Stormin’ Norman Hadley was a bear of a man. “‘Big?’” says his best friend Eddie Evans. “‘Big’ is too small a word.” Hadley was 6ft 7in, weighed around 280lb and could bench-press more again. He won 15 caps for Canada as a lock forward in the late 80s and early 90s and it ought to have been more, played four Tests for the Barbarians and spent the best years of his career at Wasps, where he was, his teammate Lawrence Dallaglio remembers, “the hardest man I’ve ever had to lift in my life”. Dallaglio reckons Hadley “must have been one of the biggest guys ever to play the game”.
And one of the brightest. “He was scary intelligent,” says Evans. Hadley had an honours degree in economics, and a top-of-the-class MBA that he parlayed into a multimillion-dollar career in banking. Evans always enjoyed it when strangers made the mistake of underestimating Norman. “They’d look at him and think he was a typical jock, like he was some kind of big dummy, and he’d come out with one of his lines.” He drops his voice an octave. “Like: ‘Don’t get into a battle of wits with me, sunshine, because you’re woefully unarmed.’”
Hadley was, and still is, a man people love to tell stories about, usually the sort that make them start laughing all over again. “Did you hear the one about him and Jason Leonard?” Or: “What about the time he took on those two yobs on the train?” That one made the papers. “Sneers Earn Lout A Clout.” But those aren’t the tales Norman’s family want to tell. His older brother, David, would be happier if he never heard any of them again. “They always glorify the violence,” he says. “Looking back on it now, I see every single blow as one more nail in his coffin.”
David has his own story about Norman, only, it isn’t one a lot of people in rugby want to discuss. Conversations dry up when it comes up, emails that mention it are left unanswered.
Police found Norman’s body in a Tokyo hotel room on 26 March, 2016. He was 51. He had left the emergency contacts page in his passport blank, but the Canadian embassy tracked down a number for David and called him. The police did not know the cause of death yet, but the story was already spreading among Norman’s circle that it was a heart attack. That was what Evans was telling people, it’s what was in the first obituaries, and even now there are friends, colleagues and teammates who think that’s what happened to him.
David never believed it. He always thought Norman had killed himself. And he was right. A month later, the autopsy report showed he had taken a lethal overdose.
David believes Norman arranged his last days so that no one would know how he died or why, that he had, in fact, asked his closest friends to say it was a heart attack that killed him. Evans denies this. But David points to a conversation he had with Norman 10 years earlier, in which he laid out at great length his plan to end his own life. “It was so surprising, the detail that he had gone into, the great planning behind it, and the whole focus was on avoiding detection.”
Every untimely death leaves unanswered questions, but Norman’s left more than most.
By the end David and Norman weren’t talking. They hadn’t since David’s wedding, when Norm, this great, gregarious man, had arrived late, “sullen and angry”, and refused to speak to the bride. It wasn’t just David. Over the last two years of his life, Norm had cut off his entire family. Their parents, Michael and Anita, called and wrote, but Norm never answered. “I have a whole sheath of emails that I sent before he died,” says Anita Hadley. “‘Where are you?’ ‘Please let us know?’ ‘At least let us know if you are well.’” Norm’s replies got briefer and briefer until, eventually, they stopped altogether. Then he closed the account.
“You always wonder: ‘What did I say, what did I do?’” asks Anita. “I don’t know.”
They do know that he was in enormous pain, physically and mentally, and had been for a long time. They know that he was suffering badly with depression, and that he had become paranoid, withdrawn and volatile. They know that he had stopped working and started wandering around the world looking for a cure. Over time he turned away from western medicine. Anita says he spent the last two years of his life travelling, to China, to Brazil, “and to some very out-of-the-way places”, visiting “secular monasteries, experimental medicines, weed shops”, because “he was convinced that western medicine was not up to the job”.
Eventually his travels led him back to that Tokyo hotel room.
Even now, seven years later, there are no ready explanations about what happened to Norman Hadley, and there never will be. But David believes he knows. He is a doctor. He specialises in trauma and emergency medicine. He believes his brother was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy caused by repeated head trauma.
