Small book hits it big in narrating a rugby dream
• Ben Mercer’s autobiography is a bildungsroman about a romantic Englishman who followed his heart to France
Rugby offers great drama. From the moments we can see on the field, to hidden bits in dressing rooms, on the physio’s table, in the bars and committee rooms, and at times in the orthopaedic wards, the game delivers drama few other sports can match.
In SA, you could add politics to the drama. Once it was parochial, now it’s about lucre. Ben Mercer could write a book about our rugby. Instead he has written one about French rugby, and the game there is not very different from ours.
Mercer was a talented rugby player from Bath, a city as famous for its rugby as it is for its culture and cures. Thomas Gainsborough painted there, Jane Austen set two novels there, Charles Dickens took the waters there, Butch James played flyhalf there.
Mercer graduated from the Bath rugby academy and played all over England but realised that his professional rugby options were limited. So he took off for France, a country whose rugby he had admired since he was 12.
Equipped with a degree in English literature, there was always a chance he would not only play rugby in France but also write about it. Mercer’s writing ended up as a book,
Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby.
Self-published on Amazon, it turned out to be a bolter: the adventures of an obscure young rugby player in the depths of French rugby’s lower reaches that became a best-seller. It outsold the biographies of famous rugby personalities, Eddie Jones, Sam Warburton, Warren Gatland and Clive Woodward.
Mercer’s book is a
bildungsroman about a rugby romantic who followed his dream to experience French rugby, French culture, the French country and to learn the language. Though he helped take his club, Rouen (pronounced Ruan, as in the Springbok scrumhalf), from the fourth division to the second division, it doesn’t end too well. But the success of the book makes up for that.
Along the way, Mercer meets some colourful characters, as you would in any rugby club. Among them are the team’s captain, Romanian international Alex Tudori, and his sidekick, Vili Hordila, a silver-haired fullback. “They took the back seats in the bus, abusing everyone further forward and talking in Romanian if they didn’t want to be understood,” writes Mercer.
Tudori was famous at the club for playing against the All Blacks, though there is no record of it. He did play against the Emerging Springboks in 2007 in Bucharest when Romania were beaten 61-7. A Fijian legend at the club was Fero Lasagavibau, a wing who did play against the All Blacks and has a try to prove it.
Mercer took learning French seriously, perhaps to compensate for history. Rouen on the River Seine was where Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake by the English. Language and lifestyle were part of the reconciliation. Mercer and his English teammates even learnt to drink like the French.
“They tend to nurse their drinks rather than hammering them like us Anglo-Saxons,” he writes. “The vibe is more of a civilised apero [a drink before lunch or dinner] rather than the hurricane of a British happy hour.”
THIRD HALF
Where French rugby and Anglo-Saxon (and SA rugby, for that matter) are in agreement is in the concept of la troisième mi-temps (the third half). The traditional postmatch drinking “is such an integral part of the sport that it is linguistically part of the match, probably more so than the warm-up”.
Living in France takes Mercer to places off the traditional tourist route. Parisian suburbs of les banlieues are “frightening places, stuffed full of unedifying apartment blocks, convoluted road systems and angry young men”. The les banlieues are synonymous with unwanted immigrants crowded into districts that are largely forgotten by those in power. They live outside the ring road of Paris that encompasses the city centre, in an area called Le Pèriphèrique, “enhancing their sense of displacement”.
Most rugby in France, as we know from writers such as Uys Krige, who played there, is brutal though not without hypocrisy. The tap tackle in the lower leagues, as Mercer finds to his surprise, is considered an act of grosse brutalite, and gets a yellow card. “For a tap tackle to be so harshly regarded in the country of eye gouging and punching seemed quite odd,” writes Mercer with a shrug of English savoir-faire.
Then there are away games. These are lost before they even begin, though his first away game was a victory over Paris University Club.
