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David Pocock: “I’m much more comfortable just being a little weird and different.” Emma Kemp | Sports

David Pocock is planning a dinner party. The guest list is already proving to be a tedious task when he realizes that he can invite the dead along with the living. “How many people are we talking about?” he dares. “That could be epic.” After careful consideration, he lands on Mahatma Gandhi. “Gandhi would be weird to be there,” he tells Guardian Australia. “Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X.”

Also present at the hypothetical soiree are the American comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, several musicians, David Attenborough and the late African conservation visionary Garth Owen-Smith. “Then you need some really crazy people.” Donald Trump? Boris Johnson? “Oh, damn no, not that crazy. More like a good person with a little glimmer in his eye. “

This party is about KeepCups and general health. And for one entertained by a former Wallabies captain and perhaps the world’s most extraordinary defensive open-side flanker, it’s remarkably sparse for other athletes. After all, Pocock quaffles more existential stuff.

It’s no shock that the 32-year-old has drawn on his 15-year professional career. At the end of the 2019 Super Rugby season, the two-time John Eales medalist and three-time nominee for World Player of the Year The Brumbies left his home for seven years after his seven with Western Force. The modest quarter-finals of the World Cup last year in England was his 113th and last test in eleven years in the Goldspringer. He saw the 2019-20 season in Ōta with the Panasonic Wild Knights but has decided not to return to the Japanese Top League.

What’s next is even less surprising. The climate crusader’s full-time foray into nature conservation was consolidated during his sabbatical year 2017, but can be traced back to his childhood on a farm in the country of his birth, Zimbabwe. Obsessed with birds and animals, a 10-year-old Pocock wrote to National Geographic Magazine to publish an article on cheetahs.

“My argument was that they couldn’t be a real cat because they couldn’t pull their claws back,” he says. “Months and months later, that letter arrived in the middle of Zimbabwe with this little package full of information about cheetahs and a note from someone at National Geographic. I was so pumped. It started there. Still, we were super conventional farmers. We used so many chemicals and inputs and everything else. “




Pocock and Allan Savory in Zimbabwe.



Pocock with Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory. Photo: Delivered

These practices were a product of their time. Since his family fled Gweru at the height of Robert Mugabe’s farm invasions, Pocock has been pushing for a paradigm shift from policymakers, farmers, and everyday people.

The pitch sounds fantastic, but it’s not one for reductive tokenism. He and his wife, Emma, ​​oversee the Rangelands Restoration Trust, an effort to restore degraded rangelands and increase biodiversity. The first project is a 70,000 hectare game reserve in southern Zimbabwe that is surrounded by common land.

Discussions are being held on extending the collaboration with communities in the field of animal husbandry. Coronavirus is making logistics and funding difficult, but Pocock, who is nearly finishing his Master of Sustainable Agriculture, hopes to travel to Zimbabwe early next year.

Almost six years ago, a 26-year-old Pocock was arrested for chaining himself to a tractor in protest against the opening of the Maules Creek coal mine in northern New South Wales. Today the fire burns just as brightly.

“But like all these really nasty problems, we need government policies that actually promote them. If you look at where we are now with climate and biodiversity, we have an agriculture that mines way more than coal, but miners receive $ 12 billion in subsidies a year. “

Kevin Rudd’s name comes up and there is a consistency with the former Australian Prime Minister’s environmental vision and grave concerns about a concentrated media landscape. “You look at the climate reporting and how urgent it is. If you read most of the newspapers related to the climate and the environment, you wouldn’t know that we are world leaders in extinction and we don’t care about a whole range of endangered species. “

After all, “man developed in nature, but the Facebook algorithm got us”. Even with 136,000 Twitter followers, there is a love-hate relationship with social media, an inability to say whether it encourages genuine engagement or “fuels leisure outrage”. “Are they echo chambers or just terrible vitriol?” he asks. “People follow me on social media for rugby. It’s about finding ways to connect with other things that will be the challenge. “




Pocock



Pocock in action for Panasonic Wild Knights in the Japanese Top League earlier this year. Photo: Clive Rose / Getty Images

Careful navigation is required to take on the dual roles of a high profile athlete and activist. For some, public moral conviction is a conversation starter – a critical vessel for change. For others, the test that is generated is too much. It’s a friction that stems from the inseparability of sport and politics, an arena where an athlete’s obligations are ill-defined and often personal. The presence or absence of a player on a pitch can be a protest.

