Prince William told a rugby player he’d named his eldest child after him.The 39-year-old royal – who has Princes George and Louis, eight and three, and Princess Charlotte, six, with wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge – visited the Welsh rugby team in their dressing room shortly after welcoming his first son into the world and after the team delighted him with a personalised gift for the tot, he let slip to George North that one of the reasons behind the youngster’s moniker was that he was his favourite player.
Speaking on the BBC’s ‘Rugby Union Daily’ podcast, Sam said: “I remember he came into the dressing room and the team manager said ‘Sam, William is coming in after the game and we’ve got a shirt to present to him’.
“He’d just had his baby boy George, which was his first, so [the shirt] had George and a little number seven on the back. I didn’t ask for number seven!
“He came in and I said ‘we’ve got a shirt for your little boy’. We gave him the shirt and he seemed to really like it.
“Then, he was chatting to George North and he said ‘I could never say this in public, and I would never tell Kate this, but one of the reasons I really liked George was because you’re one of my favourite players’.
“That’s a heck of a thing to tell George. George will be 80 or 90 years of age, and he’ll be able to tell his grandkids ‘you know the king of England, King William, Prince George is named after me!’ And they’ll say ‘Whatever granddad’. ”
Sam believes William – who is patron of the Welsh Rugby Union – enjoyed the “normality” of hanging out in the dressing room with the squad.
He said: “Prince William was a regular with Wales. He was a good one.
“The boys would just be chatting to him in their towels, and he didn’t care. I think he quite liked the normality of it – of people not being ‘yes sir, no sir’. He’d be talking rugby, talking about his kids.”
