“What I wanted to do was to just put it all out there. Because I think that putting it all out there, it gives a wider picture of why I was where I was, and also gives the full picture on how recovery is possible for people” – Ryan Caldwell.
WHEN YOU ARE reading ‘White Lines’, the autobiography of former Ulster, Bath and Exeter Chiefs lock Ryan Caldwell, you can judge this book by the cover.
On the cover, the ‘I’ in ‘White’ is represented by a line of cocaine. Not subtle. Indiscreet. The best books are.
The premise is the familiar rise, fall and period of straightening up again and the happy ending.
Tempted by the latter-day Caldwell, face and hands covered in tattoo ink, and hair scraped back in a striking picture by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Cathal McNaughton, and encouraged by the chronological storytelling, you go looking for the root of the downfall.
The traumatic childhood. The abuse. The neglect. The boarding school and/or casual, indifferent parenting.
But it’s not there. What you get instead is a young lad wired to the moon, going along to mini rugby on a Saturday morning tempted by the promise of hot dogs and finding that he has a talent for running with the ball despite his massive size and trainers slapping on the grass.
It helps that he has untapped reserves of aggression with no outlet. And on the sideline with their flasks of tea and constant encouragement are his parents, sometimes his sister and always in the background, a beautiful relationship with his gentle soul of a grandfather.
So he falls in love with rugby. He takes a ball to bed with him most nights. He ends up in Royal Belfast Academical Institution (‘Inst’ to the locals) where he comes under the somewhat strict guidance of Brian McLaughlin, who will later pop up as their relationship sours.
He captained Inst to the School’s Cup success on St Patrick’s Day at Ravenhill. By now he was already telling people he would play for Ireland someday. And after being taken on by Dungannon, with Paddy Johns a close observer, makes it back to Ravenhill as an Ulster player.
On we go. He gets a call-up to the Ireland squad, he’s taking part in a supposedly non-contact drill as they are gearing up for the 2007 World Cup, he hits Paul O’Connell nonetheless. O’Connell is pissed. He follows Caldwell and drills a punch so hard that Caldwell’s teeth come through his cheek. He starts fitting and loses consciousness. He almost dies right there and then.
Enforced retirement
Soon, injuries enter the picture and the long, slow battle with his body drags on until he reaches 30 and he is spat out the other end of professional sport, requiring two hip replacements.
And that’s the rugby part.
In his own life, his girlfriend falls pregnant when he is in his early 20s. They have another child and he also becomes a step-father to her boy.
It takes a certain man to adapt to that. Caldwell isn’t that man. Not yet. He has years to go and is stuck in the permanent adolescence of a rugby dressing room.
He cheats. He lets people down. He starts taking painkillers, then drugs. He starts dealing and acting as muscle for unsavoury types. The book takes off like a rocket.
OK. We’ve said enough. Time for Caldwell to tell his truth.
“In a way, part of it was to tell my story on my terms. In doing that, it was to build understanding, I suppose, to open up important conversations that need to be had, especially for men and how we’re dealing with things, and really just in the hope to inspire other people,” he says.
“It’s possible to change. Because a lot of people I even talk to, they’re like, ‘I’m good.’ People say, ‘It’s just the way I am, I’ve always been that way.’
“And I’m like, ‘but it doesn’t have to stay this way, you know, you can make efforts to change.’
“But the thing with change is that it takes effort and a lot of people like the idea, but then it seems like such a mammoth task for a lot of people.”
Some years back, Caldwell managed to get his life back on track. He had been living in the high-rise flats in Belvoir, south Belfast, mired in serious drug use.
Some big shocks were to come: the Police closing off a cul-de-sac in a search for him as he was breaking curfew, his ankle tag giving him away and rolling a joint instead of going out with dignity.
Spells in Maghaberry Prison. A suicide attempt. Other occasions of suicide ideation.
Out jumping Leo Cullen for a lineout. Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
When he was ready for change, he went to Columbia, to the thickest jungle where he would try Ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew that has the potential to take you on a trip that just might blow open your doors of perception.
Recovery
He knows this is where many are lost. What with the ceremony over the substances, the puking black bile into buckets and the Shamans and whatnot.
But it worked for him. He came home and, bit by bit, started putting his life back together again.
****
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“Look”, he says, showing me a page from a journal that he wrote in 2022.
He’s in baggy tartan pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt in his house in the village of Straid, outside Ballyclare and he’s pointing to this one page from four years ago.
