Serge Betsen

Three years after losing on his debut to Italy, Serge Betsen rose from the bench against England in the first-ever Six Nations. He was given less than 15 minutes to prove his worth, to prove that leaving him out for three years was a mistake. But, in a haze of emotion, he was sent off almost immediately. France lost, and coach Bernard Laporte told the media Serge would never play for his country again.

Above the Wasps FC clubhouse in Twyford Avenue, west London, Serge Betsen has an office right next door to the one once occupied by Sir Ian McGeechan during very different times for a club that’s now based in Coventry. Downstairs, filling the walls are memories of what Wasps, and indeed rugby itself, once was. 

It’s from here that Serge runs Serge Betsen Rugby, a name that could just as easily be given to a brand of rugby as a commercial brand. Whatever time does, for anyone who witnessed him playing, they’ll know his style. Some of us can still hear it, the sound of hefty thuds ringing around stadiums; others can probably still feel it too, bruises never quite healed and joints and bones never quite being the same. 

As the morning cleaners buzz around, Serge tells us of his first cap for France more than 20 years ago, in 1997. “The French team had just won the Grand Slam [in 1997] and they changed a lot of players for a game against Italy,” he recalls, “they wanted to start with a new generation, to try out new people.

“I only got ten minutes at the end and we lost 40-32 in Grenoble. It took me three years to get back into the squad – although I always say we helped Italy get into the Six Nations, because they joined just after and I think that result helped them.”

Serge was 22, but Italy’s gain, was his loss. “It took me three years to get back into the team, although I didn’t really know why I’d got picked in the first place,” he admits.  “I think it was because the French Universities side had just won the world championship.”

Whether he’d been surprised by his selection or not, the door had been opened for him – the only problem now was that it had been closed again and he was none the wiser. 

“I never heard anything from anybody,” he says of his post-debut feedback. “Nobody was saying, ‘okay Serge, this is your profile, this is what you need to do’, you didn’t get that interaction from the French team. I was getting more frustrated, wondering when they were going to call me again.”

He made the wider squad for the 1999 Rugby World Cup but never made it to the tournament. It was only the arrival of Bernard Laporte after the world cup had ended, that brought an end to Serge’s exile. 

Salvation came in the 2000 Six Nations, ironically, the first with Italy involved. “I was so happy to be in again, I just wanted to show that I’d learned,” he says.

“I was on the bench for Wales, it was my 11th selection on the bench, but this time I got on.”

Then it was England. “I knew the rivalry, I knew the challenge but what happened was very, very bad for me,” he says. “We were winning the game, I was on the pitch, I came on and after one minute and 30 seconds and I got a yellow card. 

“I didn’t listen to the referee, I had a scrum cap on and I was so focused, the referee blew for a penalty, I didn’t go back ten and I tackled straight away – I wanted to do things, I wanted to tackle, I wanted to smash everything, I wanted to make sure the French team would win the game. But I got a yellow card, was off for ten minutes and we lost the game.

“After the game, I didn’t get any feedback, nothing, the coach told the media – and I have to say Bernard Laporte was very harsh – that I’d never play for the French team ever again. I’d let down my team-mates, the dream was over and I thought I’d never get picked for France again.”

Kumba, in south west Cameroon, is the start of Serge’s story. Serge Betsen Tchoua was born here in 1974 and had an upbringing no different to any other Cameroonian child. He’d play football, embark on the two-hour school walk every day, and was brought up by his maternal grandmother. “My mum wasn’t there, my dad was in and out, but you didn’t really think about who brought you up,” he says. “It’s quite common in Africa that you grow up with different members of your family, so you don’t ask questions.”

That soon changed when his mum returned to Kumba to take Serge and his brothers to France. 

Like many people in Africa, or across the third world, Serge’s mum had left Cameroon for Paris in search of work, sending money home to the family while saving money to bring them with her. “She was a hairdresser and had a sister in France,” says Serge. “My grandmother died and that’s one of the reasons my mother came to take me back.”

Serge, one of seven, initially returned with two brothers and a female cousin. “When I moved to Europe I started asking questions,” he says, “Why are these things happening? I was really frustrated at having to leave my friends to go to a new world – I was angry at my mum for leaving me and then coming back to take me away.

