O'Driscoll has always been grounded, regardless of fame

He’s shown huge perseverance and taken every setback in his stride, whether it was losing a game to win a Grand Slam or lasting only a couple of minutes as the 2005 Lions captain or not making the final Test team on his last Lions tour. But those who know him well underline that Brian O’Driscoll always maintained his poise and dignity.

You could call him rugby’s Pop Herring. Except Alan McGinty can laugh about it.

There isn’t a high school basketball player in America or beyond probably these last 30 years who hasn’t heard that once upon a time, Michael Jordan didn’t make his varsity team. And it’s true: sort of. When he was a sophomore, his friend and classmate Leroy Smith made the senior team but the much smaller Jordan didn’t and instead was told by Clifton ‘Pop’ Herring he’d develop better by playing among his own age group that year. That call would actually aid Jordan’s development but Jordan such was a champion of using real or imagined slights to stoke his motivational fire that throughout his NBA career and well after it he would perpetuate the myth that he had been unfairly cut.

That in turn did an injustice to Herring, who almost every morning that year had opened the gym doors and let Jordan work on his jump shot. All these years later a now down-and-out Herring is regularly stopped on the streets outside his ramshackle house and asked is he the guy who once cut Michael Jordan. “No,” he replies, “it’s a lie that you continue to tell.”

It’s no lie about Alan McGinty though. He really is the coach who cut Brian O’Driscoll.

And it’s a mark of both men that they’re each fine with it.

O’Driscoll was overlooked for a couple of teams in his time at Blackrock College. Unlike Jordan, he couldn’t even make the starting line-up with his junior varsity side. The best centre in the world was a scrum-half back then at a time a bigger and skilful team-mate called Ciaran Scally was playing scrum half just about as well as any Irish underage player ever had.

Then in the quarter-final of that 1994 Leinster Junior Schools Cup campaign, the unfortunate Scally had to come off with a broken nose. There was about 10 minutes left when McGinty called over his whippet-like back-up scrum-half. Blackrock already had the game in the bag as well as a scrum on Newbridge College’s 22. The instruction was clear: don’t show any moves; we’ll save them for the semi-final. O’Driscoll duly nodded, ran on, fed the ball, then took it himself from the number eight’s feet and ran laterally towards the touchline. Then he dummy-scissored the opposing inside centre, then their winger, before straightening up to accelerate towards the corner flag and touch down.

Watching on in amazement from the sideline were McGinty and the bloody-noosed Scally who was suddenly wondering if he’d get his place back. As it turned out, Scally would; he was so good that, like O’Driscoll, he would later go on to play for the full senior Irish side at just 20 years of age before his career would suddenly halt through injury. Later that spring of ’94 the team would reach the provincial final, only to lose to Belvedere College, with a certain Brian O’Driscoll remaining rooted to the bench.

McGinty is never let forget that. Within a minute of O’Driscoll’s unforgettable hat-trick in Paris in 2000, his phone was ringing with some former Blackrock College graduates ribbing him. Are you the idiot who didn’t play Brian O’Driscoll? “You can only laugh,” says the current headmaster of the college, and he pretty much has ever since, carrying an old photo of a 15-year-old O’Driscoll around with him. “I’ll say, ‘See that little fella there? That’s Brian O’Driscoll! And that’s why he didn’t get picked that year’!” Yet again like Jordan, O’Driscoll was small for his age but hugely skilful and hugely determined. What particularly struck McGinty was how O’Driscoll refused to play the victim.

“When fellas that are good footballers don’t get on a team you can get histrionics but Brian just got on with it. In fact at the end of that cup campaign I would get a lovely letter from Brian’s father, Frank, saying how much Brian enjoyed the season and being part of that squad.

“And if you look through Brian’s career, he’s maintained that attitude. He’s shown huge perseverance and taken every setback in his stride, whether it was losing a game to win a Grand Slam or lasting only a couple of minutes as the [2005] Lions captain or not making the final Test team on his last Lions tour he’s always maintained his poise and dignity. And I think a lot of that comes from his parenting.”

It hasn’t escaped the genial McGinty Frank has been his son’s agent for all but one year of his career. Brian tried someone else for that short period of time but, as McGinty observed, “you could see the difference, there appeared to be something very artificial”. Which is why O’Driscoll switched back to his old agent, his old man, someone truer to his real values.

Unlike Jordan, O’Driscoll has never had a pop at his Pop Herring and told the world at a big function that “you made a mistake, dude”. Actually O’Driscoll frequently returns to his alma mater where McGinty is now the headmaster and imparts to the students there the values of persistence, service and sheer good manners.

McGinty has seen O’Driscoll smilingly pull up students seeking his autograph. “What word did you forget?”

“Please.” “That’s it!

And...” “Thanks.” “You’re more than welcome!”

Like Jordan, O’Driscoll would undergo something of a growth spurt in his penultimate year at high school. He still didn’t make the senior team in fifth year but by sixth year he was playing alongside Scally, not just with Blackrock but Leinster and Ireland.

With the school, O’Driscoll played out-half. “At that level you play your best footballer there,” maintains McGinty. But the autumn of 1996 at a training session in Terenure College, one of the Leinster schools coaches, a man by the name of John McClean, sounded out a young O’Driscoll about the prospect of him playing at centre. “You could see he had the qualities to play there from playing other positions,” says McClean. “He had good hands and with his low centre of gravity it looked like he could be very good at making an outside break. I wouldn’t take too much credit for it, it was something I just thought might work. So he said okay and we tried it and he played there.”

