Worcester had the antichrist of rugby
MY LIFE IN RUGBY
IGOT injured a lot throughout my career, but not your normal injuries, far from – I got stabbed, stamped on and broke my arm and I even got hit by a double decker bus! And before you think it, I wasn’t even on the piss like Danny Cipriani when he famously got run over on a night out in Leeds with the Sale lads. I’d just pulled up on the High Street to do some banking for the business, the most mundane of things to do, and the bus careered into the layby where I was stood and knocked me over my parked car.
I’d only just signed for Phil Maynard at Bees and had four months out with a broken elbow and badly disfigured fingers but at least I lived to tell the tale! Then, the next year, I went on holiday and got bitten and ended up in a tropical disease ward. It caused me to lose all the strength and power in my right-hand side – not much good when you’re a prop! That was another four months out, a trend I repeated the following year when I needed a knee op in preseason.
Phil comes into my rugby life quite a lot to be fair. He offered my brother Terry and I full-time contracts when he was at Worcester in 2002 but, to be honest, the thought of doing nothing else but rugby scared me. I did play half a season for him at Stourbridge, though, before we linked up at Bees. The man is never off the phone. He was always bringing in a player from here, there and everywhere, mixing players on their way up with players on their way down and others who had been around the block more than a few times.
His motivational skills were exceptional. I remember the time when a seasoned player who was never near first team selection came up to Phil to announce that he was injured and would be out for three-four weeks. Phil said, ‘that’s a shame, I had you pencilled in for Saturday’ and then proceeded to pretend to scratch the guy’s name out. The piece of paper was actually blank. He just looked at me when the player had left the room and said, ‘that guy will go away now and work his socks off because he thinks he’s in with a real chance’.
While Terry went on to play in the Premiership, I always combined working with playing. It amazes me that there are still high-profile players out there who haven’t prepared at all for life after rugby and, when that day comes, they’re shocked to find there aren’t sixfigure salaries out there for them. I was running my own security business in my 20s as a Moseley player, running 150 nightclub and pub doormen in Birmingham which was good fun. Just before Terry went to Gloucester, we played in the same front row when North Midlands beat Eastern Counties to win the 2004 County Shield. That was a personal highlight for me because we are very tight as brothers and to get to play together at Twickenham was special.
I went through the Leicester youth system and played with the likes of Leon Lloyd and Lewis Moody, but I have no regrets about how things turned out for me. It was a good job I didn’t rely on rugby money to pay the mortgage because, at Moseley, boys were always being paid late. You definitely didn’t go there to get rich but we had a good crack. Moseley’s biggest achievement in the years I was there was just staying in the Championship. Compared to a lot of the other clubs we were chronically under-funded. We nicknamed ourselves the ‘rag-tags’. I had an old official team photo sent through to me the other day from Bill Drake-Lee and we were all in different shorts and socks because we didn’t have enough club stash to go around.
Peter Short, Andrew Hall, Scott Bemand and Pete Buxton all had a good grounding there.
Hally and I are good friends and we regularly played golf together as part of the ‘Wednesday Golf Club’. None of us were any good and on the one occasion someone hit a drive straight down the middle of the fairway, it smacked an unsuspecting lady walking across the course straight between the eyes. We pegged it down the fairway to see if she was alright and the bloke that she was with had a right go at us. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry once she got to her feet and was okay. Things like that are memories that live on with you, and with her, no doubt, and are talked about time and time again whenever we all meet up for socials.
With spending so much time on the sidelines at Bees, I ended up supporting Phil in any way possible. I set up a second team and ran water – whatever it took to keep me involved and around the changing room. I just loved being with the boys.
When the time did come to hang up my boots at that level, I became DoR/occasional player at Bournville RFC, while also running a player management company alongside Phil and Lawrence Grove, who was heavily involved with Bees. Being a player agent is a cut-throat world and it wasn’t really for me. I did a year or two and we had players like Alex Grove, Neil Clark and Jason Hobson on our books but it’s not the glamorous life everyone thinks it is, certainly not when you’re stood watching Worcester Cavaliers versus Newcastle’s Development XV on a freezing cold Monday night.
I’m no longer hands-on at Bourneville but I still help out as a director, as well as being a more than willing tourist! Both my sons play rugby, one socially and the other is at Hartpury and hoping to make it as a professional. One thing I would say to any young rugby player is don’t give up just because a Premiership academy has given up on you. Once Covid-19 allows, I’m going to be launching the Second Chance Rugby Academy for players who may be late bloomers or just don’t know the right people to get a leg-up regardless of talent. That infuriates me.
Worcester are a great example of a club that have overlooked players for all the wrong reasons. I watched one academy coach there line up the players, split them by size and pick only the bigger players. “I can make big lads into rugby players, but I can’t make good players bigger,” he once said to me. For me he is the antichrist of rugby and everything that is wrong. It’s a good job Damian McKenzie or Harry Randall didn’t grow up in Worcestershire.
“I got stabbed, stamped on and even got hit by a double decker bus!”