A reporter who came to interview him recently could not believe it.
“You’ve watched it again?” “Yes.”
“All of it?” “Yes.”
“That’s extraordinary! Why on earth would you want to do that?” “Some people might think I’m a bit sick for watching it,” he says, “but I just . . . it’s nice to see me playing rugby again. It’s just nice to watch my last session of rugby.”
Three hundred and 62 days have passed since that session on the morning of Tuesday, March 15 last year. Matthew “Hambo” Hampson, a 20-year-old from Rutland, had just won his fourth cap for England against Italy in the penultimate game of the Six Nations Under-21 Championship and had travelled to Franklin’s Gardens to prepare for the game with Scotland.
The session unfolded as countless others had before and he was starting to enjoy himself when the forwards were gathered to work on the scrum. Hambo, a tighthead prop, adored the scrum.
“My favourite thing ever in a game would be to screw my opposite number,” he says. “That’s what a prop lives for: hitting his opposite number and knocking him back.”
Tony Spreadbury, the international referee, had travelled from his home in Bristol to oversee the session. The forwards were mixed and matched to form opposing packs and put to work in different areas of the pitch. At first it was mostly technical, the stuff viewers never see, and then the tempo was raised with some full-contact scrums.
“Crouch and hold,” Spreadbury instructed, as the two front rows eyeballed one another and prepared for war. Hambo waited with relish for the call. This was what he lived for, that pounding in his chest in the seconds before battle. He used to love playing Wales because the Welsh hated the English and that always set his competitive juices flowing.
“The first time I started for England was a game against Wales and I was sin-binned,” he smiles. “I loved that game, it was made for me, the muddiest day ever. The first ruck you went into, you got a smack in the mouth and knew you were in a game. It was a crap game of rugby but a proper brutal battle.”
“Engage!” Spreadbury ordered. With pleasure, Hambo responded. It was his all-time favourite word. But this time something went wrong. He remembers the call and he remembers the shove and he remembers the scrum collapsing, just as it had many times before. He remembers going down and his feet being lifted off the ground and feeling suddenly unable to breathe as his friends piled on top of him.
And after that he remembers nothing, only darkness.
ANNE HAMPSON was working at the local education authority in Peterborough when she got the telephone call from Peter Drewett, the England manager: “Matt’s had an accident.” She was not overly alarmed. From the moment she had given birth to the second of her three children, Matt had been having accidents. There was the time he undid the child seat and opened the door of the car and she saw him bouncing down the road in the rear-view mirror.
There was the time he jumped off the thatched roof of a cottage that Phil, his father, was renovating, into a bale of straw. There was the time in Yugoslavia when he ignored their warnings about the puddle by the side of the road and jumped in up to his neck. He was a huge baby, hard work from the moment he was born and blessed with at least nine lives.
“Oh well,” she replied, “what’s he done now?” But the manager sounded hesitant, anxious. “We’ve got him in the ambulance,” he said.
“Oh, okay.”
“Em, it’s quite a serious accident.”
“How serious?” “Well, he’s not been able to feel anything, but we think he can feel a bit now.”
Her heart skipped a beat. Phil was working on a house near Rutland. She called and arranged to collect him and they drove immediately to Northampton General Hospital. Matt Cornwell, a teammate of Matt’s at Leicester and England and a friend since childhood, was waiting for them in reception.
He looked as pale as a ghost and sounded fretful. “Nobody has been allowed to see him,” he explained. “We’ve no idea what’s happening.”
Those first hours in Northampton remain a blur. There was a meeting with the team manager and with the doctor, but the Hampsons were totally confused. “You have all these questions but nobody has any answers because they don’t know,” Anne says. “We knew it was the end of his rugby career and that there was a chance he wouldn’t walk again and you are trying to take it all in and it’s just dreadful.”
Matt was sedated, with his neck in traction, when they were taken to see him in intensive care. “He just looked normal,” Anne says. “He hadn’t broken his neck, he had dislocated his neck and trapped the (spinal) cord and needed an operation, but it wasn’t a specialist unit and they didn’t seem to know what they were going to do with him.
“They couldn’t find him a bed in any spinal unit in the country — that’s what we were told. I was really upset. I’ve got my son playing for his country, he deserves the best and they couldn’t even find him a bed. How far was Stoke Mandeville (Hospital, and its specialist spinal unit) from Northampton? Why wasn’t he receiving the best possible care? The stress of watching him lying there with a little weight hanging off his neck and being told he had nowhere to go was unbearable.”
The next morning Matt was transferred to Stoke Mandeville for a four-hour operation. When he emerged there were tubes in his mouth and tubes in his nose and a hole had been cut in his throat to pump air into his lungs. For three days Anne sat with her unconscious son, listening to the whoosh of the ventilator keeping him alive. And for three days she cried.
DARKNESS and then the haze; and then the dreams through the haze. The dreams were weird. He was in an airport somewhere in France and people were running towards him, screaming that there was a bomb about to explode. An SAS team dressed as nurses sprinted into the terminal. They ordered him to get out, but he informed them that he was Hambo and then he led them to the bomb and defused it.
