Concussed (eBook)

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A love affair begins

From as early I can remember, sport was my life. Rugby union and league, football, cricket, horse racing, golf, tennis, Formula One, motocross, wrestling, boxing, golf, athletics, squash, BMX, skiing (on TV – Dad would never actually take us). Anything. You name it, I watched it. Or even better, I played it. I lived for sport, breathed sport. Sport got me out of bed in the morning, kept me sane in the classroom. It kept me fit, strong and largely healthy, minus the odd broken finger, black eye or sprained ankle. I loved sport.

As an adult I watched sport live or in the pub, played it with my mates, wrote about it for a living and even, on occasion, got paid to talk about it on television or the radio. Sport has been in my life from the moment Dad hung me up in a bouncer in the living room doorframe and let me gurgle at England playing in the Five Nations on TV. In fact, sport’s not just been in my life. It has been my life.

I first played rugby when I was four. I’d insisted on joining my big brother Tom in his first game for our local club Richmond against rivals London Welsh. Too little to be thrown straight in, I spent most of the morning shivering on the touchline. It was freezing. I cried and told Dad I wanted to go home. It was the only time in my childhood I can recall ever not wanting to be near a sports field.

I soon forgot about the discomfort and the following season pulled my tracksuit on again and never looked back.

If it was on TV, we watched it. If it was on the field, we played it. As we grew older, if it was in the newspapers, we read it. The back pages were our happy place, as were the fields, parks and pavements where we lived out our sporting fantasies.

TV was big too. Wrestling on a Saturday morning, followed by Saint and Greavsie and Grandstand or World of Sport with Dickie Davies, then out to watch Old Meadonians play rugby or cricket with Dad in the afternoon. Mini rugby on Sunday mornings followed by lunch and an afternoon watching Ski Sunday and Rugby Special. Perfect.

Watching was good but playing was better. Obviously. Even being diagnosed aged four with a blood disorder – idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura – which my eagle-eyed nurse mum spotted and insisted the GP refer me to a specialist, hardly slowed me down.

Thanks to Mum, I recovered, and soon had sport coursing through my veins again.

My dad, Roy, was born at Quintin Boat House by Chiswick Bridge in 1944 just before it was bombed by the Luftwaffe (fortunately, the family were in a coal cellar next door). His dad, Tom, had taken over as a boatman from his own father, Freddie, in 1934. Dad never rowed. Rugby, football and cricket were his great loves. Quintin, like most sports clubs in those days, was governed by class and social status. Dad’s mum was a stern, upright Victorian lady called Elsie who made amazing fruit cakes and cut the crusts off fishpaste sandwiches to keep the committee men sweet. Incidentally, one of her relatives, Charlie Dorey, was the fruit chairman of Brentford Football Club.

Dad’s two brothers, Eric and John, were keen sportsmen too. John, a junior international class oarsman, is still President at Quintin, whereas Eric was captain. Their elder sister Gwen, a PE teacher, taught them cricket.

The boat house was the family home where Grandpa Tom, a Queen’s Waterman who rowed the royal barges and was Great Britain’s official boatman at the 1960 Rome Olympics, kept the place in good order.

But the Peters family’s undisputed claim to sporting fame was Dad’s second cousin, Martin, who scored ‘the other goal’ in England’s 4–2 World Cup final win over West Germany in 1966. Nicknamed ‘the Ghost’ for his uncanny ability to run untracked from box to box, he made more than 700 professional appearances for West Ham, Tottenham Hotspur, Norwich City and Sheffield United before a brief, unsuccessful stint as Sheffield United manager in 1981. He was the first ever £200,000 transfer and also won 67 caps for England, scoring 20 goals. Martin died in 2019, aged 76. He was the third from that team to die from dementia.

By all accounts, Dad was an excellent amateur rugby player and cricketer. He captained, played full back for Southern universities and Middlesex and, so he still reminds us, once hit England fast bowler John Snow for two fours in an over. Dad’s rugby career ended aged 27 when a specialist at Moorfields Eye Hospital told him he’d go blind if he took another blow to the head. He’s still only partially sighted in his right eye.

