‘It was annoying. We kept giving smaller nations their greatest day’
Former winger Sean Lamont reflects on his 105-cap Scotland career, the ‘embarrassment’ of losing to Tonga, his pride at playing alongside his brother, and the family’s shock when Rory suffered with depression
This is a good day for a chat with Sean Lamont because he’s stuck at home in Glasgow. “I don’t have the car - it’s at the garage,” explains Scotland’s thirdmost-capped rugby redoubtable and right away I’m thinking: is this the car, the 1967 Ford Mustang?
No, it’s the family saloon, the far more reliable A to B device for wife Gemma and their sons Aaran and Euan, which is currently being serviced. Now I’m worried: is Lamont’s classic American hot-rod in brilliant red sadly no more? “I still have it but it’s just not going anywhere right now. The wife isn’t too pleased that it’s become this expensive garden ornament but as hobbies go it’s better than always being in the pub. I love American V8 muscle-cars and Mustangs most of all.”
If the professional rugby player, continuing into retirement, is “just a giant man-child” then by his own admission Lamont is a very good example of one. It was a Mustang which Steve Mcqueen whipped across the hills of San Francisco in Bullitt, the greatest car-chase movie of them all, and the wingman still dreams of ripping up Bearsden in his coupe. “The engine needs rebuilding. The guy I bought it from was pretty smart. I was given a 15-minute test drive and the reason for that was right after 15 it overheats. If I’d known that, and about the rust which has caused me to replace whole panels, I’d still have bought the car but would have paid a damn sight less for it.”
This sounds like a proper love affair and I’m wondering if, car to man, it’s the perfect match. “Ah, I see what you’re getting at and I suppose the link isn’t too tenuous,” he laughs. “One of us has a big powerful engine, is great in a straight line but doesn’t really move much. The other is the Mustang!”
Probably “doesn’t really move much” is an admission of a lack of feint and sleight of foot. “I’m not a flair guy, “Lamont once conceded, “but if you want someone to run, I will run very hard.” He couldn’t corner like Lt Frank Bullitt (though in the film some of that was Hollywood SFX so, really, who ever could?). He was, according to Jim Telfer, “not a real rugby player, just a runner and basher”.
But, boy, what mileage he got out of the pistons in his legs. When a Scot amasses three figures for appearances, and particularly during a less than glorious era, you wonder if he’s been clocked. When Lamont, 40, parked up for good in 2016, 12 years after his dark blue debut, the personal odometer stopped at 105 caps. Only Ross Ford and Chis Paterson, both teammates, sit slightly ahead of him on the roll of honour. And as he tells me more than once over Zoom: “I always said I would never officially retire from Scotland and I haven’t. I’m still available if they need me, although frankly they’d have to be quite desperate!”
But after that big build-up for our man I’m afraid I’m about to let down one of his tyres by reminding him of a defeat that might have been the rugby team’s Peru or Costa Rica, an embarrassment provoking as much soulsearching as those suffered by their footballing cousins - Tonga, 2012.
“Oh God,” he groans. “That was terrible. When I played for Scotland I hated losing, even though I had plenty of practice at it. What was really bloody annoying was that we kept giving the smaller rugby nations their greatest day. I was playing when Italy beat us at Murrayfield, their first-ever away win in the Six Nations [2007], and the Tonga game was another of those because they’d never won against a top-flight country before.”
The South Pacific islanders’ 21-15 victory in a game played at Aberdeen precipitated head coach Andy Robinson’s resignation. “We cost Robbo his job because we didn’t get the finger out. I could ask why the match was played at Pittodrie on a narrow football pitch but I think we got over their line four times without scoring so we simply didn’t execute the game properly. Sure it was embarrassing, not just personally but for the whole of Scottish rugby.” Lamont must have wished he’d taken ownership of that Mustang earlier, the engine souped up, so that at the final whistle he could have gotten the hell out of Dodge.
Not that running away was his style. In 2011 after a bad loss to Wales he was nominated for the post-match interviews when he tossed aside the media-training handbook of anodyne quotery. He was angry - very angry - and repeated the word several times before moving on to “raging”. “I had to apologise to my teammates afterwards. Maybe I spoke too frankly. But I was simply trying to get across what playing for Scotland meant. It’s the most important thing.”
Scarring though some of the reverses were, in an era when the team lacked confidence and identity, Lamont insists they could not detract from the pride at, and thrill of, representing his country. He affirms: “Running out for Scotland was, to coin a phrase, my Everest. I won a lot of caps but never took a single one for granted. I played for a lot of coaches and must have got on with them all because I was in the team for so long and they include Robbo who gave me good advice to stop the habit I had of putting on the handbrake just before contact.” The muscle-car of the Scotland XV - who turned out for Northampton and Scarlets in between two spells at Glasgow Warriors - adds: “But I knew who I was as a player. Not Lions level because I wasn’t rounded enough. I was good but fairly basic. I carried hard and made my tackles. I had a little but it went quite a long way.”
You know, that could be Lamont talking about his appearance, sans rugby kit, in a naked calendar. Monsieur January of 2007 for France’s Christmas bestseller Dieux du Stade - Gods of the Stadium - he did it for a laugh, and that wasn’t the first time either, having stripped down to “socks on cocks” in his uni days to help fund an overseas tour. The pictorial evidence isn’t on display in the house, rather stuffed into the back of a wardrobe. One tabloid dubbed him “The Full Lamonty” then rather spoiled the punning headline by claiming he was “having to live down being adopted as a gay icon”. “You
couldn’t write that sort of thing now, could you? But it was rubbish. If the calendar helped promote my sport among whoever - then fantastic. The whole thing was great fun, especially for someone like me who was never particularly shy.”
