O’Driscoll’s incredible work ethic is what made his legend

David Campese has uttered the odd verbal gaffe in his time, but the Wallaby legend was prescient enough to foresee the direction rugby was already taking when he announced his formal retirement from the game back in 1999 after one of the most wondrous of careers.

“I’m going to leave it to the new generation,” he proclaimed, “to the crash-it-up robots that dominate the game.” Fifteen years on, and his description of rugby is so uncannily accurate, that it recalls Biff Tannen, the town bully in Back to the Future who gets his hands on Marty McFly’s Grays Sports Almanac, and uses it to get filthy rich by betting on sporting results for years to come.

What he couldn’t know is that Joe Schmidt would be uttering similar sentiments, though in a far less dramatic fashion, 15 years later when Brian O’Driscoll prepared to depart from the stage. O’Driscoll and Gordon D’Arcy are, according to the Ireland coach, the last of a dying breed of centres who seek to utilise guile rather than grunt to breach opposing defences.

All of which brings us to the kernel of today’s meandering.

It is easy to frame the O’Driscoll phenomenon as one that was always meant to be.

Educated on and off the pitch in Blackrock, and with a father who played for Ireland before him, the temptation is to say his path was laid for him, that all he had to do was follow the crumbs.

Not so. For all his natural talent, his leadership skills, his work ethic and his desire to succeed, there are actually many reasons why BOD might not, maybe should not, have turned into the player he did.

First, he was too small: Small and lightweight as a teenager, Schmidt also spoke about the behemoths that O’Driscoll has had to face in the centre in modern rugby. He’s no midget. At 5’ 10”, he’s in and around the average height for an Irish adult male, but he is Lilliputian in a world where the giants Gulliver encountered in Brobdingnag are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Then he was too big: O’Driscoll morphed into a man who had to watch his weight in the early years of his professional career. Look back through the pictures of his time in the early to mid-00s and if you can see beyond the awful blond hair you’ll notice more than a hint of a double chin in some of them. The 24/7 athlete we know now had yet to be born.

Then he was too big, but in a different way: Like a lot of rugby players in the mid-00s, especially in Ireland, O’Driscoll turned into something of a gym monkey for a spell. Muscle was layered upon muscle for a few seasons there until common sense kicked in, individually and collectively, that less was sometimes more. Close to a stone was reportedly shed as attributes like agility and speed were once again prioritised.

All the greats have vision, don’t they? Depends what you mean. O’Driscoll has done things with a rugby ball that 99.9% of people would never even imagine, but he seems to have done it for the majority of his career while being almost blind as a bat. Having worn glasses since he was five, he said at the time of the procedure in 1999 that it was being done more for a “general life point of view” before rattling off a list of pastimes including reading, watching telly, playing golf and driving.

He’s not flawless as a player either: For a man who has delivered some of the most wonderful passes — through the legs, behind his back, through thickets of players, round the corner — he doesn’t always throw the most aesthetic of spirals. His kicking, too, hasn’t always been in Jonathan Sexton or Dan Carter territory, though he has been uncommonly fond of the odd grubber.

The point here isn’t to poke holes in the O’Driscoll legend. Like that saying about how it is our blemishes that make us beautiful, it is O’Driscoll’s flaws and his determination to work on them that have made him the player he is as he departs the scene for good after tomorrow night’s RaboDirect Pro12 final against Glasgow Warriors at the RDS.

Leo Cullen, who also leaves his playing days behind him tomorrow and was on the Blackrock College ‘Dream Team’ on which O’Driscoll was an unused sub in the final, pointed out recently there were half a dozen other players on that side he would have tipped for stardom ahead of the man who would become Irish rugby’s greatest ever.

To paint him as a higher being, a god among mere mortals, does the man a disservice.

His abilities and achievements have been rightly lauded but the fact is O’Driscoll squeezed every last ounce out of himself to become what he did. That remains his greatest achievement.

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