Actor Jack Gleeson and a few of his Trinity buddies in the buff. Tasteful.

His passing went largely unnoticed, even within the rugby family, which was strange, given how he shaped the careers of so many promising players in their formative years.

It’s not given to many men to meet their lifelong hero and inspiration. On the eve of the Rugby World Cup Final, the Irish Examiner’s Donal Lenihan tells the story for the first time of a journey which took him from the Christian Brothers College in Cork in 1972 to breakfast in the Emperador Hotel in Buenos Aires to interview one off the world’s great survivors.