Martin Purdy spent his professional rugby career as a lock, the position built for the unglamorous work of winning lineouts and scrums rather than scoring tries, and he did it well enough to win two European Cups and two Premiership titles with Wasps over four seasons after signing with the club in 2003. His playing career carried him from Wasps to Bath, a season in New Zealand with North Harbour, two Italian clubs, London Welsh, RC Massy in France's Pro D2, and finally Rugby Olympique de Grasse, where he also coached.
That career ended on his own 36th birthday, October 29, 2017, when a dislocated shoulder took the decision out of his hands. Purdy studied engineering at Cambridge before turning professional, a detail that reads less like trivia and more like a clue to what came next: a second career built on precision and materials rather than opposing forwards.
Now 43, Purdy runs a carpentry workshop in Saint-Andre-de-la-Roche, in the hills above Nice, shaping wood with what by all accounts is the same dedication he once brought to a Premiership front row. The trade shares more with professional rugby than it might first appear, both demand a kind of physical patience, a willingness to repeat a difficult motion correctly hundreds of times until the result is right.
Purdy's move from professional sport to a hands on trade is a familiar shape, even if the specific craft rarely is. What makes his particular version notable is the setting, a workshop in the same stretch of the Riviera hills that his old opponents on the European rugby circuit would recognise more readily as a training base than a woodshop, and a reminder that the region's appeal extends well past its coastline and casinos.