How friend’s suicide made Ward open up
Harlequins hooker tells Kate Rowan why he had to challenge macho tone of dressing-room banter ‘For the first time, I opened up in a man’s world. I was taken aback by the response I got’
Having “rhino skin” in the face of criticism is something Dave Ward believes every professional athlete has to do. But when it comes to the dressing room, the Harlequins hooker is determined to help create an environment where showing vulnerability is no longer taboo.
For much of his career, Ward was only willing to show off that “rhino skin”. He had struggled to deal with pent-up emotions of anger and frustration since he was a teenager: the desire to prove himself became so overwhelming that tensions boiled over into his rugby. “I certainly flirted with the line in taking out the anger and frustration,” he says. “As rugby is such a disciplined sport, if you take out that anger and frustration it is to the detriment of your team and my team would have felt the full force of that. I went through a stage where I got quite a few yellow cards. You should be taking out your frustrations on the rugby pitch in a good way.”
Ward’s outlook changed forever in 2012, when the Harlequins director of rugby, Conor O’shea, broke the news that one of his closest friends, and former team-mate, had committed suicide. Ward, who would rather not name his friend, becomes visibly emotional as he recalls that bleak day. “When I found out, I was in utter shock. I couldn’t believe it – I had spoken to him a couple of weeks before, he seemed fine, he was his usual chirpy self. People talk about life and soul of the party, and he really was one of those guys. No one had a bad word to say.
“He was a fantastic guy who had everything going for himself and that is why I was so shocked, sad and then I became very frustrated. The anger came back to me, first in thinking he had been selfish, and then I got angry with myself. I thought I was being selfish for thinking that way.”
Ward opened up in the dressing room beyond what he describes as a “surface level”. “It was absolutely the first time for me to open up in a man’s world,” he says. “As a man, in a macho sport, that was the first time I had spoken to other men about deeper issues than what you were drinking on a Saturday night and who you were going out with.”
From there he was comforted by how his team-mates opened up regarding their problems. “I was very surprised by the response I got from other guys, telling stories about loads of different things that had happened in their lives – losing a relative, breaking up with a partner or whatever it was. It was how others opened up and how it helped me that has encouraged me to keep on opening up.”
Ward pauses. “I lived with the guy for six, seven months, we were probably best friends at the time and two years later he took his own life. It was such a sad day for his family, but it was very sad for me too because we never really delved into those harder subjects which men tend to avoid. I now want to encourage the young guys at Harlequins to talk about those harder subjects and maybe asking if someone is OK is not quite enough. Maybe it is about delving a little bit further. If you see a guy who is upset, you should ask him what’s wrong.”
Dressing rooms are not generally an easy place for players to discuss their emotions. Professional athletes are, after all, defined by projecting a veneer of invincibility, so any notion of admitting vulnerability does not tend to come naturally.
Ward agrees, but believes that it is not just sport where men feel constrained. “The thing about a rugby dressing room – and it is the same with any workplace – is that if you show a weakness, people will get into you, not in a bad way but in a jokey, family way. It is like how sometimes people will take the mick out of you if you show a weakness. It is absolutely fine to do that sometimes, but that is why it just stays on the surface.”
Ward, 33, is a very different character to the young man who bottled up his negative emotions. Now, he will write down how he is feeling and from there make an action plan to deal with the stress he is experiencing. This has also extended to his participation in Harlequins’ “Be a Man of More Words” campaign in conjunction with the Movember Foundation, to raise awareness of the high suicide rate in young men.
As well as becoming a determined advocate for younger generations of players getting the time and space to speak, he hopes that, by sharing his story, other men in other industries will become more open. “I have worked in scaffolding, so I don’t expect groups of scaffolders to suddenly be sharing all their feelings with each other,” he said. “It is more if they could turn to each other one-on-one and talk. I would hope that guys could say this is going to be a serious conversation and actually open up and get a response that could help them and not have any stigma attached.”
Dave Ward is supporting the Movember Foundation and Harlequins Foundation’s Be a Man of More Words campaign to raise awareness of men’s mental health and stop men dying too young.