“The constellation of symptoms, the age it occurred, for his history of head injuries, all fit the classic pattern.” David believes that by the end Norm had come to the same conclusion. The two of them never spoke about it, but David knows that Norm saw the Will Smith movie about the disease, Concussion, and that he discussed it with a friend afterwards.
Norman couldn’t have been sure then, because CTE can only be fully diagnosed postmortem. And David can’t be sure now, because the test needs to be done within 72 hours of death. He tried to arrange to have Norman’s body sent to Boston University for study at its specialist CTE Center, but Tokyo is a long way from Boston, and there were too many bureaucratic hurdles in the way. He wonders if that was deliberate too.
“I think his plan at the end was that he did not want an autopsy, because like he told me years earlier he didn’t want people to know that he had depression, that he had anxiety, and I think this CTE thing scared the crap out of him and he didn’t want people to know that he had it.”
There is no evidence to support any direct link between CTE and suicide. In fact, present research shows that suicide rates among retired professional athletes are lower than they are among the general population, and that suicide rates are lower among those diagnosed with CTE than those with other illnesses. In 2019, a group of leading experts in the field were so concerned about the way the media were reporting on the isolated cases of sportspeople with CTE that they wrote an open letter about it to the Lancet. They explained that “too often an inaccurate impression is portrayed that CTE is clinically defined, its prevalence is high, and pathology evaluation is a simple positive or negative decision”.
None of these things are true and the suggestion that they are means “individuals with potentially treatable conditions, such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, might make decisions on their future on the basis of a misplaced belief that their symptoms inevitably herald an untreatable, degenerative brain disease culminating in dementia”. Norman’s mental health symptoms might well have been treatable. Experts I spoke to while writing this article were unequivocal that his symptoms were not the inevitable result of CTE, whether he had it or not.
So much of this remains contested. The latest consensus statement by the Concussion in Sport Group, which shapes policy across world sport, was published at the start of the month. It was widely criticised by campaign groups on the grounds that it still refuses to acknowledge a causal link between head trauma, contact sport and CTE, a position that puts it at odds with the US National Institutes of Health, as well as the lived experience of families such as Norman Hadley’s.
The hard truth for the Hadley family is that there is so much we still don’t know about CTE, and so much we still don’t know about what happened to Norman, even after months of reporting. There are uncertainties piled on uncertainties and, faced with all that doubt, the people who knew and loved him have had to find their own answers.
Evans has his own. “We know he committed suicide,” he says, “but we don’t know he committed suicide because he got banged in the head.” Evans won 49 caps for Canada himself, he played with and against Norman all the way through. He is protective of his friend and of the game that brought them together. “I would love it to be that black and white,” Evans says. “That Norm got his bell rung so many times, and his brain was all messed up, and he hated everybody, but I know that’s not really the case.”
He remembers a conversation he had with David after Norm’s funeral. “He said to me: ‘Eddie, it’s important that you tell people that he had this post-concussion syndrome, we’re not going to be able to help people unless you explain that.’ Well I’m not sure that’s what Norm had. I think it was a combination of things. Norm was always dark, he had been since he was a kid, and unfortunately he carried that through life.”
***
Norman never wanted to be a rugby player. He dreamed of ice hockey, but he was too big and too slow. That didn’t matter in rugby. His gym teacher took one look and put him straight into the team. They weren’t a sporty family, Michael and Anita were both academics, but Norm took to it right away. He played through the age grades and went into club rugby, even had a stretch playing in New Zealand with Western Suburbs in Wellington. He made his debut for the national team in 1987, an eight-point win against the USA. Rugby has been played in Canada since the 19th century, Norm’s side grew into the best they ever had.
In 1991, Canada went on a run to the quarter-finals of the World Cup, where they lost 29-13 to the All Blacks. It was a hard match, much tighter than the margin makes it sound. Hadley was in the thick of it, as always. Watch the quarter-final back now and you can see the team gather around him as they square up to the All Black haka.
“Norm had that physicality, that hardness, that epitomised Canadian rugby in the 90s,” says Evans, who played that day. “Norm was a physical anomaly, there wasn’t much you could do about it, it’s like a tsunami, he’s in there, boots are flying, shoulders are flying, he’s flying into rucks and mauls, he’s dragging guys all over the place, you can’t really stop it.”