What did he know about bombs? He was in a hotel somewhere in France and was going to his room in a lift when it stopped at the wrong floor. He pressed a button to go up, but nothing happened. He pressed a button to go down, but again there was no response. He tried stepping out of the lift and the doors closed. He was trapped.
Why was it always France? He was at a reception with his England teammates Matt Cornwell, Tom Varndell, David Ward, Tom Ryder, Richard Thorpe and Alex Dodge. They had just beaten Wales; he had scored his first try for England. A gunman appeared out of nowhere and started spraying them with bullets. He was hit twice in the chest and was bleeding profusely. They put him in an air ambulance and flew him to a hospital in France.
The Welsh were trying to kill him! The craziness lasted three days until finally it ended and he was able to open his eyes. His mother was sitting by the side of the bed. He could not speak because of the tube in his neck. He could not feel his arms or feel his legs or feel anything except a wretched dryness in his mouth. She dipped a stick in some orange juice and dabbed his tongue. His mind returned to the scrum. Something pretty bad had obviously happened, but he was not worried.
Everybody seemed so positive. Things would be better in a month, or so they assured him, and he was happy to believe them. But a month became three months and there was hardly any improvement; he was still in a critical ward, still breathing through a ventilator and still without feeling in any of his limbs. Black thoughts started invading his head, blacker than darkness, blacker than pain, blacker than anything he had ever experienced.
I will never be able to play rugby again. I will never be able to walk again. I will never be able to lift a glass of beer to my lips. I will never be able to have sex again. I will never have kids. No woman will ever want to marry me. I will spend the rest of my life rotting in this lifeless shell.
Spring was now summer and he had hit rock bottom, venting his rage and frustration on Anne or Phil or Amy (his sister) or Tom (his brother) or whoever was in range. “It’s always the ones you love, isn’t it?” he says. “It’s always the ones that you know are not going to say, ‘Right, fine, sod you then’. They’re always the ones you go for. It’s horrible.”
His family felt the sting but were determined to turn him around. “It’s just a nightmare, isn’t it?” Anne says. “You’re trying to be normal and to be positive, and he is lying there and it’s just terrible. But if you go to bits, what use are you to him? From the outset we decided that we had to be strong and to be positive and that Matthew had to see we were strong and positive and looking to the future.”
His mother brought him home-made food and reminded him constantly of his progress. Phil brought him DVDs and sat by his bed reading the rugby reports. His teammates at Leicester visited regularly and kept him posted on the dressing-room gossip. He had never met Joe Worsley, the England flanker, before, but he popped in one afternoon to say hello. A family friend, Jackie Ponchin, spent two days a week by his side.
His black thoughts faded; their kindness had made a difference; the corner had almost been turned. Almost.
ANNE HAMPSON remembers the day she introduced her son to rugby. He was five years old and cried on the morning they brought him to Oakham Rugby Football Club. She also remembers the reason: the kid was absolutely made for the game.
“We couldn’t cope with him on Sunday mornings,” she recalls. “He had a lovely personality but he was big and rough and strong. At pre-school he used to get banned from the play corner for knocking everybody out of the way. He was already scrummaging.”
The game was soon his singular passion. He made his first tackles at Oakham, won a national “minis” final with Syston at Twickenham and joined the Leicester Tigers academy as a 15-year-old. Dusty Hare and Andy Key were his mentors at the academy, but his all-time hero was the Leicester prop Darren Garforth, who took him under his wing to explain the dark art of scrummaging.
He first played for England as an under-18, a day he remembers as one of the proudest of his life, a pride that never faded in the three seasons that followed. “I can’t look at my parents in the crowd when I’m singing the national anthem because I’ll start crying,” he says. “It’s very emotional, you feel the hopes of the country on your shoulders and it doesn’t matter how many times you play.”
Anne and Phil supported their son every step of the way; at his first England trial, at the Under-19 World Cup in France, at the Under-21 Six Nations game against Italy that was to prove his last. The bottom fell out of their world on the day of the accident. Their beautiful son, their gorgeous boy; how cruelly this game he loved had treated them. And then, just when they thought things could not get much worse, they did.
In December, after nine months of haggling over the issue of compensation, the Hampsons received a legally framed letter from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) informing them that the financial aid they were receiving would terminate in January. The tone of the letter was appalling, its financial implications devastating. Anne fixed Twickenham in her sights and decided to go to war.
“It was interesting going to the RFU and seeing all this stuff about the spirit of rugby,” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, what is the spirit of rugby? Is this letter the spirit of rugby?’ My son has lost a chunk of his life playing for his country; I think he deserves the best for that. I did a lot of threatening and told them from the heart how I felt. ‘You have got to face up to your responsibilities’, I said. ‘Matthew is a Leicester Tigers player but he was in your club, the England club, on the day this accident happened’.
