All the time that I have been investigating former players in middle age facing up to life-changing diagnoses, I have been watching the effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s on my wife
It has been a horrible week for rugby, a fitting end to a year more harrowing and transformational for the sport than quite possibly any – 1995 and 1895 can make way now for 2020. From the salary-cap debacle at the start, through the ravages of a global virus, the more familiar ravages of an audience endlessly critical of the product, to this, an association with dementia in former players barely at middle age – what chance our grand old game surviving?
From a personal point of view, it has been an unsettling few months, this story first appearing in my inbox in July, while sitting on a beach in Devon. The implications were obviously dire for the sport, the cultural milieu, within which I’ve lived most of my life.
I remember the chill, circa 2012, of witnessing her first glaring lapse of memory, over dinner in the cafe
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