Ask most rugby fans (and players) around the world who their favourite referee is and you’ll hear the name Nigel Owens get mentioned with great regularity. The diminutive Welshman has earned respect both for his ability to referee an open game and his quick wit to keep the big men in check.

He wasn’t always so chipper, the now openly gay referee having endured some dark days before coming out in 2007. He sat down with CNN and dropped a couple of bombshells:

“I didn’t want to be gay…I actually went to the doctor at one stage to see if I could be chemically castrated in any way, if it would get rid of me being gay.

“Looking back at that it was a horrific thing that one would have to do but that’s what I was going through at the time.

“It was only when my Mum came to see me in hospital when I tried to take my own life and she told me: ‘If you try to do anything like this again then you take me and Dad with you because we don’t want to live our lives without you.’

“I was an only child. I sat up in bed that night and I cried. I thought to myself that I need to grow up here. That’s when I accepted who I was and that was the biggest challenge of my life over with.

“A lot of people are struggling with who they are. They can’t tell other people they’re gay because they’re fighting it themselves. That’s one of the reasons a lot of people are not out in sport yet.”

[source:cnn]