TOM SMITH, BOSTON STRANGLER
An exclusive extract from "This is Your Everest" the inside story of the legendary Lions tour of 1997
TOM SMITH, BOSTON STRANGLER
Tom Smith’s rise had been far from easy. Born in London, his father died when he was only six and after beginning his 177 education at Emanuel School in Wandsworth, he was packed off to boarding school on the banks of Loch Rannoch in his mother’s native Scotland when he was thirteen. Rannoch was in the middle of nowhere. The closest rival was Perth Academy, a hundred-mile round trip away, while the schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow were two-hundred-mile round trips.
Tom Smith: I wasn’t behaving as well as I should have been at school in London; I wasn’t working as hard as I needed to,’ he says. ‘And then I was offered a choice about going to Rannoch and I was glad to go. It was a good place for me; it was a pain in the arse to get to, but it was unique. You used to get the sleeper train up from London and wake up on Rannoch Moor, either freezing cold or with midges everywhere, one or the other. But it was gorgeous. There was a great rugby ethic there. It was a small school, so we struggled to win many games and half the season was always snowed-off, but it was a great place to play.
There was a coach there called Peter Rowan who focused on us being fit and he worked us pretty hard; there were lots of hills around and we’d go running for hours. There were times when it was pretty tough and cold out there but at the end of the day rugby is a hard game and you need to be tough to play it. It was a good foundation for me in so many ways.’ Smith was hard and uncompromising despite his size – at just five foot ten and sixteen stone he was a Mighty Mouse McLauchlan incarnate. That was small for an international player, but then again, the Mouse had done all right during a forty-three-cap career for Scotland and as a cornerstone of two successful Lions tours in 1971 and 1974, playing in all eight Tests. And like McLauchlan, who had learned his trade in the West of Scotland playing against farmers, miners and shipyard workers, Smith had served a testing scrummaging apprenticeship.
Tom Smith: When I joined my first senior club in Dundee, there was an old prop called Danny Herrington, a bit of a local legend, who basically shoved my head up my arse in training, twice a week every week for what seemed like years. That’s what you call a learning curve. Those training sessions were my classroom. Danny took the view that a young prop should have his share of bad experiences before trying to inflict them on other people. ‘From Dundee I moved to Watsonians in Edinburgh and played on the sevens circuit at the end of the year and that was where Jim Telfer apparently first saw me. Back in those days, you’d get a call to come down and do live training against the Scotland team on a Tuesday or Wednesday night before a Five Nations match, so I went down and did a few scrums and what have you, and it all kind of kicked off from there.’
Martin Johnson: Tom Smith? I didn’t know him from a hole in the head before the tour.
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Ian McGeechan: Jim rang me up before the 1997 Five Nations when Tom was about to make his debut and said, ‘I want you to watch Tom Smith. Don’t just look at how he gets on in the scrum, look at how he gets about the field, how he reads the game. He’s different – and I think he might be the kind of guy we could use in South Africa.’ So I watched him and Jim was absolutely right. He’d only just arrived in international rugby but I could see that he was a special player. He scrummed well, lifted well in the lineout, hit the rucks he needed to hit, was good in defence, but it was the way he handled the ball and the running lines he took and his work rate. That’s what really stood out.
Jim Telfer: Tom was exceptional. A natural athlete, really strong for his size and he had great skills. You didn’t need to roar at him, you knew you would always get 100 per cent. He was unfazed by whoever he was playing against. He was my kind of player, no fuss and no bother.
Keith Wood: Tom was small, but he was strong, fast and had the most unbelievable hands – I mean, truly extraordinary. He had this weird low centre of gravity and could catch anything close to the ground and his rucking was superb, like all the Scottish guys at the time who had come through the Telfer system. He was a constant presence wherever you needed him, he was all over the park. And in the scrum, I loved working with him. It was funny, we toured again in 2001 and as soon as we bound up for our first scrum together in four years, it was like settling down into a familiar armchair. It just felt comfortable and he would do anything to help make your job easier. You would tell him you needed something and he would barely acknowledge it; he would just accept it, no matter what you said, and he would do it. He was properly selfless. I would say, ‘I’m going to have to loosen my bind here,’ or something, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge it, but I’d go and do what I needed to do and he’d let me off with it, you know? His job was to do his job, and part of his job was to make my life a little bit easier and so that’s what he did. I thought he was magnificent.
Tom Smith: I went on tour with Scotland to New Zealand in 1996, got capped in the Five Nations against England and five months later I was on a Lions tour. I didn’t really understand too much about the Lions before the tour. The hype is different these days, every game you play now either puts you in or out of Lions reckoning, even if it’s three years out from the tour. So I was gloriously naive at the beginning but the significance of it kicked in pretty quickly. You’re at the first get-together of the squad and you’re surrounded by these legends of the game. It’s pretty intimidating at first, but everyone’s just an ordinary person and you’re all there for the same reason. That makes you relax into the atmosphere and then the nerves and the energy really get going when the rugby starts. It’s difficult to explain, but it seemed a bit lower-key back then than it is now. Nobody expected us to do anything; I think we were going there as lambs to the slaughter. Expectations were quite low and then, obviously, it started to come together.
