26 The Times MagazineToday may be a good day, but it’s been a
rough few weeks. The memory losses are just
one of his symptoms. There’s also the mood
swings. His downs used to last a day or so,
says Steph; now they linger for weeks. He has
stood on the train station platform imagining
what it would be like to throw himself onto
the track. “You just feel, ‘I don’t deserve to be
here.’ I used to think people who took their
own lives were selfish whereas now I think
it’s probably one of the most selfless things
you could do. You think everyone else is better
off without you.”
“But they’re not,” says Steph, giving him a
pat. “You’re going nowhere, love. We just need
to get you sorted.”
As a result of the emotional turmoil,
and for the sake of his family – “No child
should wake up thinking, ‘What mood is
Dad in today?’” – he has recently decided to
start taking medication for his anxiety and
depression. “I just want something that levels
me out a bit. I’ll put my hand up – I used
to think any talk about mental health was a
massive weakness. I used to think it’s a load
of rubbish. But I get it now. If anything, I hate
the highs as much as the lows. Because in the
highs I just want to do everything, like I used
to. And then I start coming down and I realise
I’m going to let everyone down, because I just
can’t do it any more.”
The irony is that he’s got more on now
than when he was playing twice a week and
training every day, including gruelling sessions
on scrum machines when he’d literally see
white dots in front of his eyes. He’s filming
a documentary for the BBC in which he’s
retracing his life, returning to the rough end
of Northampton where he grew up and the
school where he laced up a pair of rugby boots
for the first time. (His first love was basketball.
If only he’d stuck at that, he berates himself.)
Then there’s the legal case that he
and other players are bringing against rugby
bosses, alleging that they failed to act on
clear evidence of the risks of head injury.
The lawyers believe as many as 50 per cent of
professional players from Thompson’s era will
end up with neurological problems. Thompson
says 300 former rugby players have already
come forward with suspected symptoms.
His memoir is part of this mission – to help
people understand what it’s like to live with
dementia. Gone are the days when Thompson
could have written it by himself. Instead, for
months, he’d meet with a ghostwriter every
evening and they’d talk through what had
happened to him. I suspect it was cathartic.
Unforgettable is as much a record of his life
for his kids when he can no longer tell them
as it is a rugby book. It asks the question,
what does a life mean if you can’t remember
it? If you can’t remember the past, how
can you come to peace with it? Movingand surprisingly profound, I can’t think of
many other sport memoirs that are likely to
make you cry. He ends it by hoping that when
the last scrap of memory does go, it will be
Steph and the kids – “Laughing, playing and,
for the sake of realism, bickering” – that he’ll
see in his mind’s eye.It was a physical injury that ended Thompson’s
career. He’s broken his neck twice; his
shoulders, elbows and knees are blown to
pieces – so much so Steph sometimes has to
push him up the stairs. But it was the brain
injury that did for him. For years he thought
that the unpredictable memory lapses were
normal. Or he’d try to cover them up, hope
that nobody would notice. He looks back now
and wonders whether snap decisions he made
in the past were all down to the brain injuries,
gradually mounting up inside his skull.
Steph – who met him towards the end of
his career, had no idea who he was, was not a
rugby fan and will never be one now – put the
moments of brain fog and moodiness down to
tiredness or stress.
At a Sport Aid event two years ago an
audience member asked a question about the
World Cup. “I told them, I don’t remember
any of it. This room of about 1,000 people
just gasped. And that’s when I started to think,
‘Something is wrong here.’”
It was another rugby player, Alix Popham,
who suggested he be tested. Popham, the
former Wales back-row forward who had
played with Thompson at the French club
Brive, had the same symptoms. “He described
how his personality had changed, how he
would forget names, words, the simplest
things. There were times out of nowhere he
felt aggressive and angry. I couldn’t believe
what I was hearing. It was as if he was talking
about me.” Thompson took some cognitive
tests which he struggled with. But it was
when he underwent a scan at King’s College
London, his head screwed down with a clamp,
that the results were unequivocal.
They arrived on an email attachment- this was during Covid and a face-to-face
appointment, even for something as traumatic
as this, was not forthcoming. The healthy part
of his brain would look grey, he was told; the
dead bits would be yellow. He stared at the
scan – there was an awful lot of yellow. His
brain showed the same kind of damage that
the victim of a fatal car accident would have.
The only difference was that between each
collision on the pitch, his neural pathways
had had a chance to mend again – before the
next blow came piling in. “If I’d sustained this
much damage in one go, I wouldn’t be having
the conversation. The good news – that
I wasn’t dead – pretty much ended there.”
‘I USED TO THINK ANY
TALK ABOUT MENTAL
HEALTH WAS A
MASSIVE WEAKNESS.
BUT I GET IT NOW’
Top: Thompson with, from top, Slone, Seren and Saskia,
in Cyprus, 2018. Above: with his wife, Steph, last August
COURTESY OF STEVE THOMPSON Continues on page 35