All In

PROLOGUE

THE BEGINNING OF

THE END

Aviva Stadium, 18 March 2017,

Six Nations Championship, Final Game,

Ireland v England

England at Lansdowne Road. A chance to stop them winning the Grand Slam. This is my 96th game for Ireland, to add to the five test matches for the British & Irish Lions. The final game of the Six Nations. An opportunity for Ireland to redeem a disappointing campaign, for me to nail a spot on my third Lions tour, this time to New Zealand in June.

We come down through the tunnel for the warm-up session about 45 minutes before the game is due to start. There’s nothing unusual during my physical and mental warm-up, as we do line-out drills, a few scrums, passing movements. When it happens, we’re doing the piston drill, with guys holding tackle bags, where we would work in groups: one player taking the ball, hitting into the tackle bag at force and laying the ball back for the following players to pick up and move on to hitting the next obstacle, pause then do it again. It is an important drill done at speed and with force, between the 10m and 22m lines. It gets the heart racing, gets the body ready for what’s coming and it’s part of the usual pre-match routine Joe Schmidt puts us through every time. We do it dozens of times before each game. It’s just standard stuff. Until now.

I hit a tackle bag with force and feel something go in my back, and, immediately, my left leg feels as if all the power has been switched off. There’s no pain, but my leg is dead. It just won’t work. All sorts of thoughts go through my mind. The obvious one: what’s wrong? Then: is this going to last and for how long? Do I tell anyone? If I look for help, will I be stopped from playing the match? I say to myself, ‘You’re grand, like, what are you talking about? You’ll run this off, you’re fine, just get up. If you were really injured, you’d have massive pain and you don’t.’ And there’s another, quieter voice whispering that I’m funking out because I didn’t have a fantastic match last week against Wales and that I’m scared now and that’s why I’m imagining an injury. And then I have this devil on my shoulder telling me to shut the fuck up: ‘You’ve got your match bonus, you’ve got your bonus in your contract, get on the field for five minutes and then come off, right.’

There is no pain and that, as much as anything else, is wrecking my head. If I’m injured so badly that I can’t play this game, then surely I should be in physical pain? I’d understand that and I wouldn’t be so confused by what’s happening.

I don’t know what to do, but I do know I have a responsibility to the team. I walk over to the physio and explain, as best I can, what’s happening to me. We start a fitness test there on the sideline, then quickly realise that we shouldn’t be doing this in public. I have to get into the dressing-room. I normally wait to be last in after the warm-up, a little superstition of mine – unless I’m captain, in which case I lead the team back in for the final moments before we return for the anthems. Now, though, I go in as fast as my leg will let me move.

In the dressing-room, the physio and doctor perform a quick fitness test. There are only a few minutes before we have to return to the pitch for the anthems and then the kickoff and we’re all under pressure here. My leg is still dead. I put my weight on the toes of my left leg and try to lever myself upwards to standing on my toes, but my heel can hardly rise off the floor. There’s absolutely no way I could run, jump, turn, lift in the line-out, push in the scrum, move at anything near the pace of international rugby. I’d be a liability to the team. And there’s nothing the medics can do to fix this.

The team doctor, Ciaran Cosgrave, turns to Joe Schmidt, who came over to check on me, and tells him that I’m not able to play. Joe doesn’t blink or argue with him, trusting his judgement immediately. He doesn’t commiserate with me now that I’m useless to him. There’s no time for that and no benefit to it. He’s all business. He tells Peter O’Mahony that he’s playing now, at number 6, and CJ Stander that he’s switching from 6 to 8. He yells at Dan Leavy not to go into the shower because he’s now on the bench. I don’t argue because I know he’s doing what he has to do, and that he’s right. He doesn’t give me a backwards glance as the team and subs head out the door of the dressing-room, along with the coaches, medical staff and everyone else.

I sit there in the sudden silence, stunned. I keep trying to do the test on my leg, as if its powers will return magically and somehow I’ll be able to run out after everyone and reclaim my jersey and play against England. I shower, hoping the heat of the water will bring the leg back to life. I put my socks and boots on again and repeat the fitness test on my own. No good. This foot won’t lift an inch off the ground. I have another shower and try again. And yet there is still no pain. Why is that?

In those moments, I’m more confused than distraught. But I remember that I have to think of others, people who’ll be worried about me. My family will be worrying when they see the team run out without me, so I text my wife, Sheena, and my dad, Richard, and tell them I’ll see them after the game. That I’m okay. Then I get dressed and I walk down the tunnel on my own, out to the subs bench, to watch the match. It’s thrilling to watch the team as they set about tearing the English apart, but I have to admit to feeling a little sorry for myself. I should be out there, that’s the only thing I’m capable of thinking.

