When the rugby stars come out to dance
Good or bad? We’re not sure, but we’re pretty positive it’s the only one which links BOD and the thriller writer Elmore Leonard, though.
Over the last few years we’ve had a couple of encounters with the great O’Driscoll. At a Six Nations launch in London a couple of years ago we bounced our question of the year off him – who would win between a bear and a shark if both had enough room to fight properly – and he was game enough to try an answer.
(Bear, he said. Or possibly shark.) More recently we had a chat with him about his cooking and his sweet tooth, and he let slip that sometimes kids toss ladies’ sanitary items into his shopping basket, a factoid that seems to pop up now in every profile of the Ireland captain that gets hastily assembled.
We first had a chat with him, though, when he had to spend a couple of hours in his shorts and precious little else in the Millennium Stadium. That’s where Elmore Leonard comes in.
It was a Gillette gig, organised ahead of the 2005 Lions Tour, with O’Driscoll, Jason Robinson and Gavin Henson all due to attend a photoshoot in the Welsh stadium – we were going to say the bowels of the stadium, for some reason the interior of a large sporting venue must always be likened to a body’s entrails – and yours truly had come over for the day.
O’Driscoll was there. Robinson cancelled. Henson was late.
When we say Henson was late, we don’t mean hold-the-bus-a-minute; we mean Mariah Carey late. Elizabeth Taylor late. One of the PR people assured us that Gavin was nearby, and an hour and a half later he still wasn’t there.
He eventually rocked up approximately three hours late. When he did land, he spent a full 10 minutes doing his own hair in front of a full-length mirror. Unless you are a drag queen or a member of Westlife, I put it to you that this is a very long time; clock it yourself at some stage.
While we waited for the arrival of the Welshman, O’Driscoll mooched around a bit. There wasn’t much in the way of food to take your mind off the skull-warping boredom, and it was probably just before the advent of killer apps for your mobile, so for entertainment you could watch the inspirational slogans the Welsh had painted on their dressing-room walls and guess what part of the Dulux catalogue each letter had been slapped on with.
Fortunately, your correspondent had come prepared. With a book. Some sixth sense for which we are forever grateful had set off a little alarm, and we tucked some reading in our pocket for the journey to Wales.
Consequently, when everybody was drumming their fingertips along the available surfaces and wondering whether the person sitting across from them would ever stop drumming their fingers on another available surface, we were coasting merrily through Elmore Leonard’s short stories.
Eventually O’Driscoll sat down in the opposite corner. Decked out in Gillette gear. Steaming slightly from the ears, having been waiting a couple of hours along with the rest of us. Bored.
We put Elmore Leonard down for a few seconds: “Glamour, wha?”
“This is the part they don’t see,” he said, then noticed what we had in our hand. “What’s the book?”
Now, this is a delicate thing. You’re familiar with the part of Out Of Africa where Meryl Streep and Michael Kitchen talk about Robert Redford’s book-lending policy.
(“You wouldn’t lose a friend because of not returning a book?” asks Kitchen; “No, but he has,” says Redford).
If anything we regard that as an unforgivably soft position. Even allowing for the mind-bending boredom everybody was afflicted with in Cardiff, even allowing for the fact that it was Brian O’Driscoll angling for a loan...
“Well, it’s, er, it’s not much good really, short stories, the dog had a poo on it actually before I left home this morning . . .”
(That last bit went unsaid).
We were saved by a stylist who called O’Driscoll back in for another application of hair gel. He never did get the book.
Sorry about that, kid. We still have it at home if you want to read it: ‘When The Women Come Out To Dance’.
By the way, one of the stories features a former big league baseball pitcher who gets to vent his frustrations on a prospective employer.
“Charlie went into his motion and bore down, threw it as hard as he could and saw the red bat fly up in the air as Billy Darwin hit the dirt to save his life.”
Next time there’s a gig with Gavin, we’ll bring along a baseball as well, what do you say?
*Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
