NIGEL OWENS ON SEXUALITY AND SUICIDE
REFEREE NIGEL OWENS ON HIS SEXUALITY, SUICIDE ATTEMPT AND BULIMIA BATTLE
NIGEL OWENS has travelled more than 2,000 miles in the past two weeks but he is still a long way from home.
The staff of an asset management firm are waiting across London to hear the wisdom of a rugby union referee whose calm self-assurance on the field of play was encapsulated by his words for the All Blacks’ Dan Carter, heard by a global audience of 120 million in the World Cup final two years ago: ‘Please don’t swear in front of the viewers.’
The experiences he will relate do not belong in the standard management manual.
The individual known for instilling discipline with humour and the lightest touch — making him ‘probably the best referee in the game,’ according to England coach Eddie Jones — had resolved to end his own life when he slipped out of his parents’ home at first light on an April morning 21 years ago, possessing two boxes of Paracetamol, a bottle of whisky and a loaded shotgun.
The pills actually saved him, Owens reflects now. He washed them down with the whisky and fell into a coma up on the Bancyddraenan mountain, above the Carmarthenshire village of Mynyddcerrig.
It meant that the gun lay untouched when a police helicopter located him. But while the reaction of his shattered parents would set his life on a different course, Owens certainly cannot say that the challenges ended that day.
At the core of his troubled soul was a sexuality which it took him years to come to terms with, even longer to admit to, and made him indescribably ashamed.
He became bulimic and frequented gyms where he worked out and got hooked on mind-affecting liquid steroids, trying to develop a physique which could somehow allow him to feel some sense of self-worth.
He tried to hide the bulimia from his parents by pretending he was suffering from colitis. This was part of a pattern of subterfuge which would have been comical, had it not been so desperate.
It included him pulling out the plug of the family video recorder so his parents might not watch the rugby show which he knew would allude to his sexuality and furtively glancing into hairdressing salons to ‘see if I could get some idea of how a gay man would look.’
He tried to shake off what, to a young man growing up in conservative rural west Wales, seemed like an illness. The 46-year-old recalls, it was a case of ‘trying to forget it, trying to get a girlfriend, even half thinking about getting engaged. Would that get rid of it?’.
And then came the day he walked into a doctor’s surgery and told the GP he wanted to be chemically castrated. He had read about it somewhere — possibly, he thinks, in the story of the Bletchley Park scientist Alan Turing, who was given the option of this treatment or prison in 1952, two years before ending his own life.
‘The doctor told me: “You can’t”,’ Owens remembers. ‘He said: ‘‘It doesn’t work that way’’.’ Owens had refereed two rugby matches in 2005 when he realised he could keep up the pretence no longer. The fixtures are seared into his mind: Scotland v the Barbarians in Aberdeen; Japan v Ireland in Osaka.
‘It was eating away at me and if something is eating away at you, your mind drifts,’ he says. ‘You make a mistake and it will cost you.’ It did. He was dropped from the Test roster.
By the time of an unexpected chance to officiate Argentina v Samoa in the winter of that year, the world knew what he knew.
He need not have feared what the world of rugby would think. The sport embraced him. He found a way to make light of things and take other people’s awkwardness away. Owens literally stepped out of a closet on one Welsh TV show. ‘I’m straighter than that one,’ he once told the Harlequins hooker Dave Ward after a crooked lineout throw.
He has emerged as a source of strength to many who have had the same struggles — working as an ambassador for youth charities, diversity and antibullying organisations and, this week, fronting a BBC Panorama documentary about eating disorders among men.
We meet in central London to discuss his work for ‘Not a Red Card Offence’ — the campaign launched by Legal and General to tackle the stigma associated with mental health in the workplace.
In the past two weeks, he has spoken at rugby clubs, staff conferences and a diversity event. The response to the
Panorama viewing was extraordinary. Yet though he has a partner and still lives among his family in Carmarthenshire, an inner sadness resides not so far beneath the surface.
‘There’s a part of me, when I see my family and my 10 or 12 cousins who are all about the same age as me and all have a couple of children or so, that wonders “What if?”,’ Owens says. ‘On our side, there’s only me and my dad. When he passes, there will just be me.
‘There’s a part of me that still wishes I had a “normal” life; that I had what they have — a wife or partner, kids. I was driving home last week — going home to an empty house and a quiet place. No kids to get up in the morning to take to football or rugby training.
‘I do think sometimes, if I could swap everything I’ve achieved in my life — refereeing all those matches, the World Cup Final, the European finals — for a normal life with my mum still here, my own children. Would I give all that up? Yes, I probably wouldn’t think twice about it, really. But that’s where I am.’
He wonders aloud if this is why his bulimia has never entirely gone. It might recede for four or five weeks but will then resurface.
When he had travelled out to referee Argentina v England in San Juan in June, Owens was invited on a day trip to a small island near Rosario, which included barbecued- cooked steak and breads which left him feeling he had eaten too much and realising to his dismay that there was nowhere to be sick.
Six weeks from now, he will walk into Auckland’s New Harbour Stadium for New Zealand’s encounter with South Africa in the Rugby Championship. Perhaps being a referee has subliminally helped steel him for what has come to pass, he says, smiling a little at the thought. ‘All those people who are not happy with your decisions.’
And with that he is away: off to discuss, in his very self-effacing way, achievements, management and struggles beyond our remotest comprehension.