Did it damage him? Anita says: “I know when he was in high school he would be in and out of hospital to the point where it become sort of a joke, and they would say: ‘Well you need a gold-plated health card you’re always in here.’ None of it seemed terribly serious at the time.” She remembers going to watch him play at university. “There was something going on at the other end of the field and he was at the bottom of it, I remember someone patting my arm and saying it will be all right. But of course I had no notion of the tremendous pressure on his head.”
Evans says: “Norm definitely had neck pain and back pain during his playing days and he had a lot of injuries, he missed a lot of playing time because of his injuries.” But he can’t recall Norm ever suffering a major concussion. David remembers it differently. He says Norm got hit in the head a lot, and would always shake it off. “He’d say: ‘Oh boy, I got my bell rung in that game,’ or he’d make some joke about it. Even with me he’d act tough.”
Norman’s family remember him as a gentle giant, who loved poetry and playing the trumpet. He didn’t go looking for violence, but his size meant it had a way of finding him. “Norm got hit a lot, and so then he had to, as he explained it, make sure that he came back in force,” David says.
“He told me he got hit more than others, because if people wanted to make a mark there was no point going after the littlest guy. It becomes a vicious cycle. Because he was targeted he had even more incentive to become bigger, and tougher, and he would hit back more, and it fed into his own aggression and it led into, I think, the recurrent concussions, the illness, the headaches, the depression, later on in life.”
It wasn’t just on the field. “I saw it in pubs and bars, when he and I were together, I’d think it would be a dumb move, but people would target the biggest guy.”
Everyone agrees Norm had always struggled with depression. Anita remembers the way his French grandmother used to say he had a “devil in his tummy”. David says: “Norm had more gifts than most folks, and more demons than most folks. He was super-bright, super-funny, super-quick, but he had a temper. He’d be quick to fight, and quick to apologise and I think pretty early on rugby gave him an acceptable outlet for his anger.”
Evans says: “He definitely had mood swings, he could get dark, but then there would be other times when he was the life of the party, when everyone was surrounding him. ‘Holding court’, he’d call it. He was the centre of attraction, and it was all there for him, his wit, his charm.”
That’s the side of him Dallaglio remembers. “As soon as the whistle went he was warm generous and friendly. They talk about people filling a room, Norm could do it in two different ways, physically, or he could do it with his personality.” He was a gifted mimic and a great talker, even did a little TV work.
“I like to think of myself as no slouch,” says David, “but Norm could talk circles around me.” He describes his awe watching Norman barking orders on the trading floor in Tokyo. Norman and Eddie Evans had moved there together, to play for company rugby teams, Norm stayed on when he got a job at Deutsche Bank.
It was there, on the far side of the world, that things started to fall apart.
Norm quit Deutsche Bank in a hurry. David doesn’t know why, but Evans says it was because Norm was so spooked by the Fukushima meltdown in 2011. “He just said: ‘I’m out, I’m not spending another day in this country with all this nuclear stuff going on.’ It was freakish, and that epitomised Norm, that he was so worried about getting radiation from this thing that he made this life-changing decision, and who knows what had happened in the lead-up to this, maybe he was having problems with his boss, maybe this, maybe that, but he made a decision literally in two or three days to get out.”
David says Norman was a lifelong hypochondriac. He thought he had cancer. He thought he had meningitis. He thought he had mercury poisoning. “When he became very wealthy he would travel to clinics, where he would get all kinds of tests done.” He would send David the results. “Some of us, myself included, kind of dismissed it. And Norm would dismiss me too, he thought I was a quack physician because I didn’t recognise his suffering.”
Norman wound up living with Eddie Evans in Bangkok. “I told him: ‘There’s a gym next door, we can work out together, we can eat good food,’ and that’s what he did, jumped on a plane and came here.” They had a lot of long conversations. “I could tell he was getting depressed, that he needed a change, he was getting argumentative, and then one day he just disappeared, literally, didn’t say bye or anything.”
Evans continues: “When he got into these dark moods I’d just kind of leave him alone. I knew he had his issues. A few times he’d asked me: ‘How can you always be so happy?’ And I’d say to him: ‘Norm, that’s not the case, we all have our days, but overall yeah, I like life,’ and he’d look at me and he’d say: ‘I wish I could be as happy as you are.’ It made me think he must have been going through some serious depression. But I just couldn’t figure it out. How could a guy who has so much charisma, so much success, have these moments when he felt he wasn’t good enough?”
