Dundee classroom served Tom well

TOM Smith was the best Scottish rugby player of the professional era. No question.

We can also describe him as the finest Lions loosehead prop since Ian McLauchlan, his similarly squat and fox-crafty countryman, scrummaged his way into the pantheon by using the size of far bigger opponents to his own advantage.

But let us not make the mistake of seeing Tom, who passed away last week at the heartbreakingly young age of 50, through too narrow a lens.

He didn’t shout about it – his was the sound of silence in a world of noise – but by playing rugby of such quality in the face of the acute epileptic condition that bedevilled him throughout his career, he achieved an important victory for the whole of sport and beyond.

And when, in the closing weeks of 2019, he was diagnosed as suffering from the colon cancer that has just taken him from us, his commitment to charitable work was every bit as unstinting as the effort he brought to bear on the Springboks and the Wallabies in his great years.

Tom was adamant that if he had to have a public profile, it would be of the lowest possible variety. But when he spoke, as he did to your columnist just before retirement, his words rang out clear and true.

“You find out about survival the hard way,” he said that day in Northampton. “When I joined my first senior club in Dundee, there was an old prop called Danny Herrington, a bit of a local legend, who shoved my head up my arse twice a week, every week, for what seemed like years. Now, that’s what you call a learning curve. Those training sessions were my classroom.”