David Flatman

In a café full of fisherman on the Devon coast, a 20-stone man that looks a bit familiar rocks up on a Triumph bike. He’s here to share stories of gun-wielding hardmen in dark alleys, chainsaw-toting vigilantes, taking uppercuts from Francois Pienaar, the friendliest divorce ever and having ‘Bob in Luton’ trying to brand him racist on Twitter. David Flatman is more than just a pretty face.

The south Devon town Brixham is famed for its fish. Some £40m of the stuff passes through its market every year, making it the biggest English port supported by a fleet of boats that’s also the country’s biggest. For a town of not even 20,000 people, it certainly punches.

Every weekday morning, the place for fish talk is Tides, a café where everyone knows everyone, and everyone works with or around fish. Today, though, there’s a non-regular in town, rolling up on a Triumph Rocket – which has the ‘biggest engine on a production bike’ – and ordering a plate of eggs and a coffee to keep the protein coming, even years after his rugby playing days have ended.

David Flatman has a place in Devon, just fifteen minutes further down the coast, but not in the flashy, Putney-by-Sea that is Salcombe, but at nearby Kingsbridge, pretty enough but far less glamorous than its yachty coastal neighbour. “A lot of people would assume you need a lot of cash to buy a second home in Devon,” says David. “But it’s an ex-council house and it costs me less every year in mortgage payments than it would to stay for two weeks in Salcombe – in fact, not even Salcombe, just two weeks in Devon.”

He’s been holed out in Devon for weeks as he prepares to return to our screens as the informed, voice of reason on BT Sport. We were going to be meeting earlier in the week, but Tom Shanklin decided to pay him a visit with his family.

The bike is the first topic of conversation. “I waited until I finished playing to get a license because I’m not very good on two wheels,” he admits. “I’m not very original with my tastes, I’m a bloke who likes sport, cars, motorbikes, watches, I love all that stuff. I’ve wasted a lot of money on that stuff in my life. 

“Cars, I’m verging on obsessive,” he says. “But more into 80s and 90s, I love Land Rovers, Range Rovers, old BMWs, and I love Porsches – I’ve bought three 911s in the past that I couldn’t afford, and regret selling all of them. My tastes aren’t mega expensive, no Lambo or anything. My girlfriend got me an old 3-series BMW for my 40th.”

His two daughters, eight and ten, love it in Devon, and although he’s no longer with their mum, they’ve arguably got the most amicable divorce ever. “We don’t have a divorce like anyone else’s really,” he says. “Pro sport is an interesting examination of finding out who you are because you’re pushed really hard in certain areas, and I found I was the man I thought I was in some ways, and not in other ways. You are who you are.

“But I think divorce when you have children, teaches you me more about yourself than anything I’ve ever been through. Divorce taught me how to be a parent, a man and a grown-up.

“It’s an unpleasant situation but my ex-wife and I are nice people, so we were like ‘this is going to happen, so there’s no reason for anyone to hate anyone, do we agree that we put the children first?’ So let’s just remember that every time we make a decision. So we have this super-chilled relationship where, for instance, I was supposed to be taking the kids back earlier but I had to do this [interview] and forgot to tell her, so I just get a text saying ‘oi where are the kids?’ And I just messaged back saying ‘sorry mate, I forgot I had this thing, can I bring them back tomorrow?’ and it’s all okay.

“It changed me massively,” he says of the divorce. “I don’t think I was bad person before, but it has made me such a better person. It’s about whether or not you’re able to zoom out and get perspective, even when the pressure is on you, anxiety is high. I’m not an anxious bloke, but there were periods in 2018 when everyone was saying ‘oh you’ve lost weight, what’s your fitness regime?’. I lost four stone in six months from pure stress, 22 to eighteen stone, purely from stress and separating from my wife. So at eighteen stone people thought I looked unwell!”.

