‘Every single blow was one more nail in his coffin’: the life and death of Stormin’ Norman Hadley

Those who knew and loved former Wasps and Canada rugby player have had to find their own answers about his death

Stormin’ Norman Hadley was a bear of a man. “‘Big?’” says his best friend Eddie Evans. “‘Big’ is too small a word.” Hadley was 6ft 7in, weighed around 280lb and could bench-press more again. He won 15 caps for Canada as a lock forward in the late 80s and early 90s and it ought to have been more, played four Tests for the Barbarians and spent the best years of his career at Wasps, where he was, his teammate Lawrence Dallaglio remembers, “the hardest man I’ve ever had to lift in my life”. Dallaglio reckons Hadley “must have been one of the biggest guys ever to play the game”.

And one of the brightest. “He was scary intelligent,” says Evans. Hadley had an honours degree in economics, and a top-of-the-class MBA that he parlayed into a multimillion-dollar career in banking. Evans always enjoyed it when strangers made the mistake of underestimating Norman. “They’d look at him and think he was a typical jock, like he was some kind of big dummy, and he’d come out with one of his lines.” He drops his voice an octave. “Like: ‘Don’t get into a battle of wits with me, sunshine, because you’re woefully unarmed.’”