The dream of rampaging round a packed Murrayfield, thistle on the breast, goes right back to Lamont’s Blairgowie boyhood. It was shared by kid brother Rory and he got to act it out as well, winning 29 caps. For the elder Lamont, those games when they lined up for Scotland together in the back three - and this happened at two World Cups, 2007 and 2011 - were the most cherished of his career. “Just awesome,” he grins.
With just 21 months between them, the pair have always been close, and began wrecking furniture in makebelieve rugger from an early age. “Once when we were arsing around I dump-tackled Rory and he broke a double bed. He didn’t just smash the slats for the mattress but the beams going from head to foot. Another time he put a fist through a panel in a door. There was blood everywhere.”
How are they different? “Rory when we played was much more of a social creature. He’d lead the charge to the nightclubs whereas I was happy finding an old man’s boozer and stopping there.” They were different as players, too. “Rory went onto the park with this reckless abandon for his own safety and paid for it with the number of knockouts he suffered. I can still see him running full tilt for a high ball in a Glasgow-edinburgh game and wanting him to pull out before he and Ross Rennie crashed faces. In the 2007 World Cup against Argentina he was taken out in the air which, if it happened today, would have been a total red card. Against England he was unconscious for eight minutes. Me, I definitely had more self-preservation going on!”
Rory’s many injuries caught up with him and forced his retirement in 2013. Three years on from that he dramatically opened up about becoming a recluse and battling severe depression, even suicidal thoughts. “He’s much better now,” says big brother. “He’s got himself set up for a new venture - a mindfulness retreat. Covid has delayed it but I think it will help others with similar troubles as well as Rory himself. He still struggles now and again but compared to where he was it’s night and day.
“For the rest of the family what happened to him was a massive shock. He was gaunt from losing so much weight and his clothes were hanging off him. We struggled over how we could help. Unless you’re a psychiatrist how do you know what’s going on in a person’s head and how do you fix it?”
The post-rugby life, and the struggle to adapt after the roars of the crowd have died as the player leaves the safety of the pro-game “bubble”, was laid bare by Rory. The sport is “great at masking insecurities,” he said. “It gives you a bullet-proof vest. You become part of a team and everyone tells you you’re great. But that’s all just a comfort blanket. Once it’s removed you’re that little child, completely scared, totally vulnerable and very much on your own.”
“Rory speaks very well about this sort of stuff,” adds Lamont. “Rugby is a job but nothing like a normal one. Everyone’s rowing in the same direction whereas quite often on the outside a job is just a job and your workmates might not care about you very much. My mate Graham Morrison moved into banking when he finished playing. After a while his line manager asked him: ‘How are we doing?’ Graham, outspoken like me, said he thought the culture was pretty awful. Spilling your guts on the table is encouraged in rugby but after that Graham was missed out of group emails and sidelined.
“My only clock-on-clock-off job before rugby was when I needed money for a lads’ holiday so I went to work in a lumber-yard. One of the tasks was testing the moisture level in wood. You fed two-by-four pieces 20ft long into this machine and waited for a green light to show. That was it from nine to five. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t got the chance to play rugby but I’m glad it wasn’t that.” Nowadays Lamont is a coach in “S&C” - strength and conditioning. “I think the reason I’ve avoided mental health issues since I gave up is simple: I haven’t really left. I don’t miss playing - the feeling of waking up on a Sunday thinking you’ve been hit by a truck and it taking until the Thursday to feel human again … fighting for my place in the team … fighting for a new contract. I do miss sharing a great win but I’m still involved in rugby, still able to enjoy the camaraderie. I’ve been able to doss around with younger guys coming through like Stuart Hogg, Mark Bennett and Rory Hughes and that’s kept me young. I definitely have a low mental age for being stupid!” Still a manchild, you see.
Lamont has always acknowledged little bro as the better player. If Rory had managed to avoid those bone-juddering collisions he would have beaten those 105 caps. Lamont had to work at what didn’t come naturally and felt the need to make himself conspicuous - hence the home hair-dye kits. “If I was playing in a trial, lots of guys vying for the same place, a shock of peroxide might have got my run remembered. On the flipside, it might have got my fumble remembered. And obviously sometimes the dye didn’t work too well and my hair would be this nasty shade of piss yellow … ”
For the ever-changing barnet, for the fluorescent gloves, for the tanning studio glow, it was presumed by West Stand sceptics that Lamont would be a flash-in-the-pan. Their doubts were recalled on the occasion of his 50th cap and even then few would have predicted he would go on to double that tally.
The hair may have occasionally been golden but the rugby of that period rarely was. The team couldn’t score tries. The ball was slow to reach Lamont’s wing, if it ever got that far. Amid all the fumbles and bumbles, his biffing and banging would wake up the debenture-holders with a jolt. And he did dive over the line twice in a memorable 2006 victory over France, the same month helping Scotland hoist the Calcutta Cup. Then, nine years later, he turned out in his third World Cup, when we were so cruelly denied by referee Craig Joubert calling that offside against Australia.
“I was raging about that. Right decision or wrong one, the worst of it was that he ran away at the final whistle. That convinced me he knew he’d f **** d up and he should have been man enough to look us in the eye and admit it.” Yet again, unfortunately, Lamont did not have his Mustang idling nearby so he could give chase.
“Running out for Scotland was, to coin a phrase, my Everest. I won a lot of caps but never took a single one for granted. I knew who i was as a player. i was good but fairly basic. I carried hard and made my tackles”
“We cost Robbo his job because we didn’t get the finger out. I could ask why the match was played at Pittodrie on a narrow football pitch but I think we got over their line four times without scoring so we simply didn’t execute the game properly. Sure it was embarrassing, not just personally but for the whole of Scottish rugby”