Hamilton fought like a Tiger after rough start

We begin at the end and the small talk that followed the interview, the casual chat as the tape goes off. Jim Hamilton is saying how much he has enjoyed being in Invercargill this past week, how it’s a “proper rugby buzzin’ town”, how the people are “old school working class” and how he appreciates their friendliness. “Me and Chunk [Allan Jacobsen] have been going on about how this is our kind of place,” he says. “And it is. We’re a bit out of the way down here, but I like it.”

He asks when the piece is going in the paper. “Wednesday, Jim.”

“Cool. It’s not gonna be one of them pieces, is it?”

“One of them pieces?”

“Yeah, you know. . .”

He takes an imaginary violin, an imaginary bow and starts playing some imaginary music. “A sob story,” he says. “It’s not gonna be one of them, is it?”

“It’s going to be the story of how you got here,” I say. “I can’t believe you made it.”

“Yeah, I suppose so,” he says. “It hasn’t been easy.”

Try to imagine this. Jim Hamilton is 15 years old and living on a council estate in Coventry with his mum and sister. His dad is away in the army. He sees little of him. He’s riding his bike home from school and the local bullies throw snooker balls at his head as he passes, they fight him, they give him a black eye, they urinate through his mother’s letter-box. It gets to the stage where the bullied becomes the bully, or at least, hangs out with the bullies to get out of their firing line. To get into a gang he needs to do some crazy things, like climbing on to the rooftops of buildings (he once fell through and narrowly avoided being hooked by the police) and spending a night in a derelict bingo hall.

Now a 6ft 8in lock, he was just 15 in the midst of his rebellion, still 15 when he was put into foster care after his mother’s life became a misery, still 15 when he came out of care and social services put him in a house of his own, still 15 when his gang “pals” found out where he was and came round to wreck the place, still 15 when rugby came into his life for the first time. He says rugby saved him. Or, to be precise, Leicester Tigers saved him.

There’s a difference. There are rugby clubs and then there’s Leicester. And there’s no club like Leicester, not to Hamilton and not to many, many others who have passed through the gates of Welford Road.

“I was born in Swindon but I have no affiliation to Swindon. I was brought up in Coventry. My dad was away and my parents split up when I was young. It was a toughish upbringing, that’s for sure. Pretty rough, yeah. It’s been a fighting upbringing, really. You were left to your own devices. A typical council estate upbringing, maybe. You’d be amazed how much it’s taken for me to get here.

“Going to Leicester to play rugby, I found a place in society. People get a perception that life is easy, but life is never easy, is it? It’s amazing to be where I am now having had the younger life I’ve had. Playing for Scotland in a World Cup in New Zealand. It’s unbelievable.”

Leicester made him and, although he moved on to Edinburgh and then Gloucester, he remains a Tiger at heart. He is well-remembered there, as a passionate player and a charismatic character with a genius for madcap drinking games. Remembered, too, for getting into trouble. At 19, still in his wild days, Hamilton picked up a criminal conviction for assault. He reckons it might have been worse had the Leicester family not rallied around him, Dean Richards, the coach at the time, accompanying him to court and standing by him when he could so easily have chucked him out. He wisened up after that, just a little bit.

“Our team, the under-21s and then the A team, used to play on a Monday night in front of 10,000 people and then we’d go out afterwards, one-in, all-in, and get leathered. We’d be back into the club at 9am to go full-on against the first team – Johnno and Neil Back and Martin Corry and Pat Howard and the rest of them – and sometimes we’d sit on bench on the Saturday for the first team, then we’d go out again on the Saturday night, game on Monday, out Monday night, in on Tuesday morning and this great vicious circle would start all over again.”

“Times have changed. The game has moved on, but I do look back on it and I do miss it. A lot of the guys I was with at Leicester have left. Harry Ellis is a good friend of mine,but he’s not playing any more. A lot of guys aren’t playing any more. Gloucester is a brilliant club and I just signed a new contract to stay on longer, but I tell the lads at Gloucester that Leicester has made me what I am today; the man but also the player and the way I play the game.”

One of his mates in those early years at Leicester was Matt Hampson, the England under-21 tighthead prop. In March 2005, Hampson was paralysed when a scrum collapsed during an England training session in Northampton. Hamilton is reading his book. Engage: The Fall And Rise of Matt Hampson by Paul Kimmage is a stunning piece of work; terrifing and heart-breaking on one level, hilarious and inspirational on another.

“I texted Hambo (Hampson) before I came and said ‘I’m gonna read your book when I’m away’, but there’s actually a tattoo that I’m getting out of the book, it’s the title of one of the chapters that talks about us when we were growing up and stuff like that. It’s about the mind of a gladiator, how the men are thinking they can’t fight, they’re thinking they won’t fight but when they’re out there, they will fight. It reminds me of us playing together when we were younger.

“It was a great book for me because that’s where I’m from. I’m a Leicester player and I’ll always be a Leicester player and that book reflects it. The way I play is a Leicester type way and it reminds me of who I am. I never thought it would. I thought it was going to be a lot about Matt’s injury, but it’s also about what it’s like to play for Leicester, the culture and the mindset that we’ve been brought up with.

“It shows that it’s not about people feeling sorry for him, it’s about the way he’s moved things forward in his life and it puts everything into perspective. He’s a top lad, Hambo. When it happened I went to see him. It’s a cliche, and I know it’s easy to say it, but it’s true. He’s an inspiration.”

Hamilton rolls up his shirt sleeve and you have to wonder where the Hambo tattoo is going to fit. There’s so many on there already. He points out his latest one, a Samurai from the Mulan legend he found in a book. Above it, he’s got the words ‘Nothing Is Impossible’ written in honour of the late actor Christopher Reeve. Nothing Is Impossible was the title of Reeve’s autobiography, like Hampson’s story, a study in bravery in the wake of his paralysis. Hamilton was on holiday in America when he decided to get it done. He went to New York especially, because that’s where Reeve was from.

His family are watching the World Cup from afar, mostly in England, but his father has been looking-on from Afghanistan, where the precise nature of his soldiering remains something of a well-guarded secret.

“He doesn’t let me say anything about it. I’ve no idea what he does out there. No idea. Genuinely no idea. I ask and he don’t tell me. He says, ‘You don’t need to know, mucker’. He’s a proper Scotsman and when he’s out there with the other blokes his Scottish accent gets even worse. He rings me up and I don’t have a clue what he’s saying. They get the American television and the Americans are starting to get into their rugby, so I spoke to him yesterday and he’s going to be watching the games.”

And you can be sure that his boy is going to give him plenty to see.