This is all new to me because I’ve rarely suffered an injury. There’s only a short list of them. My eye-socket was broken when I was a 17-year-old playing All-Ireland Division 3 rugby for Trinity College, which is why my left eye sometimes seeps tears. I had three concussions in nearly twenty years. I did my shoulder AC joint once but played through the pain in each subsequent game. I played with syndesmosis, an ankle injury, and came back to play again the following week, even though I could only run in straight lines. I cracked three vertebrae but was playing international rugby again within a month and never had any subsequent issues arising from that, as has been confirmed by leading medical specialists. I don’t suffer muscle strains or tightness. My bones don’t break. I joke that I’m Wolverine, and I slag my friends who seem to be injured for every Monday training session. I don’t even miss those. It’s why, just a month before this England game, I signed a new contract with the IRFU, to take me up to after the 2019

Rugby World Cup, even though I’ll be 36 years old by then, because everyone knows that I’ll be fit, available and good enough for that.

What I don’t know is that my entire career has just ended.

CHAPTER 1

ANCHORED

Joe Schmidt once told me that I wasn’t ‘anchored to rugby’. He said it to me as I was telling him my career might be coming to an end, and I think he intended it as reassurance.

I didn’t ask him to elaborate, but what was important to me about it was my feeling, satisfaction even, that it meant Joe got me, understood me, that he had a real sense of who I am as a person. He realised that I didn’t fit the stereotype of a rugby person who had no interests or perspectives beyond the game, and I was glad that he knew that about me and that he didn’t judge me adversely for it.

I suppose that phrase could be interpreted different ways, but I have my own view of what an anchor does. On the plus side, it provides stability and safety and helps you to stay rooted to your moorings, no matter what buffets you. It keeps you in place. Those are good things, clearly. But not always. An anchor also prevents you from moving when you might need to and can limit where you can go and how far you can travel. If you’re anchored, you’re stuck fast.

I can imagine what many other players might have taken from such a comment from Joe, given that I’ve heard almost as many of them talk fearfully of him as talk respectfully or gratefully. They might have seen it as a criticism, and not only that but as a warning that he didn’t regard them as being committed enough to their job and that there might be adverse consequences if they didn’t knuckle down and change their ways. But I also think Joe knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t be bothered by such an opinion and wouldn’t take it as a suggestion to change my approach if I somehow managed to get back to playing. While my ways of doing things in my professional life were always evolving, and I always took his advice on that, my attitude to rugby’s place in my overall life had been consistent througout.

I love rugby, and if I hadn’t been playing with Leinster or Ireland, I’d have been lining out with my mates on a Saturday afternoon for the pure fun of it. I loved winning – and worked myself to the bone to win – and could get enormously frustrated when I lost, but I also knew when to let that go rather than allowing it to dictate my mood and my life beyond what was, after all, my job. I’ve sometimes watched, amused or aghast, as some people within the game, and some pundits and fans outside the bubble, blow up its perceived importance out of all proportion. It’s only a game. It’s not life or death.

A few years ago, during a press conference, I made a comment that was misinterpreted but that I’ve had to live with ever since. I said that, outside of what I needed for work, ‘I don’t watch rugby’. The qualification in my statement wasn’t noticed by many people. It was represented as meaning that I somehow didn’t like rugby or didn’t care about it, that I didn’t have the right attitude to playing the game just because I wasn’t getting up early and watching super rugby from the Southern Hemisphere or even the other internationals. Some people apparently wanted me to declare as a fan. I did and do watch rugby. I watched what I needed to watch and I did it for work, not for enjoyment. I looked back at my training sessions, I previewed teams, I reviewed our games, I watched lots of it. But when I’m on, I’m on, and when I’m away from it, I’m away from it. I needed that separation, to allow me to see the bigger picture.

I always had a natural curiosity about life outside rugby. Yes, I loved playing and was proud of my achievements in the game, but I wasn’t defined by rugby or consumed by it. I wasn’t solely a rugby player when I was a player, just like I’m not solely a former rugby player now, nobody beyond what I did with an oval ball. It played a big part in my life, but it wasn’t my whole life. It informed my identity, but it didn’t provide my identity.

In the reaction to my comment, I realised that some people had their narrative of what I was supposed to be as a rugby player, an identikit I was supposed to fit, one that wasn’t going to tolerate tongue piercings, dyed hair or a baseball cap worn backwards, which are apparently symbols of ‘disrespect’ to the sport. Coaches and journalists aren’t slow to tell you when they think you’re overstepping the mark – their mark – and as I became better known, fans weren’t slow to pitch in either, influenced by what they’d read in the papers or, in recent years, on social media.

