My rugby career, 1977-80, was short-lived but eventful. I played at loose-head prop (one of the three fat guys at the front of the scrum) for my school. My job was to shove more athletic team-mates forwards when we had the ball and shove opposition players backwards when we didn’t. For a couple of years, it was great fun. I broke my wrist, got punched, butted and trampled, but hey, it was worth it for the laughs and no real damage was done. Call me old-fashioned, but I do think (a bit) of hardship can be character-building. If you’ve been frozen half to death as the sleet whips in off the North Sea at Withernsea, you are better equipped to take future misfortune in your stride.
Having turned 15 just before the 1979-80 season, the matches got more serious. Sometimes, especially in the wild places ranged along the Humber estuary heading west from Hull towards the South Yorkshire coalfield, we were up against seriously hard, nothing-much-to-lose lads, a mix of dockers’, miners’ and farmers’ sons — a pretty terrifying combination. Some had full beards, hairy chests and grown-up muscles. The uppercuts connecting with my chin at scrum time started to hurt. Meanwhile, I was becoming more interested in bands, girls and politics. Also, O-levels were approaching and in those days I was still a conscientious student. So I probably would have called time anyway.
She meant well, my mother, but if there was one thing she loved more than pursuing a (usually but not always just) cause, it was making a fuss. Sometimes this desire to promote what she saw as the collective good blinded her to the collateral damage her efforts may inflict on individuals. Individuals such as me.
We had played a home game against, I think, Driffield. Afterwards, as was still the custom in 1980, most of us didn’t bother with a shower, despite being caked in grass, mud, sweat and quite probably blood. Different times, right? And anyway, once we got home, most of us would have a quick splash in the bath before heading into town to go shoplifting.
Still filthy, I ran into my mother in an especially crusading mood. “Were there no showers available?” she demanded. I told her, honestly, that I didn’t know. Maybe there were, maybe there weren’t. I hadn’t checked. I’d just swapped my boots for plimsolls and cycled home.
Advertisement
“Right,” she huffed, choosing to believe I had just confirmed her long-held suspicion that the school, with which she was permanently at odds about something, wasn’t bothering to provide showers for sports teams on Saturday mornings. It turned out, I discovered later, that this complaint (which was not, as it happens, true) was her current bugbear.
What made my mother’s campaigns dangerous for me, a thousand times more dangerous than they otherwise would have been, was that she served on the school’s board of governors. Before our next midweek training session, the rugby coach asked the assembled squad which of us had had a shower after the previous match. Two or three, or four, lads (those whose appreciation of personal hygiene was ahead of the curve, probably because they already had a girlfriend) said, yes, they had. “So, Crampton,” said the coach, his tone all the more menacing for its uncharacteristically low volume, “don’t go telling tales to your mother in future.”
I suppose many of us can recall an episode from adolescence that even decades later leaves us flushing with shame. This one was mine. Injured male pride, injustice, the coach addressing the matter in such a way as to guarantee maximum humiliation, most of all the way my mother had betrayed my best interests to serve what she imagined was a greater good: it was a potent cocktail.
You will appreciate what this incident did for my standing among my team-mates. Explaining that I had told no such tale did not help. As in a political scandal, the details don’t matter. To anyone beyond the principals, only the headline sticks. And when the headline is “Mummy’s boy moaner’s dirty lies”, then, as regards your status in the seething, striving, ultra-macho environment of a teenage male rugby team, you don’t have any.
My rugby days were numbered in any event. The contests were getting faster, harder, more brutal. I was approaching my personal pain threshold. The cost/benefit seesaw — camaraderie vs getting whacked in the face — was tipping towards self-preservation. Now, with the camaraderie snatched away, the decision was taken from me. As any sportsman will tell you, it’s good to go out on your own terms.
Advertisement
I never picked up a rugby ball in anger again. Watching the brutality of the game now, maybe my mum did me a favour.
robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk
