Beware of the Dog

Brian Moore, one of the most successful rugby players of all time in England, published his memoir, Beware of the Dog: Rugby's Hard Man Reveals All, in 2010. Although Moore had already published an autobiography in 1995, that one was an anodyne, ghostwritten recounting of only his sports career. In this newer book, Moore lives up to the subtitle by exploring not only his reputation as a vicious competitor but by delving into the psychological traumas that he believes fuel his personality to this day. Revealing the effects of childhood sexual abuse and unresolved feelings about being adopted, Moore explores the many facets of his personality, the demons that still plague him today, and the ways in which he has coped with the ending of an illustrious career in sports.

Moore was born Brian Kirk in Birmingham in 1962, to a Malaysian father who almost immediately abandoned his family. His mother, Rina, gave him up for adoption, and when he was seven months old, he was adopted by Ralph and Dorothy Moore, Methodist lay preachers. The Moores would go on to have five children, three of them adopted, and the family lived on a council estate in Illingworth, near Halifax.

In his memoir, Moore describes for the first time that when he was nine or ten years old, a teacher sexually abused him during a field trip – abuse that continued in school. The book graphically describes what Moore suffered, explaining the ways in which this betrayal affected him. Ashamed that he was unable to tell anyone because the abuser was a church friend of his parents, Moore was also horrified by the fact that “he wasn't initially repelled by what was happening.” In an interview given on the book’s publication, Moore admits that, however explicit the book seems to be, there are still things about the abuse he hasn’t fully described: “What would be the point in telling people more – in recounting all the hours and days that you just sat there with your head in your hands thinking 'I'm so useless?'”

Moore remembers how much he differed from his siblings because of his extremely competitive nature. Eventually, he channeled his anger and frustration into rugby: “As a game of violent collisions, it allowed me to fire into rucks and mauls quite legally and yet with as much force as I could muster.” Part of this anger came from the abuse he suffered, but part came from not acknowledging how much the fact of being adopted had affected him. Moore discloses that he spent most of his life dealing with feelings of rejection and abandonment – feelings that created rage that had no good outlet until rugby.

On the rugby field he soon earned the nickname “Pitbull,” visually becoming the stereotypical “hard man” – he was “built like a small tank, his shaven head marked by battle scars and his left ear crumpled.” During his career between 1987 and 1995, Moore won sixty-four caps for the England rugby team, played in three Rugby World Cups, won the Grand Slam in 1991, 1992, and 1995, and went on two British Lions tours – a set of sports achievements that have made him both one of the most renowned rugby players of all time, and a controversial player. In his memoir, he doesn’t shy away from describing his aggression on and off and field, labeling his passion for the game as a sort of pathological addiction to violence.

When it came time for Moore to retire from rugby in 1995, he writes about the self-doubt and fears that obsessed him. Despite the fact that since rugby was still an amateur sport when he was playing, Moore was also a successful solicitor, and a well-educated man with a well-documented love of Shakespeare, opera, fine wine, and a sometime manicurist, Moore makes it clear he wasn’t sure he would be able to handle life without rugby.

On top of this, Moore was dealing with the aftereffects of two failed marriages, and from his decision to find his birth mother, Rina. The meeting was fraught with unresolved emotions, as Moore told her he forgave her decision to give him up without fully understanding her reasons for doing so. Afterward, he says he didn’t maintain the relationship with Rina or with his two siblings – the idea of getting close to them felt disloyal to the mother that raised him.

Moore observes that all of his life he has been plagued by a negative voice that runs an incessant commentary about him in his head. After reading Tolkien, Moore named this voice “Gollum” – it was the closest portrayal he had seen of the way his two sides are in “a daily running battle…He's there all day, every day. He seems to appear in the best and worst of times. When you are on the bottom, he says, 'Ha, ha, I told you so.' When you are on top, he mocks.”

Moore’s psychological healing started when he helped fund-raise for an organization that prosecutes online child sexual abusers. For the first time, he allowed the memories of his own abuse to come back and started processing the guilt and shame he had been left with.

Now, Moore is happily married to his third wife, with whom he has two deeply beloved daughters, Imogen and Larissa. He has built a successful media career for himself, writing about sports for the Sun and the Telegraph and commenting on international rugby matches for BBC TV. He acknowledges that he is still a work in progress, some days overwhelmed by his trauma and other days able to cope with it. He recently told the details of what happened to him to his adoptive mother. As he puts it, “She was upset but took it quietly and with compassion. She wrote me a little note saying, 'I hope you can put this in the past.' My mother has a faith to help her. I wish I had."