I see it differently. I’ve met too many guys who treat professional rugby as the same sport they first played as eight-year-olds. I had my dreams back then, too, of being Simon Geoghegan, the flying Irish winger who was the brightest spark in the Irish teams of my childhood, the ones that often got beaten because they weren’t good enough. But dreams don’t sustain you. Once I turned professional, I stopped playing rugby just for fun and I worked as hard as I could to be the best I could be for as long as my career was going to last. I was very much aware that it was a business in which I had a job, and I approached it like that. I think my peers in the game – even those who didn’t like me – would acknowledge that I took it seriously and gave it my all.

I wanted to learn about all the things that could make me the best player I could be. I became interested in performance, wellness, nutrition, fitness, finance and a whole range of other things in my efforts to build a broader understanding of the professional system and my place in it. I got the best people in their fields, nutritionists, performance mentors, masseurs, whatever was needed above and beyond what Leinster and Ireland offered, to provide the services that would make me the best.

I was aware, at all times, that it would come to an end, and possibly not at a time of my own choosing. I thought I’d be doing well if I got six years at the top international level, so I was going to get the best out of it in terms of performance and I worked accordingly. I decided I was going to get the most out of it financially, too, from the contracts with Leinster and Ireland and from the commercial endorsements. And I was going to use it all as a platform for my future beyond the sport. I wasn’t going to allow the conventions of the game and limited expectations prevent me from taking the opportunities that would arise to do other things. Rugby would open doors for me and just because other people wouldn’t step through the openings, and frowned upon those who did, that wouldn’t stop me.

I realised early on that I was a cog in the rugby machine and that, ultimately, I was disposable. I had to maximise my return from my investment in this sport. I knew that my employer on the other side of the table wanted to get the most out of me for their money. I had to do the same from my side. It was the same if a sponsor was employing me to promote its brand. I came to realise that I had a brand, too, and I treated it as a business in which I had to create value and then capture that value, just as they did with theirs. I admit I probably wasn’t as discreet about this approach as others were and being upfront often got me into a bit of trouble. But my attitude was, ‘Well, fuck it, I’m going to do the best I can to get the most out of this.’ There would be a long life to live after rugby was gone.

Professional rugby is still a young sport, which means it hasn’t yet worked out all the imbalances inherent within it. The IRFU is a hybrid, with the voluntary blazers and the über professionals working side by side, dealing with both amateur and professional games. That makes things even more difficult than they would be otherwise. The game has been professional for 25 years, so people are still learning as it evolves. It’s not perfect and there are a lot of things that could be better about it. That said, Irish rugby has done many things better than other countries, as success for the main clubs and country during my time playing shows. A lot of that is down to Joe Schmidt, to whom I also owe a lot. I know what I’ve done for myself, but I also know and thank all the people who have helped me along the way.

There are an awful lot of people looking to control the players at professional and international level, but I wanted to control what I could of my own life while knowing that I had to be part of a team or teams. Joe may have made that anchor comment about me, but he also said that I was the most professional player with whom he had worked. He said that to other people who then said it to me. I’m proud of that. It shows that I delivered on my ambitions in rugby.

I had the confidence to back myself, both on and off the pitch. I believed in my ability to face up to bigger opponents and to look them in the eye. In school I often got into trouble with coaches and teachers who might have mistaken self-belief and confidence for arrogance. I understand it now, in retrospect, but I wanted the best, to be the best. What was wrong with that?

I think that ability to see the bigger picture may have had a bit to do with my upbringing and the characters of my parents, Richard and Christine, and also the travelling we did as a family when I was a child.

I’m the youngest of four and by quite a distance. I always joke that I’m the one that got past the keeper. Graham, the eldest, is twelve years older than me, Richard Jnr ten years older than me and Joanne, my only sister, is eight years older. We call myself, my mum and dad ‘the family within the family’. I probably was a bit spoiled and indulged, and my siblings would say that I got it a lot easier than they did. Joanne left school at seventeen, as she didn’t do transition year, Graham joined the army and Richard went off to Japan for years after he finished college. My Dad held a number of senior positions in the Irish Army, finishing as a brigadier general, which meant he was regularly posted overseas. As a result, it was often just me and my mum in the house, so no doubt I did have it easier.

