Marcus Smith

He ‘runs like Forrest Gump’, could’ve been in the next Jonas Brothers, almost played for Tottenham Hotspur and his dad is a country-hopping rugby international. His mum though, gave him the skills. This is Marcus Smith.

It was never in doubt. As long as his mum Suzanne had anything to do with it, Marcus Smith was always going to be something. His brothers, Tomas and Luc, too. Rugby players, footballers, pop stars. “I used to play guitar when I was younger,” explains Marcus. “My mum had this idea that she wanted to make us into a Jonas Brothers sort of thing – my youngest brother (Tomas) used to sing and play the piano, the middle one (Luc) played the drums and then it was me on guitar. I was never a big fan of the Jonas Brothers, but she loved them. She’s quite an ambitious lady and she just always wanted us to do our best whatever we did – she even got my brother a proper microphone to help his singing. I think we managed to play Wonderwall.”

For the moment though, that plan has been shelved. Instead of forming the most unlikely version of The Smiths the world has ever seen, Marcus – now 19, but 18 when we meet – has put the guitar to one side, and is instead pulling the strings of the Harlequins first team [with the drummer, Luc, in the Quins Academy – we don’t yet know if Tomas is going solo]. 

When he’s not doing that, he’s hanging out with the full England squad. 

As an Eddie Jones ‘apprentice’ player, unlike most 18-year-old players in the Premiership, the timetable we’re working around to meet him is not the academy one, but the Six Nations one. First choice with Harlequins since the opening day of the campaign, Marcus’s time has arrived earlier than most. He’s done okay too, topping the Premiership points scorers chart as the season comes to a close. 

The problem with interviewing your typical sporting teenager, is there’s usually only so much to talk about given the general lack of years on the planet. Marcus was born in 1999. The year Manchester United did the treble, the year we thought the Millennium Bug would destroy the world and when, for some reason, B*Witched blamed everything on the weatherman. 

A mere six years ago, Marcus was probably thinking about moving up to big school, contemplating whether or not it was still okay to play with his toys and possibly worrying about being picked on by bigger boys from year 11. Now, the bigger kids are actively picking on him on a weekly basis. And bigger kids rarely get much bigger than the likes of 130kg Nathan Hughes or any other backrow behemoth that fancies a rampage in his direction. 

To tell the story of Marcus, you have to go back to the beginning, to the Philippines – although perhaps a foreword first on Hong Kong. “My dad [Jeremy] moved to Hong Kong from Brighton when he was 28,” explains Marcus. “He met my mum when he was working in a bar and my mum was an air stewardess for Cathay Pacific, they moved to the Philippines and had me and my brothers. 

“I love the Philippines, it’s close to my heart. I was born there, my mum’s from there, it’s a big part of my life – I was there for eight years, longer than I’ve lived here, so it’s massive.”

Home was Manila. A world away from the leafy suburb of Twickenham in which he plies his trade these days – although, for that matter, even Guildford, where he lives and trains, is something of an ‘outback’ when compared to the capital of the Philippines. Officially the most densely populated city on the planet, there are 46,000 people per square mile. Double that of New York City. “It is a bit chaotic,” admits Marcus, perhaps understating somewhat. “The centre is busy because there are loads of people packed into a small area, but when you get to the outskirts – the beaches and then the islands – it’s nice and relaxing.”

The same couldn’t be said for school. “Manila was a lot stricter, they enforced the discipline there,” he says. “If you’re late, you have to look at the wall – it’s proper old-school. You just had to go face-to-face with the wall for ten minutes, like a naughty chair. And, if your nails weren’t cut, there was proper strong discipline. They checked your nails every week. You’d get flicked with a ruler if your nails were too long – I got that once, they were always cut after that.”

While Marcus was learning the importance of a good manicure, he also began his rugby education. This came from a far more familiar task master. “My dad started a rugby school,” he explains. “He was playing rugby with a few other ex-pats at a sports club called Manila Nomads and they all brought their kids down to play rugby. It started with about 12 of us and it’s still going on now  – I think there’s a couple of hundred there.”

