The relationship between Rory Lamont and rugby has always been uneasy. When it was good, it was really good: 29 Scotland caps, two World Cups, and stints in Europe’s top leagues with Toulon, Sale and Glasgow.
When it was bad, it was really bad: whispering campaigns about his attitude, 16 operations, “double figure” concussions. By the time the game ran out of uses for him, the feeling was entirely mutual.
Three years ago this week, Lamont announced his retirement. The last of his many injuries, a lower leg fracture from the previous year, hadn’t properly healed and the end came as a relief.
“I was thinking, ‘finally it’s over’. I felt like an animal being put out of its misery. I’d had a miserable year, people questioning my integrity, and I couldn’t wait to crack on with my life and all the amazing things I was going to do.”
Never did he picture becoming a recluse, battling severe depression and suicidal thoughts. Nowhere in the retirement brochure did it say he’d lose 25kg in four months and be unable to stomach solids for a further five. The bit about being so low he hoped he’d be run over by a bus? Not what he’d signed up for either.
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“You get this bullet-proof vest: you’re part of a team, being told that you’re great. But it’s just a comfort blanket
Lamont has never previously spoken about the tumult he’s experienced since “dropping off a cliff” in 2013, but it’s precisely the culture of “macho hype; the paper-thin illusion of never putting vulnerability on display” he wants to challenge by shining a light on the dark corners he now knows all too well.
His is an extreme example of what can happen on the other side of a professional career where money, profile and support staff are padding against normal life. But parts of it form a cautionary tale for anyone making the same transition. Where, as a player, Lamont always believed that rugby didn’t define him, the loss of it absolutely has. No longer being a full-time athlete has torn at the fabric of his existence, pulling down all the safety nets he hadn’t even noticed until the day that they weren’t there.
“Rugby is great at masking insecurities. You get this bullet-proof vest: you’re part of a team, everyone’s telling you you’re great. But it’s just a comfort blanket. Once that’s removed, you’re that little child, completely scared, totally vulnerable and very much on your own.”
His slide into “a soul-crushing sadness” was greased by an amalgam of factors. There was the injury, which even after he left Glasgow required two further operations. Neither worked, leaving him unable to walk more than 50 yards without excruciating pain in his ankle. Then came the digestive issues he believes were the product of years of painkillers, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories linked to all those surgeries. “For nine months, all I could handle was veggie juices. The feeling was like the most brutal hangover, day after day after day.”
The worst was still to come. Lamont spoke out about concussion, saying he knew of players who’d cheated the pre-season tests medics use as a baseline when comparing cognitive performance after blows to the head. The lower the baseline, the less striking the disparity between pre- and post-injury readings, and the more likely the player will be cleared to return to action.
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These were big claims, as was Lamont’s assertion he had been forced to play while injured. The SRU, whose medical team is headed by the highly respected James Robson, made it clear to Lamont they wouldn’t welcome any repeat of this latter allegation.
Murrayfield will argue that their duty of care was complete by then, pointing to the clause in SRU contracts that allows early termination if a player is continuously absent for six months or more through injury. The union say they tried to maintain contact with Lamont, and flag the likes of Chris Paterson, Al Kellock and Dougie Hall as contemporaries whom they have helped find new employment, the first two elsewhere in the union and Hall with a Glasgow sponsor.
If anything, however, Lamont’s need was as much mental as practical, and was more pronounced after his retirement than leading up to it. The sense of isolation he perceived has proved utterly overwhelming.
“I felt like a spent battery, tossed on the scrapheap,” he said. “When you think you’re in a family, it comes as a shock to find out it was just business. That umbilical cord to my family, my rugby family, was completely cut after the concussion stuff and I was left broken on the side.
“They’d had to break my leg again for another operation, and I was stuck at home, twiddling my thumbs, starting this new life completely cut off from everyone. I was waking up every day to nothing and I found myself in a deep depression. Seeing people would actually make me feel worse — it would remind me of what I used to have. I wasn’t always in love with rugby, but I was surrounded by friends, travelling the world. Suddenly everything was gone.
