MMA fighter, television celebrity, novelist - former England rugby union international James Haskell has not been short of interests since retiring from the oval ball game.
However, Haskell, who played 77 times for his country and toured New Zealand with the British Lions in 2017, has now revealed he was an entrepreneur long before he hung up his boots.
In fact, as a secondary school pupil he found a way to rake in the cash, running a porn "racket" between him and his friends.
The back-row forward's latest book, Ruck Me, reveals how he was handed the opportunity to line his pockets by a builder who was undertaking work on his family home: “I must have only been about 14, but he said to me, ‘Do you like porn mags?’
“I obviously replied, ‘Of course.’ And a couple of days later, he turned up with three cardboard boxes full to the brim with every porn title known to man.”
And Haskell humorously admitted how he exploited his newly acquired donation.
“Having got my grubby teenage hands on this mountain of porn, I decided to turn it into a business," he explained.
“I had a jumbo-sized briefcase, so I jettisoned some of my schoolwork, replaced it with porn mags and started selling them to fellow pupils for two quid a pop, or renting them out for one quid."
Once the business venture ended, Haskell didn't immediately destroy the magazines. In fact, he forgot about them until he was rummaging around his parents’ shed several years later.
Haskell, 36, reckons he found about '2,000' magazines hidden behind lawnmowers, and opted to burn them on a bonfire.
He did so however, without ripping them up first.
“So what you have are pages and pages of undamaged content still left," he said.,
“Which only rears its ugly head when a few days later a wind picks up. Which then carries fragments of f*, t and a*** on the wind. These then coat everything in a six-mile radius.
“It’s a tricky question to answer when your mum asks why all her trees and front lawn have been covered in images of lady gardens.
“I decided not to tell her she’d been unwittingly harbouring one of the largest collections of vintage porn in the country."
Since his retirement, Haskell has steered clear of the porn industry, but he did appear on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in 2019.
