Bateman emotionally fit to fight his demons
Leicester Tigers prop tells Oliver Brown that he still has to work hard to beat the ‘dark moods’
There is no easy way to broach the subject, but I have to ask Greg Bateman about the time when, racked by depression and self-medicating with opiates, he decided to paint his garden fence at 4am. “Looks good, doesn’t it?” the Leicester prop smiles, admiring his handiwork from his window.
Despite his battles with all manner of mental torment, he has quite the skill for finding levity in darkness. Even the vices he acquired at his lowest ebb, such as drinking on his own in the middle of the night, offer material for black comedy. “I’ve learnt a lot of things about good wine this past couple of years.”
Eight months have passed since Bateman first publicly unburdened himself about his troubles, writing about the methods he would use to lift his “dark moods”, such as popping pills or seeking comfort in the bottom of a glass.
Today, at 30, he is far less prone to these extremes, a powerful testament to what he calls the “positives of being emotionally fit”.
While Leicester are still in a parlous state, their struggles on the pitch no longer shake his wellbeing as once they did.
These days, Bateman can salve the pain of a poor result by separating his mind from sport, driving off to finish the courses for his MBA, or draw up plans for the coffee and beer businesses in which he is involved.
Knowing his own head as well as he now does, he realises that an all-ornothing preoccupation with rugby could tip him over the edge.
“I have some obsessive tendencies,” he reflects.
“If rugby had been my only thing, with what has happened at Tigers recently, how would I have dealt with it? Not very well. So, I like being drawn to different projects.
“It keeps me fresh. It allows me to attack rugby how I want to, rather than giving only 60 per cent, feeling burnt out, and worrying that we might be playing against Ealing next year.”
It was not Leicester’s travails that triggered Bateman’s descent into the maelstrom, but the upheaval in his personal life, when his marriage broke up and his former wife moved their two children to Devon.
After one defeat at Gloucester in November 2018, this bottled-up anguish came to the surface. He was supposed to travel to see his children that night, but such was his distress, captain Tom Youngs offered to drive him.
“I just had my head in my hands, thinking, ‘F--- this’,” Bateman says. “Everything just hurt a lot more. I had been used to some real dark days at Leicester, where you spend half the game under your posts, wondering how you’re going to get out of it.
“But this was a new season, and I dared to feel those times were behind us. It’s the hope that kills you, right? That evening, my head had just gone. I had all this stuff going on in my private life, I turned up to work, and we were s---. I didn’t want to play any longer.”
The advice of team-mate Matt Toomua, the Australia fly-half, jolted Bateman into recognising that he needed help. “‘Mate, if you had a bad knee, you would fix your tablets. It wasn’t addictive, purely practical, because I needed sleep so I could train and play. Having a drink took the edge off, so that the demons didn’t sit as far at the front of my mind. I don’t need it now.”
The documenting of mental health issues in rugby is a recent phenomenon. Duncan Bell, the former Bath front-rower, was the first to do so, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2012.
Since then, provisions at Premiership level for those experiencing similar struggles have improved: Harlequins, for example, have incorporated mindfulness and meditation into their training drills. Belatedly, the hidden stresses of sport at this level, where anything from long-term injury to selection issues can leave a heavy emotional toll, are receiving the attention they deserve.
“More needs to be done,” Bateman says. “But what does ‘more’ look like? Is it someone coming into a squad of 40 blokes to talk about emotional fitness? That’s not going to happen. It needs to be about education. It’s no surprise, as the game has grown more professional and the pressure has increased, you’re seeing players’ mental problems emerge.
“Think about the journey a rugby player has been on: if you’re lucky, you will have done your A-levels. A lot of lads will have gone straight into an academy, criticising themselves or being criticised. When life throws bigger things at you, you haven’t been trained in how to navigate the emotions properly.”
Ultimately, Bateman is relieved, liberated even, to share his battles with the widest possible audience. Beside his initial Instagram post, he has also collaborated with Fika, an emotional fitness app for university students, to convey the ways in which he deals with his own vulnerabilities. “At first, I agonised,” he says. “But my counsellor at the time explained: ‘People find it incredibly helpful when role models share this’. I never thought of myself as a role model. I’m just some guy who gets beaten up for a living.”
His story, though, is one with universal resonance. From the pit of despair, Bateman has redrawn and invigorated his life. For all that Leicester toil, he will run out at Welford Road this afternoon in the knowledge that there is far more in his future beyond rugby. As he puts it: “If, by telling all this, there is one other person who no longer feels alone, then it’s worth it.”