Is Ryan Nelsen NZ sport's 'Mr Clean'?
By STEVE KILGALLON - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 23/05/2010
If people want bad stories, gee whiz, if they want to find them of course [they can]," says Ryan Nelsen.
"I've been drunk and gambled just like any other person off the street [has]. I don't say I'm Mr Clean ... I just live my life like any other dude off the street."
But in seven years of premiership football, while his work colleagues have ingested drugs, slept with prostitutes and fought in nightclubs, Nelsen has remained untouched by the slavering beast of the British tabloids. And using the phrase "gee whiz" probably doesn't lend you much street cred either.
So even if he rejects the label, if New Zealand sport has a Mr Clean, it's Ryan Nelsen. Sure ain't Sione Lauaki.
"I've luckily managed to avoid most of it, but I still feel like I've got something in me: some wild party, or to fall out of some nightclub somewhere," he counters. "I'm not over the hill yet; I've still got a rebellious streak in me."
In New Zealand, the Nelsen brand is guided by Hamish Miller, a former senior executive at NZ Football and the New Zealand A1 GP team who runs his own sports marketing firm and has been co-opted by NZ Football as part of their World Cup project team. "He's one of the sharpest marketers and sponsorship dealers I have ever come across and New Zealand has ever come across," says Nelsen. His agent in Europe is an old classmate from university.
Asked if high-profile sporting miscreants have irritated him, Nelsen says: "Only as much as the next guy. Unfortunately, they live in the public eye and that's why it's out in the media. Am I going to sit on a bright white horse and judge people? [No].
"Everyone's got skeletons. Probably living away from New Zealand the past 12 to 13 years has helped."
He swerves the question of whether he's been surprised, given that long absence from these shores, how substantial his public profile is here and talks instead about the general excitement about the cup.
But he admits that in New Zealand, "it's a lot more fun. You can do a lot more here without people really worrying about you. In England, you are under the microscope non-stop but I love a beer, I love a wine, I love a gamble. I just do whatever normal guys do".
Nelsen says he's moved from novelty value with the English hacks to becoming old news. "For those guys, there are far more young exciting players to make headlines than me."
Nelsen has made plenty of headlines this week, although most would be blander than he might be accustomed to ('Nelsen says All Whites steeled for world cup'. Really?). It began in Fargo, North Dakota, and a flight to Denver. Denver to Los Angeles. LA to Auckland. Auckland to Christchurch. A visit to his old primary school (The Press: "The Blackburn Rovers star said he had many happy memories of his old school, Our Lady of The Assumption"). A morning of interviews, a book signing, an evening speaking engagement. Interviews the next morning from 7 o'clock. A flight to Wellington for an afternoon of more interviews. An evening speech at a city hotel. Then a breakfast TV appearance (Nelsen rated 2/10 for "hotness"), a flight to Auckland, "and now I'm sitting in front of you". It's only midday on Wednesday.
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All the trappings of the celebrity interview accompany this arrangement. We have the immaculate PR person looming over us with theatric watch-tapping. We have the opposition newspaper sitting a few tables away awaiting their own precisely-minuted turn. We have Nelsen trying to answer questions and simultaneously masticate a chicken salad. This is about his "three-thousandth" interview this week. He calmly diverts the first question into a lumbering plug for his book which he had ghost-written "to let everyone know about the players and the team".
All thes things aside, he is lively enough company. Nelsen is desperate to divert attention away from himself, declaring that "despite what you might think about the last three days, I am quite a self-conscious person". He wants to push it, instead, on to his team-mates, saying: "There are a lot better-looking guys than me on our team" and later "There are much better human beings than me in the All Whites". He suggests that "six or seven" could have higher profiles than he enjoys by the tournament's end. This seems somewhat unlikely.
The pursuit of skeletons is joyless. Nelsen admits enduring the "soccer poofter" connotations of choosing football over rugby in enlightened early 1980s Christchurch and to being an "awful student" at St Thomas of Canterbury College. But yet he possesses a political science degree – which he insists he worked for despite being on a sporting scholarship at Stanford University – which was originally intended to be the precursor to a legal career.
He says "of course" he will get a real job when he retires, "in the real world, not this utopian, fake football lifestyle I'm in now". Yeah, but he doesn't have to work. "For me, to get my head round it, I will have to work."
Yeah, but he doesn't have to work. He concedes that, but insists he's "intrigued" by the business world and hints he'd move back to the US to pursue it. It's as near as he gets to admitting he's unlikely to live fulltime in New Zealand again (his wife is American) and while he plans to collect his British passport, has no intention of staying amidst the mill towns of north-west England beyond the final whistle of his last Premier League game.
And while Nelsen is self-mocking enough to claim his greying temples as merely "Arctic-blond" highlights, he shows a brand awareness strong enough to decline, courteously, the proposal of a staged photograph on the grounds that he's already up for enough mocking.
"Can I pull the bad attitude now?" he says lightly. "You know what shit I will get from the guys? For you, you take your photo and walk away, and I get crap from all the guys."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/sport/football/3728218/Is-Ryan-Nelsen-NZ-sports-Mr-Clean