The Times Magazine 35He still has the scan on his phone.
To begin with, he was relieved. “I’m not
stupid,” he thought. But this was swiftly
followed by horror.
“I think when you first got told, everything
just crashes around you,” Steph says. “I thought,
I’m going to lose him within five years. And
I was devastated. But over time, talking to
doctors, we’re trying to find a brighter future.
Obviously the diagnosis isn’t going to change,
and he will decline, but he isn’t about to die.
Now I just think we take it day by day.”
Since being diagnosed, he has become a
powerful campaigner for change to the sport.
“I didn’t know rugby could be lethal,” he says
bluntly. He isn’t alone – Sam Warburton, the
former Welsh rugby captain, has said, “How
long will it be before we see a player die on
live TV?” Former internationals James Haskell
and Jamie Cudmore have set up the lobbying
group Progressive Rugby, demanding that
World Rugby accepts that playing professional
rugby can lead to CTE. On the other side of
the debate, Matt Dawson, a former team-mate
of Thompson, insists he will hold no grudge
against the sport if he develops long-term
issues. “I don’t feel the game let me down.
The whole of my life is because I chose to play
rugby. I’m a big boy, I made that decision.”
But Thompson argues that after the sport
became professional in 1995, a game once
known for agility and speed became relentless,
too reliant on power and strength. In the book
he writes, “I went from someone with real
agility to a solid block with a 24in neck.
I was basically half man, half bull.” His
generation were, he says, “like crash test
dummies”. Three days after the World Cup
victory they were in training again.
“Time and again, I’d be knocked out training
and the level of concern from those around
me would be nothing more than a shrug of
shoulders. After all, it was just Thommo, and
Thommo was always OK, wasn’t he? Now I
believe I did my job but the people around me
didn’t. They were dishonest and they hid stuff.”
Even now, with cases like his, “There are
people in rugby, from top to bottom, who
remain oblivious to the risks.” He cites the
case of Luke Cowan-Dickie who was knocked
unconscious in the 61st minute of a match
last summer. He lay motionless for several
seconds, until a team of medics attended to
him and rolled him on to his back. Cowan-
Dickie was able to get to his feet and walk
off three minutes after the initial contact. The
next day he flew to South Africa for the Lions
and played the following Saturday. “Even the
Boxing Association came out and said if one
of our boxers got knocked out, we wouldn’t
even let him train for six months.”
He wants players to be given annual brain
scans, concussion holidays of three weeks,
better medically trained pitch-side personnel,
a limit on contact in training. Perhaps most
controversially he want substitutes to be used
differently. “A situation has arisen where teams
can throw on eight fresh subs and use them
to smash a vulnerable opposition. They should
only ever be used in the case of injuries.”
As soon as he started speaking up, along
came the Twitter trolls. The worst were the
rugby mums, he says. “You’re ruining my
son’s life”, “I’ve lost respect for you”, “You’re
destroying the game” and worse. “Rugby
needs to start over. They tell me I want to
make the game soft. But I want to make it
safer! Sport is something most people do to
stay healthy, not have their future taken away.”
There’s no way, he says, that he’d allow his
children to play rugby the way it is played at
the moment.Sometimes Thompson feels like “a big
phoney” because his memories escape him.
“I feel like a fraud, that I’m letting people
down, because I can’t tell them the rugby
stories they want to hear.” But – no doubt
exacerbated by his diagnosis – I suspect
Thompson has always struggled with his self-
esteem and steaming hell for leather down a
rugby pitch was one way of offsetting it.
Certainly, there’s no love lost between him
and his mother and stepfather, who abruptly
told him to leave home at 16. He has not
spoken to them since. Friends’ parents would
take pity on him and set him a place for
dinner. In the end, his team-mates ended
up being more like family – which might be
another reason he never wanted to let them
down on the pitch, unwittingly jeopardising
his own life in the process.
“It’s been nice for you having your own
kids,” says Steph, “because you found the love
that you’d never experienced before.” Seren
found out he was ill at the school gate when
she overheard one of the parents consoling
Steph. Thompson makes a point of spending
as much time with the children as he can,
hoping he can program himself in their minds
as he is now and not the man he may become.
“I want them to remember how it felt to be
hugged, to be kissed, to feel my bristles.” He
struggles saying no to them – “I need to enjoy
every minute of this while I can.” Saskia,
meanwhile, has learnt how to fill in the gaps,
just like her mum does. “She came out and out
of nowhere sat on my knee and started kissingme on the head.” Now she does it every night
when he puts her to bed.
How does the future look? “We’ve stopped
really talking about it for the minute,” says
Steph. They used to argue but she has learnt
to walk away, or simply agree, when Steve is in
one of his black moods. Before the diagnosis
he worked for a company mending burst water
mains, often doing the night shift, but his
neurologist worried that the lack of sleep
was exacerbating his symptoms. Now he
works for an occupational health organisation.
How are they financially?
“Month to month,” says Steve. “Worse
than we’ve ever been.” What haunts him
is the knowledge that in the end he might
need residential care, which costs on average
£100,000 a year – and that’s even if he can
get it. Most care homes won’t take anyone
under 60. “In the space of a few years, there’s
going to be a group of 6ft, 18st men [his
generation of rugby players] who need
somewhere to go and no one will be willing
to take them.”
There’s a chance that the legal case will
come good – in 2013, 4,500 former American
football players sued the National Football
League and won a settlement worth around
£700 million. But he isn’t holding his breath- there’s no point investing a lot in it because
it’s just going to wear him out. “Yeah, I just
need to try to come up with a plan where
I can keep a roof over our heads.”
Instead, he tries to eat healthily and
exercise. Every morning he does red
light therapy – red light is said to reduce
inflammation and encourage the body’s
repair system. At the same time he also
does thin air therapy. The idea is that
breathing reduced-oxygen air encourages
the development of new blood vessels. There
are a few signs of hope – he thinks he would
be worse if he was doing nothing. He has
learnt the hard way not to overexert himself.
His neuropsychiatrist has explained that,
“I’m like an old Nokia battery that needs
to get charged regularly, otherwise I crash.”
It’s midday. We’ve been talking for two
hours. I can see the effort it’s been, and how
exhausting it must be to hold it together. It’s
hard to imagine what it must be like to talk
about a life that is disappearing, bit by bit.
I wonder what he’ll do after I leave.
“He’ll have a sleep,” says Steph, speaking
for him. “He’ll have a sleep all afternoon.” n
Unforgettable: Rugby, Dementia and the
Fight of My Life by Steve Thompson is published
on April 28 by Blink Publishing (£20)‘I THOUGHT, I’M
GOING TO LOSE HIM
IN FIVE YEARS,’ SAYS
HIS WIFE, STEPH.
‘I WAS DEVASTATED’
Steve Thompson Continued from page 26
Read an extract from Steve Thompson’s
book in The Sunday Times tomorrow