“I had all this uncertainty, it’s still something I think about now, but it is what is,” he concedes. “Before then, I felt I just had a normal life; going to school – we’d have to go mornings and evenings because they had to find ways to fit 100 students into one class – and just having a normal African life. It wasn’t a dangerous place, everything seemed okay and nothing major happened really.”

He rarely returns. “I don’t really go back very often,” he admits. “It’s very expensive to get there and it’s hard to find the time. When I got married in 2000, I decided to take my wife down, she’s from La Rochelle, and that was the last time I saw my dad. Because I grew up with my mum’s family, I knew him, but never really got to know him properly. After we visited, he passed away.”

Moving to Paris was a challenge on many levels. “I knew nothing about France,” he says, “I had no idea what I was going to find there, what my life was going to be, or how I was going to get there – I’d never even seen a plane before. 

“I landed in a new city with different views, a different atmosphere in every sense, and then there was weather, oh it was cold, it was winter and I remember freezing!”

Despite his initial reaction, he was glad to be with his mum. “I was pleased to be with her every day as I started to realise why she had been missing,” he says. “It was a challenge though, I didn’t really see my mum because she was working so much. 

“I wanted to protect her and, because I was the youngest, I was always listening to her, supporting her, trying to be the perfect son.”

Did she ever explain why she left? “My mum is not a person with a lot of words,” he says, “she does things, she doesn’t talk about them. She was driven to do things and put us in a good situation for school, and that’s what we needed, but she wasn’t there as a result. It was difficult to talk to her and ask questions, so I tried to be more proactive rather than asking questions.”

In Clichy, in northern Paris, Serge and his family lived on a one-way street, the name of which translated as ‘lucky’ but, perhaps ironically, was also home to a cemetery, “it was very quiet,” he says.

Either cleaning or hairdressing, his mum worked all hours to feed and clothe the family – for which she paid a further price in recent years with a number of back operations – this also gave Serge a certain amount of freedom.

It was when playing at a local athletics track, that a 12-year-old Serge got chatting to an older boy who invited him to come back later that day to try something called ‘rugby’ for the first time. His two older brothers were twins and one was a keen footballer, something Serge was eager to avoid. “I didn’t want to follow him,
I wanted to do my own thing,” he says. “I hadn’t even heard of rugby or seen a rugby ball,” he says, ‘yet for the first time ever, I wasn’t late and turned up at 3pm. They explained all the rules and were so patient, it just really struck me how welcoming the people were.”

At the club, he made friends hailing from all over the world, from Sri Lanka to Algeria to Tunisia to Vietnam, where his new best friend came from. “It was like United Colors of Benetton,” he says.

His tackling education began courtesy of a 12-year-old girl called Corrine. “She taught me how to tackle,” he explains. “She was the sister of the boy who’d asked me down to play. It was actually a family affair, as their dad was the president of the club.

“It’s funny because I had this conversation with Olivier Magne many times and he said it was more typical to be taught passing and basic skills first, but for me it was tackling. For our club tackling was very important, I think it was because the president felt we didn’t always have the skill or physicality, so we had to make up for it. 

“He would always say, ‘I don’t care if you score a try or win, I just want you to show that you have pride in your team, show that you will die for your teammates’.”

Given lessons like this explains a lot of Serge’s passion for contact and he was a fast learner, being selected for the Paris district side aged 14. It was only when the small matter of parental permission slips arose that Serge hit the first hurdle of his rugby career. “Mum didn’t really want us to go outside of the house because she wasn’t there, she was working, so I started to do rugby without telling her. 

“I’d always be back before she was, because she was working long hours, and I wasn’t doing bad things, I was playing sport, but she found out when I had to get paper signed by parents.

“It was a big crisis,” he recalls, “She was really angry, I was crying, because I wanted to carry on, and in the end my uncle stepped in, saying she needed to let me go.”

She agreed on the proviso his school work didn’t suffer. “She said, if school is not going well, then you’re not going to rugby,” says Serge. 

No sooner had he gained parental permission, a broken cheekbone tested his mother’s resolve. “I’d managed to get a knee to my face,” he says, “the hospital was right next to the pitch so it was good for that, but I had to have surgery and mum was really upset. 

“Most of the people within my family were saying that rugby was brutal and dangerous, it was ‘what are you doing, you should be playing football and earning a lot of money!’ But I didn’t care about money, it was about passion, the atmosphere, the people around this sport.