At away games, referees are partisan — “steps are taken to make the away team’s experience less comfortable”. Dressing rooms are painted a sad colour, ball boys don’t pass back the ball in a timely fashion or dry it effectively for a hooker of the visiting team. Home games, in contrast, are defended with every breath. “To play rugby at home is to defend the very ground you stand on and to represent the spirit of the city,” he writes.
That attitude is reflected in the bellicosity of French captains. In team talks, they speak about la guerre (war) and le combat (the fight). For Mercer it’s a bit distasteful. “Rugby, for all the language and trappings, is a game. War is not.” He met a veteran from Britain’s recent wars. The man had no limbs. “Rugby can cause serious harm to its participants, but not like this.”
Living in Normandy inevitably took him to the beaches. “To see the scale of the cemeteries in Normandy [of soldiers who fell on D-Day] is to be humbled before swathes of ordinary men whose bravery you’ll probably never approach.”
Nevertheless, he says the power of the protagonists in the game nowadays, and their conditioning, has risen alongside their sustained ferocity. “Rugby has a big problem in how to address player safety.” When he wrote the book, four young French players died over the past year due to injuries. “I’d still argue that the war comparison is unhelpful but rugby has a case to answer; how it does this could change the future trajectory of the sport.”
He clearly thinks deeply about the game. He recognises its contradictions. “The physical demands of rugby are so conflicting and so at odds with each other that athletic excellence is impossible. A rugby player would be physically better at any other endeavour. A prop would be stronger if he didn’t have to run while a winger would be faster if he didn’t have to cover all that ground. Everyone would be healthier and more athletic if they didn’t have to tackle.
“Training for a marathon won’t win you a sprint, but rugby players must compete in both,” he writes.
‘VIOLENT CHESS’
It also requires a lot of thinking. For Mercer, rugby is “a sort of violent chess”. There will be a seam to exploit, or a space to attack. “You just have to have the right implement and be able to spot the opportunity. The best teams have a range of solutions to counter any defensive tactic that they might see, whether that’s using forward power, incisive back play or a smart kicking game.”
Then there’s the humour. There’s a lot of trash talking and sledging in French club rugby and French people react badly to jokes about their mothers. One of Mercer’s personal favourites was “ta mère boit de la Kro”. It means “your mother drinks Kronenbourg” (a cheap French beer).
Once his rugby career was over, and Mercer began telling such stories back home in England, he realised there was a book in it. A historian friend told him: “I don’t care about rugby, but that sounds interesting.” So he began to write and 30,000 words later, he began to tap into the memories of teammates.
When going to publishers and agents became too complicated, he self-published through Amazon, spending a few quid on software. He spent no money on marketing. He did it “through smart positioning, leveraging my network and being persistent”, he said.
He used Twitter a lot. “I’d jump into conversations that were discussing similar topics to my book — things about lower-tier rugby in particular. I went on podcasts, convinced a couple of other players to share the book on social media and I wrote some posts about the creation of the book.” He read podcast extracts from the book.
The big difference was the reviews. “I was nervous about asking for them, but once I asked for a few, I got over this. Reviews make the book listing more appealing and they also draw the attention of the Amazon algorithms.
“There seemed to be a tipping point once I reached 20 or so reviews. The book hit the top of the rugby book chart and I was really overwhelmed. I tweeted a message of gratitude and that message took off after being retweeted by Brian Moore [a former England player].
“Then some bigger publications took notice and covered the book. Since then it’s been much easier.”
Mercer now works parttime with Life After Professional Sport. The organisation helps professional athletes navigate the transition into “real work”.
“Retirement is a difficult experience for many athletes and the statistics are pretty stark,” he said. “Many will suffer from financial hardship, mental health issues or other personal problems like marital trouble. A common problem is lack of a clear purpose and having to navigate a very different work environment.”
Mercer, it seems, is not only navigating that transition but also helping us to do so successfully.
THE PHYSICAL DEMANDS OF RUGBY ARE SO AT ODDS WITH EACH OTHER THAT ATHLETIC EXCELLENCE IS IMPOSSIBLE