For Brian O’Driscoll, it was the longest day. February 10, 2013. Game day. England at the Aviva Stadium.
For the former Irish captain, and the country’s greatest rugby player, the day began shortly after 8am in the morning with a call from his wife, Amy Huberman, and would end nearly 15 hours later in a bar just off Grafton Street.
“It’s on.”
It seemed strange but, for someone whose life was devoted to process and living in the moment and separating stimulus and response with the deep breathing and mindfulness required to remain calm, the professional rugby player seemed to be more frazzled than the imminently expectant mother who had just telephoned him in his Shelbourne Hotel bedroom.
As the father-to-be softly agonises, the mother-to-be sternly assesses.
“Listen, this is what is going to happen. You’re going to come in, we’re going to have the baby, and then you’re going to head back and play the match.”
O’Driscoll, perhaps momentarily lost for words, had not deigned to even think of these ones. If anything, he wanted her to say them. In a whirlwind of uncertainty, this certainty invested a curious resolve within him.
The baby had not been due to arrive until February 14, perhaps aptly; that would have coincided with the natural break in the Six Nations, when O’Driscoll would have been afforded time off from what he would have hoped would have been an unbeaten start to the championship campaign.
Perfect timing. Except neither life nor sport deal in the art of the perfect.
The previous evening, Huberman had attended the Irish Film and Television Awards ceremony in the Westbury, just a few streets away from where her husband was restfully preparing for the visit of the English.
She attended with her mother but left before the main dinner, but they were still hungry so they decided to stop off for a takeaway snack on the way home, fully intending to have an equally restful night as that which awaited her husband, before she too attended the Aviva as a spectator the following day.
“Hope yizzer don’t go into the labour on the same day Ireland play England!” shouted a good-natured wag; Huberman, whose persona betrays a playful nature, chuckled good-naturedly. As if, she smiled to herself.
The next morning, she woke with what she thought was fast-food prompted indigestion. She was wrong. It was eight hours to kick-off. Her big moment would, however, precede it.
“I was freakishly calm,” she remembered later. “My main worry was, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to not annoy him because he’s got a big day tomorrow’.”
Still, as her husband began to tackle his solitary breakfast – despite not being captain any more, he was still accorded the privilege of his own room – the phone rang with the call that would transform his day into one like no other.
As he related in his book The Test, after digesting the news, if not his untouched breakfast, he rang the room of the Ireland manager, Mick Kearney, an unflappable individual whose calm assuredness sparkled on occasions such as this. When he arrived down to O’Driscoll’s room, he simply hugged the player and wished him luck.
Scampering through the hotel, mostly still a-slumber, O’Driscoll effected a hasty take-away of a breakfast and planned the quick half-mile dash to Holles Street.
“Howya Brian?” beckoned a taxi driver. There seemed not a moment to waste so O’Driscoll jumped in.
“Could you give us a spin to Holles Street?” It is six hours until kick-off.
As Ireland’s most famous couple, few would have been unaware of the details of their imminent arrival.
“Of course. Everything alright with the baby?”
“Ah yeah – just a check-up!”
Kearney had sent him on his way with his best wishes but also with the mildest of warnings as his dual lives intervened – he would need to re-assemble with the squad at 1.15.
Journalists, from sport and entertainment, were aware of the breaking story, and cognisant that, while one event would have a direct impact on the other, the birth would naturally take precedence.
For a time that day, it seemed inevitable that O’Driscoll would have to forgo his place in the Irish team, most likely prompting a reshuffle that would have seen Keith Earls come in to supplant the enduring partnership in the sport, that of O’Driscoll and Gordon D’Arcy.
In the maternity ward at Holles Street, O’Driscoll’s most enduring partner in life was beginning the gruelling three-hour labour that would eventually produce Sadie O’Driscoll into their world.
Phone calls are made to joyful families. The clock is ticking. It is now three hours until kick-off.
“I think you better go,” says the new mother. Again, she expresses the selfless thoughts her husband feels are almost too selfish to express.
He lingers for five minutes before she once more beckons for him to leave.
In a car provided by the management to ferry him back to the final team meeting in the hotel, O’Driscoll’s head is whizzing; not for the first time, his instinct informs him he is not fit mental state to play a Test match, against formidable England, of all teams.
He had missed the squad’s walk-through so something seemed amiss to the players but coach Declan Kidney had revealed nothing.
“The management had given me until 1.15pm,” he later told Ryan Tubridy. “I was back at the Shelbourne Hotel by midday. I didn’t want to talk to anyone but I had to wolf down my food to refuel in time for kick-off.
“I was playing a game of that importance and yet, in an instant, my whole perspective had changed. This most wonderful thing had happened. Everything else paled into insignificance.”
The first player he sees in the hotel is his colleague and friend, Ronan O’Gara. “Everything OK?” He beams when he hears the news. If the morning was unforgettable, the afternoon is not. England power to a 12-6 win in the gloaming. Kidney’s reign is slipping.
“It would have been the icing on the cake for the day that was in it. But it wasn’t to be. England played a smart game and made less mistakes than we did and that was the difference between the sides.”
Last month on radio, O’Driscoll admitted he should never have played; the result may not have altered, in any event.
As it is, O’Driscoll is already thinking of a joyous hospital ward as he digests defeat in a gloomy dressing-room.
Outside, we are collecting quotes for the paper, ourselves seeking to overlap the two events of the day.
“Amy showed great courage and generosity to let Brian go off and play and, for that, we’ll be eternally grateful,” Kidney says. “I’m actually flabbergasted his missus let him go,” Mike Ross tells us. “You know, ‘Alright, love, see you later, I’ve got a game to play’!”
“He shot out the gap straight away after the game. I expect to see him crawling back into camp next week, happy to be there.”
He is there again by 6.30 and remains for several hours, before decamping to Hogan’s on George’s Street and then around the corner to Bruxelles where a few of us are also downing tools from a different day’s perspective.
With a baseball cap and casual gear, he appears like any other drinker and nods of appreciation are shared across the room. An ordinary person after an extraordinary day.
Maybe it is around this time that he first thinks of quitting, before the Leinster fans urge him some months later to play for “One More Year”. It would be the year of one more Slam.
That way of life was ending, though. And a new one was just beginning.