“I couldn’t stop playing,” he continues, “even when I was injured I went to watch my friends playing, but I was crying on the sidelines, I just wanted to be with them.”

A million people are said to attend the Bayonne Festival and in the early-90s, Serge was one of them. He was heading to the northern Basque city to find out what his new university life was going to be like, as he prepared to mix study with rugby at Biarritz. The festival might be infamous for its bullfighting, but it was other activities that made Serge fall in love with the region. “I’d joined Biarritz in the summer and my best friend Steffan was helping me to move down and see where I was going to university,” he explains. “It was when the Bayonne Festival was on and everyone was wearing white and red scarves. We had the beach, sun, surf, drinking, and I was going to join a very big club and do what I’d always dreamt of.”

Staying in the villa within the Biarritz stadium, along with his fellow academy players, Serge took his meals in the clubhouse, where he would get more than a few life lessons. “Pascal Ondarts ran the place,” he says. “He was a prop who’d played at the highest level and been at the 1987 world cup, and he was the boss of the clubhouse where we had our lunch – he looked after us. He was one of the funniest guys ever and was always telling us stories about his playing days.”

With Pascal as his new-found guardian, it was during his first season at Biarritz that he took his mum to her first game – the 1992 Top 14 final – and he discovered a whole new side to her. “It was Serge Blanco’s last game and they lost against Toulon [19-14],” he explains. “I took my mum but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, she was so excited – she was shouting, analysing the game, and then started telling me how much she loved boxing. It turns out she loved fighting when she was younger because she loved the physicality and contact!”  

That season, as an apprentice at the club, Serge had followed every game of the Biarritz campaign. “I’d been to all the matches: the quarter-final when they beat Bayonne in the last minute; the semi-final against Bordeaux and then the final. They were so unlucky to lose that game, but from then I said I wanted to get revenge for my team, I wanted to win that trophy for Biarritz.”

The following season, Blanco, then president, propelled his namesake to the next rung of the career ladder. “I remember he came over to me when I was running in the athletic field and he said, ‘you’re going to be part of the first team’ which was amazing, I’d only been there two years.”

No sooner had he made the Biarritz first team, shortly followed by his French Universities victory, Serge then received his fateful call-up to the national squad against Italy, and we know what happened there and for the three years that followed.

Being told you’ll never play for your country again, makes a player think. It certainly did for Serge. “I’d let me team-mates down, I’d made a mistake and I had to think about what I could do to change all of that,” he says. Inspiration came in the unlikely form of his friend, the centre Sebastien Bonetti, who he knew to be something of a ‘trouble maker – not a focused guy’. Yet he’d witnessed his friend make his debut with incredible ease, totally at odds with what he expected. “He talked to me about psychology and how it had helped him relax,” he recalls.

Fortunately for Serge, Laporte hadn’t stuck to his word, and had selected him for the autumn internationals in 2000, and again for the Six Nations the following year – when Bonetti made his calm debut. But he never started and was given minimal game time from the bench. “I played for the French A team and I realised that emotionally I wasn’t ready to play for France,” he admits. “I was so focused on showing what I was capable of that, I didn’t pay attention to the wider context.”

He began weekly psychology sessions. “I discovered how to relax, how to listen to my body, how to stay calm – people were laughing at me because I started sleeping for short periods just before kick-off.”

His new ‘calm under pressure’ technique paid dividends, when he was finally given his first starting place – against the world champions Australia in 2001, a side full of stars such as Larkham, Gregan, Foley, Burke, Waugh and Kefu.  “We won 14-13 and I had an amazing game,” he says. “After that I was always first choice.”

The Six Nations saw Italy first up, which again wasn’t without its problems. “I’m not sure we underestimated them because we’d lost to them before,” he says, “but we struggled, we really struggled. I remember at half-time, the TV camera was in the changing room, and Bernard Laporte was shouting and everyone got to see that angry face – he used to shout a lot!”

Wales were despatched next, before the third game, England versus France at the Stade de France. 

England had destroyed France 48-19 the year before. “There was a lot of tension, it felt like a ‘crunch game’ atmosphere, and we talked about what happened the previous year, when we got smashed at Twickenham.

