LIFE on the FRINGES of PROFESSIONAL RUGBY Copyright © 2019 by Ben Mercer
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CONCEPT 02 BEN MERCER LIFE ON THE FRINGES OF PROFESSIONAL RUGBY Copyright © 2019 by Ben Mercer All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. INTRODUCTION Athletes, maybe even more than other people, depend on the myths they can tell about themselves — BENJAMIN MARKOVITZ We all tell our own story. Look at a block of flats and you’ll see 1000 souls all starring in their own drama, telling and retelling their own lives. I moved to France to continue my professional rugby story. I’d given England a bash and hadn’t made the top division. This was a bit of a last go, a chance to do something different, live somewhere I’d always wanted to live. French rugby always held a romantic appeal for me. The laissez faire approach to life, learning the language and the thrill of ‘joue’ when everything comes off miraculously. Famous French wins against the All Blacks in 1999 or even heroic defeats like the World Cup Final in 2011, the European dominance of the swashbuckling Stade Toulousain in the 2000s with home- iv Introduction grown players slinging the ball everywhere, their insouciance combined with the sheer joy of playing so expressively. My years there did give me these experiences. I learned the language, threw the ball around and lived with a degree of insou- ciance for a while. Later things began to rub against me, shaking me out of my complacency and I began to question what I was doing there. The team began to think the same thing. This story is about the things I learned or didn’t learn over my career. How professional rugby works. And what you do when you realise that what you’re doing isn’t enough for you anymore. What I’ll tell you about in this book is not necessarily right and others who were there could disagree. The events I describe are true to the best of my recollection and how I feel about these things may be tempered by time and perspective, a gradual shaping of my own history. I’m now retired from playing and don’t necessarily miss it. I’m not beholden to sensitivity or reputation in the way that a higher profile player is, although I will withhold some details to save poten- tial embarrassment or just to do right by some of my former team- mates. My gay teammate doesn’t need outing by me, even if he was happy for everyone at the club to know about him. My teammates taking drugs don’t need naming, even if they may not still be playing. To know that these things happen in the context of professional sport is insight enough. Some of the insights may be easy to dismiss as things that only happen at a lower level, not at the more rarefied echelons of the game. I can tell you that many of these things are universal and that money doesn’t make people essentially different. It just gives them greater resources to indulge their similar impulses. Where top players vary from the likes of me is in the diversity of their experiences. They play the same teams every year. They visit the same stadiums every year. They play against the same guys by and large every year. A guy like me has a far more diverse range of Introduction v rugby experiences and in this book, I’ll attempt to communicate them to you. I gained an English Literature degree before embarking on my professional rugby career proper and have always fancied the idea of writing a book. Infrequent attempts at writing things up to this point have been me paying lip service to this idea but perhaps not really believing in it. The pages of a book are an easy place to fail and I became someone scared to fail, both on the field and away from it. Simultaneously I’ve regarded myself as something of a scholar athlete, finishing my studies and continuing to learn while I’ve been playing, most notably by learning French. This book is partly me justifying my self-proclaimed status as a Platonic scholar athlete, partly a way of showing you what’s behind the curtain of profes- sional rugby in another country. Stories can keep us alive and moving forward, even as they exert a pull back into the past. In sport you’re always looking back at where you’ve come from, what you’ve just done and at what’s coming next weekend, but you never feel more alive than you do in the moment, on the field, where you can forget about everything else. That’s why we all play. Crafting your own story is something we do every day, with every- thing we do. Here I’m writing my own history. Moving to France wasn’t an attempt at writing history; I just didn’t have a job and felt that this could be my next adventure. That adventure became some- thing unique and special, being a part of building a new bastion of rugby in a non-traditional rugby region. Now that adventure is over but I get to tell my version of it here. I hope that you enjoy it. YEAR ONE - CROSSING THE CHANNEL WHEN THE BALL I PASSED HIT MY WINGER IN THE FACE, KNOCKING him over and halting the session, I looked around at the desolate training pitch in the French public park, at my motley collection of new teammates in a random array of training attire and thought I’d made a big mistake. I’d signed for a year at Stade Rouennais; a project team with wealthy owners and lofty ambitions in the north of France. The aim was to create a new rugby power in the non-traditional rugby region of Normandy. Judging by our first session, this aim was not a realistic one. Realism was something that was beginning to permeate my view of rugby as a career path. I’d spent a couple of seasons as a second divi- sion player for Plymouth Albion in the RFU Championship, the second tier of English rugby, taking a short break in Sydney before pitching up at the Cornish Pirates, and was now beginning to take stock of my options. I’d been an ambitious young player, deferring my plans to pursue professional rugby to attend university and get the security that came 2 BEN MERCER with a degree. The utility of my English Literature degree is up for debate but credentialism and the need to justify my decent school grades played their part, as well as my desire to leave home and experience the university lifestyle. Upon graduation, I immediately decamped to Plymouth for two seasons, fabricating a holiday so I could spend a week in the gym sweating out my final university excesses before arriving for presea- son. After two years in Devon, I headed to Australia for a couple of months, which turned into almost a year, before heading back to the UK where I saw the Pirates as an opportunity to restate my claims of being a good enough player to reach the Premiership. Rugby is not a good option as a career path. Even if you avoid serious injury, your career will be over in your thirties and the average Premiership salary is about £150,000 a year. There are only 500 or so of these contracts, making getting one extremely competi- tive, and I’d wager that this average salary is heavily skewed by the top end of the market where some guys will be receiving up to half a million pounds per season for their efforts. A select few are now getting more than that. There is also the matter of your position. If each team had 4 players in each position then you need to be in the top 50 players in yours to get a deal. With hundreds of thousands of registered players in the UK, as well as talented foreign players being readily available, the odds are not in your favour. The Championship is far less well remunerated while offering you little to no job security. Most deals are one year long and are liable to be snatched away from you if injury suddenly makes you unavailable for any substantial length of time. As an outside back in my mid twenties, I was no longer a ‘young’ player but almost a mid-career professional and unless something changed for me quickly, my youthful dreams of the top level of the sport would remain just that. Demographics are against you in rugby and securing a contract in the Championship that pays you a liveable wage is no mean feat. Fringes 3 Extending the statistics quoted above means that you’re probably in the top 100 players in your position in the country if you’re playing in the Championship, yet this is not enough to guarantee a living. Many contracts are less than £20,000 a year while some are as little as £6,000. You can be in the top 100 in your profession and feel like a failure. I’d tended to earn reasonably in the Championship through incentivised contracts and keeping my living costs down but I by no means felt like I’d ‘made it’; to me that meant getting to and staying in the top division, with all the advantages that that brings.