As Pocock well knows, the news is prone to getting lost in unsavory tits. After the Brumbies vice-captain promised not to marry Emma until gay marriage was legal (it happened in December 2018), he called out Waratah striker Jacques Potgieter in 2015 for hitting two teammates during a super rugby match referred to twice as a “fagot”. He complained to the referee and received heavy criticism for causing drama. After an investigation in Sanzar, Potgieter apologized. Pocock praised him for it.

Last year, in the middle of the Israel Folau saga “Hell is waiting for gays”, he openly pointed his finger at his Wallabies colleague because he had used his platform “incredibly disappointing”. However, every word is tactful. Pocock never forced his views on his fellow players or tried to disrupt their focus.

That remained the case throughout the week when a conversation about a knee ahead of the third Bledisloe Cup test in support of Black Lives Matter sparked controversy. Pocock kept his advice, was careful not to disrupt the wallabies’ preparations, and knew he was giving space to a playgroup he had recently left to speak for himself.

Indeed, the end of the Pocock era heralded an inevitable rebuilding. As a loyal supporter of Michael Cheika, who is quick to defend his outgoing coach from the post-World Cup pot shots, he is optimistic about Dave Rennie’s brave new world.

“From what I hear, the guys at camp are very happy and enjoying it, and I think the last few gigs showed that,” he says. “Early days but I’m really looking forward to seeing a whole slew of new wallabies get an opportunity and hopefully build something in the next four years. He really seems to get guys in shape and has given a lot of young guys a crack who played really well through Super Rugby AU. It’s really exciting. I remember getting my chance in 2008 when I was 20 years old. Robbie Deans was similar – he was ready to crack the guys. “




David Pocock



Pocock poses ahead of the 2019 World Cup – one of three tournaments he has participated in during his eleven-year international career. Photo: Adam Pretty – World Rugby / World Rugby / Getty Images

Not that Pocock is too inclined to reconsider the past – his Wallabies debut, the 2011 World Cup quarter-finals against South Africa he once dreamed of, and the knee reconstructions that made a litany of injuries. Or because since he was a child in 1995 he wanted to play in a world championship on his grandfather’s farm and then played in three games, and of the ultimate disappointment that came with every exit.

“How many people have helped me get where I am? It just rams home how much a personal achievement is a myth, ”he says. Such feelings mark a deep thinker from the past.

Pocock is remarkably meek for a specimen of this physicality that his teammates affectionately called him “Bam Bam”. Nuggety as a wombat, the 115 kg, 184 cm package is protein powder in person. In the last few months training has been weakened from “fit” to “active”, although this still includes meeting friends Lift and carry large stones on grassy hills on the Murrumbidgee River. Under the muscles there is an avowed “introvert”. Emma, ​​he says, prefers the word “cage”. “I’m much more comfortable just being a little weird and different.”

There are examples. In a World Cup camp in New Caledonia before 2019, Wallabies team manager Patrick Molihan found Pocock halfway up a tree buried in a book. “A huge one whose roots go into the ground and which is super easy to climb. That’s super cliché, but I think it might even have been The Overstory that I took with me on this trip. He [Molihan] took a picture and sent it to management so they all gave me shit about it.

“Emma gives me crap because I’ve never read or seen Harry Potter, I’ve never seen Game of Thrones. When it comes to pop culture, I’m useless. I’m the worst pub quiz person you could ask for on your team, unless the question is, “What’s the tallest waterfall in the world?” Pocock has learned a lot about music after discovering Triple J when he arrived in Australia as a 14-year-old. old. For a country in which “taxpayers finance a lot of stupid things”, the socially conscious youth station offered everything that a Christian education did not offer.

He would no longer call himself religious and the issue of marriage equality has “caused quarrels with relatives.” “People have long read the Bible in a certain way, and talking about love and inclusivity is a challenge for some people. But that’s really changing. People are starting to see how valid and humanly different relationships are. It’s very hard to hate people when you actually get to know them. “

Because of this, people were at the heart of Pocock’s philanthropy. In the past, he has worked more directly on community development, focusing solely on livelihoods and education, health and infrastructure. In the future, he did not rule out politics.

“Right now I’ve made up my mind to spend my time solving some of the underlying issues in order to keep the communities in a state where you really have trouble just feeding your family, let alone living on the land “, he says. “Your life is totally dependent on it.”

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