Allan ‘Chunk’ Jacobsen is a cult hero for Scottish rugby fans who defied the odds to be one of the best of his era despite his old-school approach
Allan ‘Chunk’ Jacobsen’s story might have been over long before it really got started.
The life and times of one of Scotland’s most beloved rugby players might have had an abrupt ending had it not been for Todd Blackadder fishing him out of the drink on Manly Beach that day.
Chunk – named after a character in the comedy film The Goonies – went on to have a storied career for Edinburgh and Scotland, an old-school prop in the professional age, a player with a heart the size of a house, a scrummager who could shift, a warm character who everybody identified with.
Without trying, Chunk was a human magnet.
He was funny and loveable and people wanted to be around him. When he got the ball in his hands on the rugby field, folk got to their feet.
Brick walls wouldn’t have stopped him on some of those barrelling breaks. And we saw plenty of them, from his international debut in 2002 to his final cap a decade later, an era that brought 65 caps.
Allan Jacobsen in the thick of things for Edinburgh.
(©INPHO/Andrew Paton)
As a kid, just one would have done him. But back to Manly in the summer of 2004.
“Oh aye, that was mad,” he laughs. “I was in a very tricky situation. It was a Scotland tour and we went across to the ocean for a recovery session. Some of the boys were mucking about but I was kinda staying out of the way because I’m not a great swimmer.
“I didn’t know it but the stretch of the beach was famous for riptides. I’m bobbing away, no bother. The water’s up to my waist. Bobbing, bobbing. Next thing, the water’s up to my nipples. Then it’s up to my neck. I’m panicking. ‘F**ing hell, I’m 30 metres from everybody else all of a sudden’. I went to swim and got nowhere.
“Todd was our forwards coach at the time and he sees the panic on my face. ‘You alright, Chunk?’ I nodded to say, ‘aye’. He looked again and said, ‘You sure?’ and I said, ‘naw’ and he came charging over to save me. It was pretty hairy.”
The story of Allan Jacobsen
Edinburgh’s Allan Jacobsen watches Greig Laidlaw’s last minute penalty clear the bar
(INPHO/Morgan Treacy)
Blackadder did Scottish rugby a big service that day and Chunk did Scottish rugby a big service in its wake. We speak as he’s wrapping up work for the day.
He owns his own bathroom business in Edinburgh and has another project in the pipeline – custom-built, hand-painted kitchens – along with his old Edinburgh and Scotland pal, Greig Laidlaw.
He was always a man for bathrooms. Hilariously so.
“I was a plumber. I always had a thing for bathrooms. When we were on tour we’d stay at some great hotels and I’d be going around everybody’s rooms checking out the tiles and the fitting and the craftsmanship.
‘That’s a nice bit of marble there, I must ask about that one’ – that kind of thing. I started using this particular type of tile because I saw it in a fancy hotel in Italy, and years and years later it became all the rage over here. I’d used it for ages at that point.”
He’s also back into his rugby after years away, helping out at Hawick with the scrummaging, bringing his gnarled experience of front-row play to club level.
It’s early days but he’s loving it. And being back amongst it has reminded him of what he’s been missing in his life this past while. Rugby was everything to Chunk.
“I finished my apprenticeship as a plumber on a Friday and then started with Edinburgh on a Monday.”
“I was 19. Does it feel like a million years ago? Well, it does and it doesn’t. I’m driving around Edinburgh quite a lot. And it’s funny because there’s all these reminders of rugby, you know? Clubs where I’ve played. It’s like another lifetime away and then you drive past a club and you remember certain games and people.
“When I stopped playing in May 2013, I completely moved away from rugby and started the business, so it was all hands on deck on that front. I just kind of drifted away from the game. I was setting up the business and I was getting a divorce and there was so much going on in my life that five years went by in a blur.
“You lose touch with everybody, all the guys you played with. I mean, I must have played with hundreds and hundreds of guys at Edinburgh and next thing you know the five years have become ten years. So I’m really happy to be doing stuff with Hawick and seeing some of the guys I was involved with. It was only when I got back into it that I realised how much I’d missed it.”
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How Allan Jacobsen made it
Allan Jacobsen playing for Scotland during the 2011 Rugby World Cup. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
And putting the boots back on inevitably led him back to thinking about his great mentor, the late Massimo Cuttitta, the former Italy prop who worked with Chunk at Edinburgh and Scotland for years.
