You need to enjoy this weekend’, I never enjoyed it.”

Remarkably, he embraced the challenge of the Stade de France and, perhaps better than he had in the past, played with a freedom that comes with trust in his talent.

There were half-breaks, offloads and an easy certainty that calmed those around him. It was the kind of performance his sponsors Gillette would have been expecting when signing him up as their UK ambassador, alongside such international champions as Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. But still, if he had a week to live, wouldn’t he spend part of it on the practice ground?

“People confuse passion with obsession - for me it has always been a passion. For a time, I allowed that passion to become an obsession when I made too much of a connection between the act of kicking a ball and a future event. If it was truly my last week, I wouldn’t kick a ball if it was raining. Well, maybe for half-an-hour. And if the pitch was by the seaside, that would be perfect.”

“I SENT a text to Jonny on the evening of the Welsh game last month. ‘Jonny, well done on your effort. Well done on being you. Blackie’.

The game hadn’t gone well for England and it was probably as disappointing as that 1999 loss, but I knew Jonny’s reaction wouldn’t be the same. His evolution over the last couple of years has been spiritual rather than anything else. He is spiritually much stronger.

“He understands that if you help other people to achieve what they want, you can have almost anything in life. It has made him a great team man. He galvanises the people around him, supports them and helps them to be as good as they can be.

“The mission for his coaches is to enable him to enjoy his life, to help him make a contribution in whatever way he can. Allow him to be himself because Jonny being himself is pretty damn good. We spoke on the phone the day after defeat to Wales.”

SB: ‘You okay?’

JW: ‘Yeah, okay. I played the game, I ended the game, I tried to do the best I could. The result went against us.’

SB: ‘Nobody has a God-given right to win.’

JW: ‘I didn’t mean to make that pass the way I did. The strategy was okay, the execution was wrong.’

SB: ‘It happens.’

JW: ‘I gave it everything I had, tried as hard as I could, but it didn’t work for us.’

SB: ‘Remember what Kahlil Gibran said when asked if he had got his message across in The Prophet? “Every word I wrote was the best I could have written at that particular moment in my life.” Jonny, if you do that, you can’t do any more.’

JW: ‘I accept that, Blackie. I accept that.’

The new Jonny: gastronome, party animal, Buddhist

25/02/08 Most of the England squad left yesterday morning for a fl ight back to London, but Toby Flood, Mathew Tait and I were booked on a later fl ight which afforded us a rare and treasured opportunity to enjoy Le Comptoir in the Latin Quarter. I recommend it. In years gone by, I wouldn’t have done this at all, win or lose. I’d have avoided it on account of people recognising me, and I’d be thinking I should be in the gym. I just choose to see it differently, and thank goodness because the French public in the restaurant were great, really friendly, shouting “Bravo!” and “Good match!” So why shouldn’t we embrace it?

22/10/07 I suspect it is widely known that I am teetotal. Well, I broke the habit of a lifetime after the game on Saturday [the World Cup fi nal] and had a bit of a blow-out. It was the fi rst time in years. A huge bond has been formed in this squad and I didn’t want to break it. After most games here, people have done different things in different groups, but after the fi nal, it seemed right to remain as a group. I am proud to have been in this squad and I wanted to show that. There will be plenty of time, I know, when I’ll be feeling the pain of having lost the World Cup fi nal, but our Saturday night was more a case of putting that off. We actually managed to have a lot of fun [with Prince Harry, right], but I felt rank as a result of it.

20/10/07 For much of the past three years [before the World Cup fi nal] I’ve been dealing with emotions that I didn’t understand. Nothing was going the way I wanted it to and I was thinking: “I can’t deal with my mind putting me through this.” The key was understanding that the mind is something you have to gain control over. I have spent a lot of time on this with my Newcastle mentor Steve Black and I have read massively into it. I have, for example, learnt a lot from the doctrines of Buddhism. Don’t think: “Jonny’s now a Buddhist.” I am not. I have just been learning different ways of looking at life and taking bits I could use and discarding bits I could not.