24 1GS Saturday April 30 2022 | the timesSport
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Rugby was
Thompson’s
life, yet it will
be responsible
for his deathreturn, he says, was to win that 50th
cap for Picton. He therefore played
on for another four years. Would he
have been so lost if he wasn’t in
France? Would he have resorted to
more rugby to fill the void? And how
many head knocks would he have
saved himself if he hadn’t?
Here was rugby — the identity and
self-worth it gave him —
manipulating his life story. The
consequences are terrible.“The sport that had become my
saviour would also be my downfall,”
he writes.
And, in case you wondered whether
everything that rugby and
Northampton and that World Cup
triumph had given him was in any
way a reasonable exchange for the
trauma he is experiencing now, here
is his answer in black and white: “If
I could hitch a ride in the Tardis
and return to my teenage years, I’dmuch rather not have laid eyes on a
rugby ball.”
For all the positives that you will
find in his telling of his rugby story,
then, it is outweighed by the
negatives. The closing chapters centre
on him at home in Cheshire, fighting
his dementia and hoping for a quick
and satisfactory end to his legal case.
The anxiety around his case, which is
how he hopes to fund the lives of his
family and his latter years, is extreme.
He is not, however, likely to get the
fast resolution that he has been
hoping for. His lawyers have been
locking horns with the rugby
authorities — primarily the RFU and
World Rugby — for well over a year.
Is there a settlement in the offing?
No chance.
If the RFU and World Rugby reach
a settlement with Thompson and
others, they are open to heaven
knows how many more similar
claims. In the next month or so, it is
therefore expected that Thompson’s
lawyers will officially “issue
proceedings”.
One thing that comes across loud
and clear from his book is that
Thompson is now petrified of the
public stage. For his condition, he
requires peace and calm, low volume,
dim lights. His TV appearances this
week, in publicising the book, will
have caused him considerable anxiety
— and that was with gentle
interviewers who were on his side. It
is disturbing to imagine how he would
cope in court with an adversarial
lawyer.
So it is hard to see a conclusion that
is remotely satisfactory. I have spoken
to key stakeholders this week and
they cannot envision it either.
“Rugby was the making of me,”
Thompson writes. “But at the same
time it destroyed me.” The
destruction continues, on both sides,
and the threat remains existential.Rugby must
balance risk
and reward –
or face ruin
Owen Slot
Chief Sports Writer
S
trangely, in the heartbreaking
yet compelling pages of the
new autobiography of Steve
Thompson, the England
World Cup winner, you will
find an extraordinarily moving
advertisement for rugby and the
power of sport. Rugby does so much
for Thompson’s life, so it is tragic that
he believes — and no one can prove
otherwise — that it will ultimately be
responsible for his death too.
Thompson’s story has terrified
rugby ever since he went public, in
December 2020, with the news that
he had early-onset dementia
diagnosed and, with several other
players, was looking to pursue legal
action against the rugby authorities,
because they believe that it was the
sport and the authorities’ negligence
that caused their illness.
At the time, in these pages, I
described the case as an existential
threat to the game.
Thompson’s book has a title,
Unforgettable, that works on a
number of levels. Within it, you
expect rugby to be the villain of the
piece yet it is somehow, at least in
parts, the good guy as well.
If you are wondering how an
author with severe memory loss can,
with a ghostwriter, piece together his
life story, the answer is quite smart.
For the 2003 World Cup section, for
instance, for which Thompson has no
residual memory, it is done through
interviews with some of his former
England team-mates — Ben Cohen,
Lewis Moody and Paul Grayson —
and the coaches, Sir Clive Woodward
and Andy Robinson, who are, in
effect, telling Thompson why he was
a great player and how he contributed
to that World Cup victory. It is a
strange yet compelling construct
where a player uses his autobiography
not to inform readers how his life was
but to actually find out himself.
In one section, Thompson likens
his fading recollections to the shelves
in a supermarket. On the top shelf are
the more recent memories, now out
of his reach, gone. Everything since
his mid-career, when he started to
accumulate concussions, is high, hard
to reach and slipping from his grasp.
The earlier years are still within easy
reach, though he needs to refer
regularly to old friends and their
required nudges and reminders.
The early years are therefore the
most vivid and this is when he tells
the story of how he fell in love with
rugby though, as he writes: “I neverloved rugby as a sport. What I loved
was the togetherness, the
companionship, the feeling of
belonging.”
His upbringing and the absence of
love or family or home life is
recounted without self-pity. He never
really knew his father. When he was
17, his mother and stepfather “kicked”
him out of their house.
“I didn’t argue,” he says. “I just got a
few things together, chucked them in
the back of an old Vauxhall Nova I’d
bought, and went. I’ve never spoken
to them since.”
Rugby filled the space. It gave him
family, identity and self-worth. His
early years are full of stories of his
mates, their parents who would give
him a lift, a bed or a meal, and
coaches who would put themselves
out for him. He recounts
affectionately how one of those
coaches, Keith Picton, “became like a
dad to me”, how he would help him
out because he was always the one
without money and, later, how he said
he would not go to watch him win his
first England cap because he knew
there would be 50.
“I know, for sure,” he writes, “that
rugby saved me.”
The hardest chapters are the ones
when you know — and which
hindsight only allows him to
understand — how much damage he
was causing himself.
His departure from Northampton
Saints in 2007 is distressing. He
describes the club as a “refuge”, his
“surrogate family” and “my life, my
saviour”. With hindsight, he can
hardly work out why he would have
left all that for Brive, in France, where
he lacked the language and that
“family”, and where the rugby would
be more attritional and more
dangerous for a player prone to
concussions. Grayson, by then a
Saints coach, recalls how Thompson
became uncharacteristically angry
and confrontational around that
period, and wonders both whether
these were symptoms of what was to
come and whether they influenced
his decision to leave. Thompson asks
himself that question too.
Almost immediately, though, he
was forced to quit the game with a
neck injury, but he was then
“massively lost in retirement” and
missed rugby and its environment to
the extent that, as soon as the medics
gave him the all-clear, later in the
year, he made a comeback.
A strong part of his motivation toGrand slams to the slammer – Becker’s rise and fall
Germany, he was
convicted of tax evasion.
The average cost of a
prison place in England is
about £45,000 a year. It
could be argued that this
is a cost wasted when
better use could be
made of Becker’s time
doing community work.
Conversely, there will be
few better deterrents to
breaking insolvency law
than Becker, the new
prison poster boy.
There will also be few
greater falls from the
heights. The jolt that the
young Becker gave
tennis was
preposterously thrilling.
He was new age, new
game, new era; one of
the real greats of
sport; a hero and an
icon to many. In an ideal
world, he may find a way
back, somehow
rehabilitated. In the real
world, for now, this is the
most crushing of
downfalls.The breaking news that
Boris was finally going
behind bars seemed a
happy headline to many
yesterday, at least so the
joke went, until they
realised that it was
actually Boris Becker, the
former Wimbledon
champion, who was
heading to jail.
Becker was sentenced
to two years and six
months for four
violations of the
Insolvency Act. He will
serve half that term
in prison. The 54-
year-old won six
grand-slam titles
and his
estimated
worth was, at
one point,
believed to be
£38 million.
“Believed to be” is the
crucial bit here — he
was given a prison
sentence yesterday
because he has
spent so longconcealing his assets
while failing to repay
extortionate debts.
What he hoped the
legal system would
believe was proven to be
many millions from the
truth.
It is not as if he doesn’t
have previous
here; 20 years
ago, in his
nativesBecker was a boy
wonder who won
Wimbledon at 17.
Now, at 54, he has
been sent to jail*