IT’S A sunny Wednesday in May 2014 in Agen, a town in the southwest of France in between Bordeaux and Toulouse.
Louis Ludik and his wife, Chamé, are sitting outside the post office trying to finalise a decision. There’s an envelope in Ludik’s hands.
The South African back has just finished his first season with Agen, who were beaten by La Rochelle in the Pro D2 promotion play-off final three days earlier.
Ludik has another year on his Agen deal but there’s a get-out clause due to them not going up to the Top 14. Inside the envelope is a two-year contract offer from Ulster. The forms only arrived earlier in the day but Ludik needs to sign and post them back immediately if he wants to join the Irish province.
There’s urgency because Ulster had nearly wrapped up a deal to sign Scottish fullback Stuart Hogg only for that to fall through at the last second. They need someone else in the back three and Ludik is a good fit.
His friend Ruan Pienaar had been in touch from Ulster to let him know the offer would be arriving, but there’s little time to get his head around it.
“We had to decide in a day basically,” says Ludik. “The next day was a public holiday in France, so we had to send it back that same day for it to be legal. We had to decide if we were going to uproot again and move to Belfast.”
He and Chamé had only moved from South Africa to France seven months earlier. They had just started to feel they were properly settling in.
But it was hard to resist Ulster’s offer. Pienaar, who had joined in 2010, sang the province’s praises every time he was back in South Africa. The Ludiks would also be moving to an English-speaking country after the difficulty of getting to grips with French.
Crucially, Ulster were offering the chance to play Heineken Cup rugby. And so, after sitting outside the post office agonising over their decision, the envelope was sent on its way.
“I just felt like I wanted to play at the top level, to play in the Champions Cup, and we decided to come here.”
A decade later, the Ludiks are still living in Belfast, where their nine-year-old son, Leo, was born and where they now run their business, Hellbent. You might have seen Ludik’s face on the packaging of their products at Lidl, Aldi, and a growing number of other shops.
He played for Ulster 112 times on the wing and at fullback before retiring in 2021 and remains involved in rugby as the attack and backs coach for Instonians RFC, who were Division 2B champions in the All-Ireland League this season.
“We’ve been here for 10 years now, so it feels like home,” says Ludik.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get used to the weather but otherwise it’s very comfortable. We’re very fortunate that the business is growing. Our son is in school here, my wife is part of the business. We’re very happy.”
A native of Johannesburg, Louis met Chamé when they were just 15 and 14, respectively, and they’ve been together ever since. He was signed by the local Lions straight out of school and was soon playing Super Rugby, as well as featuring for the Emerging Springboks side.
In 2009, he featured for his Lions against the British and Irish Lions and was due to play for the Emerging Springboks against the tourists a few weeks later only for an unfortunate clash to rule him out.
“David Wallace ran into my leg and tore my ACL and that put me back quite a bit,” says Ludik.
He had joined the Sharks in Durban by the time he recovered from the injury and though he got back to impressing in Super Rugby, enjoying a particularly strong 2012 campaign, a Boks cap never came. He was told to get his visa ready for the Springboks end-of-year tour but he didn’t make the final squad.
“That was heartbreaking,” says Ludik. “I thought if I didn’t make it that year, I wouldn’t make it.”
Reflecting now, he wonders if he could have been a bit more patient but he decided to look for an opportunity overseas. The move to Agen led unexpectedly on to Ulster.
He loved his time with the Irish province, even if they didn’t win a trophy in his seven years there. He had to negotiate injury niggles like most players but he was a consistent performer for Ulster out wide despite strong competition for back three places.
He loved the dedication of Ulster fans and still admires them now that he’s part of the crowd himself, while it was a joy to play with a few superstars like Charles Piutau.
“There might be nothing on in front of him but he just wanted the ball,” says Ludik. “He brought that excitement the whole time.”
Having extended his initial contract with Ulster, Ludik became eligible for Ireland in 2017 through the old three-year residency rule but there was never any contact from the national team.
“I knew it was going to be quite difficult,” says Ludik. “I only qualified when I was nearly 30 so it was quite late.
“It would have been awesome but I realised that there were so many quality local guys in the back three that if there was a 50/50, they would always go for the local guy and that makes complete sense.”
When he retired, there was a call to make between heading back to South Africa or staying in Belfast. Hellbent was already up and running, so the Ludiks had a big reason to stay.
“We decided we wanted to stay and make Belfast our home. We sold property in South Africa and moved our money here.
“Some guys move back but we made the decision to stay here and it basically comes down to the safety.
“If we didn’t have Hellbent, it would have been different as well. The opportunity was here and we ran with it.”
The business dates back to 2018 when South African prop Schalk van der Merwe – who had a brief, injury-hit spell with Ulster – hosted a big barbecue for his son’s birthday party.
Keen to make it a South African braai, van der Merwe went to his local butchers and bought some high-quality Irish beef to make his own boerewors, a popular South African spiral sausage made with spices.
All the guests, South African and Irish alike, loved the boerewors and wanted to get their hands on more. Ludik’s wife joked during the party that they should start up a business but it soon became a reality.
They had no idea how to get it up and running but Rugby Players Ireland helped Ludik and van der Merwe to connect with Invest Northern Ireland and a branding company.
“They came up with the name Hellbent because they thought we were hellbent on making Belfast our home but also hellbent on sharing our culture with locals and other South Africans around Ireland and the UK,” says Ludik.
Ulster had released van der Merwe in late 2018 and he went home to South Africa to win the 2019 Currie Cup with the Cheetahs, but he was soon needed back in Ireland.
Ludik had a successful meeting with Henderson Retail, who run SPAR and EUROSPAR shops across Northern Ireland, and rang van der Merwe asking him to return full-time to Ireland to make the boerewors given that Ludik was still playing for Ulster.
So van der Merwe has made his home in Ireland too.
“He’s a proper farm boy,” says Ludik. “He’s outside of Banbridge on the farm. Even when he played here, he lived in Ballymena which is about 45 minutes at least from the stadium.
“Everyone else stayed quite close but he wanted to be on the farm, didn’t want to see anyone, just fields and sheep around him. He drives about an hour to the factory every day but he loves the peace and quiet when he’s at home.”
Having started out selling their products to small artisanal stores in Belfast, Hellbent soon had success with competitions for new food businesses in Aldi and Lidl. Once the products hit the shelves, the demand blew Ludik away and it hasn’t let up since.
Just last week, 98% of the 50,000 packs that Lidl took from Hellbent were sold within seven days. There are lots of different meat products in the range now and it’s clear that it’s not only South African expats are enjoying them.
Hellbent has been a completely new experience for Ludik post-rugby.
“Running your own business is relentless, it doesn’t stop, especially a small business,” he says. “If you’re not going to do it, nobody else is. If you don’t have the scale and budget to employ more people, you have to do it yourself.
“It’s tough but it’s also very enjoyable and satisfying. Rugby is very demanding and if you don’t have something that challenges you when you retire, I think it can be difficult. I almost haven’t had time to reflect on my career massively.”
He loves the coaching with Instonians, allowing him to switch off from work and enjoy putting his own slant on the attack knowledge he picked up in his years as a professional player.
The club have been enjoying a stunning rise through the AIL, having only been promoted from the junior ranks in 2022.
They dominated Division 2C last season, notching a remarkable 18 bonus-point wins from 18 games, then went close to another clean sweep this season as they lost just two of their 18 matches.
Division 2A awaits in 2024/25 and Ludik will be key to their drive to climb another rung of the ladder.
10 years on, he’s glad he popped that envelope into the postbox in Agen.
