Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Rugby union referee, widely regarded as the best, known for being openly gay in a sport marinated in machismo.
On the island
Eight records
The Green, Green Grass of Home
When I go away all over the world, and I spend a lot of time away from home during the year, you know, something like last year, one hundred and eighty nights of the year away somewhere in the world, somewhere sleeping in a hotel somewhere, a lot of the time on your own. And I always like putting on, you know, something that reminds me of home, and the green, green grass of home.
Moravauriti is the Welsh name of the song. It's the Welsh version of How Great Thou Art. I always have a playlist in the change rooms playing on speakers before I referee a game. The last song that I will ever listen to before going out on the field will be How Great Thou Art.
My cousin had taken over a local pub in Kumaur. There'd always be somebody there playing the organ. And they asked me to go up to give a song. I was about nine, ten, eleven years old at the time. I went up and sang this song a little piece and this old guy there, he took his hat around the pub and people would chuck money and then I had about five or six pounds. This is my money a fortune then.
Myfanwy is a very, very famous song in Wales. And every time I'm somewhere, I was out in Paris in a restaurant in the middle of Paris and somebody there recognised me, said, 'Oh, Welsh Nigel, my grandmother's in there, she's having a ninetieth birthday party. This was they were French people. Could you please sing a song?' So I sang them Myfanwy, and they were all clapping and cheering. So, when people asked me to sing a song, this is the song.
I tell people now that I had a girlfriend back then and they wouldn't believe me, but I did. This was the song that was number one. We always had a smooch in the school discos and in the club discos and always had a little snog at the end of the night then of the smooch and that's the Power of Love means so much to me really because it's well yeah, probably the last time I had a girlfriend.
I Need the SongFavourite
It leads perfectly into the song really. My Angen Agan is the Welsh version, it's a Welsh song by Bryn Vaughan, I need the song. The words are in Welsh. If you translate them they say, you know, you turn to the song and the song will get you through it and this song got me through the darkest times of my life.
It's The Sound of Silence by Disturbed and it's on my playlist. It's the last but one song that I listen to now before I go to referee.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:55How do you balance knowing the laws of the game with the flow of the game?
Learning the laws and knowing the laws of the game and knowing when to blow the whistle, that's the easy job of refereeing. The secret then is knowing when not to blow it. And that is the balance that you need to get right if you want to be a top referee and remain at the top is a feel for the game and empathy of what the players are trying to achieve, but also setting your boundaries out of what is acceptable and what is not. And it's not always easy to get it. Even if you've got the knack of doing that, sometimes in games you let something go that you should have blown and something that you've blown, you think, oh, I should have let that go, and it's not always easy, but that is the challenge. And if you get that right and two positive teams, then you have the ingredients then of having a flowing game.
Presenter asks
3:57How much has your country defined you as a person?
A huge amount, I think. Probably not just my country, but my language, my history, my heritage, my family, and my community that I was brought up in. You know, a lot of people will tell you that life is what you make it. I'm not quite sure I agree with that, because I'm a big believer in that life makes you. The community you were brought up in, the people within the community, your family, your friends, the local rugby club, everything around you, I think, when you're growing up as a young person will have a huge influence on you. And by the time you come to your late teens, early twenties, I think then you've you'll probably become the person that you'll become for the rest of your life.
The keepsakes
The book
Kenneth Grahame
The first book I ever read and the first book I ever really enjoyed and was Wind in the Willows. Um probably about time I read it again'cause I haven't read it since I was around twelve or thirteen years of age, really.
The luxury
Or cup of tea. And Welsh tea. It's gotta be Welsh tea, bugs. I don't know, there's something about a cup of tea that cures so many ills, isn't there?
Presenter asks
10:40When you were a small boy, your dad and grandfather used to break in horses – that must have built your nerve?