My mother, Christine, is a formidable woman. She’s funny but very organised, too. There was no rugby interest in her family. My granddad, James Whelan, was an amateur boxer. She is a very can-do person and she had to be as the family moved around a lot because of Dad’s work, to Limerick for a few years, to Fermoy in County Cork and to Cork, and on various foreign postings, before Dad settled the family near the Curragh army camp and a home in Naas, County Kildare, shortly before I was born (in Israel, when Dad was on peace-keeping duties with the United Nations (UN)) on 15 December 1983.

Mum ran a crèche from the house for years, on and off, depending on where Dad was working. There were always other kids in our house when I was growing up. I broke a couple of their collarbones playing rugby around the yard. Imagine doing that now. She’d probably be sued or shut down for health and safety violations, but back then it was simply a case of, ‘Ah sure, look, these things happen.’ She also did counselling work for the Samaritans in her spare time and still does.

My father, Richard, is very much in the army mould, very disciplined, very big into proper behaviour. He’s from Janesboro in Limerick and he played rugby, first for Shannon RFC, then for clubs at the various places where he worked. He’s very structured, quite old school and traditional in his thinking. He doesn’t drink alcohol, never did, and is very strong in his religious faith. When I was in school, I had to go to Mass every morning for the whole six weeks of Lent, no choice in the matter. He gives out to me a lot to this day for cursing so much. ‘You’ve a mouth like a soldier sometimes,’ he complains, but that’s the retired army officer in him.

He attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Irish Army and established the elite Army Ranger Wing (ARW), which is a special ops unit within the Defence Forces. Then he went to work with the UN in the 1990s, serving as a colonel across various peace-keeping missions and then as a brigadier general as the Irish observer to NATO. Dad never spoke much about the work of the ARW. I know it is designed for the physically capable and the mentally robust, but from what I’ve heard it is all about structure and discipline, and I’ve no doubt he would have established a really strong work ethic among those troops. He didn’t talk much about any aspect of his work at home, regarding it as confidential, but talking to people who worked with him, I’ve heard that he had a very matter-of-fact approach with soldiers and officers alike. That fit with his personality alright, and he also brought a bit of that home with him.

Dad was tough, but always fair. Discipline was a big thing for him. So was a keen work ethic. He used to throw all of these clichés at me, like ‘Nothing’s worth doing unless you do it well,’ or ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going,’ or his favourite one, ‘Talent is nothing without discipline,’ and he just hammered them into me. He’d tell me: ‘You don’t need to be the toughest, or even the strongest, you just have to have a certain mindset.’ Clearly, a lot of it rubbed off on me, even if it may have taken me a long time to realise that. I might have rolled my eyes at times, but I heard him and much of it seeped in. For example, Dad’s the reason why I train on the pitch in a jersey and shorts, never in a tracksuit. ‘Train as you want to play,’ he told me, and that included wearing what I would wear in a game, nothing more or less. I did as he told me. I was the product of nature and nurture. I realise now that there’s an awful lot of him in my character.

But then, there are differences too, things that I rejected consciously. For example, I never for a moment considered a military career, to follow in the footsteps of my father and my eldest brother. I always regarded the army as being too disciplined, too much following orders and not being able to question things. I don’t like doing stuff just because I’m told to do it. I don’t like repeating the status quo just because someone says that’s the way it’s always been done. I don’t like stereotypes, don’t like being put in a box. I’ve always had a slightly rebellious streak and I’ve been told I have a stubborn side. And I hate to say it, but I probably got that from him, too. But in terms of how to be a man or a father or a family man, I couldn’t have had a better example. My dad puts family first, no matter what. He was never going to be missing in action, down in the pub or anything like that. As a non-drinker, he was always available to drive everyone home after a night out, and then would still go out and do some ridiculous hiking event or whatever the next day. He’s a very disciplined man, and still is, doing things like organising walking tours of the Second World War battlefields.

Dad has had quite the career himself. There are three pictures in our house of him as a teenager, standing in his uniform at the graveside of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 in Arlington National Cemetery. He is among the group of 26 Irish cadets who performed the Queen Anne Drill, also known as the Funeral Drill, as part of the interring ceremony. Jackie Kennedy is in one of the photos, that’s how close he was to the mourning party. Dad was a member of the 37th Cadet Class, which had greatly impressed Kennedy during his visit to Ireland earlier that year when they performed the Queen Anne Drill at Arbor Hill in memory of the leaders of the Easter 1916 Rising. When Kennedy was assassinated, a request was made, apparently a personal request by Jackie Kennedy, that these Irish soldiers be brought over. The drill is very solemn and performed in silence at a very slow pace, without the barking of orders, and it lasts for about three minutes. Dad’s photo shows how close he and the other Irish soldiers were to the very high-profile people at the ceremony, but he says that he was so focused on the job at hand that he didn’t really process who all the famous people were. There are loads of remarkable details in the story of how they got there, but probably most notable is how, when they flew over to the USA on the same flight as President Éamon de Valera, they brought their rifles on board as normal luggage and stored them under their seats for the flight.

