Baby faced, but Pearce is a ref to be reckoned with
Saturday, April 11, 2015 at The Stoop and Harlequins are playing Gloucester in front of a full-house on a beautiful spring afternoon. The ball sails out of play, the packs jog over for the set-piece and the referee approaches the touch judge with a brief acknowledgement: “Ok, Dad.”
The players within closest earshot wonder whether the young chap in the middle is taking the mickey out of the old feller running the line.
“Did you hear what the ref just said?’’ one of them asked the touch judge.
Touch judge: ‘“Heard what?’’ “He called you ‘Dad’.”
“So he did.’’
“Bit of a cheek, eh?’’
“What else is he going to call me…?’’
Andrew Pearce, then 52, was the touch judge. Luke Pearce, then 27, was the referee, the first, and so far only example of a father-and-son officiating in tandem at a Premiership match
Six years on, Andrew’s younger son is ever closer to being accepted as the world’s No. 1 referee. If he isn’t there yet, it may be but a matter of time judging by his most recent exercise in law-enforcement and man-management which happened to coincide with Ireland’s momentous win over New Zealand.
Given that Pearce still looks younger at 34 than the majority of those in his care, the mind boggles as to how he would have appeared to the players when the 16-year-old schoolboy refereed his first match: Crediton 2nd XV v Newton Abbott 3rds. The family’s refereeing journey began long before that in a part of the world where they have never suffered fools, least of all referees. Pontypool & District rugby is not for the faint of heart.
Pearce, senior, started there in his home-town when he, too, was 16.
“I was playing rugby at school but I was always a second or third-level player,’’ he says. “One of my uncles was a referee and one day he said: ‘Why don’t you give it a go?’
“My first match was at ICI Fibres. I wasn’t very good but it was a start. There were so many local derbies that if you got to referee a few miles down the road at Raglan, you thought you were on tour.
“Back then in the valley, they lived for Saturday afternoon. If you were courageous enough to get onto the pitch in the first place, you had to expect that some people wouldn’t like what you were doing. It really was a school of hard knocks, very hard knocks.
“A match between Blaenavon Quins and Abersychan round about 1981 comes to mind. It felt like we were in the Arctic, so cold that I had to abandon it in the first half.
“Blaenavon Quins were ahead and they claimed he result had to stand because we’d played 30 minutes. Once I’d cut through the frozen laces to get my boots off, I told them we had played 28 minutes and that the match would have to be re-played. You can imagine how popular that made me in Blaenavon.”
The Pearce family relocated from Pontypool to Exeter for work reasons in 1987. By then their elder son, Adam, destined to play centre for Cullompton, had a baby brother. Luke was all of three days old when he left Wales.
“I’d moved to start a new job in Exeter,’’ says Pearce, sales director for All Sport Insurance.
A past-president of the Devon Society of Rugby Referees, Pearce senior spent some 25 years officiating in the English game and still works at Premiership level as an official time-keeper. He will have had plenty of practice, tracking his son’s knack of making the average meteor look short of horse-power.
Pearce, junior, refereed his first Premiership match, Gloucester v Worcester on September 2011, at 23. The following year he and his father were first and second reserve touch judges for England-New Zealand at Twickenham.
“Luke’s always been older than his age,’’ says his dad. “He’ll tell you that being a referee stopped him being bullied at school. His great strength is his man-management.’’
Anyone under-estimating the demands made upon international referees or Pearce’s capacity for taking them in his stride need only look at France-Wales in Paris last March. It made his capping by the RFU at Twickenham last Wednesday alongside 21 others belonging to England’s 26 living Test referees all the more deserved.
“Pontypool and District rugby was a school of very hard knocks”