David believes it was more than that. “I’m quite certain that it was more than just depression. He’d lost his ability to control emotions, he was becoming increasingly paranoid, he no longer had the high-functioning business acumen that he had before, and by the end he was this paranoid guy, angry at the world, angry at his family, cut off from everybody.”
Norm fetched up in a little rental house in Vancouver. These were the worst days. Michael and Anita went to visit him there in 2013. “He had his bedroom curtains drawn the whole time,” Anita remembers. “They’d ask why and he’d say that he ‘didn’t want people in the building opposite seeing in’.”
David remembers that Norman was “afraid”, that he “thought that many people were after him to get his money”. He found out later that Norm lost a lot of it making bad trades from his bedroom. “He’d lost the ability to do it, he didn’t have the cognitive speed to handle it.” He says Norman complained that the light gave him headaches. “I know by the end he would have people go and do the grocery shopping for him, he never ventured out at all.”
Anita says: “There was anger, tremendous anger. Every now and then he would just explode for no reason at all, it happened on one of his visits to us, he stormed out over absolutely nothing, so I phoned his cell and said: ‘Please Norman come back, that made no sense, come on back and let’s talk about it,’ and he did, and always he showed such remorse. I remember when he was a little boy and he ran into the house with a posy of dandelions because something bad had happened, I can’t remember what, and he was in disgrace, but he was always so remorseful afterwards. Only over time, he stopped coming back.”
There was a final message. Norm said he needed to go away and that he hoped to be back again soon. “But he wasn’t.” They tried to get his friends to help track him down. “But honestly we were completely lost as to where he was.”
Eddie Evans visited him in Vancouver, too. “That’s when I noticed the physical changes, he said he had something wrong, some nerve stuff happening, he was starting to get really painful reactions across his whole body, so essentially all our conversations would be him explaining to me the level of pain he was going through.”
He remembers watching Norm using some kind of machine for treatment, hooking himself up to electrodes. “He looked like hell. He would tell me: ‘I’m dark, Eddie, I’m dark, I’m not all there all the time.’ It was like physical thing to me, when I think of the way Norman explained his depression, it was like waves of bad chemicals in his body.”
He spoke to Eddie about killing himself. “I would say: ‘Norm, come on you’re going to get better, you’re going to turn this around, you’re going to beat this thing, the pain will disappear, you’ve just got to persevere through this, you’ve done it before and you’ll do it again.’ But he was a mess.”
David says Norm valued three things: his wealth, his health and his intelligence. By the end, he felt all three were slipping away. “All his life he was the biggest and the smartest, and I think that’s what made it so tough for him when he began to realise that he wasn’t any more.”
If Norman did have CTE, he would have been one of the earlier cases in rugby. In recent years, 80 former players have received diagnoses of early onset dementia and probable CTE. They are mostly from the generation after his. They are among a group who are bringing legal action against rugby’s governing bodies, whom they accuse of negligence in failing to take reasonable action to protect the players. Several have spoken about how the diagnosis has affected them. In my own interviews with them, several described conversations with others among the group who have experienced suicidal ideation.
There is help there for them now. Help that Norman Hadley never had access to, hard as he looked. The sport, like society, has been racing to catch up to the problem. But Norman’s family worry that there is still a stigma about speaking out, just as there can be around discussing mental health. No one wants to be seen to blame the game that’s given them a living, and which so many people love so much, especially when the precise extent of that blame remains unclear.
“It would never really sit with us, the terrible shame Norman had about his illness,” says his father, Michael. “Norman’s death doesn’t diminish him at all. He was an impressive guy. And the fact that he suffered terribly at the end doesn’t take away from what he did, not by any means, he achieved far too much, so there’s no shame, as far as I am concerned, in his illness. My hope is that other people in his situation would think: ‘I don’t have to hide,’ because there must be a lot of silent suffering going on by people who think it’s unmanly, or somehow un-rugby-like, to say: ‘I have been badly hurt.’”
• International helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14.