Still living in Bath, David says he rarely goes 24 hours without seeing his girls. “I live about 30 seconds from them,” he says. “We don’t have a custody arrangement; we deleted the whole custody section, so I see them every day. We don’t have ‘these are daddy’s days, these are mummy’s’, it’s whatever works for us around our jobs.

“It’s not perfect, it’s just about being kind, if you can just be kind you get so much further.”

The former Bath prop is exactly as you’d expect him to be in person. He’s got a familiarity that makes you think you’ve known for years and his reasoned approach to situations on the rugby field – at least now as a commentator – seems to be reflected in all other aspects of his life. Although even when trying to say something nice, he can come unstuck – especiallyon the anti-social pit of despair that is Twitter. “I hate Twitter,” he says, “I quite like a lot of it, but the things I hate, I hate so much that I talked to my agent about six months ago about getting rid of social media.”

In a social media world of extremes, being in the middle is difficult. “Victory is not about one side winning and one side being declared losers – I’m paraphrasing here from a saying so famous I can’t remember it – but it’s about compromise and meeting in the middle with everyone feeling like they’re giving a bit. So I don’t mind Twitter in the sense that not everyone agrees with me, I never mind people disagreeing. 

“I tweeted something recently that I thought was a really nice thing to tweet, it was about my kids waving to the police and the police waving back, and I thought it was so nice that I tweeted something about my kids loving the police, they waved to them and they waved back.

“A couple of people said there was something hideous about this, about it being alright for me, because I’m white. Even Ugo Monye was like ‘these people are full of shit, lovely tweet, glad they waved back’.

“My first instance was ‘bugger off, as if I’m racist’, but my girlfriend saw it and said ‘what are you doing? Think about the current climate, think about police brutality, Black Lives Matter, and how easy you’ve got it – you live in Bath, wear chinos  and boat shoes, middle class children, you are exactly the person that is protected by the police, you are not someone who is disengaged. You have to realise that, while nobody can think you’re racist, but you have misjudged the tone’ – and I think she was right. A week or so later somebody else saw it and replied, and I said, ‘I think you’re right, I think I misjudged it, I shouldn’t have written it’.

“But as soon as I said, ‘you’re right’, she said ‘delete it then’ but I wasn’t going to do that, it’s there, I said it, and this is all about learning and I’m as open minded about anyone who isn’t like me, as anyone could possibly be.

“But Bob on his sofa down in Luton doesn’t see that, he just thinks, ‘yeah get him, we can get him, we can call him racist and justify it’. Well, you’re not actually. But they love it, they love getting in a fight on Twitter and I’m just not interested in fighting on Twitter, it doesn’t form part of my week.”

He grew up in Kent, a mum from Durham, a dad from Thornton Heath, and they lived in Maidstone. “It was quite rough, there was lot of scrapping in the town,” he says. “I didn’t get into that many scrapes, but there was a high  concentration of travellers, some particularly violent, and it meant by the time I was sixteen or seventeen I stopped going out because I was targeted.

“Bald head, thick neck, it was always ‘look at that prick’. I also think from about fifteen I was worried about getting hurt in fights which would mean that I couldn’t play rugby any more, and I’d also had a couple of mates who got quite badly hurt.”

Some Maidstone nights stand out more than others. “One night we came out of a nightclub, and there was a bit of an atmosphere,” he explains, “you could either walk down an alleyway and there are police, or you duck down an alley where it’s really dark.

“We usually went the safe way with the lights, but there were these guys there that looked like they were waiting for someone’s head to kick in, so we went the dark way and there was a bloke there with a leather jacket, holding a gun. He said to us, ‘fuck off, you’re going the wrong way’ so we had no choice, we had to go the other way.

“The lads down there had seen us go the other way and been turned back, and they were just waiting, fifteen of them, they were 25 and we were sixteen. What do we do here?

“The bouncers came out, we thought they were going to take care of us, but they didn’t. Then, luckily, a bloke came out of the pub next door with a chainsaw and said ‘come with me lads’, and shouted at the other lads, ‘if you touch them, I’ll cut your fucking heads off’, and started the chainsaw.

