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In a weird twist, Eddie Evans has a fake job to thank for his real job.

From 1992 to 2002, the former Canadian international rugby star (50 caps) lived in Tokyo and played in Japan for IBM. Rugby until after the 1995 World Cup was considered an amateur sport so athletes couldn’t get paid to just play. In Japan, players would have regular jobs with the companies that sponsored the teams.

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“Regular” in this case is a loose term.

“Fake job, yes,” said Evans while sitting on a deck in Vancouver recently.

“We did have to dress up and go to the office and sit there. They had me working on a few little things. Mostly translating, actually. I was like a financial director or something like that. Some wacky title that I had no right to hold.”

The twist is that as an employee of IBM he had a right to a staff shares purchase plan.

Photo by Colin Price / PROVINCE

It proved to be a lucrative move, as a decade later Evans used the money he made from the stocks to launch his Thailand-based X-treme Rugby Wear sports clothing company. The company is an international success and supplies various custom sports uniforms to schools, clubs and national rugby teams from Alaska to Africa.