Diligent, smart and brimming with passion, this old Tiger keeps growling
CLUB HERO
IT MAY be six years since the last of his 72 international caps but like some craggy mountain range, Mike Brown stands – unbowed and eternal – as a sentinel of the English game.
He could become the oldest player in Premiership history, with overtaking the record of 40 years, 109 days held by Brad Thorn a distinct possibility.
It is mind-bending to think that when he made his Harlequins debut, Andrew Mehrtens, a 1995 World Cup finalist, was in the same team. Brown, 38, was part of the furniture at The Stoop for so long that the club named a bar after him. When he moved on after 16 years, only to be released by Newcastle after a season, it seemed his career was over. He begged to differ. The phone stopped ringing but he stubbornly trained on alone for six months until, in January 2023, Leicester offered him a trial. It was a blind date which has flowered into a late-career love-in, with Brown signed up until mid-2025. “Contracts aren’t handed out on nostalgia, they’re given out on performance and he has been great for Leicester,” says the club’s general manager Richard Wilks. “When he arrived he hadn’t played a game for months and months, but he was in ridiculous shape. He wasn’t going to let the fact that no one was paying him stop him from being his absolute best. He had to keep up those standards. “He looked like a 28-year-old and trained at an unbelievably high level – like the Mike Brown of old. He didn’t drop a ball for a week. It was a very easy decision to give him a contract. He was a really obvious fit from the start. He came for a week and he’s going to end up staying for two years.”
The key to his longevity, according to those who see him on a daily basis, is the relentless dedication to his craft. With his family living in Surrey, he will sometimes drive up to Tigers’ training from the south of England. If he does, he will build in an extra hour before it starts for stretching and manipulation, so there is no danger of any pulled muscles. That can mean setting off at 4.30am. “He invests in himself. He is inc
