Pascal Fabre, 68, involved in rugby. An understatement! We met him.

The career of a “dinosaur”

“I am a dinosaur of Breton rugby”, smiles Pascal. “Côte d’Armor, Finistère, founder of the Morlaix club, I have been in Brittany since around 73 as a player and I have been here ever since. So I have a fairly long career behind me.” A menhir.

His roots, grandparents and great-grandparents, are in the South-West, but the story of young Pascal’s beginnings starts, in the mini-poussins even if the category did not exist at the time, in Rueil-Malmaison, in the 92, at the RAC (Rueil Athletic Club).

A Breton baptism of fire

And then at 16 – his mother is Breton – came the return to Brittany. There was no Cadets team: jumping two age groups, straight into the seniors! Pascal smiles about it: “I must have played for a dozen years with the team at Le Rheu, north-west of Rennes. And then afterwards I studied to become a PE teacher.”

The CV is far from blank: Stade Français, STAPS in Rennes, Racing. Memories: “At the time, 82-81, I was doing my military service, I was at Couette-Quidans and I would travel up to play. And then I was posted to the North at the LUC (Lille Université Club). But I only did a year.”

The knee gives way, the passion stays

What came next? Breton, inevitably, and a posting to Landeleau: “That is where I settled and I must have been a PE teacher for at least 12 or 13 years. And then I had been pretty badly injured when I left Lille, all the ligaments in my knee torn off.” Not easy for Fabre the number 10.

Little by little, he started playing again and gave a hand to the struggling club in Fédérale 3: “It was mainly to bring the mates back. Because in fact I have always played rugby with my mates. So that was the compass. And so we saved the club a bit at one point. And then we carried on playing until, I don’t know, some time in the 90s or 92. By the end, I can’t have been moving very fast. The pitch, I had the impression it was getting bigger and bigger!”

Builder at Morlaix and committed administrator

And then came 2000: “I came to live in Morlaix, there was the Landivisiau club, I think I coached every age group!” And so? Pascal created the Morlaix club in 2000: “I thought it would be an outpost of the Landivisiau rugby school. And then in the end the mayonnaise took in Morlaix.”

In 2008, Pascal took over the presidency of the CD29 (the Finistère departmental committee) for 8 years. Then the Ligue de Bretagne on the steering committee, sitting on the board during Fabrice Quénéhervé’s term as the man in charge of educational rugby, everything to do with relations with schools and with the rugby school alongside the Ligue’s technical team.

The fight for pitches

So much for the rugby CV, volunteer, administrator, coach. What remains is the engine, the desire, the motivation of a life in rugby. Pascal: “Playing rugby. A rugby where we pass the ball to each other. But sometimes that isn’t always compatible with getting the decisive wins. But that’s how it is. There are 2,000 outdoor pitches for major sports in Brittany. Not even 10% of them are fitted with sockets for rugby posts.”

A Missi Dominici! “Give us pitches! There are quite a few football pitches that are a bit deserted. Football pitches, there are some in every village in Brittany. And they are not always in use. Football, I think they are living off their treasure a little. But sometimes we win a bit of market share.”

Today, what does Pascal’s rugby life look like day to day? “We have an educator’s role that goes beyond the simple stage of the game, an increasingly marked social role. I think that is essential. Education through rugby or through sport, I firmly believe in it. You can see the difference between people who play sport and those who don’t, or who have not been through that mould. We do have people with a bit of respect, a healthy way of living.”