My mum, Jennie, was not so into sport but kept fit cycling to and from her shifts at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, where she worked in the plastic surgery unit. She also made sure we always had clean kit to wear and sandwiches to eat, and was forever on hand to patch up the endless bumps, bruises, grazes and cuts we picked up along the way.

My maternal grandmother, Alma – Nanny – also trained as a nurse in her fifties after divorcing my grandfather Bill, a head teacher and active figure in the Derby trade union movement. She would play football with me and Tom in the fields behind her bungalow in Littleover, Derby, where we spent many happy summer holiday breaks with our cousin Jonathan.

Tom and I competed fiercely. It was a classic sibling rivalry and our friends knew to steer clear if we had a grump on with each other. If there was a flattish piece of road, grass or track, we’d turn it into a cricket, football or rugby pitch and get playing. Or fighting.

When we were very young, Dad fashioned a tackle bag out of old carpets tied together with string, which meant we could practise tackling at home. We’d often get the bag out when our friends came round to play. What our neighbours made of us hitting the bag at full tilt every Sunday morning I’ll never know. We just wanted to play. All the time.

Dad worked long hours, meaning it was often left to Mum to ferry us to the various sports clubs and after-school activities we were desperate to be involved in.

Weekends were our time with Dad, who would take us to Dukes Meadows in Chiswick in the rugby season to watch his beloved Old Meadonians (now Chiswick RFC) or Chiswick House in the summer to watch the cricket. We’d go in our tracksuits and play for hours in the dead ball area while Dad caught up with his old team-mates over a pint of Fuller’s in the rickety old clubhouse with a corrugated iron roof. At full time the players would enjoy half pints of bitter shandy, lined up on a tray by the steps of the clubhouse. One day, when I was 8 and Tom 10, we drank three halves each while no one was looking.

The players changed in the boat house across the road and I’ll always remember the excitement of hearing the studs chattering on the tarmac behind the hedge before they charged into view and out onto the pitch, accompanied by the inescapable waft of Deep Heat. We’d watch for a bit and then play until darkness fell before shuffling back into the clubhouse, caked in mud, waiting for what seemed like hours for Dad to finish up in the dark, smoky bar. A meat pie with watery mash and vinegary ketchup would stave off the hunger until we’d convinced Dad it was time to leave before he got in trouble with Mum.

I first went to Twickenham Stadium in 1985, aged seven, when Dad got us tickets for London Welsh against Bath in the John Player Cup final. Tom’s maths teacher Kevin Bowring was playing No.8 for Welsh and we were close enough to the pitch to get a sense of how physical the game was. The bravery of the players and ferocity of the contest took my breath away.

Just a couple of months later Dad, an avid Brentford fan, got us tickets to Wembley with our uncle Eric and cousin Ewen, to watch the Bees lose 3–1 to Wigan Athletic in the final of the Freight Rover Trophy. My heart nearly thumped through my chest when we entered the stadium.

At school I’d spend lessons staring out of the window, desperate for the haven of the sports field. I was quite good too. One cricket season, aged 12, I averaged 332, out once in seven innings, before scoring my first century against Caldicott the following year on my way to a first XI school record of 430 runs in seven innings at an average of 107.5. I was obsessed with statistics and kept all our team’s scores and averages in a notebook.

Growing up, mini rugby on a Sunday morning was a ritual. After that first freezing cold introduction, I fell in love with everything about the game and, with Dad as coach, we were all conquering. Richmond went unbeaten for two seasons in the Under 11s and Under 12s, culminating in a win over arch-rivals Chiltern in the final of the London Irish tournament, which we won 6–0. The game was played in front of a full grandstand and a crowd several rows deep around the pitch. That’s how I remember it anyway. For us, the win was our first ever over our fiercest rivals; for Chiltern, their first ever loss in their final game together after five years unbeaten. They’d even made their way into The Guinness Book of Records. At the final whistle, we all cried.

On 4 November 1988, Dad took me, aged 10, to my first international at Twickenham. England’s team contained the core who would go on to reach the World Cup final three years later. The back row of Dean Richards, Dave Egerton and Andy Robinson tore up the Wallabies, while RAF flying officer Rory Underwood shredded them out wide. I drank in every second of the game, captivated...