If Mathieu Bastareaud lifts the World Cup trophy on Oct. 31 it will complete one of the the most extraordinary tales of redemption and courage in sports.
The barrel-chested French center is the man Sunday’s opponents Ireland fear most. However, six years ago Bastareaud feared himself when a terrible sequence of events led him to try to take his own life.
Bastareaud, 20 at the time, ended a night out on the town in Wellington during a tour of New Zealand looking like he had gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson.
He claimed he had been set upon by a group while returning to the team hotel, but the story quickly unraveled and he admitted he had been drunk and fallen over a table in his room.
Bastareaud laid bare in his autobiography, Haute Tete (Head High), the dilemma he faced on his first foreign tour.
“I am cowardly. So instead of telling the truth and placing my confidence in the coaching staff [Marc Lievremont was coach at the time], I invented an elaborate lie,” he said.
Bastareaud was sent back to France and the media would not let the story drop.
Bastareaud went to dramatic lengths after reading a host of damning comments about himself on Facebook.
“I made my way to the kitchen. I pulled out a large knife and I slit my wrists,” he wrote in his book. “I fell to the floor and passed out.”
“My mates who were in the living room understood immediately what had happened,” he said. “They immediately called the emergency services.”
Bastareaud — who was treated in a psychiatric ward, but subsequently took to drinking — said he was not certain whether the suicide attempt was a cry for help.
“I don’t know if I really wanted to die,” he wrote. “At the very least I wanted to make myself suffer. Suffer so I could punish myself.”
Bastareaud briefly regained his place in the France team under Lievremont, but failed to make the 2011 World Cup. He returned to the Test arena in 2013 and as a player found unparalleled success at Toulon.
However, his fragility remains as he showed in December last year when he broke down following a 30-6 thrashing by Stade Francais. He has since been taking advice from boxer and sports psychologist Faisal Arrami.
“It is not his emotions he has to control, it is the reverse,” Arrami told Le Monde.
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