Dad’s career brought him all over the world, and me and my mother with him. I loved moving about as a child. I was born in a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee called Tiberias. Dad was serving there on peace-keeping duties with the UN. We left before I was six months old and I had one trip back to see the place when we were living in Cyprus, doing the usual tourist things of seeing the Wailing Wall and the Dead Sea. I never took an Israeli passport and even though I was born there, I don’t know if I would be entitled to one, if I ever wanted it.

My first detailed memories are of living in Cyprus, on an army base in Nicosia. We were there on and off for a couple of years when I was of primary school age. I had a great time. I thought it was a fantastic adventure. I got to live on an army base and we played sports all the time. It was brilliant during the summer. My brother was a lifeguard at the pool and as I loved swimming I was there from nine o’clock in the morning, heading off on my own from the house to meet whoever was around, safe because my big brother was working there. It was always sunny and we were always outdoors. On Sundays after Mass we sometimes drove down to Salamis, on the Turkish side of the island, and went snorkelling around the ancient ruins.

I also went to school there. I was picked up at my house by the school bus at about 7am. I went to an international school, which was very different from the Christian Brothers school in Naas that I would later attend. We did French and German lessons, subjects I’d never have done in Ireland.

Whenever my older siblings were there – which wasn’t too often – they weren’t as keen on being there as I was, but they were doing different things, partying and being teenagers. I was left largely to my own devices, indulging my fascination with ants and snakes and all that sort of stuff. On the occasions I stayed indoors, I played with Lego. I was massively into Lego. I had an almost unhealthy fascination with Lego Technic. I built anything I could get my hands on. I loved the methodical processes of figuring out a problem and finding a solution.

The lack of supervision meant I could get up to little bits of trouble. In the pre-division days, before the 1975 Turkish invasion, the old main road across the island used to run into the army base. It sat just inside the Greek side of the dividing line that marked it off from the Turkish side of the island. There was a wire fence around our camp on our side of the road, then there was the road itself and then on the other side, also fenced off, a minefield, with Turkish outposts beyond it. I kicked so many balls across the road and over that fence to see if they would hit anything that would set off a mine. It never happened. I had a set of binoculars and I could see the Turkish soldiers at their posts, starting about 150m away, looking back at me. One time when I looked over a guy was pointing a gun at me. I imagine he only did it to put the shits up me, but it worked well at the time.

When we were leaving Cyprus, Dad bought a car there to bring home to Ireland because they were so cheap. It meant a long drive back through Europe, so Dad decided to make it an educational tour, taking in lots of war history-related tourism. He brought us to Auschwitz and then over to Normandy. I think I was about eight and my poor sister was seventeen, having just finished her Leaving Cert. She was forced to spend weeks of her first summer after finishing school in the back of the car with me, our parents in the front.

It was a trip to remember, though. As a child I was very interested in those war magazines that used to be published monthly and have some kind of toy or a memento attached as a freebie to entice you to buy them. But I developed an interest in the stories beyond the toys when Dad brought us to Normandy. The battlefields and burials gave me an appreciation of the scale of war. The cemeteries really got to me; the sheer size of them was mind-blowing. We think of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery as big, and it is at 124 acres, but it was built up over hundreds of years. In Normandy, the thousands of bodies were placed there in just a few short years, and they are just the ones that could be accounted for. The Normandy beaches fascinated me, too, going onto the battlements and imagining the sand full of people, many of them landing to almost certain death, scrambling over the already dead, many of them young men not much older than me. While as a child I probably got bored easily, an awful lot of it did sink in.

It was the same at Auschwitz. It was only later in life that I understood what I’d seen there; things I saw on that trip seeped into my mind and became powerful memories in adulthood. I can remember the tracks for the trains leading the people like cattle to their fate, but most especially I can still see all the many, many shoes piled up, belonging to people of all ages who were brought there to be murdered. Thanks to my parents, from an early age I had the sense that the world beyond the Ireland I knew was often very different.

I got more of that from Dad’s next big posting, in Kosovo, during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The dangers meant that we stayed in Zagreb, in Croatia, but we weren’t really allowed to stay there too long. Dad’s job wasn’t great. He was literally counting the rockets flying over his head. And I was like, ‘What happens