“Down here it says,” he points out, “grateful for my best-selling book, grateful for my best-selling book right there. That was in 2023, and I was writing this every single morning.”
The book was still years off but he was already manifesting.
Eventually, Peter Lockhart called. He had been a guest on Lockhart’s ‘Stand Up’ podcast on Ulster Rugby, and they had got into his life story.
Lockhart persuaded him it would make a book, so he sat in his podcasting studio and talked every week for hours, sometimes long after the tape was rolling.
“I was so committed to it, but then once I started to get into the rugby career, I started after 22, 23, when I was playing with the injuries in the hips, I started to really lose the love for the game,” Caldwell says.
In Ireland training camp. Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO
Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO
“There were a lot of things going on at the time. I wasn’t happy in the marriage, the values started to slip, the wheels started to fall off.
“Growing up, I left my mum and dad’s house, I was about 19, 20 and then shortly after that, I was living in a rugby house.
“A couple of years after that I was ending as a dad, and a stepson, and a small young family. I just don’t think I was ready for all that, to be honest.
“I started to chase, I was chasing a feeling that I wasn’t getting in rugby anymore, I thought I would get it with women, and then drugs.”
A cheeky line here and there became a full-blown habit. At one stage, in his latest ‘new start’ he was on a night out with his new Exeter teammates. He sneaked into the toilets, cut out a line, yanked the chain on the toilet to drown out the sound of him putting it up his hooter.
Once he flicked the latch of the cubicle, he found Exeter head coach Rob Baxter standing there.
In enforced retirement, drugs swallowed him whole. Every so often The Belfast Telegraph and The Irish News would carry reports of Caldwell in the latest scrape.
He had already been divorced. Depression entered the picture and the body and mind keep the score of that great intangible of anyone who played rugby as their occupation – concussions.
And yet all the while, his parents were still there. His mother might have had to keep feeding her son who would rather spend money on drugs than food, and his father would be lost in exasperation at this son who made him so proud now reduced to crime to fund his habit.
But they never gave up.
“My mum, she read the book and my dad, he’s read it twice now,” he says.
“For a while, my parents and I had such a strained relationship because of my absence, not because of them. I put their head away a bit. I put them through it with everything, but they’ve been an absolute constant throughout, with support and everything.
“When my mum was reading the book she phoned me when she was halfway through it. Really upset, in tears, crying, saying, ‘God, I knew it was bad. I did know it was bad but I didn’t know it was as bad as this.’”
As lost as he was, he was hiding the worst. An honourable conceit, perhaps.
“My relationship with my parents now is better than it’s ever been.
“We’ve been through so much together. It’s funny, like, my mum and dad will tell me, ‘I love you.’ And we were never really like that before.
“I sort of came home to myself and healed my own self, the more I came home to my mum and dad too, and then be able to have a really good relationship with them is amazing.”
****
At 5am, his eyes open. He’d have been in bed from before half nine and he’s out like a light.
Downstairs he goes, the kettle goes on and he does a little gentle movement to oil the hinges. He sits in absolute silence listening to his lungs filling and emptying.
This is contentment.
Cathal McNaughton
Cathal McNaughton
“Our wee kids are only three and one so they’re not quite up at school yet, but I get a wee hour every morning to do a bit of playing before I have to go and do some work,” he says.
The work is hosting retreats and programmes through his company Inner Evolution.
He practices breath work, meditation, cold water therapy, the lot. You can do it in studios or in the Mourne Mountains.
“It features things like mind coaching and regulation of your central nervous system,” Caldwell says.
“Really creating a new reality but really embodying it as well, so it’s like all the things that I have used in my recovery I like to share with different groups of men or different people that come in.”
Some of his former teammates just simply cannot believe it. Big Caldy, the Alpha Male in any company, always ready to throw digs, a certified mad bastard? Doing, what’s this, breath work?
The work
And he’s busy with it. Men’s minds have become scrambled and he sees the evidence.
“There’s been a shift over the last few years. There’s more and more men stepping up and helping other men create some change.
“I think a lot of us are products of our environment but you look at the last 20 or 30 years and even in society, the whole culture. You look at the music and you look at different things on the media. When we were growing up, it was all programmes like Geordie Shore, Jersey Shore, all that stuff you’re looking at these people just going out and getting steaming. They were being promiscuous and it was being sold as being cool.
“This was conditioning us. More so men, to be a certain way. If you want people to notice you, this was the way you have to be.”
Where does that leave us as a species?