“People say about living in the Bronx, but remove the guns and Maidstone couldn’t have been much different then, it was just brutal.

“My parents moved out seventeen years ago, and I’ve never been back since. I do not miss that place at all.”

Maidstone had also been his first rugby club, but when too many games got cancelled, the very committed thirteen-year-old David moved to the stronger Sevenoaks club up the M20. “I was desperate to play, and I remember having six or seven weeks with no games,” he says. “It broke me, so it was a big thing at thirteen, to leave my childhood club, and go to somewhere with 40 kids and they’re all trying to win the Kent Cup, I just thought this was good, this is what I want.”

Similarly, with school, a lot of games were cancelled, which meant he’d hit the gym instead. “By the time I got to sixteen I’d been lifting weights for eighteen months,” he says. “My dad, who’s an educational psychologist, looks back now and thinks I had a version of depression because my mood was so altered for months and months.

“In the end they let me stay home for one day a week, I hated it so much, they said ‘don’t go in on Friday’ to try and give me something to look forward to because I didn’t have the rugby. They asked where I’d go to for sixth form if I could go anywhere and I said Dulwich College, best team in the country and I’m always reading about them.

“My parents sold both family cars to pay for me to go to Dulwich College.”

Dulwich College led to Saracens, aged eighteen. “I arrived there with two others from Dulwich in 1998, and in the gym not only were we not that far behind the seasoned pros, but we were ahead of some of them. The programme at Dulwich was mega.

“Day one was this horrible endurance circuit and we had 20 push-ups, 20 seconds off, 20 push-ups, 20 seconds off, until you fold. Richard Hill would go forever, and in my group, it was me and Francois Pienaar, who always did them on his fists. At the end, everyone else had stopped and it was me and him. He did more than me, but I almost felt I had to stop before he did.

“We then had to do wrestling and I was with Francois, and I accidently ducked down and head-butted him right on the bridge of his nose and split his face. He smacked me a couple of times, uppercuts, and I remember thinking he’d broken my nose or jaw or something – my face really, really hurt, but I pretended it didn’t.

“He then had a chat before the afternoon session and said, ‘people like Flats, that sort of attitude, he is going to play for England’. The afternoon was running and I got absolutely blasted, I thought I was having an asthma attack and I said to the fitness coach, ‘it’s my asthma’, and he said ‘it’s not mate, you’ve just  got the lungs of a fucking field mouse fella, you got to grow them’, so I had to keep running and I was miles off.”

“My first ever live scrum session was against Paul Wallace, straight after the Lions, best tighthead in the world. Flankers alternating were Francois Pienaar and Richard Hill, we had Tony Diprose in the team, unbelievable, Danny Grewcock, Tony Copsey, Scott Murray…

“Why didn’t we achieve? It wasn’t about attitude; we went pretty hard... I don’t know, the Leicester team at the time had a particular chemistry that worked well, and I can’t help thinking it was to do with our training – did we do enough fitness, were we aggressive enough, was our coaching good enough? Not sure. I remember going to England and John Wells, the ex-Tiger, was coaching and I came back and Francois Pienaar asked what it was like, and I said it was a different level. He told us where to put our heads in lineouts, told us to finish our lifts, not just lift and drop, Wellsy was very technical, but he was where the standard should have been.

“Francois is a legend, but he didn’t go on to be a career coach. I look back and people think it’s all about the players, but in a game with so many facets, so many different physiques, coaching is so important. That’s the sole reason I left Saracens and went to Bath – because Michael Foley had signed as forwards coach, and I’d heard from loads of people that his attention to detail was off the chart. 

“That was what I needed because I wasn’t a naturally talented kid, I was a naturally strong kid, and I was up for it, but I was stagnating. I played every game; I’d played 100 games or something by the time I was 21.”