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“When you’re so profoundly depressed, you’ve nothing to say. You can see people recoiling from the negative energy. You become an actor, and after a while that becomes exhausting, so you just become a recluse. All I had was anger. Anger that nobody was there to help me, medically to begin with, then emotionally. That anger intoxicated me and made the depression even worse.”
At times, it became unbearable. “I had daily suicidal ideation. I never got to the point where I was like, ‘right, where am I going to do this?’, but I felt completely trapped. It’s soul-crushing, and you’re looking to escape it. You’re thinking, ‘I don’t want to live like this. I’d rather die. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get struck by lightning or step in front of a bus.’ Coming out of rugby, my world pretty much collapsed.”
Although never clinically diagnosed (“I don’t have a lot of trust in medical professionals because of my experiences”), Lamont had battled depression before. It was the intensity of this fug that made it more of a “living nightmare” than anything he’d known. Various studies have drawn a link between depression and concussion, a fact not lost on Lamont as he pondered how little the game had left him. His wife, Julia, got to see the extent of the struggle close up, but not even brother Sean was fully aware, especially when Rory moved back to Manchester.
And what of his other “family”? Where were they? How close did he let them get? “That’s the whole problem. There’s a fall from grace when you step out of rugby, but you’re so conditioned by the environment you’ve been in, it seems like a sign of weakness to put your ego aside and say ‘I’m having a difficult time here’. There’s so much stigma attached to that, so much shame, you don’t reach back in and ask for support.
“I got to my brother’s 100th cap [against Samoa in the World Cup], and caught up with the Scotland boys. They were all really happy to see me and asked what I’d been doing. The last thing I wanted to tell them was the truth. They’d have been like, ‘please don’t infect us with your woe, we’ve just got to the quarter-finals’.”
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Lamont isn’t out for sympathy. “I feel guilty, constantly. I know there are other people going through much greater misfortune, so I tell myself ‘how dare you feel sorry for yourself?’. But I fell from a great height in a very short space of time, and when that happens it’s a heavy landing. We’re all vulnerable, we all fail, and this bravado culture which ends up with concussions also sets us up for a lot of difficulty when we step out of the game.
“I know this is what a lot of guys go through. We need to change the culture. By me speaking up, hopefully people will see there’s no shame in admitting you’re struggling. Guys who have gone through this maybe need to be a bit more vocal about what it’s like to drop off a cliff. Unions won’t do it, clubs won’t do it — it has to come from players, former players, and the players’ union.”
There is no such body in Scotland, but Lamont remains eligible for support from the Rugby Players Association through his time with Sale. He hasn’t explored this option — “shame and stigma” once again — but can imagine a future helping to “drive the change that needs to happen. Other people going through this need to know there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
Only now is he starting to believe that. He still can’t walk more than a couple of minutes without the sting in his ankle becoming acute, and “there’s still too much monotony” to his days, but his digestive health is improving, he’s about to start therapy, and he’s re-engaging with the world again.
“I have some breathing space,” he says, hirpling to his car, still with a long road ahead of him.
Why rugby is ‘Neverland’ for players caught in bubble
John-Henry Carter, another former Sale player who experienced a traumatic transition out of the sport, has written a Masters thesis on the subject.
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Drawing on JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, he says that professional rugby is a ‘Neverland’, where a complete singularity of thought gives players the illusion of omnipotence. They are ‘Lost Boys’, whose identity is tied up in the team and the game, leading to an acute sense of bereavement and bewilderment when they are no longer part of either.
“Accepting and working through the loss and all that comes with it, including depressive feelings, is essential,” says Carter, now a psychodynamic psychotherapist at Oxford University, where he is also director of operations at the rugby club. “Rory’s courage and openness will help normalise an experience with which many ex-players will identify.”
Life and times
1982 Born in Perth
2004 Signs for Glasgow after a spell in the Northampton Saints academy
2005 Makes a try-scoring Scotland debut against Wales
2007 Signs for Sale Sharks, joining up after his first World Cup
2009 Signs for Toulon
2011 Features in a second World Cup, before re-joining Glasgow in December
2012 Suffers a lower leg fracture against France in February
2013 Makes a 58-minute comeback against Zebre a year after initial injury, but is forced to announce retirement that April