“I think men have no direction. We find people who are in the same space all the time. Like attracts like.
Winning a lineout against Munster. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
“That’s a breeding ground for those behaviours. Let’s talk about the way society is, a lot of the men I work with, they are getting home at the end of the day, eating crap for dinner, watching porn, and have a couple of bottles of beer.
“They are getting up then and repeating this cycle night after night. Going out at the weekend and blowing off all their steam.
“They think that this is normal behaviour, but it is all distraction from what is going on. The porn is a distraction. The drink is a distraction. And it comes down to not being fulfilled or living the life we want to be living.”
He continues, “A lot of men I work with are having the same issue. They are chasing all these dopamine highs. But we can only do this for so long. We cannot outrun ourselves and it will all catch up. And in that time, that’s when you have to face yourself.
“I got to that stage. You start to understand that all these patterns are made normal by society. It’s not natural for humans and what it is doing for men is making things worse. It is perpetuating this cycle.
“So we are trying to reconnect men back to themselves. Through things like breath work, meditation, cold water therapy. Going out into nature, hikes, talking circles.
“It happens bit by bit. People say they don’t mind talking but then you introduce a bit of breath work three or four weeks into the programme and these guys are starting to talk about what is going on in their life.
“You see these massive shifts in people – from being heard, from investing in themselves. And not doing the habits that are just a distraction.”
The further he wanted to go into oblivion, the less he could see of himself. In the book he tells a story of being in fights in Belfast, of acting as a henchman when drug deals were going down, all through a curious detachment at the character wearing his own clothes.
“When I was at my lowest point, I was completely disconnected from life. Real life. From nature, from myself. I had no idea who I was,” he says.
“And from that place, you just cannot make good decisions for yourself. Because you have no identity. No foundation. It’s like trying to build a house of straw. You have to have the strong foundation, and the foundation is you.
“I would say to people – you are your whole life. This vessel that you are in, this body, that’s the medium through which you express your life. All your feelings, emotions, stress, tension, and if you are carrying that around, that’s what you experience in life.
“So a thing I try to do with people is just get them connected to the simple thing. To themselves. And notice all the things you are grateful for.
“Changing this identity and this mindset and once we can change that, life changes.”
It’s the most powerful drug he’s ever had.
****
If you are affected by any of these issues and need help, contact the Samaritans – 116 123 – or www.samaritans.org, or Pieta House on 1800 247 247 or www.pieta.ie.
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Rugby, drug addiction, prison, recovery - the life of Ryan Caldwell
“What I wanted to do was to just put it all out there. Because I think that putting it all out there, it gives a wider picture of why I was where I was, and also gives the full picture on how recovery is possible for people” – Ryan Caldwell.
WHEN YOU ARE reading ‘White Lines’, the autobiography of former Ulster, Bath and Exeter Chiefs lock Ryan Caldwell, you can judge this book by the cover.
On the cover, the ‘I’ in ‘White’ is represented by a line of cocaine. Not subtle. Indiscreet. The best books are.
The premise is the familiar rise, fall and period of straightening up again and the happy ending.
Tempted by the latter-day Caldwell, face and hands covered in tattoo ink, and hair scraped back in a striking picture by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Cathal McNaughton, and encouraged by the chronological storytelling, you go looking for the root of the downfall.
The traumatic childhood. The abuse. The neglect. The boarding school and/or casual, indifferent parenting.
But it’s not there. What you get instead is a young lad wired to the moon, going along to mini rugby on a Saturday morning tempted by the promise of hot dogs and finding that he has a talent for running with the ball despite his massive size and trainers slapping on the grass.
It helps that he has untapped reserves of aggression with no outlet. And on the sideline with their flasks of tea and constant encouragement are his parents, sometimes his sister and always in the background, a beautiful relationship with his gentle soul of a grandfather.
So he falls in love with rugby. He takes a ball to bed with him most nights. He ends up in Royal Belfast Academical Institution (‘Inst’ to the locals) where he comes under the somewhat strict guidance of Brian McLaughlin, who will later pop up as their relationship sours.
He captained Inst to the School’s Cup success on St Patrick’s Day at Ravenhill. By now he was already telling people he would play for Ireland someday. And after being taken on by Dungannon, with Paddy Johns a close observer, makes it back to Ravenhill as an Ulster player.