He would play there too for McClean at UCD the following year. McClean still vividly remembers O’Driscoll’s first colours game against Trinity when he threw an outrageous off-balanced one-handed pop-pass with his left hand while being sandwiched-tackled for a team-mate to run onto for a try.

“I can’t think of another player who would have tried that,” says McClean, who was UCD’s director of rugby at the time. “Well, maybe David Campese would have, but I don’t know if he could have executed it. Brian always had the confidence to try that kind of thing. It was obvious even then Brian had a great work ethic which he showed in how he applied himself in the gym [under the guidance of Liam Hennessy] but he also had a child-like love for the game.

“You even look at Brian training now with Leinster and Ireland; he trains and plays with a smile on his face. He’s never lost that. In our time with him he loved playing games where the whole point was to make a fool out of the opposition. He just loved putting guys into space and going into space himself. And Lee Smith, our first team coach, really encouraged Brian to do that: to keep playing his game, to try things. And you saw against Italy the last day how he’s still trying things. He’s still not afraid to make mistakes.”

Others who have worked with him have also been struck by his attitude to mistakes. Certain mistakes were fine; as Bernard Jackman would learn with such an attacking team as Leinster that sometimes the team that was willing to make the most mistakes would win. But other mistakes were intolerable.

Take Peter Stringer’s intercepted pass against Namibia in the 2007 World Cup; one of the abiding images of that woeful campaign was O’Driscoll bawling his scrum-half out of it. O’Driscoll has since accepted his own reaction was unacceptable. But Stringer’s decision more than his execution really rankled. “We had done a bit of research on them,” he’d say a few years later in an interview. “We had talked about not throwing long second passes.” And for anyone who played with O’Driscoll, there was no excuse for forgetting your homework.

“A lot of stuff in rugby is pre-scripted,” says Jackman. “You know who’s to be where at a ruck, or this lineout or that. You’ve practiced it on the training ground, you’ve been given it in documentation, so if you still don’t know what you’re to do that’s not high performance. So I’m not talking about a dropped pass or a missed tackle if the intent and focus was good; I’m talking about mistakes in terms of standards and people not knowing or carrying out their role and responsibilities. And Brian insisted on standards. He would regularly say that we needed to be harder and expect more from each other and the measure of it would be that when he was sloppy people were to pull him up about it. He wanted to see fellas driving each other on and reacting positively to it and see it as an opportunity to change and improve.”

Shane Byrne can vouch for the same. With both Ireland and Leinster there was a continuous dialogue between the pair of them which wavered between being a democracy and a dictatorship. “He was completely non-discriminate when it came to who he’d challenge. If you needed to get bawled out of it, he’d do it. ‘Your performance is on your shoulders and we’re depending on it.’ I was in charge of the scrum and there might be times where he’d want the ball in such a spot and I’d have to tell him, ‘Well, under the conditions as they are now, it can’t go there’ and he’d understand we’d have to come up with some other method. We were lucky in that everyone wanted to improve and we had a lot of other leaders but certainly Brian helped establish and drive that culture.”

At times very early on in O’Driscoll’s career he wasn’t so much the enforcer as the one who incurred the wrath or at least the mirth of enforcers.

“After Paris [2000], Brian had the world at his feet,” says Byrne, “and no doubt there were stages afterwards maybe his confidence ran away a bit on him. You couldn’t blame him; he was only a kid and the structures weren’t in place to maybe mind him like there is now. But the great thing about rugby is that it is a great equaliser. It doesn’t tolerate enormous egos and lads getting carried away with themselves. There were a few incidents on the training ground with hits that went in and so on that sorted that out.

“But the main person responsible for how grounded Brian became was Brian himself. Was I surprised when in 2002 [autumn internationals] Eddie [O’Sullivan] made him captain? Not one bit. He was ready then, even though he was only 23. He took that responsibility in his stride. It was very easy to recognise that this guy had everything that was needed to wear the armband. It’s amazing and actually beautiful in a way to see how he’s developed into a true ambassador, not just for Irish rugby but Ireland in general.”

They’ve all felt that pride, seeing his continuous, almost never-ending growth. Jackman and Byrne saw how he and Gordon D’Arcy changed how centres play, adapting to whatever rule changes the IRB came in with.

They’ve countered the onset of age too. “As the wheels have slowed down,” says Byrne, “their physicality has gone up.”

Jackman analysed the England game for RTÉ and felt O’Driscoll was Ireland’s most dangerous player. The same again with the Italy game. The visiting side actually seemed relatively comfortable with Ireland playing outside them until O’Driscoll got the ball in his hands. Today Jackman will head up from Grenoble to Paris with the conviction that it will be a good day for Ireland and in the knowledge it’s the last chance he’ll get to see the ultimate team player wearing green again.

“The way Ireland are using him as a target man, Brian has to make carries whereby he has no chance of breaking the line, only making good gainlines, but he’s doing that selflessly for the team. He’s still doing whatever it takes for his team to win.”

Sometimes it won’t come off. McGinty recalls young O’Driscoll’s last game with Blackrock. It was a Leinster Schools semi-final against Clongowes and in the closing minutes O’Driscoll from out half tried four drop goals. None of them went over – “though we maintain at least one of them did,” laughs McGinty again. But just like when he missed out on a junior cup medal, O’Driscoll just picked himself off the ground and went again.

And today in green for one more day he’ll go again and again.

The rest of us knowing we’ll hardly see anything like him in green again. And then inspiring, consoling and boring future generations with the nugget: did you know there was a time Brian O’Driscoll couldn’t make his school team?