The brickbats of bigotry don’t hurt Nigel Owens any more
Having come out as rugby’s first openly gay referee in 2007, Owens is acutely conscious of the potential effect of abuse on others
It has not been easy for Nigel Owens to become Nigel Owens. To anyone with even the barest of knowledge of Owens’s story, that's understandable.
When Owens first began to realise he was gay, he fought against it. He was horrified by the very idea. He tried to bury the feelings, he researched chemical castration, and in his twenties he tried to kill himself.
It’s very far from the Nigel Owens we see ...