On we go. He gets a call-up to the Ireland squad, he’s taking part in a supposedly non-contact drill as they are gearing up for the 2007 World Cup, he hits Paul O’Connell nonetheless. O’Connell is pissed. He follows Caldwell and drills a punch so hard that Caldwell’s teeth come through his cheek. He starts fitting and loses consciousness. He almost dies right there and then.
Enforced retirement
Soon, injuries enter the picture and the long, slow battle with his body drags on until he reaches 30 and he is spat out the other end of professional sport, requiring two hip replacements.
And that’s the rugby part.
In his own life, his girlfriend falls pregnant when he is in his early 20s. They have another child and he also becomes a step-father to her boy.
It takes a certain man to adapt to that. Caldwell isn’t that man. Not yet. He has years to go and is stuck in the permanent adolescence of a rugby dressing room.
He cheats. He lets people down. He starts taking painkillers, then drugs. He starts dealing and acting as muscle for unsavoury types. The book takes off like a rocket.
OK. We’ve said enough. Time for Caldwell to tell his truth.
“In a way, part of it was to tell my story on my terms. In doing that, it was to build understanding, I suppose, to open up important conversations that need to be had, especially for men and how we’re dealing with things, and really just in the hope to inspire other people,” he says.
“It’s possible to change. Because a lot of people I even talk to, they’re like, ‘I’m good.’ People say, ‘It’s just the way I am, I’ve always been that way.’
“And I’m like, ‘but it doesn’t have to stay this way, you know, you can make efforts to change.’
Some years back, Caldwell managed to get his life back on track. He had been living in the high-rise flats in Belvoir, south Belfast, mired in serious drug use.
Some big shocks were to come: the Police closing off a cul-de-sac in a search for him as he was breaking curfew, his ankle tag giving him away and rolling a joint instead of going out with dignity.
Spells in Maghaberry Prison. A suicide attempt. Other occasions of suicide ideation.
When he was ready for change, he went to Columbia, to the thickest jungle where he would try Ayahuasca, a psychoactive brew that has the potential to take you on a trip that just might blow open your doors of perception.
Recovery
He knows this is where many are lost. What with the ceremony over the substances, the puking black bile into buckets and the Shamans and whatnot.
But it worked for him. He came home and, bit by bit, started putting his life back together again.
****
“Look”, he says, showing me a page from a journal that he wrote in 2022.
He’s in baggy tartan pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt in his house in the village of Straid, outside Ballyclare and he’s pointing to this one page from four years ago.
“Down here it says,” he points out, “grateful for my best-selling book, grateful for my best-selling book right there. That was in 2023, and I was writing this every single morning.”
The book was still years off but he was already manifesting.
Eventually, Peter Lockhart called. He had been a guest on Lockhart’s ‘Stand Up’ podcast on Ulster Rugby, and they had got into his life story.
Lockhart persuaded him it would make a book, so he sat in his podcasting studio and talked every week for hours, sometimes long after the tape was rolling.
“I was so committed to it, but then once I started to get into the rugby career, I started after 22, 23, when I was playing with the injuries in the hips, I started to really lose the love for the game,” Caldwell says.
“There were a lot of things going on at the time. I wasn’t happy in the marriage, the values started to slip, the wheels started to fall off.
“Growing up, I left my mum and dad’s house, I was about 19, 20 and then shortly after that, I was living in a rugby house.
“A couple of years after that I was ending as a dad, and a stepson, and a small young family. I just don’t think I was ready for all that, to be honest.
“I started to chase, I was chasing a feeling that I wasn’t getting in rugby anymore, I thought I would get it with women, and then drugs.”
A cheeky line here and there became a full-blown habit. At one stage, in his latest ‘new start’ he was on a night out with his new Exeter teammates. He sneaked into the toilets, cut out a line, yanked the chain on the toilet to drown out the sound of him putting it up his hooter.
Once he flicked the latch of the cubicle, he found Exeter head coach Rob Baxter standing there.
In enforced retirement, drugs swallowed him whole. Every so often The Belfast Telegraph and The Irish News would carry reports of Caldwell in the latest scrape.
He had already been divorced. Depression entered the picture and the body and mind keep the score of that great intangible of anyone who played rugby as their occupation – concussions.
And yet all the while, his parents were still there. His mother might have had to keep feeding her son who would rather spend money on drugs than food, and his father would be lost in exasperation at this son who made him so proud now reduced to crime to fund his habit.
But they never gave up.
“My mum, she read the book and my dad, he’s read it twice now,” he says.