I nearly lost my life as well, or nearly got very injured by it. When I was born, my grandfather was in hospital and he had a stroke, massive stroke. And my mum was actually in the hospital at the time ready to have me. My grandmother took me in her arms then after I was born and pretty much put me in my grandfather's arms, who was now in bed with a stroke, basically that he could hold me because he would probably never get a chance to hold me again. The following day, he started improving. He got better and he then lived for another 13 years. And I was very lucky to be part of that 13 years. … There was one horse called Cara, beautiful horse, and they were breaking it in, and my dad hasn't got much patience. And I was on the back of the horse, and my grandfather was there with the stick by the side of him now, telling him what to do. … And my dad sort of tapped him on the back and said, 'Come on, move.' And the horse reared up. And fell backwards. I fell down and the horse was falling on me. But as I fell, my grandfather just dropped his stick and just pulled me out of the way just in time, so the horse sort of fell on the side of me. It hurt me a bit, but that would have killed me.
Presenter asks
14:03You had direct experience as a kid of bullying – can you tell me what happened?
I was bullied when I was in the Gwendraeth Grammar School and by one individual who's the same age as me. The reason why a lot of people who are bullied do not talk about it is because you feel a sense of shame. You feel a sense that it's your fault. You feel that you are weak and you don't want people to know that you are weak. And it's a very, very difficult time in my life. And there's no doubt it affected my education, 'cause I didn't want to go to school. I was landing up doing things that I'd been taught not to do, to lie to my parents that I was ill and didn't want to go to school. And I feel very passionate really about helping people to overcome that sense of shame. Believe me, I've experienced it myself. It's a very, very horrible place to be.
Presenter asks
25:02What about your parents when you told them [you were gay]?
I told my mum was the first person I told. … I was brought up to be honest, and here I was now lying to the most important people in my life, and it was affecting my life because unless you're happy within who you are, you cannot excel and be the best you can be at whatever you're doing. … I went to tell my mum. It was very difficult telling my mum that we both cried, but she said, look, nothing's changed between us, everything will be the same. And when I told her, she said, well, I did guess. … I left her to tell my dad. It took her a couple of days. And he found it difficult at first, not with me, but in dealing with it. But my love for him and his love for me hasn't changed one bit.
Presenter asks
29:04Is all of your life now happy and balanced? Are [bulimia and steroids] in the past where they belong?
Yes, they are. The bulimia only sort of finished about not that long ago, to be honest with you. The time I stopped is when my mum sat me and my dad down and told us that she had cancer and she was dying. And I was in bed crying and thinking to myself: here I am, healthy but still making myself ill and suffering from bulimia, where my mum and millions of other people across the world are fighting every day just for an extra few hours with their loved ones. And that's when the bulimia stopped and touch wood. I haven't suffered from it since then.
“I tell people now that I had a girlfriend back then and they wouldn't believe me, but I did.”
“I was also at that stage then of my life, I was about nineteen, starting to realize that I was different. That I was suddenly finding myself attracted to men. And this was totally alien to me. Brought up in a small village, I had never met or seen or known a gay person in real life. … I was becoming somebody that I knew nothing about and somebody I didn't want to be.”
“I overdosed on the paracetamols and the whisky and slipped into a coma. And then my mum and dad obviously phoned the police. There's a police helicopter out looking for me and family and friends and everybody searching for me and I was out in the mountains right above the house, looking down at where I was brought up in the mountains above me. And if I hadn't gone into the coma, I have no doubt I would have ended my life, because the shotgun was lying on my chest, underneath my chin, ready to pull the trigger. And because I slipped into a coma, I couldn't do it.”
“The doctor told me, 'Look, another twenty minutes and it'd been too late to save you' and my mum said, 'If you ever do anything like that again, then you take me and your dad with you because we don't want to live our life without you.'”
“Refereeing that World Cup final between Australia and New Zealand in front of eighty five thousand people and millions of people watching at home scrutinizing every single decision you make and a huge amount of pressure was nothing compared to the challenge of accepting who I was and in accepting who I was then saved my life.”
“I don't think people sometimes realize or appreciate how lonely my life can be sometimes and that worries me from time to time.”