Ben lifts lid on life as a professional journeyman
Jeremy Blackmore talks to Ben Mercer about rugby life just below the top level
For some, professional sport is about glory, about trophies, extraordinary moments or triumphs against the odds. Former Plymouth and Rouen centre/wing Ben Mercer, however, knows very few athletes make it to the top and, for the rest, life is very different.
He tells the story or the professional journeyman in his new book Fringes: Life on the Edge of Professional Rugby.
Italy flanker David Sisi recently told The Rugby Paper that he was enjoying the book while on lockdown in Parma, noting the parallels between his experiences in moving abroad to Italy and Mercer’s time in France.
Mercer, 33, began writing the book after retirement when he realised that even close friends were unaware of what it took to be a professional sportsman.
Mercer says: “I believe it’s a valuable perspective, given that we usually only hear about sports stories from the very elite end. Most professionals don’t exist at that level.
“Sometimes being a professional sportsperson is great but there are a lot of things that people don’t know about. It’s about how it feels and what it means to play rugby for a living, to dedicate yourself to an uncompromising but occasionally beautiful game.”
Only the minority taste the top, he says: “For the majority of professionals, you play but to the wider public you don’t exist. You earn but you don’t drive a flash car. You sometimes pack out a stadium, other times you play in a deserted park.”
Mercer says in the current coronavirus crisis, athletes are being confronted with how precarious professional sport is with some players facing 25 per cent wage cuts.
“It’s the complete insecurity that these guys have. I was very lucky that I never got that badly hurt but there are all those factors as well.”
He adds that in the lower tiers, while players work full time, they do not have the same rights, protections and salaries as those at the top level. Many play with year-to-year contracts making life doubly precarious.
Mercer was first spotted as a schoolboy in Bath and joined the Bath Academy aged 15, captaining both his school team and Bath U21s. He trained with the first team on his gap year, playing alongside future stars such as Nick Abendanon and Nathan Catt.
During his studies at Newcastle University he captained the team alongside playing for the Falcons Academy and Blaydon RFC in the A League and National 1, with Martin Shaw and future Scotland Sevens skipper Scott Riddell.
One of the many disappointments faced by professional athletes came early; Mercer never played age group rugby for England. During his time at Newcastle, he was selected for England Students but sustained a hamstring tear which ruled him out of all the games.
“My rugby career never really amounted to what I imagined it would. When you’re a young player in a Premiership academy, trialling for England age group teams and training with full-time professionals that’s how you think it’ll go.
“One of my old teammates quit the minute he realised that he was never going to be good enough to play for England. This is not that uncommon!”
Others carry on, hoping they will break through later and make it to the big leagues or international arena. For some, that persistence is justified.
Nick Easter, for example, was a latecomer to pro rugby who made his England debut a few months short of his 29th birthday in 2007.
Often though, whole seasons can prove ultimately futile without hope of promotion or trophy success. But the love of the game is the other overriding motivation: “It’s a fun thing to do because you get to play rugby, it’s a great game. There’s never been a better game in terms of the skill level and the athleticism.
“You never run around as a kid playing sport thinking I can’t wait for someone to slip a tenner in my boots for this.
“You play because it feels great and it’s fun. You’re in a group and you’re doing something that’s bigger than yourself. If you pull something off that’s skilful or exciting, that immediate feeling is fantastic. That’s part of the reason people keep playing. Some people play right up until they’re real old boys because they love playing the game.”
After university, Mercer signed his first full time professional contract with Plymouth Albion and spent two seasons on the south coast, reaching the playoffs in his first year. He then had a year in Sydney playing part time before returning to the southwest of England with the Cornish Pirates.
Disillusioned and uninspired with plying his trade in the lower tiers, Mercer considered quitting rugby and moving to London to get a regular job. It was then that he was approached by former England No.9 Richard Hill who was helping to build a professional club in the non-traditional rugby area of Rouen.
As general manager of Stade Rouennais, Hill recruited Mercer and several other English players, winning promotion to Fédérale 1 in 2015.
Mercer’s new book explores how it feels to live year to year, with teammates constantly on the move between games and clubs – and how professionalism irreversibly changed Stade Rouennais (later renamed Rouen Normandie Rugby) as they moved up the divisions, addressing the tension between progress and identity in a rugby team.
He speaks about how it feels to be out there on the field and occasionally to do something extraordinary and how it feels when this is no longer enough for you to make the sacrifices required to keep playing.
Having loved his time in France, Mercer made the decision to retire after four years at Rouen. He admits there was no Plan B when he began his rugby career. Thinking about life after sport can be difficult for athletes when they are competing, he says, despite being aware that their careers are finite.
He now works with the organisation LAPS (Life After Professional Sport) which helps athletes plan for their futures. Having career options is important he says and something he put an increasing focus on as his career developed.
“When I finished studying I was quite happy to spend a year training and wiling away my free time, putting it into my rugby, but particularly as it went further on I just thought if someone looks at my body of work, the rugby’s not Premiership Rugby, it’s not international rugby, what are they going to see?”
With one eye on the future, he earned a coaching badge at Plymouth and coached in a school in Australia. Later he gained a qualification to teach English as a foreign language to French students in Rouen.
“Part of the thing with France was, I always wanted to go there and learn French. So, I threw myself into that and got a coaching job when I was there.
“I was always trying to think, ‘am I moving forward with my rugby, am I having fun, am I learning, am I getting paid enough to put a bit away for a rainy day’. I wanted to make sure that I was at least doing a couple of those things at once.”
He sees through the work LAPS does just how many athletes go through similar transitions post retirement.
“It does feel kind of lonely in some ways, particularly when you leave a big team, or a team sport like rugby,” he acknowledges. “You leave a squad of your mates who you high-five every day. You can feel a little bit isolated.
“It is probably more common than you think because there are so many athletes, so many sports. The circumstances beyond the top of professional rugby where the money is pretty good, professional football where the money is very, very, very good – apart from those guys, a lot of people are going to be in a similar boat.”
LAPS also works with young athletes just entering professional sport at academy level, as well as those in the middle of their careers.
Opportunities can include gaining coaching badges or work experience, as well as more formal qualifications.
“You don’t have to commit hours and hours a day,” advises Mercer. “But if you can do something, it just proves you have been a little bit proactive and you’ve been nurturing some other skills or relationships.
“We try to give people different routes that they can pursue and instil the importance of starting that process as early as you can.”
Having retired from professional rugby, Mercer now turns out for the occasional charity game or day-long tournaments where he can play again with his school and university friends more than ten years since they last took the field together.
“The sport continues to bring me joy and cement my friendships, as it has done from the age of seven.”
“For the majority of professionals, you play but to the wider public you don’t exist”