Was dad any good? “He actually played for Hong Kong a couple of times ,” says Marcus. “And then he was selected for the Philippines when we moved  there – he keeps telling me I’m still behind him on the international side. He played wing, he used to be quick apparently – but not anymore.”

So he takes after his dad? “I’m a bit of both, I’m disorganised like my mum, but I can get quite angry like my dad – we snap quickly,” he admits. “My mum captained her football team when she was younger so she always teases my dad saying ‘Marcus got all his skills from me’. My dad doesn’t like that. She was sporty though, she was a fast runner too.”

Next, came Singapore. Having been to a local school in Manila and starting to learn the Tagalog language, in the island city-state he went to an international school and his rugby education was cranked up a notch. Selected for a Singapore Barbarians side he toured Australia and Indonesia and, even when playing locally for his club Centaurs, he started to feel the true impact of the game. “There were a lot of bigger kids in Singapore,” he says, “there were some South African boys who were very big – dense bones. It was hard against them, I think their dads instilled it in them from a young age to never give an Englishman a chance.”

Through trips to the sevens in both Hong Kong and Singapore, Marcus was also exposed to more international rugby, and soon found his favourites. “I used to love watching Fiji,” he says, “the way they move the ball and run about with smiles on their faces. That’s how I like to play the game, always with a smile on my face, because at the end of the day it’s just about having fun for me.”

Family is everything. Every anecdote about his life is peppered with a tale about mum or dad. For instance, his dad bragging about his former glories: “he’s always going on about when he played against Sean Fitzpatrick in Singapore.” Or his mum being the brothers’ stylist: “she opened a hair salon in Manila – and still cuts our hair. We try and say what we want but she always adds her little touches, sometimes you try to argue but it always ends up alright. She buys our clothes too, although she’s made some mistakes – like those three-quarter length trousers that nobody looks good in.”

Given his age, it’s perhaps not surprising that he relies so heavily on his mum but, more significantly, it’s the influence of both parents that ensured Marcus always kept his options open, playing both football and rugby every weekend right up until, quite remarkably, three years ago. “When I first came back to England I preferred football,” he says, “I played a lot of football back in Asia and my mum wanted me to be a footballer because she thought rugby was too rough and aggressive for me because I was pretty small.”

The Smiths arrived in Jeremy’s home town of Brighton when Marcus was 13. Still playing both sports, the decision to choose rugby over football, actually came from an unlikely source – Tottenham Hotspur football club. “Football was definitely my sport until I was 15, but Tottenham broke me,” he admits. “They watched me for a couple of games then I went up to the training ground for a two-hour trial – it was a bit of fitness and then a full 11-a-side game against their academy side. I thought I did alright, but they told us straight up we didn’t make it. We finished the session, they invited all the parents and read out names with about three or four going into another room. The rest of us they told together ‘you’ve not made it’ – just like that. I was crying as we drove back to Brighton and I rang my mum as soon as it finished because she was back in the Philippines – it was four in the morning there and I was crying down the phone, I was gutted, proper gutted. She was upset too – but only because she doesn’t like me being upset.”

Marcus doesn’t talk like a professional sportsman. He doesn’t feel the need to roll off the clichés or avoid saying the wrong thing, he’s blunt and honest, like the teenager he is. Even though there are undoubtedly countless rugby players who would’ve loved to be a footballer – not least for the millions of pounds involved – few would admit it. Marcus does. “I think I shouldn’t have given up that quickly,” he says of his football career, “looking back I should’ve given it another crack, because if Tottenham had wanted to look at me, then you’d hope a few other clubs would’ve wanted me. But you don’t know.”

