"God answers my prayers everywhere except on the golf-course."
No Other Place
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George North, Harper Collins, 2025. ISBN9780008735906
The book tells the story of George North's career from discovering that he was good at rugby as a teenager, to getting a scholarship to a boarding school, on to a professional contract, then being capped for Wales at 19, having a successful international career including British Lions before going to play in France. The description of the transition from looking up to the Welsh international players as his idols to them becoming teammates and dealing with that transaction is excellent. He refers to the uniqueness of the Welsh rugby team going out on a Saturday evening in Cardiff to socialise with the fans who had supported them in the afternoon, arguing that this does not happen with any other elite sport or team.
The book is excellent on describing the mindset of the pro and on explaining the cost of success, which came partly from talent but also involved brutal training camps. He describes what is needed to turn a good player into an international level player as coaches needing to “put these new lads in a place where they're uncomfortable and leave them there for a long time. Then you'll see very quickly who will step up and consistently deliver for you and who's going to shy away… The ones that stand up, run them into the ground again and see what they do. I'm aware how horrendous this must sound if this is not your life”. He adds that any who do not stand up to that pressure should be discarded.
The book’s descriptions of and reflections on the demands of elite sport, the insecurity the anxiety of dealing with the ageing process and the total commitment required is another excellent aspect. He writes “I'm not sure you can play elite sport without giving up some part of yourself. You can't ride this train for free.
“It's almost like a mad love affair, how it is between you and the sport when you reach the top. It's the weirdest relationship you'll ever be in. You grew up and this thing is your obsession, it's your dream. But holy shit-balls it's a weird cruel relationship. You have epic days but also points where the object of your love treats you like an absolute bastard and dumps you on your arse and doesn't call you back. The funny thing is you keep coming back for more”.
He elaborates on his thinking: “it's admittedly a miserable way to think about it. It's also at odds with how I feel about this sport. Rugby means so much to me. But it's all about results. And my miserable summary of it is a reflection of how brutal elite sport can be… you push yourself to a point where you're almost breaking everything in your body and then it comes down to 2 letters W or L”.
He argues that rugby is the truest team sport because football matches can be won by one fabulous player and in cricket one player can score 200 or take 8 wickets while rugby is much more of a team game requiring your 14 teammates “to be different shift cogs in the same machine”.
There is a disturbing chapter on concussion where he refers to the experience of being knocked out in front of 9 million people watching on television and then being knocked out again in the same match, to the extent that your personal health becomes a national debate. He writes: “Something had to change. Four concussions in five months is bad news. No one cared about my brain as much as I did”. He describes poor diagnosis and then finding the right specialist. This is a really important chapter but strangely concussion is not mentioned again in the rest of the book.
There's a brilliant description (p298-9) of an important try for Wales and his decision making - whether to commit fully to try to catch the ball and score and risk missing it and giving important possession to an opponent or to take the more cautious option – all the while anticipating what his coach will say to him after the game!
Again he gives an honest insight into the cost of playing elite rugby and what it is doing to his body in the long term but admits “if you put two cards in front of me and told me they were my two options called A where I played rugby and struggled to get done the stairs in later life and card B where I skipped down the stairs every morning but never ran out my country and never scored a try that made 73,000 people scream - I'm always picking A.
Towards the end of the book he makes one fascinating comment: “I'm not a man for regrets, at this stage of the journey. I've travelled too far, seen too many places but that's my one, if I have one. Maybe I should have enjoyed it far more than I did”.
This website specialises in the connection between sport and Christianity. I was therefore interested in a conversation that he records with his coach Sean Edwards, a Christian who goes to church every Sunday and who once asked North if he were religious, to which he replies that he's not.
That leads me on to my two reservations about the book. For someone who by his own admission is not religious he makes a lot of references to the God and Jesus - but always as expletives. For me the most tedious part about reading this excellent book is the constant, repeated insertion of the F word in sentence after sentence where it adds absolutely nothing to the sense of that sentence. I was left wondering, does North really talk like that in normal life and why the excellent, Cambridge educated, former BBC Sports journalist, who is credited as his co-writer, Tom Fordyce, chose to include them. And indeed why an editor at Harper Collins did not remove the majority of them.