The first result that comes up when you google “rugby and drinking” is a link to a Reddit discussion where a man named Killian asked: “As a fond drinker and an avid player I’ve always pondered the question: ‘How wankered can I be before I shouldn’t play rugby.’ So I’m hoping for anyone with experience or insight to enlighten me.”
The replies were a list of drinking stories from rugby players around the world, including one from SA in which the words “koshuis”, naturally, and “brandy in the water bottles” are used. Many, many played drunk. One dropped acid before a game. A hooker threw up after every scrum. A loosehead prop caught a ball one-handed in the lineout because he had a pint in the other.
They are schoolboy-funny, changing-room tales. Ho-ho and all that, or, if you were the sailor in the New Zealand navy who was passed out on rum before 10am on Anzac Day in 1998, and had to be woken up as they remembered he was in the ship’s rugby team that was playing a few hours later, it was more ho-ho and a bottle of rum
“I remember nothing. My brother, who was on the ship with me, states that apparently I played the game of my life. I was tackling like a demon, I was running into everything and bouncing off like a drunk in a car crash,” wrote Matelot67. “We lost, but I couldn’t even face an after match beer. By the time the game finished, I was pretty much sober, but with the worst hangover of my life.”
His final line to dear Killian was: “So, the answer is... quite drunk. Sometimes it helps, but it hurts afterwards.”
It has helped many rugby players hurt afterwards for years. Some thought the hard-drinking days were behind the sport, but, step forward Billy Vunipola, who, at the age of 31 may have managed to drink his way out of any hopes of playing for England again. Vunipola has 75 Tests, stands at six foot two and weighs 126kg. He was the heart of England when they went on their run of 18 consecutive victories.
Vunipola arrived at the Epic bar in Mallorca at 3am, ordered “six Amarettos with orange juice and freshly squeezed lime”, the bar manager told the Mirror. He got drunker, took off his shirt, got mouthy and pushy, was tasered, charged, fined and came home to England with the story kicking off around the world.
His story is not one that, as it has been in some quarters, should be praised for just a good old rugby boy doing what good old rugby boys do. Vunipola shows all the signs of an alcoholic. He has been, as AA Gill put it, no longer drinking for the light but for the darkness. While others drink to make themselves feel good, alcoholics drink to stop feeling so bad.
Vunipola had his first drink at the age of 25 while at Saracens when he was struggling with the drudgery and boredom of training every day and his injuries. He has been in physical and mental pain for a long time; the surgeries on his shoulder and knee, broken arms and scars on his body are possibly only matched by the scars on the inside.
“I went from not drinking my whole life to having a serious, serious injury at 25 to thinking, ‘Right, I’m going to start drinking’. Just before I started drinking, people probably don’t know this, I broke up with my now-wife. I don’t know, I was just going through a weird phase of wanting to be that 20-year-old that never got to be that 20-year-old,” Vunipola told Rugby Pass.
“It’s no coincidence that all my injuries happened when I went on a bender essentially for 10 months before I went crawling back to my wife. We ran a tight ship [at Saracens]. I was rebelling for myself. Training felt monotonous at the time. Coming in every day, training harder than everyone else, then just coming home. Training by myself, as everyone knows. Drinking was my vice at the time and I wasn’t just doing it at the weekends. I was doing it on weekdays. Essentially I was getting hold of all the younger boys and leading them astray.”
When you are drinking like that and the black dog of depression comes along for the walk and never goes home it becomes a spiral from which the only way out is rock bottom and rescue. Booze and depression form a blood sport, a fight to the death of reason and knowing, a car crash you can see coming, where the crunching and the fury lifts you away from the brake pedal and into overdrive, and to the end that self-destruction brings.
The answer you are looking for, Billy, is that the booze doesn’t help and it always hurts afterwards.
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