As a student of the rugby-loving Brighton College, his second sport had been progressing too. Before he’d completed even a single season of rugby in England, he was invited to train at Harlequins. “It was amazing, Quins were champions of England at the time and their academy was doing well,” he recalls. “A lot of the first team came from that academy and they were saying it could be us next.”

Playing for Brighton College, he’d also found the position he would make his own. Initially a scrum-half, he was now a fly-half ‘because Jonny was’. Like many England fans, his dad was the ‘biggest Jonny Wilkinson fan’ and even though Marcus was only four when it happened, the obsession had rubbed off on him having seen the Rugby World Cup final of 2003 countless times – ‘dad had it on loop’. Had he not been named after another rugby player (his dad’s friend and former Harlequin Mark Appleton), Marcus suspects he would be Jonny Smith. 

Being rejected by Tottenham spurred Marcus on and he soon got his reward. “I got into Quins soon after the trial and started doing a lot more rugby than football and I found my love for rugby.”

Rugby started to find its love for him too. First with Sussex age groups, then South of England camps and then England under-16s – albeit the latter route was one taken via Yorkshire. “There were trials for South East but I didn’t get in,” he admits. “Luckily my head coach at the school knew the coach of the North and when their fly-half got injured, I got called up.”

Not everyone was impressed by his arrival. “I remember my first session in Yorkshire,” he says, “and I got there ridiculously early to make a good impression and all these Yorkshire boys would come in and look at me funny – I could see them speaking about me in the corner but I just kept my head down.”

Once he started playing, things changed. His performances against the Midlands, France, Scotland and Wales, earned him not only the approval of his team-mates, but also a call-up to the England U16s. Already destined to be a Harlequin, at aged 15, months after the Tottenham trial, he was now an England age grade international.

Attempting to win Matt Dawson’s old England kitbag isn’t something that appeals to many. But it doesn’t take much of a trawl of his social media to reveal Marcus’s failed attempt. He’s gone from fandom to stardom so quickly, that his timelines are probably littered with things he may wish he’d not posted. His pinned Tweet is one from George Ford in 2016, telling him, ‘Great to meet you Marcus, hell of a talent, keep working hard mate!’ Less than 18 months on, the two were sharing the same England training pitch. “I always looked up to him when I was younger,” he explains, “I saw myself as a similar build and style and tried to emulate him on the pitch a little bit. Then, when England were down training in Brighton, I got invited to join them and it was unbelievable. I had to try so hard to not be starstruck. I tweeted him [George] to say thank you, he Tweeted back and I was buzzing. I was in a maths lesson when I got the message, it was amazing.”

There aren’t many young kids who could keep their minds on long division when they’d just been invited by Eddie Jones to train with the full England squad, but Marcus managed it, even if, by his standards, he ‘isn’t that academic’. “I was alright [academically], I did alright,” he says. “I always worked hard but was never that clever.”

What were your GCSE results? “Three A*s, six As and a B.”

Yeah, terrible. “Brighton College is very academic,” he responds. “A lot of my mates did better than me but I was happy with mine because I also had all my sport going.”

A-Levels? “I did maths, politics, business and economics, but I dropped economics. I got an A and two Bs.”

Favourite subject? “I love maths, because I like a challenge,” he explains. “I don’t like subjects where this answer could be right or this one could be right, I like subjects that are black and white so it’s either 1) or 2).”

A decisive mind is a useful trait and even before he signed pro forms, Harlequins wasted no time in making the most of his skillset on the field. “I played one A-league game when I was at school and I got invited to a few sessions before that,” he says. “I had my first session and I was sat next to [Marland] Yarde, it was unbelievable. I was in a changing room with my mates one week and the next week I was in the same changing room as Yarde, [Chris] Robshaw, Danny Care, Nick Evans, all of them. It was a weird experience, but, yeah, it was cool. 

“At Quins everyone has a bench and a peg with your name on it and below your seat is a rack where you hang all your boots – I remember walking in and there were hundreds and hundreds of boots there. And I love boots, so seeing all of them in different colours and seeing what Danny Care and all them wore was probably the biggest thing for me.”

