Damian Hopley knows from bitter experience that being a professional athlete can exact a heavy price on the mind as well as the body. Rugby players have always been in harm’s way and Hopley discovered this as a young man 20 years ago. Playing at centre for English Premiership rugby team Wasps, he won what looked like the first three of many England caps in 1995. Rugby union had just stopped being an amateur sport and the Cambridge graduate had given up his job in the City to ride this first wave of professionalism, but Hopley found himself in troubled waters.
In 1996, playing for England at the Hong Kong Sevens, Hopley injured his knee. He saw a surgeon but he injured the knee again and nine operations and two reconstructions later his professional career was over before it had really begun. “The hardest thing is the huge dent in your self-esteem and purpose and realising that you are not a rugby player. It was like a bereavement. Your sense of worth goes out of the window. I didn’t belong any more. Your personal life then goes into freefall because you become so self-obsessed. I had a girlfriend at the time and she walked out on me. Quite rightly, because I would have been a nightmare to live with.”
At 27, Hopley began working in the media and tried to get his life back on track. He met other sportsmen including the former Coventry City footballer David Busst and the former Gloucestershire and England cricketer David “Syd” Lawrence, whose careers had also been cut short by gruesome injuries. Meeting them, Hopley says, helped give him a fresh sense of perspective.
In the summer of 1998 Hopley set up the Rugby Players’ Association (RPA). “I was pissed off with the way I had been treated and that was the catalyst,” he says. There was initial opposition from the RFU and some club owners so Hopley began his project without being paid. But today, he runs an organisation that has about 700 current professional players, both men and women, and about 400 former players on its books.
Outside the sport, the perception of elite rugby players is one of steely alpha males, but the reality is often different. Several players have talked about their battles with depression, linked to the end of a career in the sport. The RPA has a new campaign, Lift the Weight, which includes a 24-hour counselling service. With chilling timing the initiative was launched in the week that Dan Vickerman, a recently retired Australia lock, was found dead at his home in Sydney. The 37-year-old had taken his own life.
Lift the Weight aims to encourage men – and not just elite rugby players – to talk about the issues. “Once people get to share the stories of their frailties it makes all the difference,” says Hopley. “Jonny Wilkinson, for instance, has been very frank about his demons.”
Damian Hopley on the end of his rugby career: "It was like a bereavement"
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