Andrew with Neil Cadigan Johns - The Two of Me - Andrew Johns

To my two grandmothers
June Bowden and Margaret Johns.
I wish you could both still be alive to
experience this great journey.

By Phil Gould

Ive been seriously tempted to write my own book about this bloke. I have this desire for people to meet and understand the real man behind the many faces of Andrew Johns. His true story simply must be told and Im so glad he has opened himself up to you in this book.

I once heard a saying that, if applied to Andrew, would go something like this: Some people play professional sport to enrich their life. Others play professional sport to define their life.

If ever a player defined his life by the way he played football, it is Andrew Johns. His leadership influenced the behaviour of others. He possessed an unshakeable trust in his own ability and honestly believed he could make anything happen on a football field. Of course, the more times he did it, the more he believed he could do it again, and again, and again.

More than a game, rugby league was a science to him.

From a very young age, Johns was not content to simply kick a football and allow it to land with unpredictable bounce. He wanted to know why it bounced the way it did, and he challenged himself to make it bounce the same way every time. He was a real student of football and footballers. His ability to extract the very best out of the players around him made him the ultimate team man. His ability to target and exploit the weaknesses in opposing teams made him the most feared attacking weapon in the game.

His skills excited us. His competitive nature inspired us.

Johns was one of the most gifted players ever to pull on a boot. Yet despite a personal skill set that players would die for, Andrew Johns, for the most part, chose to play this game in a tough and most uncompromising manner.

His brutal honesty in self appraisal was sometimes staggering. His loyalty to his club and his team-mates was unquestioned. You would go to war with this man.

From the humble beginnings of working-class Australia comes a man who, through sheer determination and talent, rose to be the greatest rugby league player of his generation; and arguably the greatest of all time.

However, success comes with its own problems. I got the feeling Johns sometimes struggled with the notoriety and publicity that follows a sporting superstar.

His personality could change from one meeting to the next. He was often caught in this conflict of either living up to what he thought other people expected of him, or living down the image of the true celebrity he had become.

Sometimes you had to raise your voice to get the real Andrew Johns to emerge. During the last couple of years of his playing career, I got the distinct feeling the only places where Andrew felt truly comfortable were out on the football field, surfing the ocean waves, or immersing himself in the anonymity of the race track.

My suspicions were confirmed with Andrews recent public admissions regarding his battle with bipolar disorder, depression and his recreational drug use. Im sure hell elaborate on these issues in the following pages, but it appears quite obvious to me that Andrew did not always enjoy being famous.

His stunning confessions on the Channel Nine Footy Show of his 12 years of drug use and the lie he had been living was one of the most honest and soul-baring interviews Ive ever heard in my life. I said at the time he was very brave to confront his issues in such a public forum. But thats typical of Andrew. The bigger the game, the bigger the challenge, the more he rises to the occasion.

I truly hope he finds peace and relief in revealing his inner demons to the world.

I do know that interview and this book will help others who find themselves in similar situations. In fact, maybe that is why Andrew is on this Earth. Maybe the high profile he has earned as being the greatest rugby league player of all time was simply a vehicle for him to make a difference in his post-football life as the face of drug reform amongst our youth.

The spotlight he has shone on mental illness and the attention he has drawn to the incidence of recreational drug use in our society must surely provide incentive for Andrew to become a campaigner for public awareness on these important issues. I hope so.

I hope Andrew devotes the rest of his life to helping others deal with these problems. Time will tell. What I do know for certain, though, is that my life has already been enriched in so many ways through having known the great Andrew Johns.