Referee Nigel Owens, right gives Australia captain Stirling Mortlock a team warning. Photo / Ross Setford
By Ian Herbert of the Daily Mail
Nigel Owens has travelled more than 2,000 miles in the past two weeks but he's still a long way from home.
The staff of an asset management firm are waiting across London to hear the wisdom of a rugby union referee whose calm self-assurance on the field of play was encapsulated by his words for the All Blacks' Dan Carter, heard by a global audience of 120 million in the World Cup final two years ago. 'Please don't swear in front of the viewers.'
The experiences he will relate do not belong in the standard management manual. The individual known for instilling discipline with humour and the lightest touch - making him 'probably the best referee in the game,' according to England coach Eddie Jones - had resolved to end his own life when he slipped out his parents' home at first light on an April morning 21 years ago, possessing two boxes of Paracetamol, a bottle of whisky and a loaded shotgun.
The pills actually saved him Owens reflects now. He washed them down with the whisky and fell into a coma up on the Bancyddraenan mountain, above the Carmarthenshire village of Mynyddcerig.
It meant that the gun lay untouched when a police helicopter located him. But while the reaction of his shattered parents would set his life on a different course, Owens certainly cannot say that the challenges ended that day.
At the core of his desperately troubled soul was a sexuality which it took him years to come to terms with, even longer to admit to, and made him indescribably ashamed. He became bulimic and frequented gyms where he worked out and got hooked on liquid self-injected steroids, trying to develop a physique which could somehow allow him to feel some sense of self-worth.
He tried to hide the bulimia from his parents by pretending he was suffering from colitis. This was part of a pattern of subterfuge which would have been comical, had it not been so desperate.
It included him pulling out the plug of the family video recorder so his parents might not watch the rugby show which he knew would allude to his sexuality and furtively glancing into hairdressing salons to 'see if I could get some idea of how a gay man would look.'
He tried any conceivable means to shake off what, to a young man growing up in conservative rural west Wales, seemed like an illness. Friday was the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Yet back then, the 46-year-old recalls, it was a case of 'trying to forget it, trying to get a girlfriend, even half thinking about getting engaged. Would that get rid of it?'.
And then came the day he walked into a doctor's surgery in the next village and told the GP he wanted to be chemically castrated. He'd read about it somewhere - possibly, he thinks, in the story of the Bletchley Park scientist Alan Turing, who was given the option of this treatment or prison in 1952, two years before ending his own life. 'The doctor told me: "You can't",' Owens remembers. 'He said: 'It doesn't work that way.'
He had just refereed two rugby Test matches in 2005 when he realised he could keep up the pretence no longer. The fixtures are seared into his mind: Scotland v the Barbarians in Aberdeen; Japan v Ireland in Osaka.
'It was eating away at me and if something is eating away at you your mind drifts away,' he says. 'You make a mistake and it will cost you.' It did. He was dropped from the Test roster. By the time of an unexpected opportunity to officiate Argentina v Samoa in the winter of that year, the world knew what he knew.
'After that, I told myself that if I messed up it would be because of my ability or failings and nothing to do with what I was trying to hide,' he says. 'When I crossed the touchline for the anthems that day in Buenos Aires I said something to myself under my breath which I've said every time I've run onto a pitch since: Don't mess it up.'
His need not have feared what the world of rugby would think. The sport embraced him. He found a way to make light of things and take other people's awkwardness away. Owens literally stepped out of a closet on one Welsh TV show. 'I'm straighter than that one,' he once told the Harlequins hooker Dave Ward after a crooked lineout throw.
He has emerged as a source of immense strength to many who have had the same struggles - working as an ambassador for youth charities, diversity and anti-bullying organisations and this week fronting a BBC Panorama documentary about the problem of eating disorders among men.
We meet in central London to discuss his work for 'Not a Red Card Offence' - the influential campaign launched by Legal and General to tackle the stigma associated with mental health in the workplace. The insurance company recently found that a mere four per cent of employees surveyed who have experienced depression felt able to talk to their manager about it - even though 78 per cent of employers believed their employees would be comfortable doing so.
'I just wish I had been able to talk sooner and not put my family through so much,' he says. His schedule has taken him as far afield as Sussex, Hampshire and Merseyside in the past two weeks alone, speaking at rugby clubs, staff conferences and a diversity event. The response to Monday's Panorama has been extraordinary.
Yet though he has a partner and still lives among his large family in Carmarthenshire, an inner sadness resides not so far beneath the surface.
'There's a part of me, when I see my family and my 10 or 12 cousins who're all about the same age as me and all have a couple of children or so, that wonders "What if?",' Owens says when we have ventured into talk of our families. 'On our side, there's only me and my dad and when he passes away there'll just be me.
'There's a part of me that still wishes I had a "normal" life; that I had what they have - a wife or a partner, own family, own kids. I was driving home from the North last week - going home to an empty house and quiet place. No kids to get up in the morning to take to football training or rugby training.
'I do think sometimes, if I could swap everything I've achieved in my life - refereeing all those international matches, the World Cup final, the European finals - for a normal life with my mum still here, my own children. Would I give all that up? Yes I probably wouldn't think twice about it, really. But that's what a life is for me I guess. That's where I am.'
He wonders aloud if this is why his bulimia has never entirely gone. It might recede for four or five weeks but will then resurface. When he had travelled out to referee Argentina v England in San Juan in June, Owens was invited on a day trip to a small island near Rosario, which included barbecued cooked steak and breads which left him feeling he had eaten too much and realising to his dismay that there was nowhere to be sick.
'There was just this one little toilet on the island, which had no door on it, and by the time we were off the island I'd digested the food,' he says. 'You are putting yourself under a lot of pressure then. You immediately feel you have to lose that weight and I had to go straight to the gym.' Could he not try to break this cycle? 'Maybe you're right,' he replies. 'Maybe I need to sit down with somebody and talk about it. If it keeps happening, something is causing it.'
It is hard to imagine a football referee or player speaking with this candour and Owens has his own views on why a Premier League player has not been able to come out.
'When someone does come out at the top of football, the sport will support them,' he says. 'Of course. Society today won't allow anything else. But football is bigger, so the homophobic, racist minority of supporters is bigger and that makes it harder. And don't imagine that tolerance makes it easy.
'I was 26 years of age before I accepted I was gay and 33 before I came out. I suspect there is a footballer somewhere fighting against himself. A lot of people in sport find they're coming to the end of their careers when they get to that age when they can be themselves...'
Owens is still in the midst of his. Six weeks from now, with 'The Sound of Silence' on his playlist to prepare himself, he will walk into Auckland's New Harbour Stadium for New Zealand's encounter with South Africa in the rugby championship. There will be that 'Don't mess it up' under his breath when he crosses the white line.
Perhaps being a referee has subliminally helped steel him for what has come to pass, he says, smiling a little at the thought. 'All those people who are not happy with your decisions or the headlines that are not always nice.' And with that he is away: off to discuss, in his very self-effacing way, achievements, management and struggles beyond our remotest comprehension.
WHERE TO GET HELP:
If you are worried about your or someone else's mental health, the best place to get help is your GP or local mental health provider. However, if you or someone else is in danger or endangering others, call 111.
If you need to talk to someone, the following free helplines operate 24/7:
DEPRESSION HELPLINE: 0800 111 757
LIFELINE: 0800 543 354
NEED TO TALK? Call or text 1737
SAMARITANS: 0800 726 666
YOUTHLINE: 0800 376 633 or text 234
There are lots of places to get support. For others, click here.
Jon Jones is widely considered one of the greatest mixed martial artists of all time.