Jamaican hopeful trying out for Toronto Wolfpack works as a mortician – and has done since he was 13
Tyronie Rowe sees this is a huge chance to get out of crime-ridden Kingston
TYRONIE Rowe hopes to seize the chance of a career in rugby league – or it will be back to being a mortician, which he has been since he was 13-years-old!
The Jamaican is one of 18 players flown over from the Caribbean island, Canada and the USA with one final chance of making it on to the Toronto Wolfpack squad.
Five men will be named in the Canadian side’s first group after a trial game against Yorkshire amateur side Brighouse Rangers today.
The Wolfpack enter League One next season but have been scouring the massive area for talent.
That was a chance Rowe just could not turn down – he could escape the rough Tivoli Gardens area of Kingston and the crime that blights the neighbourhood.
Gang violence is commonplace in the area and Rowe – who also works at a school coaching rugby to children – is likely to have found himself dealing with victims.
“I embalm the bodies and get them ready for their funerals,” he revealed about the job he does for two or three days a week.
“I’ve been doing it since I was 13. Where I come from you cannot plan long-term, people there are just surviving day by day.”
That gang violence made Rowe’s journey to today’s final trial even trickier, as it meant he had to go to his tryout the very long way around.
“Where the tryout was is probably four miles from home,” he recalled. “But I can’t take the bus there because they won’t go down the road as there is a turf war going on.
“There’s a turf war to the left of me and to the right, and I live in the middle - so the buses all go around the area, it took about four hours to get there.
“I wasn’t even sure if I’d get home.
“The neighbourhood I came from is really rough, it has the highest crime rate in Kingston and no-one knows unless they’ve been around the amount of peer pressure that exists around there.
“There you don’t go looking for trouble. Trouble comes and finds you.”
Thankfully for Rowe, he did make it and impressed watching Wolfpack director of rugby Brian Noble enough to make this stage.
The 28-year-old has some background in rugby league, having played for Jamaica in two Rugby League World Cup qualifying campaigns.
He has also featured for both Coventry Bears and their feeder club, Coventry Dragons – either as a prop or second rower.
Now he and his fellow trialists – including former USA sevens player Ty Elkins, Canadian teenager Quinn Ngawati and Jamaicans Nathan Campbell, Antonio Baker and Kenneth Walker – face their final audition before former Great Britain coach Noble, ex-Leigh boss Paul Rowley and former player turned Hollywood actor Adam Fogerty decide who gets a deal.
And it is easy to understand why Rowe is making such a big deal of it.
He added: “This week here has been the most important week of my life. It’s been a life-changing experience.
“Becoming the first Jamaican to earn a contract in League One would be massive.
“Thankfully, I learned a couple of months beforehand that the Wolfpack would be visiting Kingston, so I spent all that time training to make sure I was the best I could be.
“Now, weirdly, as the game grows closer I’m starting to get more calm and confident.
“If you had asked me a couple of months ago, I’d have been very nervous- now I just can’t wait.”