“We said we were going to get back at them, show them what we’re capable of, hit them hard in the ruck, in the tackle, challenge them in the setpiece, the scrums, lineouts, all that talk – we were going to show everyone how proud we were to be playing for the national team.”

What happened next is why Serge is just as famous in English rugby circles as he is French; he single-handedly destroyed our golden boy, Jonny Wilkinson, taking down the Rugby World Cup favourites in the process, 20-15. “It’s the game most people talk to me about, against Jonny Wilkinson,” explains Serge, “the way I challenged him to do my own work, and stopped him every time he was carrying the ball. 

“I think these days, the way refereeing is going, I’d have had a red or at the very least a yellow! I came back on the national scene with the right preparation, it showed the results. 

“I was very proud, thinking that I could change things, I could change my destiny. That was one of my proudest moments ever – it was the hardest thing to deliver too. 

“We then won the last game in Ireland, I scored two tries and we won the first-ever Six Nations Grand Slam.

“For the first time ever I was in the media area,” he says. “The guys were waiting for me on the bus and the joke was, ‘why are we waiting for Serge?’ and one of the players said, ‘he still has Jonny Wilkinson on his shoulder’.” 

Laporte never doubted Serge again. “I always showed him I’d be the best I could be,” he says. “What was really positive about his personality compared to other managers, is that he was able to talk to you very hard, very harsh, but then he was always the guy you could have a drink with as a mate – which is something I really respected. Not many managers had that switch.” 

That Serge’s redemption came against England, was pure coincidence. “I remember when we lost the game in 2000, the jury had decided – I was the bad guy, I was the guy who struggled, I was the guy who didn’t make it the way I should’ve.

“I had to dig deep in order to change the mindset, to change the way people saw me, so that I became the guy who didn’t get the yellow cards and who listened to refs. The whole challenge for me wasn’t about Jonny and England, it was about me being able to offer value to the national team, it just happened to be against England.”

Later that year, Serge Betsen did what Serge Blanco hadn’t been able to, and led Biarritz to the Top 14 title, a feat he’d achieve twice more, in 2005 and 2006. He was also nominated for world player of the year. 

The French side was a strong one, with Pelous, Galthié, Rougerie, Harinordoquy, Traille – capable of beating anyone on their day, but it never quite made it at the Rugby World Cups, saving its best moments for the Six Nations. “It was a golden era,” Serge says of his French side, “but it wasn’t without its frustrations. We didn’t win the world cup, we won the Grand Slam three times, the Six Nations five out of seven or eight seasons. 

“I’m proud, but frustrated, because you want to win everything. I played two Rugby World Cup semi-finals, both against England and we lost both. It was hard, especially in 2007, when we were the better side but didn’t finish the job. 

“We got close with Biarritz in the Heineken Cup too, but we lost to Munster in the final. As an athlete I’m pleased with what I achieved but at the same time, I have a scar that’s open because I should have done more – but you can’t go back.”

The next chapter is still being written in England. “I’d challenged myself to retire after winning the world cup,” he says, “but it didn’t go to plan. I didn’t want to finish my career after losing the third-place match against Argentina, I wanted to carry on.

“I’d spoken to Leicester and Bath a year before, but decided to stay, and then Richard Hill, who was at Bristol, invited me down there. I rang Rafa [Ibanez] who was at Wasps to see what he thought of Bristol, if it was a good club, and he said ‘come to Wasps’, and a deal was done.”

Essentially brought in as cover for Tom Rees, who was expected to be away with England for long periods, Serge spent two seasons with Wasps, before retiring in 2011. 

Ironically, while Wasps – at least the professional wing – have long since left Twyford Avenue, Serge still remains, seven years after hanging up those boots. 

His wife, Frederique, with whom he has three children, had been reluctant to move to London initially, but had since fallen in love with the city and wanted to stay, and Serge was happy to agree. 

Today, he creates rugby curriculums for schools, with a focus on state schools. “I feel like those kids need to play rugby, and not just football,” he says. “London is about football every day – it’s too much, they need to see something else, they need to rely on other activities.

“I want to see kids play rugby at least once in their life,” he continues, “just to try and get a rugby ball in their hands at least – because that ball can change your life.”

Words by: Alex Mead

Pictures by: Han Lee De Boer

This extract was taken from issue 5 of Rugby.
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