how (and why) I wrote a sports memoir
Fringes is over 111,000 words. When I started the project, I found that a 300 page book is about 80,000 words and thought that this was a good target to shoot for.
Once I started writing, I found that I was creeping up on that quite quickly and rampaged clean past it. In the end, I cut a fair bit of material and even felt like I had more to say, ruefully leaving out anecdotes or passages that didn't quite serve the narrative.
There were also a few anecdotes that could be quite compromising if they'd been left in there!
Here's an exploration of why I wrote the book and how I went about it.
the end result!
why I bothered
Once you become a retired athlete, finding meaningful work is a struggle.
You had something that, usefully or otherwise, formed a huge part of your identity. In many ways, being a pro outside the elite of the game is almost harder to shake off. You don't get the fame and fortune that can arrive as rewards for achieving a rarefied level of competition and so the actual act of playing, the hope that you might crack it one day, is potentially greater for you and your self image than it would be for an international player. You don't make loads of money or win fame - it must be the activity itself that gives you much of your identity.
I was experimenting with bits of work to find my next 'thing'. In between short stints in different businesses, learning new skills and finding out what I did and didn't like about various roles, I completed a short fiction course online. I'd always liked the idea of pursuing writing in a more structured way and this was a no-risk way to write creatively and get feedback from a group, all under the veil of anonymity.
This went well and I began to dabble with other short bits of writing, some of it around my rugby career which I was parsing over in my mind, some of it just little fiction experiments. None of this was public, it was all for my own understanding and improvement.
Encouraged by working with a career coach, I wrote a piece about retiring from rugby and posted it on LinkedIn. I was incredibly nervous about writing as myself and how it would be received, whether the vulnerability on display would be too much and whether people would think it was shit.
It got great traction and loads of kind messages, many from people I didn't know. The feedback from those I did know was that they could hear me reading the words to them in their head as they read.
This little clickbaity piece was the first thing that gave me belief in my abilities as a writer.
a tipping point
I always wanted to write a book. Small attempts at writing had always been disorganised and halfhearted. I'd never really tried, even though it was something I liked the idea of. We all do this - certain things are 'not for us'.
I'd recently broken up with my longterm girlfriend, had completed some underwhelming work experience in London and was pondering my life's direction. Consuming podcasts had lead me to discover the 'ship it' mindset of Seth Godin and Pieter Levels. If you want to do something you should just do it. Even if it's bad, what you'll learn will be worth the journey.
Then I bumped into a schoolfriend who had just ghostwritten part of a book. I'd been ghostwriting myself for a few clients. She outlined how she had a proposal done for her own book. I sent her a message and we met up for coffee where she was strangely convinced by what I had to say and told me how to go about approaching publishers.
I liked the vanity metric and support of the idea of a traditional publisher but I was drawn to the independence, growth opportunity and speed of the self-publishing route. I resolved to write something and pursue both avenues concurrently.
the books I like to read acted as models for my own
I read anything and everything. I read all day, from a variety of sources. My sporting proclivities have lead me to read a variety of sports books, some good, some terrible. Some I've read solely because I like the person, even if I have little confidence in the book being good.
Some of them are eye opening; think Mike Tyson's autobiography or Tyler Hamilton's doping expose. Some of them are fascinating windows into the process of athletic excellence like Dennis Bergkamp's book or Michael Lewis's portraits of sporting prowess backed by data science. Some are rampant expressions of ego like I Zlatan, which is hilarious. I still think the Nicklas Bendtner version could be the Alan Partridge of sports books and am devastated to see that one actually exists! I thought this could have been a dream gig for me.
Some of these books are inspirational stories; Ben Ryan's book about coaching Fiji 7s is an honest yet romantic view of playing rugby. He depicts the lives of the Fiji 7s guys, earning a pittance despite their status as the world's finest rugby athletes, while also portraying how exciting he found the job of helping them to realise their potential. He doesn't let himself off the hook either, outlining how difficult his choices made life for his family and their role in the end of his marriage.
There was a corollary to my story; John Daniell's book Confessions of a Rugby Mercenary is about a decade old and covers his final year as a professional, playing for Montpellier when they were newly promoted to the French Top 14. His decision whether to retire or not is debated over the course of the season while he also gives a bit of colour to the narrative by describing the history of French rugby and its teams in some detail.
It's also a fun book for rugby nerds as his time at Montpellier coincided with some young players who have gone on to be stars of the French club game; Gorgodze, Trinh Duc, Ouedraego and Picamoles among them. He paints a pretty uncompromising picture of what life is like in the French game, particularly around negotiating contracts. I wanted to provide a similar level of insight with my own book.
Finally, one of my favourite sports books is another memoir, Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. Finnegan writes serious stuff for the New Yorker about conflicts around the world but his book is about his life as a surfer. Not a professional but evidently a serious surfer, Finnegan has ridden some of the world's fiercest waves and his musings on what it means to pursue a sport that gives you nothing material, that demands so much from you and those around you, that's so dangerous and that becomes so entwined with who you are fascinated me and I wanted to portray the life of a lower tier rugby player in this respect.
Why does something that can cause you such pain, that doesn't reward you much financially, why is it so appealing and what's in it for you? And what happens when you have to leave it behind, as Finnegan had to eventually end his jaunt around the world chasing waves to begin a real career. How do you reconcile these contrary parts of yourself?
what i do and don't like about sports memoir
Memoir is by definition an act of hubris. Your thoughts and feelings are on display, you're educating the reader in an area of life they may not know and this belief that anyone might be interested is an odd act of generosity and arrogance. I wanted to avoid this. Rugby is a collective sport and I wanted this to come across.
I also wanted to use my experiences as a window into discussing bigger issues around the sport and revealing how it is to those who assume that it's all fun all the time.
