BIG! MAKING IT
Told he was too small to be a successful rugby player, Harry Thacker has defied the odds at Bristol and is now...
THE latest Bristol rumour is that a brewery is preparing to name a batch of cider after Harry Thacker. ‘ I’ll have a few cans if they do,’ chuckles the long-haired hooker, who moved down from Leicester in the summer.
Apples and all, Thacker has taken quickly to West Country ways. He welcomed his first-born, Jackson, in October and there is still ample space in the house to store his surfboards.
‘Life’s good down here,’ he says. ‘ Close to the sea and what not. Leicester’s home but I’m far happier now. I can’t say I miss the rugby because I didn’t really play much rugby back then.’
Bigger is not always better. Thacker has scored six tries in his first seven starts for Bristol. He is now seen pinging around like a pinball wizard at Ashton Gate, where the attack-from-anywhere style has allowed his running skills to flourish.
It was a different story at Leicester. At 5ft 8in and 15st, Thacker was told that he was ‘too small’ to make the grade at Welford Road. Dreams of being a one-club man were cut short but the 24-yearold has since become the league’s in-form hooker under his new boss Pat Lam.
‘I felt like I was always fighting a losing battle at Leicester,’ he says. ‘A fair few coaches there told me I was too small. I never really felt they trusted me to do a job.
‘The whole Leicester culture is built around a big physical pack. That’s what they pride themselves on and that’s the way they wanted to play. Big collisions, big hits, running over people. Unfortunately, I’m more likely to run under people.
‘ It just felt like I was always having to prove people wrong. No matter how well I played, they’d always bring in a bigger person. That’s the game-plan they wanted to play and I didn’t fit into that.
‘ Don’t get me wrong, I’d have loved to have been a one-club man at Leicester but that’s not the way it fell. The club meant a lot to me but, when Bristol came along, I could tell Pat really wanted me there. Feeling wanted was something I’ve never really felt in my career. I liked that.
‘ He tried to get me the season before but I decided to give it one last crack with Leicester. Not a lot changed and it was too good to say “no” to.’
Thacker and his partner Charlotte have moved to a house in a small village, half an hour out of the city and close to the coastline. Sitting in his living room with his baby asleep in the corner, he explains how Lam and his wife, Stephanie, often visit to check up on how they are settling in. They talk about family and holidays — such as a recent surfing trip to the Maldives where Thacker came face to face with two sharks.
On days off, Lam encourages Thacker to spend time with his young family, who have converted a VW transporter so they can camp on the south coast.
‘Holidays to Dubai aren’t really our cup of tea,’ he jokes. ‘We like a bit of adventure. Sleep in the back. Cooker, bed… it’s got it all.’
Lam’s mantra i s to i nspire a community through rugby success. Unintentionally, Thacker has taken up the mantle of being a soundboard for youngsters struggling with rugby’s insatiable appetite for size. It is a growing concern in the game but Thacker offers something of an antidote.
‘ Growing up i n the Leicester system as a kid, bigger guys were always getting picked ahead of me,’ he says. ‘Everyone got their letters saying they were picked but I didn’t get one. I got a phone call saying, “We think you’re too small, you can come in and go to the gym or come back in a year’s time”.
‘I was under a strict gym regime to get me as big as possible. It got to the point where they got me doing some pretty weird exercises to put on weight. I’d be doing things like calves, quads, hammys.
‘Trying to hit every muscle group I could to try to put weight on. I put on as much weight as I could put on — to the point I wasn’t as able to play the game I wanted to play.
‘There was pressure put on me to grow at 14, 15, 16. Now I get a lot of messages from kids that age on Instagram saying: “I’m being told that I need to put as much weight on as possible… what did you do”?
‘I don’t think guys at 14 should be smashing the gym. It’s important to work on core skills. The weight will come. It used to get me down but it gave me the drive to prove people wrong.’
Today, schoolboy rugby players are getting even bigger — with access to a vast market of bulking products. Type ‘bulking supplements for rugby’ into Google and there are pages of products glamorising weight gain, branded with images of tape measures around biceps.
T hacker’ s attitude towards supplements? ‘I didn’t bother with supplements and stuff like that,’ he says.
‘I can see why kids do, because of the pressure they’re receiving. At Leicester, we were given supplements that were all checked properly.
‘ It’s something you need to be careful with because there are a lot of dodgy things you can pick off a shelf. It’s all over the internet. When you’re 14, 15, 16, you’re not educated about that stuff.’
Now Thacker is big in Bristol, where the Bears take on Newcastle today. The game will be dubbed a ‘relegation battle’ but Bristol have grander visions.
‘The vision of our club is to be a top-six team,’ he says. ‘I don’t think we’re far off that.’