My Life in Rugby is a fantastic blog written by Ian Nimmo – the former Leicester, Coventry, Nottingham, Cornish Pirates, Newport Gwent Dragons, London Irish and London Welsh lock forward (Rugby Union.)
Nimmo has given an incredibly raw and honest insight into his experience in Rugby, as well as his behaviour out-with the sport, which often led to him being labelled as 'strange.'
He talks about his dream to play for Scotland when he was younger and his reasoning for eventually giving up. The blog provides a fantastic insight into the sport and we at GRM thought it was well worth a share!
You can read the full blog below…
RIGHT the way through my 10-year pro career, rugby was never something that completely defined me. I loved it to bits, but I always had lots of other interests outside of the game. When I first started out at Leicester, my thinking seemed a lot different to most of the other young lads, which kind of gets you labelled as strange a lot of the time. But whilst I respected guys were there because of their attitude and single-mindedness, I never really wanted to sacrifice my personality to the extent that they had done. I felt I could behave one way when I was at work and another outside of rugby, but that was frowned upon at times which pissed me off.
Perceptions of people are easily made and I remember the old Bath scrum-half Chris Cook, who’s now at Bristol, telling me, whilst he was on loan at my last club, London Welsh, how wrong he was about me. I’d been sent off against Bath the previous season and he said to me, ‘you’re completely different to how I expected, I thought you had no sense of humour and were dead serious all of the time’. I suppose it took quite a while for me to be me and be a pro rugby player at the same time. One of last conversations I had with Cockers when he was coaching me Leicester basically went like this. He said, ‘I really don’t understand you but I’ve enjoyed having you around. And, you never know I might buy you back one day and you can tell me to fuck off’. I said, ‘I probably will’. To be fair, I had quite a lot of time for him – opposites attract as they say!
Even though I was about fifth in line for selection – behind Leo Cullen, Louis Deacs, Benny Kay and Jim Hamilton – I wish I’d never left Leicester. I signed for Edinburgh because I had aspirations to play for Scotland but I got fucked over, basically. Scotland felt like home to me as I’d lived there from the age of 13 with my Scottish father and I’d played age-grade rugby for them. But the move to Edinburgh fell through once the Carruthers brothers withdrew their support for the club and the SRU started to offload contracts to cut costs. I’d played a load of games that season, mainly for the Tigers’ A team and on loan at Coventry and the medical staff at the SRU said I needed a shoulder stabilising op. I disagreed and the whole debacle nearly ended up in court. Given I went on to play another 150 games from that point on, I think my judgement was right.
For a while, as I held onto the dream of playing for Scotland and I played for Heriot’s until Glenn Delaney rang me up and asked me to come down and play for him at Nottingham. I played the rest of the season with them, and the following season until I broke my leg. Pirates came in with an offer and Glenn told me to take it because I had a smashed up fibula and might not get anything else.
The two seasons I had at Pirates was enjoyable on every level. Tim Usasz, the Nottingham scrum-half, wondered what I was going to do down in Penzance, he was going on about Nandos and cinemas and superficial stuff like that. Despite my long hair, I wasn’t much into surfing but life coasting around the different beaches suited me fine. Anyway, Tim was one seriously confused guy. He was nicknamed the Russian, I think because he looked like one, he played for the US and had an Australian accent.
Pirates had just won the B&I Cup when I joined and we reached back-to-back Championship Finals when I was there. I made it into the Championship’s Dream XV which was a nice touch, too. The pity was that no matter what, Pirates could not go up and that led to a lot of lads leaving, me included. Newport Gwent Dragons bought me out of the final year of my contract and I played a lot of rugby the first season that I was there. It was great to have confirmation, finally, that I could play at that level as a first-choice lock.
Things were going great in Newport until I got ulcers on my eyes due to wearing contact lens. Dragons didn’t have an insurance scheme as such, instead they paid into a pot that would then be allocated towards medical treatment at their discretion. I ended up having to pay for laser surgery myself because they wanted it done on the NHS, not at a specialist eye hospital.
Not long after I got that sorted, Lyn Jones came to me and said they’d signed too many foreign players and I counted as one, which was interesting as the season before they’d tried, unsuccessfully, to register me as Welsh. The only jersey I ever wanted to pull on was a blue one, so I wasn’t having any of it and they ended up paying me out of the final year of my contract.
London Welsh and London Irish were both options but I went with the former because they offered me a season-long deal as opposed to a rolling month-by-month contract. Brian Smith couldn’t understand why I’d turned them down, saying ‘I’ve given you a great opportunity’. I was like, ‘mate, you haven’t given me anything. I’ve worked hard for every opportunity in the last nine years’. It irritated me that I was being made to feel like I should be grateful for being a pro rugby player. Don’t get me wrong, I was, in the context of some of the other jobs I could have been doing, but he wasn’t doing me any favours like he was making out.
We won the Championship in my final year at Welsh, something we’d come so close to doing at Pirates, and the coach Justin Burnell was surprised that I hadn’t been in to see him to talk about the following season in the Premiership. I’d met a girl from the Isles of Scilly, who’s now my wife, and I was at a crossroads in my life. I could continue on the rugby merry-go-round as a journeyman pro, which wouldn’t have been enjoyable for my girlfriend, or any kids we might’ve had as they’d have been pushed from pillar to post, or I could pack it in, aged 29. Rather than give up once my body had had enough, and go from 50-60 grand to earning practically nothing, I decided to start up a business and earn practically nothing to begin with but build the business by the time kids arrived. That’s the route I chose, and it’s one I’m glad I made. Beers and a BBQ on a remote island every Sunday, weather permitting, beats getting beaten up for a living on a weekend.