Jason Leonard - Jason Leonard - The Autobiography

On another occasion, I decided that it would be a really good idea to put a small firework in the keyhole of the woodwork door at school. Don’t ask me why! I suppose I had this firework, saw the keyhole and thought it seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately the woodwork teacher didn’t agree! In fact he thought it was a particularly bad idea and called my Mum to the school to tell her so. Mum says she got more of a telling-off than I did!

Luckily I discovered sport before I could cause too much further damage and in it I saw a release for all my pent-up energy. The first sports that appealed to me were those that my dad was interested in – boxing and darts. Rugby came later when I got to senior school. I also had a passing interest in the Cub Scouts and karate but Mum says that as soon as she bought me the Cub uniform, I gave it up.

Dad was working as a sheet-metal worker when I was born and trained as a carpenter shortly afterwards. He thinks he’s the real sportsman in the family because he plays darts and can hit the bull’s eye after 20 pints. I suppose I’d have to agree with him really. I might have played for England and the Lions, but can’t get anywhere near the bull’s eye – with or without alcohol.

Mum competed as a swimmer when she was younger and taught my brothers and I how to swim. I went a lot at school and completed the bronze, silver and gold awards, but swimming never appealed to me as there was nowhere near enough violence in it. What I loved was boxing – going to fights with Dad in the East End, when he would surprise me by talking through every punch and explaining all the moves in detail. No one believes that their parents know anything when they’re young and I was no exception, so Dad’s boxing talk used to amaze me no end.

It was my interest in boxing that saw me involved in a bizarre activity which forms my earliest memory of school. I was in the hall, holding a challenge match to see if anyone could punch me in the stomach and hurt me. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m sure it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. There were boys at the school queuing up to hit me and see if they could inflict any pain. No one ever did, although a few hurt themselves trying. I think money was changing hands somewhere along the line and some smart kid was probably making a fortune out of it, but I just remember standing there, clenching my stomach muscles and watching the looks on their faces as they hit me and held their hands in agony.

I went to Warren Comprehensive from the age of 11 onwards – a good, decent school, but by no means out of the ordinary. It was a real football school in the East End tradition, with links to West Ham football club based just up the road. There was little interest in rugby there, because it was seen as a sport for posh kids and those with a public school education. Things have changed a lot since then and professionalism means that it’s hard work and talent that are rewarded now, not whether you wear the right school tie; but back then we felt that it was ‘them and us’ as far as rugby was concerned, and our school tie was definitely not the right colour (even if you bothered to wear one).

I played some football as a youngster, but not football as most people would know it. I was actually recruited to perform a role which is not strictly in the rules or the spirit of the game – I was there just to chop people down. Put simply, I played rugby in a football team. There would be ten footballers and me, but I liked to think that I was the crucial player. I was given a job in defence which involved kicking anyone who got past the other players into the air and it worked a treat – there are probably still some guys wandering around today with scars to prove it.

However, I was always destined to find myself in a rugby team, and because of my bulky physique, I started playing for the school side at prop. I don’t have any particular memories of playing rugby for the first time, but Mickey Eyres, a teacher at Chadwell Heath who also played prop at Barking Rugby Club, remembers seeing me and realizing that I was a naturally talented player who would just go to waste in the school system.

I played some local matches for the school side and was invited to go to area trials, which resulted in me playing Barking and Essex representative matches, but Mickey was right – I didn’t go far in the school system because I wasn’t at a rugby school. There were a couple of good rugby schools in the area, such as Campion, and they supplied the majority of players for the representative sides. I don’t think a kid – coming from Warren Comprehensive, at that time, stood much of a chance. But being overlooked never entered my mind – I played rugby for fun and had no real desire to make it to the top. I don’t think I even thought about it at that time.

Mickey Eyres invited me to go down to Barking Rugby Club one Sunday morning. He said that it would be a chance for me to play at a higher level, alongside players with more experience, and I decided to take his advice because it sounded like fun. It’s clear now that everyone around me thought that I might have a real talent for the game, whereas I liked rugby because of the friends you could make and because it was a rough sport. I also loved the fact that everyone socialized afterwards and there were usually a few girls hanging around.

I can clearly remember when I first went down to Barking Rugby Club and how I was made to feel welcome straight away. I walked into that old clubhouse for the first time, aged just 14, and thought it was fantastic – an excellent place full of down-to-earth people. The sport itself allowed you to throw your weight around, plough into other players and fling them around the park. I almost believed that I’d died and gone to heaven.

When Barking had a look at me, they said I should be in the U16 side even though I was only 14. From that moment on, I would go on playing a long way above my age group. By the time I was 15, I was in the U19 side, and by the time I was 16, I was the U19s’ captain. I started to concentrate all my time and enthusiasm into Barking Rugby Club and although I played a few representative games for the school, I focused on club rugby, so it was there that I really developed my game.

Once I was at Barking Rugby Club, I started to take rugby seriously, realizing that this was a sport I was good at and loved. Everything else paled into insignificance besides rugby, the one activity to which I was totally devoted. I became determined to be fitter and stronger than everyone else, so I started weight training, and used to run to Barking from Chadwell Heath for every session. It was about 4 miles to the rugby club and once I could do the run easily, I bought myself a weightlifting belt and planned to fill it with weights to give me more of a challenge. Mum spotted what I was up to and stopped me before I injured myself. Dad says he remembers coming up to my room after I got back from Barking one night to find me totally out of breath.

‘Are you OK, son?’ he asked anxiously.

‘I’m just a bit tired from the run back,’ I said, not letting him past me into my room.

The next day he found a bus stop sign with a solid concrete base tucked away in the corner of my bedroom. I had decided that I needed more of a challenge that night so had decided to run back clutching a big lump of concrete. Dad put it outside and I think we confused bus drivers in the area for weeks!

As I was spending so much time at Barking, education, school work and exams that had never meant much to me anyway, mattered less and less. I had never worked very hard or concentrated particularly when I was at school so I never troubled the masters in the top group. This meant the school lost interest in me academically and I was encouraged more in my sport than with my books, to the extent that I abandoned all interest in school work and devoted all my time to the sports field. Not that I was alone in this, for I can remember when they gave us the option of playing sport on Wednesday afternoon, which meant you had time off lessons. You’ve never seen such a rush for the door – there were all these kids who’d never touched a ball before suddenly rushing out of classes like they’d been selected to play for England.