“For a while, my parents and I had such a strained relationship because of my absence, not because of them. I put their head away a bit. I put them through it with everything, but they’ve been an absolute constant throughout, with support and everything.
As lost as he was, he was hiding the worst. An honourable conceit, perhaps.
“My relationship with my parents now is better than it’s ever been.
“We’ve been through so much together. It’s funny, like, my mum and dad will tell me, ‘I love you.’ And we were never really like that before.
“I sort of came home to myself and healed my own self, the more I came home to my mum and dad too, and then be able to have a really good relationship with them is amazing.”
****
At 5am, his eyes open. He’d have been in bed from before half nine and he’s out like a light.
Downstairs he goes, the kettle goes on and he does a little gentle movement to oil the hinges. He sits in absolute silence listening to his lungs filling and emptying.
This is contentment.
“Our wee kids are only three and one so they’re not quite up at school yet, but I get a wee hour every morning to do a bit of playing before I have to go and do some work,” he says.
The work is hosting retreats and programmes through his company Inner Evolution.
He practices breath work, meditation, cold water therapy, the lot. You can do it in studios or in the Mourne Mountains.
“It features things like mind coaching and regulation of your central nervous system,” Caldwell says.
“Really creating a new reality but really embodying it as well, so it’s like all the things that I have used in my recovery I like to share with different groups of men or different people that come in.”
Some of his former teammates just simply cannot believe it. Big Caldy, the Alpha Male in any company, always ready to throw digs, a certified mad bastard? Doing, what’s this, breath work?
The work
And he’s busy with it. Men’s minds have become scrambled and he sees the evidence.
“There’s been a shift over the last few years. There’s more and more men stepping up and helping other men create some change.
“I think a lot of us are products of our environment but you look at the last 20 or 30 years and even in society, the whole culture. You look at the music and you look at different things on the media. When we were growing up, it was all programmes like Geordie Shore, Jersey Shore, all that stuff you’re looking at these people just going out and getting steaming. They were being promiscuous and it was being sold as being cool.
“This was conditioning us. More so men, to be a certain way. If you want people to notice you, this was the way you have to be.”
Where does that leave us as a species?
“I think men have no direction. We find people who are in the same space all the time. Like attracts like.
“That’s a breeding ground for those behaviours. Let’s talk about the way society is, a lot of the men I work with, they are getting home at the end of the day, eating crap for dinner, watching porn, and have a couple of bottles of beer.
“They are getting up then and repeating this cycle night after night. Going out at the weekend and blowing off all their steam.
“They think that this is normal behaviour, but it is all distraction from what is going on. The porn is a distraction. The drink is a distraction. And it comes down to not being fulfilled or living the life we want to be living.”
He continues, “A lot of men I work with are having the same issue. They are chasing all these dopamine highs. But we can only do this for so long. We cannot outrun ourselves and it will all catch up. And in that time, that’s when you have to face yourself.
“I got to that stage. You start to understand that all these patterns are made normal by society. It’s not natural for humans and what it is doing for men is making things worse. It is perpetuating this cycle.
“So we are trying to reconnect men back to themselves. Through things like breath work, meditation, cold water therapy. Going out into nature, hikes, talking circles.
“It happens bit by bit. People say they don’t mind talking but then you introduce a bit of breath work three or four weeks into the programme and these guys are starting to talk about what is going on in their life.
“You see these massive shifts in people – from being heard, from investing in themselves. And not doing the habits that are just a distraction.”
The further he wanted to go into oblivion, the less he could see of himself. In the book he tells a story of being in fights in Belfast, of acting as a henchman when drug deals were going down, all through a curious detachment at the character wearing his own clothes.
“When I was at my lowest point, I was completely disconnected from life. Real life. From nature, from myself. I had no idea who I was,” he says.
“And from that place, you just cannot make good decisions for yourself. Because you have no identity. No foundation. It’s like trying to build a house of straw. You have to have the strong foundation, and the foundation is you.
“I would say to people – you are your whole life. This vessel that you are in, this body, that’s the medium through which you express your life. All your feelings, emotions, stress, tension, and if you are carrying that around, that’s what you experience in life.
“So a thing I try to do with people is just get them connected to the simple thing. To themselves. And notice all the things you are grateful for.
“Changing this identity and this mindset and once we can change that, life changes.”
It’s the most powerful drug he’s ever had.
****
If you are affected by any of these issues and need help, contact the Samaritans – 116 123 – or www.samaritans.org, or Pieta House on 1800 247 247 or www.pieta.ie.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
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