“It’s weird but I really started thinking about rugby again when Massimo died in 2021. He was unbelievable for me. He was one of my boyhood heroes who then became my coach. I was with Massimo constantly for five, six, seven years, every day, always in my ear, talking about this and that, coming round my flat in the morning and late at night to talk about scrummaging.
“He was my scrum coach, but he was like a brother and a dad and everything all rolled into one.”
When did Chunk realise he could make the unconventional journey from Preston Lodge rugby club to Test-match rugby? He remembers it precisely.
“It was at Hawick and I was 13 and we won a final against Clarkston and I was getting a medal from the great Roy Laidlaw. He leaned over to me, hands me the medal and says, ‘You can play for Scotland one day’.
“To me, that was unbelievable. The Scotland scrum-half from the 1984 Grand Slam thinks I can play for Scotland! And from that point on, I believed it.”
“We played teams like Kirkcaldy and Peebles and they had brilliant scrummagers. The best scrums in the country back then were in the third division. You had boys whose only job was to push and that was my initiation.
“There’s something about being in there and dominating people. The best feelings I’ve ever had in my life have been when I’ve been pushing a scrum. When you push a scrum off its own ball, the feeling is unreal. You show a prop some video of him scoring ten tries in his career and then show him a video of him pushing ten scrums off their own ball and you’ll see what he loves more.”
The early days in Edinburgh
He remembers the early days of his pro career and the lessons he learned. One of his first European games was against Northampton, who had Garry Pagel and Federico Mendez in the front row. Hardcore.
A young Chunk came off the bench and held his own. He basked in the challenge of going up against some of the game’s most fearsome operators.
“People underestimate the mental side of what a dominant scrum can actually do,” he says.
“On the one hand, the dominant scrum and the euphoria you get from that. And on the other side, the sheer deflation of going backwards. It’s a big part of what rugby is. I almost feel like the people who run rugby are trying to change it so it’s not like that anymore, but that’s what rugby actually is. That’s what rugby has always been.
“The scrum is a contest, a confrontation. Sometimes you’ve got to accept what it is. Maybe people who run the game are chasing an audience and forgetting about the people who love scrummaging, love the combat, love the theatre of a scrum. I mean, Jesus Christ, it’s brilliant.”
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Making it as an international
Chunk’s rise to international rugby was swift. In May 2000 he was in the Scotland team that lost a 45-42 thriller against the Barbarians.
He’d just finished his first season with Edinburgh and was now sharing a pitch with Jason Leonard, Robin and Zinzan Brooke, Lawrence Dallaglio, Ruben Kruger, Os du Randt and James Dalton.
“Twelve months previous I was in the third division in Scotland and now I’m running out against these guys. When I look back now, it all just seems bizarre. When I actually say these things out loud, it doesn’t sound like it could have happened, but it actually did.”
He didn’t get a cap for the Barbarians game, but that honour would soon come. He was understudy to Tom Smith for two seasons, played non-cap games and A games and midweek tour matches. He bided his time. It came against Canada in 2002.
Laidlaw’s prediction, and Chunk’s life dream, had come true. On the day Scotland won the 1990 Grand Slam against England at Murrayfield, he was in the schoolboy enclosure and that day, he says, lit a fire within him.
Scotland’s Allan Jacobsen is a shown yellow card against Ireland in the 2011 Six Nations.
(INPHO/Billy Stickland)
He imagined what it would be like to win the Calcutta Cup – and he achieved it. He went on to beat South Africa and Australia, and Ireland at Croke Park.
“Nobody gave us a chance in those games.”
Chunk had something different to others, a quality that people instantly warmed to. Even though they didn’t know him, they felt like they did. He was an icon of sort. A role model.
“I used to get a lot of parents coming up to me after games – the mums especially – and their kid might be a bit chunky, like myself, and maybe they saw that I made it and so their lad could make it, too.
“I was a different shape to everybody, so I was a different kind of role model. I don’t know where the popularity came from, but it might be a number of different things. I’m just normal, I suppose. I think people understood that I always tried my hardest. Maybe that was it.”
It was that and more. Chunk was a terrific player and is a terrific bloke. He’s found his way back to rugby now and that’s only a good thing, for him and for the Scottish game.
And if you need a bathroom or a kitchen? He’s your man. His services come with stories. Entertainment guaranteed.
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