Sports autobiographies are often very similar, particularly with Premier League footballers. Top rugby is the same, many are privately educated and play the same fixtures every year, in the same stadiums against the same opponents. Rugby is a very limited sport in this respect and runs a bit of a closed shop.
Sports stories can be contain some outrageous stories, sometimes of extreme hardship and pain. Mine doesn't have extraordinary stories in the vein of Tyson's book, my background is unremarkable as rugby players go and I don't have the experience of the highest level common to most rugby stories.
What I do have are stories of the majority of rugby professionals, those who don't play for England and who live from year to year and a completely different perspective to the usual rugby autobiography. I hoped to represent these silent players, to provide an intelligent insight into a wider, unheralded apart of the sport and to do justice to it
what I had to consider
the feelings of my teammates
I didn't want to out people for certain behaviours that could land them in hot water, or things that they could receive opprobrium for. I wanted to outline what really happens without necessarily naming names.
not boring the reader with match reports
Match reports are boring to read when they are about the highest level of the game, let alone when they describe lower division French matches between teams none of my readers will have heard of. I wanted to use the match stories to illuminate the reader in terms of how decisions are made, what it feels like to play a game of rugby as a professional and the reasons behind certain choices that players make.
respecting my junior career
I wanted to respect my junior career and provide some background into how I ended up becoming a professional but didn't want to dwell for too long in the distant past. The 4 years I spent in France would provide the bones of the narrative from which I'd hang reflections on the sport in a wider context. I didn't want the book to be a list of things that I'd done on rugby pitches, I wanted it to tell a bigger story.
telling the untold stories
I wanted to write a bit of a celebration of the many players in my position. Those who dedicate themselves to a beautiful and brutal sport that may never give them what they want. I felt like I could write a little paean to these people, even as I represented how many compromises you have to make to pursue this odd existence.
telling the truth
Writing the book was partly an act of catharsis for me, making sense of my rugby journey. It was also something that I felt had to be honest. Even if I had to hold certain things back, I wanted to depict reality as I saw it and this meant not letting myself or those around me off the hook. If I was going to outline behaviour that I found distasteful or idiotic in others, I was going to have to apply a similar lens to my own actions. This could be a bit painful.
the writing
getting started
This wasn't so hard. I already had some rough material from my noodling around rugby in general. I made a Google Doc with some brainstormed ideas as starters and just wrote underneath each one when I remembered things to say or discuss.
I continued this each evening and relatively quickly, I had about 35,000 words.
Once I'd found out about the 80,000 words = 300 pages, I was quite pleased with myself. It was a good start.
going all in
At this point I decided to really commit. I opened our old team WhatsApp group and told the lads about my project. I asked if there was anything that they felt I should include. I had to go and get my charger so I could sit on the phone as the messages came rolling in, many of them hilarious reminiscences of our time together in France.
After, I collated these into my Google Doc and did the same, writing underneath each one and following them up with the boys if I got stuck or couldn't remember something.
ploughing through the first draft
I worked on the draft every day, accruing material and working up towards 80,000 words. I felt that once i got there I could reassess and see what I had of value. I was expecting to trim the content down as it wouldn't all be gold; I planned for some pretty rigorous pruning.
Each evening I'd come back, sit down and write away, taking occasional breaks to watch snippets of the American version of the Office.
I eventually had about 110,000 words in a rough format, sorted by events and themes but not in a narrative order.
The next step was to shape this raw material into an actual story.
here’s a blog post I wrote at the time…
structuring the narrative
I had some ideas of how I wanted the book to go.
John Daniell's Confessions of a Rugby Mercenary would serve as a good template; we were covering similar ground but his book took place over just one season. The events of one season weren't enough to sustain the whole story I had in mind and would probably devolve into me recounting the minutiae of our matches, something that I was determined to avoid.
I felt that with the lower level of rugby and thus the much lower level of familiarity with the teams and places, I was best served using the 4 years I spent in Rouen to provide the narrative arc and give a picture of the whole project which progressed at a slowish pace. It also gave me the capacity to fast forward through whole parts of each season and concentrate on the milestone events and matches for the most part.
Daniell's book is interspersed with descriptions of French teams or the history of various aspects of French rugby. I wouldn't quite offer the same structural division in each chapter but would incorporate the spirit
Barbarian Days by William Finnegan was less of a structural mentor but more of a spiritual guide. I wanted to describe clearly how it feels to be on a pitch, how it feels to perform the skills required for playing the sport and explore some of the more existential questions that hover around the game but are rarely discussed. Often the game is blindly lionised or criticised and I felt that there was an opportunity to recognise the good and the bad of playing rugby professionally.
I found the timelines of my 4 seasons at Stade Rouennais, surprised myself with how matches had occurred in different orders to how I remembered them, then used that framework to drop reminiscences into place, adding appropriate bits of colour or wider explorations onto corresponding matches. This gave me the guidelines required to make a coherent story but allowed me the freedom to digress and discuss other issues or people that I found interesting.
finishing the draft
Once I'd chosen and crafted a general structure, it was a matter of dropping what I'd written into my narrative framework and tidying up the edges. Inevitably there were pieces I'd written that didn't really make sense in this new context and I had to let a few of them go.
This is part of writing (I found out). You might be really pleased with a turn of phrase or a particular anecdote but eventually, if it doesn't serve the whole it needs to go. This part of the writing process really hammered this home for me.
Thanks to the amount of previous writing I'd done though, this part didn't take so long. It was more a case of moving the more discursive segments around to give them an appropriate event that could act as an entry point.
Once this was done, I gave it a quick read, downloading it onto my Kindle to change context from my laptop screen and to experience the text the way a real reader would. Then it was time to show this first draft to other people and get their feedback.