And he means it. When you ask him the best thing about being a professional, ‘free adidas boots’ is the answer with general ‘stash’ next on the list of favourites. All in all, this professional rugby lark is pretty straight-forward for the teenager from the Philippines – especially when compared to his exams. “I didn’t feel in control,” he says of his exams. “Whereas with football and rugby I always felt that even if I didn’t train properly I could still make up for it in some way during the game, but in an exam if you aren’t prepared you are a goner. I remember in the lead up to my GCSEs, I got three Ds and my mum went proper hard at me. It was a nightmare, my phone got taken off me and I had to work really hard. It worked out alright though – she always knows how to get the best out of me.”

By contrast, making his Harlequins debut in front of 80,000 at Twickenham was easy.

“When I was just trying to kick a ball during the warm-up there was a camera literally right in front of me – a metre away –and I was having to kick over it, I remember thinking, ‘this is serious’. When JK [John Kingston] told me I was starting, I saw it as an opportunity, I was obviously a bit nervous. It was a big stage, it was my first big game for Quins but I was more excited than under pressure because I felt I had nothing to lose, I didn’t have to do anything to impress anyone. I didn’t have to do much to have a good game. I’m getting more pressure now because a lot of people are speaking about me, but I just try and blank it out. My dad always says I play better when I’m under pressure and I have people watching me, so I just try and enjoy it.”

His biggest and most vocal fan is, of course, his mum – Suzanne, which can be a rollercoaster when your son is playing against guys twice his size. “She gets more nervous than I do,” he says, “my mate was sat next to her at the double header and I had to come off because I was concussed. I got hit and my neck was all over the place and she was crying in the stand. 

“She’s a big shouter at games too,” he continues, “I heard her once at a Quins game, she was shouting her lungs out when I was running. She loves Forrest Gump and she always wants me to run like Forrest Gump – she’s shouting ‘run, run, run’. She even texts me say to ‘run like Forrest Gump’ before games. She’s always there on the sidelines, but I love it really. It gives me a boost.”

Marcus continues to live the double life of a teenager and first teamer. “At training I speak to Danny Care and Mike Brown because I’m playing with them, but when I leave the club I go back to the academy house, which is basically two three-bedroom houses next to each other. 

“I would say it’s messy,” he says. “It’s got a bit of character with six of us living there. The kitchen’s not the best, there’s socks everywhere, dirty washing all over the living room. One of the guys – I won’t mention his name – sometimes gets his mum to do his bedding to replace the sheets. We’ve helped him a couple of times, but she’s come to do it a couple of times too and then taken him out for a cup of coffee afterwards.”

Is he house trained? “My dad used to lose his temper  with me because I was so disorganised, but I’m getting better. I’ve started to cook a little bit, I can do spaghetti Bolognese, that’s a good start. And smoked salmon in the oven with vegetables, pretty easy stuff. My mum bought me a rice cooker for my 17th birthday for when I lived on my own and I love it.”

With most of his team-mates having already had families and generally at a different stage of life, Marcus acknowledges that while being ‘good mates’ they won’t all be his ‘life mates’ because of the differences, even in the fashion stakes. “Tim Visser keeps telling me he can hook me up with Burton, but I’m like ‘nah mate, I don’t want to dress like my dad’,” he says.

Those closest to him remain those he grew up with, although he’s starting to notice a few subtle differences emerging. “I feel grown up because I’m getting a salary now,” he says. “A lot of my mates aren’t earning yet because they’re still at uni, but I’m paying tax and all that – it’s pretty cool.”

Having fun the HMRC-way and fronting up to the rigours of Premiership rugby are perhaps his only steps into adulthood.  “The guys I live with are still pretty young at heart  and when I get home, we play a bit of Xbox and just kind of do what teenagers do. We’re even more childish than my uni mates because they’ve got work to do.