Jason Leonard: Tom Smith is, in my opinion, one of the greatest Lions ever. He went on two tours and played six straight Tests. Hell of a player. People see the Lions in different ways. For me, the jersey was always the focal point. Putting on that jersey, I would think of Mighty Mouse McLauchlan or Graham Price or Fran Cotton – and when you put that jersey on, all you want to do is to live up to those legends. Current players will be thinking the same about Tom Smith.
Martin Johnson: No one really knew guys like Tom. He’d only played one year, he didn’t play Europe, so we didn’t really know him. It was all brand new. And obviously he’s very, very quiet as well.
Lawrence Dallaglio: I just thought he didn’t like me. It made me feel better when I heard everyone else thought he was quiet. He was a man of few words, but he didn’t have to say anything; it was his actions – he inspired others through his actions.
Matt Dawson: I remember Mark Regan sharing with Tom at one point and he woke up in the middle of the night to find Tom standing over him, stark bollock naked, throttling him. And Ronnie is in an absolute panic, screaming, ‘Oi, bab, what yer doin’? Get orff, get orff!’ And he threw Tom off, and Tom got back in his bed and knew absolutely nothing about it the next day. He was known as the Boston Strangler after that.
Mark Regan: I didn’t sleep again while we shared. Fucking shit myself.
Tom Smith: Yeah, the sleep-walking was a bit of an issue, apparently. Sleep-walking wasn’t the only concern Smith had, however. When he was eighteen he suffered his first epileptic seizure, a condition he still manages to this day – although not always successfully. ‘During one nocturnal seizure I fell out of bed and broke my toe. That was a bit difficult with a high impact game and I missed a few Test matches because of it.
Then, around 2005, I started having daytime seizures which caused short-term memory loss and pretty nasty headaches. I played a Calcutta match against England after having a seizure on the day of the game and that was definitely not the best afternoon I’ve had. ‘It wasn’t something I really shared with other people, though. I always wanted to be judged by what I did on the field, not by what I did in spite of my epilepsy. There are plenty of people out there playing with epilepsy. They just get on with it. When I went to South Africa, I did wonder if something might happen, if I might have a seizure, but I’ve been fortunate that, on the whole, my epilepsy hasn’t been too serious – on a scale of one to ten of how serious it could be, I’d rate myself just a one. I only had seizures during the night at that stage, while sleeping, and that was a concern before going on tour and sharing a room with another player, but luckily nothing like that happened while we were away. Just the sleepwalking – and apparently trying to murder my roommate.
Martin Johnson: Tom was quite hard to get to know at first, but you couldn’t help but see that he was a hell of a player. I remember doing lineout drills once and the ball’s flying everywhere off the back of the lineout and one of the props was supposed to catch it and run around the corner. And the other prop doing the drill couldn’t catch it – I won’t name who it was – but he just couldn’t catch it. But then Tom stepped up to do it and a terrible ball gets thrown down to him – and he caught it off his bootlaces without even thinking about it. And I remember thinking, ‘Okay, this guy’s got some skills.’ Then you add in his performances – and the Gauteng game was probably the big one. He had to stand up in the tight and scrummage against a big, horrible, nasty team in a full-on Test match environment at Ellis Park, and to do that as well as doing all the other things he could do got him in the Test team. You know, when you hear Jason Leonard talk about the guys in history like Mighty Mouse, Fran Cotton, Graham Price . . . he’s right. He absolutely is. Tom is up there with the best ever.
Graham Rowntree: Before the tour started, both myself and Jason Leonard were the favourites for the Test spots. We’d had a good Five Nations, our club form had been strong, but it was tough. It was tough. As the games unfolded they got gradually tougher. It was quite clear that some guys will gain some form compared with other guys and it was quite obvious early on that Tom Smith was a special talent. I was aware of Tom, having played against him on his debut in the Five Nations, but he was exceptional. I wasn’t involved in the Gauteng game but Tom was and I was astounded by his performance. There were a few props around that time who changed propping. It wasn’t just about set piece dominance anymore – because of them it suddenly became about what you could do defensively, what you could do with a ball in hand, what you could do when you made a break. Nowadays you take that for granted with all prop forwards, but back then it was only Tom doing that and a couple of French props – Christian Califano and Franck Tournaire. And they changed propping. Suddenly this new hybrid mobile, ball-handling prop was everywhere. And Tom set the standard for that, particularly for northern hemisphere loose head props.
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