Before joining Bath, he also had another legend of the game to contend with, Buck Shelford. “That was a time when it was seen as the best way to run a rugby club to get the biggest names possible,” he explains. “Because they wouldn’t be big names unless they were brilliant. But there’s a big difference between being a great number eight and being a great DoR or coach it’s got nothing to do with how good you were at rugby.

“The first few times you address the team, they will shut up and listen because you’re a legend but you can lose that credit very quickly and with Buck we were, being polite, miles off.

“He did a Sky Sports interview after a game and said we had no natural leaders and that was our problem and then Kyran Bracken, our captain, came in for next interview, and was asked ‘what do you make of that?’ Kyran said, ‘Pot Kettle’.

“Buck said in one meeting that people are ripping us apart in the press, and one player, think it was Kris Chesney, said ‘they’re your quotes, they’re quoting you’ - he was the one ripping us up in the press.”

Despite being a regular in the side, after a five-month lay-off, he was told by the coach to start looking around as there may not be a contract option. “I was like ‘shit, really?’. The CEO then called me in and says, ‘what are you thinking about your contract?’. I said, ‘well Buck said I wasn’t needed here’.  And he was like ‘what? We definitely want you, don’t leave, we’re going to offer you a contract’. I went back to Buck and he said, ‘I thought you were Nick, the other guy, sorry, wrong prop’.

“I feel bad saying these things cause he’s a great player, and icon, probably the best-ever number eight, but he wasn’t cut out to be a head coach for a Premiership rugby club, and neither am I.”

He left Saracens to join Bath in 2003, but not before having doubted his future in the game. “Five years into Sarries, I thought I could stop, and I’d be fine,” he admits. “My body was breaking, I’d played too many games too young and I could have probably gone and worked in a bank and had a heart attack at 35.

“But I ended up speaking to him and Foley was  a grand master of a coach. It made me so much better, but unfortunately the injuries I got at Sarries halted me along the way.

“I tended to get injured when I knew I was getting better, I’d be in contention for an England spot and get injured again. I’d get back on tour, ‘you’re going to start against the All Blacks’, then get injured again.”

He’d won eight caps for England during his time at Saracens, seven from the bench, and although he didn’t know it, he wasn’t going to add to them. His last cap, against Argentina in 2002, was his finest. “I had a good game in what was a very tough place to go and play in those days,” he says. “Completely by accident I did a sidestep in midfield and gave Phil Christophers an offload and it was a match-winning try – best thing I ever did. France had won the Grand Slam, and France toured and played Argentina the week before and Argentina crushed them up front. We beat them.”

Following the tour, he injured his shoulder against his future side Bath, and he began a sequence of operations. “That was it,” he says, “five shoulder reconstructions, four Achilles ops, elbow reconstructions, it’s  just annoying. 

“I’ve probably lifted too many weights,” he admits. “Even now, given the choice, I’d lift weights five days in a row, and you shouldn’t do that, but I just love it. 

“I don’t care that I got injured, that I got eight caps when I could have got more, the only thing that frustrates me is that I got injured when I knew I was getting better.

“By the time I got back I wasn’t the same, so I never quite got to be my best but I still had my career and played for England, played hundreds of Premiership games and played for Bath for ten years or whatever and I’m very lucky.”

Another crucial moment was at Bath, in good form in 2007, the potential of more caps on the horizon again, but having to play tighthead due to an injury crisis. “If my left shoulder hadn’t gone, against Bristol in 2007,” he says of the time he could’ve won more caps.  “The coach said any chance you can play tighthead? I said, ‘mate, I’m not a tighthead, I just don’t like it, but I’ll do it, I’ll have a go, but I can’t promise I’ll be any good’. He said it would be just one week but of course someone didn’t come back and it ended up being four or five games and against Bristol at the Rec, I was playing a front row of Dave Hilton, Mark Regan and Darren Crompton. We did alright and then in the 76th minute, the scrum just slipped in the mud, I felt something go in my shoulder, two reconstructions later and it was never the same, I could never bind properly again.”