“I don’t see rugby as work at the moment,  I love it – I still feel like I’m 16, playing a bit of rugby and then coming home and playing my Xbox. We go out for dinner and it’s a good laugh.”

Where do you go? “Wagamama maybe, there’s a good road in Guildford with a load of restaurants: Wagamamas, Nandos… I would love a Nando’s Black Card, how do I get one? Has Maro got one?”

Not knowing the answer to either question, we move on to life as a first teamer. “I’m quite a chatty guy,” he says, “so I’m not afraid to open my mouth. The coaches are always saying, ‘Marcus you can tell them whatever you want to see, you’re the ten, you’re the general’. 

“The physical side has been the hardest, especially recovering after games,” he admits. “You get battered because you’re a fly half, but I’m trying to get stronger. When I came in I was a bit doughy, a bit soft, but I felt like I was getting stronger as the season went on.”

Is he looking for big gains?  “Eddie told me not to be a certain weight, just be strong. He said, ‘whatever weight you are, just get super strong and super fast’. That’s all he wanted. Don’t focus on the weight because if you’re miles under it, you’ll start eating the wrong things  to get up to it.” 

Never likely to drive defenders back in defence, he instead opts to “sprint off the line and try to act as a speed bump – the physics mean I’m never going to stop them dead am I? Tuilagi is what 100 and something? I’m 80 kilos. The odds are against me, but I try and slow them down.”

Considering, in our own words, his ‘lack of years on the planet’, Marcus has plenty to talk about. 

For instance, let’s discuss the ‘official’ YouTube Marcus Smith compilation? “My mate made it, I didn’t want him to post it though, I just wanted it for myself to see what I do well. I’m a confidence player and when I’m happy and smiling I play lot better so I do like watching it – probably a bit too much!”

How about your plans after rugby? “I want to start my own business when I’m older, I don’t know what – my brother’s into cooking, so maybe a restaurant…” Or? “Maybe a pilot, it’s my mum’s influence.” 

The importance of religion? “My mum’s family is very religious but my dad’s side isn’t, but we do go to church as often as we can – my dad’s not very religious.”

Who follows you on Instagram? “At the start of the season I had no big dogs following me, then I played Wasps in the third week and followed Danny Cipriani – and he followed me back! Things like that give you confidence, if he’s going to follow you, he clearly thinks something of you.”

Do you get on with Danny Care? “I room with him as they try and put 9s and 10s together. He’s funny. We watch Black Mirror together, it’s a weird show. We watch some episodes and look at each other and say ‘what’s going on here?’. It’s nice to room with him though, he’s good. He’s a legend.”

What about that ‘Big Game’ hit on Luther Burrell eh? “He was off balance, but I did him quite nicely.”

His Harlequins initiation song? “I sang the one from Joseph, what’s it called? Everyone all joined in so it was good. Dino (Lamb) sang Jingle Bells for his and nobody joined in and it got a bit awkward. Joseph was a good choice though – Any Dream Will Do! That’s it, that’s what it’s called. Jason Donovan.”

Erm, showering with Adam Jones? “He played in A League and I was in the shower with him and I was 17 at the time, he said: ‘I don’t think this is allowed Marcus, you’re half my age’.”

Either way, at this rate, Marcus is still way ahead of schedule on the rugby front. What’s the next goal? “You’re never fully content,” he says, “that’s something my mum and dad drove into me – to keep going and never stop learning. I’m always setting goals. At the start of season, it was to make my debut at Quins – that was my goal because I was meant to be on loan at Esher. That goal changed to starting week-in, week-out and not just be a one-off. Now it’s a case of pushing that onto the next season and playing for England.” 

Every goal, Marcus puts into his little notebook, crossing off each one as it’s achieved. At this rate, he’s going to be needing a new book soon. 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Ben McDade

This extract was taken from issue 2 of Rugby Journal

To order the print journal, click here