“I don’t want to sound too critical. Things have come on and have been very positive since. Martyn Thomas (the chairman of the RFU management board) has embraced Matthew’s situation and has promised us lifetime support. I think it took them a long time to come to terms with; in 130 years they had never had a serious accident at that level and they didn’t know how to deal with it.
“They ought to embrace the fact that somebody like Matthew could be very helpful to them. He still loves the game; he still loves it all; he has all of the characteristics you would want to use as the spirit of rugby.”
THE spirit of rugby is sitting in a bed in Stoke Mandeville telling me a story about the day he turned the corner. It was not a sign from God; it was not a prod from Anne; it wasn’t even a visit from the real God, Martin Johnson. No, the reason Matthew Hampson decided he was going to be Hambo again was because he glanced around the ward at the hospital one morning at the quadriplegics who had tripped getting into the shower, or snagged their trouser leg climbing a gate, or who had been left by the side of the road after a hit-and-run.
He saw the guys who had movement only in their eyes and the girls who were fighting cancerous tumours of the spine and the kids who had been struck down before their first cap for England. Nobody ever came to visit a lot of these people. They weren’t blessed with parents like Anne and Phil or supporters like Leicester or friends like Martin Corry, who always gave him a mention in his newspaper column, or Tom Varndell, who donated his first England jersey.
And as he glanced around the ward that morning he realised that despite the awful cruelty that had befallen him, there were others who were even more unfortunate. “The support I’ve had has been overwhelming,” he says. “I was at a dinner in London this week (a National Sports Club lunch) and it’s overwhelming when you see people donate stuff or come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I’ve read about you in the paper’.
“You just feel, ‘Why are they supporting me?’ You think that because you know that there are a lot of people in here who don’t have anyone, there are a lot of people in here who sit and basically just rot, and it’s horrible. They’ve got nobody to take them out and go places. I feel blessed because of the people around me, my friends and family.”
There was also the example of Paul Tiana, a middle-aged businessman who found himself in the same ward as Matt after falling from a horse. “There are two kinds of people in this hospital,” Matt explains. “The people who think the world owes them a favour because of this terrible injury they’ve suffered, and the people like Paul Tiana.
“Paul is tetraplegic, a C5 or a C6, which means he has some movement in his arms, but he didn’t want any favours, he didn’t want anyone pushing his wheelchair or doing anything for him. I used to sit and have lunch with him; I’d have my mum and dad with me, but Paul had found a way to eat on his own. He’d had this special adaptor made so he could hold a knife and fork. It took him twice as long as anybody else to eat his food, but he insisted on doing it himself.
“He had his own business and had to work — I think he had three months in hospital when he couldn’t work, and then he started back into it. He’d wake up every day feeling dizzy and crap and wheel himself downstairs and into a room with his laptop. He’s out of here now and living his life to the best of his abilities, a fantastic, driven bloke.”
Matt intends to follow his lead.
“You hear a lot of people in here, lads with lesser injuries than me, who say, ‘My life is shit, I’ve thought about ending it’, but I’ve never, ever, thought that. I’ve never once felt like ending my life, because I’ve got my family and friends and it would be selfish. That would be the easy way out. There are good days and bad days, but I’ve had more good days than bad, definitely, and you just, basically, have to live your life the best you can with what you have.
“I might not walk again, I might not get any feeling back in my arms, but they’re making progress with the research, so there’s always hope. That’s why raising money and raising awareness is so important. If spinal injury had as much money put into the research as cancer, I think they would have found a cure by now.
“That’s one of my goals when I get out of here. I want to do some charity work and raise money, because there are a lot of young lads and young girls in here who are very hopeful that they are going to find a cure.”
A SATURDAY morning in the St George’s ward of Stoke Mandeville hospital. Anne is feeding Matt a freshly baked croissant with jam on it for breakfast. Phil is feeding him the sports pages and what the experts are saying about the Powergen Cup semi-final between Leicester and Wasps.
“A lot of people think you must hate rugby because of what happened,” his mother says, “but you’re not a bitter personality, are you, you’ve never been bitter.”
“No, if you get bitter and twisted it weighs down on you and you can’t get anything done,” Matt concurs. “It’s no good for you.”
“He has always been a ‘the glass is half-full rather than half-empty’ kind of person,” Anne says. “The injury hasn’t taken his personality away from him.”
She feeds him another piece of bread and gazes at him lovingly. “You’re still you, Matthew,” she says. “And still worse than ever in many ways.”
But he is not so sure. “People say all the time, ‘You’re still the same old Matt’, but you’re not, you’re different. But I suppose your personality doesn’t change . . . and people look at you in a different way, it’s just something you have to deal with.” Phil has taken a back seat during much of our conversation, but his memory is suddenly stirred.
“One thing Matthew said to me early in his injury which I couldn’t believe was, ‘I’ll be a better person for this in the long run, Dad’. I thought it was an amazing thing for a 20-year-old to say. I don’t think I could have said that.”
“Well, you are, aren’t you?” Matt says, talking about himself. And for the first moment in the telling of his story, a tear wells in his eye and runs down the side of his face.
