Tom Savage is trying to explain a career trajectory that resembles something close to the 1990s TV Show Quantum Leap where the main character, Sam Beckett, starts each episode occupying a stranger’s body.
For eight years, it was perfectly normal as he made nearly 200 appearances for Gloucester in the second row. Then, as Savage says, it gets “a bit funky” as he swapped Kingsholm for Suntory Sungoliath in Japan and now the 35-year-old Londoner finds himself captaining Moana Pasifika, a team designed for players of Pacific Island heritage, in Super Rugby. “I am probably in as much disbelief as anyone that I’ve ended up here,” Savage says. “I still don’t really know how it all happened, but it is the coolest thing that ever happened to me.”
Savage is the only European player at Moana Pasifika but it is a mark of his popularity that he took over the captaincy from injured New Zealand flanker Ardie Savea in the defeat by the Chiefs last weekend. While much of the novelty of playing with and against All Blacks on a weekly basis has started to dissipate for Savage, who is in his second season at Moana, the prospect of performing the club’s cultural hakas, the Tau Moana and Fa’avae, still fills him with terror.
Credit: Instagram/ moanapasifika
“I’m more nervous about both of those than I am about any aspect of the game,” Savage says. “In this team, you’re either from the Pacific Islands, or you’ve been born and raised in New Zealand, and they have been doing it from day dot. My eldest is now five years old, and she’s already doing some form of haka at school.
“I think being a bit older now, I don’t get embarrassed. I’m prepared just to put the work in. I’m not going to be as good as those boys at it. If you watch me, I might be a beat or two out and I might get the odd action wrong, but just as long as I’m trying as hard as I can I don’t think anyone’s going to have any issues with that. It is awesome to be a part of, but it is incredibly surreal.”
To rewind slightly, Savage was picked up by Gloucester in 2011 while playing for Hartpury University. He loved playing for the Cherry and Whites and never envisioned representing another club but then there was a change of coaching staff and a new contract was slow in materialising in 2018. His agent then told him Suntory Sungoliath were in the market for a second row of his build, which led to some frantic Googling. A week later, he had signed.
Savage would spend four years in Japan, where both his children were born, although he never fully got to grips with the cultural differences. “I attacked the languages as hard as I possibly could,” he says. “I was by no means fluent, but I got to what I call cafe and supermarket Japanese. I could hold my own in a restaurant.
“I often say, with Japan, there’s foreign countries and then there’s foreign countries. Everything is so different there. A lot of it in a really good way. You can leave your wallet and phone on a table, walk away and it would still be there hours later. But then when my wife gave birth they don’t actually have pain relief in the hospitals. There’s not even gas and air, so my wife just breathed her way through it.”
After four seasons, Savage was again looking for a new challenge and asked his agent if there was anything going in Super Rugby. “Like many people my age back home, I think I first fell in love with rugby watching Super Rugby on Saturday mornings,” Savage says.
The answer came back that Moana Pasifika, then in their second season, were interested and so Savage was packing his bags for Auckland. “They were having a bit of a changeover around the squad and staff and were trying to build their way up a little bit. They were looking for someone like myself, an experienced, professional guy in that lock space, and sort of my name fitted the bill. That’s how it all came about, really.
“The demographic of the team is a lot of Samoan and Tongan players, but there’s Fijians and guys from Cook Islands and Niue. And then there’s me. That is the make-up of the team. Tana Umaga, the head coach, is trying to build an identity that we are unapologetically Pacific Islanders.”
It did not take long for the team to accept Savage, so much so that the Tongan contingent have tried to claim him as “Tomasi”. “We work on our cultural roots on a daily basis,” Savage says. “These guys are playing for where they’re from, which is a super powerful thing, but, fundamentally, we are still a rugby team and anything that was new or different to me very much just became the norm after a week or two. I think anytime you join a rugby team the most important thing is that you buy into everything that is put in front of you and work your socks off. That’s what I did and will keep trying to do.”
