It’s an exciting occurrence, even in connection with an England international rugby player. “I can’t quite believe it,” is how Sara puts it, and those five words are a summary of the amazing experiences she and her husband Cliff have been sharing with The i Paper.
Tommy Freeman’s story is one of persistence and success and trauma and family love, and “one of the worst days of my life”, which was how Sara describes his full-on tonic-clonic epileptic fit when he was aged 18 in December 2019.
FIRST-HALF HAT-TRICK for Tommy Freeman
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He went to the House of Commons and, in a room near the main chamber, gave a short speech on behalf of the Epilepsy Society charity, which in National Epilepsy Week was tied to two questions about funding and assessments put to Starmer by MPs.
Freeman is a powerful advocate. He has scored 15 tries in his last 11 matches for club and country, and is a strong tip to be named England’s player of the season next month.
Freeman has been shortlisted for England player of the season (Photo: Getty)
Sara will tell you medical matters were never Tommy’s thing. He isn’t comfortable in settings such as hospitals, even though Sara is a nurse and, while she and Cliff essentially retired at 55, she still works one day a week on the children’s ward at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn.
But a diagnosis of epilepsy forces a person to walk a particular path. Freeman volunteered the subject for the first time in public in an interview with The i Paper in January last year, relating the discovery of what turned out to be idiopathic generalised epilepsy at the age of 13, after he endured “stares” or involuntarily switching off during lessons at Culford School.
“And I said ‘my children talk to me when I talk to them, so I don’t believe you’. And the consultant said, ‘Mrs Freeman, for you I’ll do an EEG’ – it was 2014, and Tommy was 13 – and we walked out of there, and they just said to me, ‘he can’t swim, he can’t shower on his own, he can’t climb, he can’t ride a bike’.
Sara’s medical training and the people skills she shares with Cliff make a potentially awkward topic easier to discuss. They and the now 24-year-old Tommy are aware there are many more acute sufferers of epilepsy than him, and it has many forms, affecting one in 100 people in the UK.
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Set against this, it might seem comparatively tame to remember how Freeman also fought back from Leicester Tigers not taking him into their academy at 16.
Freeman didn’t. He enrolled in an AASE (advanced apprenticeship in sporting excellence) at Moulton College, and Northampton, who already knew about him from younger days, took another look.
Sara recalls: “He’d driven for about 20 minutes and he phoned me and said, ‘mum, I feel bad. I think I’ve got starings again’.
“Anyway, he arrived home, and his dad had made him some toast, and within 10 minutes, he went into this huge fit, and it was absolutely horrendous.
“So we got him on the floor, and he went into a full tonic-clonic fit. He vomited, his lips went blue. He just carried on fitting. He didn’t answer us, he didn’t acknowledge us. I called to his brother to call an ambulance, and I just lay next to him and kept saying, ‘Tommy, come on, come on, get out of this’.
Freeman was picked for the Lions tour of Australia last month (Photo: Getty)
The ambulance was delayed but two neighbours who were ambulance workers came in to help.
“I said that heals quickly, you’ll be fine. The problem for me was Tommy was just absolutely distraught and he said ‘that’s me gone with rugby now’. And I have to say we thought as much.”
His older brothers Jack and Sam – now a policeman in Norwich, and RAF policeman at Marham respectively – had experienced febrile convulsions brought on by high temperatures when they were young, but this was different.
“I remember going out into the garage,” Sara says, “and I just broke down in tears, because I always buy the boys the same things for each other at Christmas, and this time there were drinks and I’d concentrated on presents for the car.
Northampton Saints “at no point said it was over”, and a 24-hour EEG dictated a new course of tablets.
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After six months Freeman was able to reapply to drive, dependent on having a year of no fits. He has never had another one.
From a serious knee operation in 2021, and a savage early dropping by then England head coach Eddie Jones, his career has shot forward, and many pundits pick him on the wing for the Lions in Australia. Cliff and Sara are excitedly booking flights and hotels.
They have the time now to follow Tommy everywhere, but when Cliff gained his “third stripe” as an RAF flight sergeant it opened up multiple postings that came with a continuity-of-education scheme, which meant a top boarding school for the boys. They sent Tommy to Culford, where he discovered rugby.
He pauses and chuckles: “Am I putting myself down here?”
“And they used to task me for Princess Anne flying to Edinburgh if Scotland were at home during the Six Nations – I think because the other sergeant just wasn’t interested in rugby.”
He joined Northampton Saints in 2018 after being released by Leicester Tigers (Photo: Getty)
Cliff’s 14 postings included Swinderby, Brize Norton, Halton, Northolt and Scampton, and Bahrain to link to communications flights in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There were afternoons with Sam and Tommy minded in a side-by-side pushchair while Cliff coached Jack in the under-eights at Bicester RFC, and many a rainy touchline.
And they work as Northampton beat Saracens and Freeman is feted afterwards as the supporters’ player of the year.
“I honestly believe Tommy wouldn’t be the man he is today, without going through these hurdles,” Sara says.
“If you’re never turned down and never facing adversity, you don’t get to where you want to be. He never, ever gave up, whatever was thrown at him. And I think that is part of his game. Yes, he never gives up. He keeps on going.”
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