At Bath, he won the Challenge Cup and was part of John Connolly’s side that topped the Premiership, but lost to Wasps in the play-off final. In 2012, aged 32, after 160 appearances, he retired. The next job on his CV was a curious one, head of communications  at Bath Rugby.

“That came about because the club tried to fuck me over at the end of my career,” he says. “They decided that I was a liability because my shoulder kept giving way in too many scrums, and couldn’t bind properly, and they were right. Had they said to me, ‘you’ve got two years left on your deal, would you like to stop so we can get someone in who’s not ruined?’ I’d have said ‘yes please’ and kissed them on the lips.

“As it was, they tried to stitch me up. Luckily, I’m generally quite nice to people, so a couple of people on the email loop told me about it and one of them said, ‘this is what they’re trying to do’, and someone left their phone on the table and said ‘you might want to look at those emails, or not, but I’m just going to get a coffee’. 

“This is an hour and a half before kick-off with Wasps. There was a trail of emails which was basically, ‘can we fuck him over and get him out?’. 

“On that trail of emails there were some really good people sticking up for me, saying you shouldn’t treat a guy like Flats like that. 

“The doc said to me an hour and half before kick-off against Wasps at the Rec, ‘I’ve got to test your shoulder range and motion of both shoulders, I can’t tell you why but this needs to happen’ and then someone else came into the medical examining room by the changing rooms and was like, ‘are you doing it now?’ 

“The doc was a hell of a bloke, one of the great blokes, I don’t know what he wrote down, but I passed. 

“After the game some of the people who were trying to fuck me over came into the changing rooms to celebrate the win and didn’t get a very warm reception from me and, six weeks later, they gave me a good job because either they wanted to or they got caught trying to stitch me up. 

“I went into the comms role, there wasn’t really anything to do, I worked hard but that was a club where you might have director after your name but you can’t necessarily make the decisions you want to make. 

“Some of these people I’d call mates now, so you do get over it and it has nothing to do with the boss now, I really respect him, but it wasn’t a nice situation. Everyone who was involved has left now though.”

“After I realised it wasn’t a job for me at Bath, I got in a bit of a shit mood really,” he continues. “I thought I could just leave, so I left with no guaranteed income at all, took a real risk, and backed myself to get enough work on TV.

“And until the pandemic, it was all good,” he explains, “the pandemic has exposed loads of people’s careers, including mine, but that’s okay, it’ll come back. 

“But leaving Bath was a real punt, having always wanted the longest contract for the security, I left a job that I could have had forever, and got well-paid for. I could work the hours I wanted too, but I didn’t enjoy it, so I stopped.”

Work now is a sum of parts: BT Sport, Channel Five, corporate work and his podcast Flats and Shanks. “Joe Rugby offered to buy our podcast, to take it over and pay me and Shanks, it wasn’t a huge amount of money, but we said ‘no’,” he says. “Then someone offered to build a studio for £100k at my house, but Shanks would have to drive to Bath every week. ‘Okay,’ they said, ‘so we’ll build one at Shank’s’, ‘nah I’d have to drive to Cardiff’. ‘We’ll build one at both?’ ‘Nah, one of us would still have to go somewhere’. So we just meet at the M4 services by the bridge and do it in the car. It’s low level and we do it because we like it.

“I annoy Shanks, he doesn’t like how long I talk for,” he explains, “but off the back of that we’ve ended up doing a lot of TV together.”

Whatever he achieved or didn’t achieve on the rugby field, makes no difference to him today. “What I love is that I played for England and my kids couldn’t give a shit,” he says. “Saracens and Bath had some of the greatest players that ever played, and my kids couldn’t give a shit, they just care about what’s for breakfast and that’s the way I like it.

“I’ve got one jersey hanging up in my house and I’m moving in a bit and I probably won’t put it back up. Compared with Bob down the road who played for his local team, I had an amazing career, but compared to a lot of my peers I didn’t, so why do I need to go on about it? About a week after I ended my career, I was completely over it. I loved it but don’t miss it at all.” 

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 11 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.