Living the sweet life
Hours like these used eat him up. The nerves, all the waiting around, the team meetings; at times before big Test matches Dave Wallace would feel like running away somewhere and hiding, not wanting to go through with it.
In fact, very often that’s exactly what he’d do, at least after enduring one of those team meetings. He’d retreat to his hotel room and then the inner recesses and refuge of his own mind, assuring himself that he would be just fine.
Around noon the day of the 2006 Heineken Cup final, Wallace slipped back into bed. Soon he was in a deep, delightful snooze, and this wonderful film reeling around in his head. He was in a packed Millennium Stadium, playing well. Munster were winning. Then Munster had won. They had won! He then woke up, realising it hadn’t yet happened, but the dream had been so vivid and so vibrant, he felt it was bound to happen and that his nerves were now at ease.
That was the only time he ever had a dream like that. There must have been something about Room 103 in the Glamorgan Hotel that weekend. His roommate was Peter Stringer and the night before that game Strings had pictured himself scoring a last-minute winning try. As it transpired he wouldn’t score a last-minute try but he would score the winning one for Munster.
Wallace had other ways to steel himself for what Less Kiss calls “those championship moments”. Music was a great epidural for the psychological anguish he found himself going through but he needed more. The more his career went on, the more he found himself inclined in those hours to find a pen and a piece of paper and start writing.
“An hour or so before we’d head off from the hotel, I’d write down a few notes about what I wanted to do. Sometimes it could be just a few notes, reminders, pointers. Other times you could rabbit on and have pages of the stuff. It was a formula, I suppose, a kind of visualisation, a little bit of a contract to myself.
“I find I work better when I write things down, when you can see it. It seems far more tangible rather than it all just being in your head. On the bus, I’d have a quick look at those notes, on what I was supposed to do, our plays and lineout calls and then briefly go through them in my head.”
That was then, when the lineout calls revolved around the positioning of Bull, Paulie and Donncha. These days the lineout that most concerns him is the positioning of Macaroon bars, lolly pops and Refreshers.
The week before last, his new business, Mr Simms’ Old World Sweet Shoppe, opened in his hometown of Limerick, the town’s very own Willy Wonka’s, as Felix Jones puts it. And at times he’ll be in there, facing off those shelves, making sure those treats are lined out just as they should, just like that Munster and Ireland lineout so often was when he soldiered with them.
Players can struggle with retirement, especially former pros. They can get bored, depressed, divorced; go mad, broke, off the rails. David Wallace will not be one of them. With the same unassuming maturity that marked his brilliant if understated playing career, he has adjusted seamlessly to life after rugby. For him, there is nothing mundane or anticlimactic about overseeing the running of a sweet shop or any of his other business ventures when only the other day he was sampling those championship moments.
“I suppose it’s helped that I’ve thrown myself into different things. I’m loving it because it’s something totally different. I’ve never really been involved in retail before, I’ve never been involved in sales, and I find I’m learning so much and doing so many different things. You don’t really get a chance to meet people when you’re in the bubble of rugby for so long. Now there’s more chance of having your own time, being your own person.”
Wallace was always good for seeing an opening; it’s what made him one of the best number sevens in world rugby for over a decade. Even before Manu Tuilagi put in that ferocious hit in that World Cup warm-up game last year that buckled his knee, Wallace had envisioned himself in business. And as Ireland continued to gear up for that World Cup without him, a walk along Dame Street and into the Mr Simms shop there got him thinking about how the franchise would fare in Limerick.
“I suppose I never saw myself going into a company and working for somebody. I don’t know why, I always felt that I’d go into business for myself. Whether that’s foolish or not, only time will tell, but I’ve got good people and advisors working with me. I just liked the whole concept of this shop and the idea of it working in Limerick. It’s a bit of a gamble in that it’s a high street model but the footfall here in the Crescent [Shopping Centre] is excellent, the best in Munster, and as there was no dedicated sweet shop here, I felt it would fill a bit of a niche.”
He hadn’t seen himself having quite so much time for the venture this early though. He thought he’d have got a couple of more years out of playing rugby. Before that collision with Tuilagi, he was in the best shape he was ever in. Didn’t matter that he was 34. That number was irrelevant compared to the scores and weights he was acing in training and the way he was playing. Only last month John Hayes said Wallace was playing the best rugby of his career in 2011 and Wallace himself would concur.
His strength and conditioning was always the founding block of his game. He believes he was always blessed with pace, something he probably got from his mother. Unknown to herself, she was something of an athlete. It was only when she was at a kids’ school sports day and there was a race for all the parents that the family realised she was a bit of a speedster. “She was beating them all, and the boys were on the sideline cheering her on when she stopped, wondering what they were all shouting about. And she still won!”
His strength was something he had to work on, something he took from his brothers, in how they applied themselves to training.
Richie wasn’t the most talented of the Wallace boys; David reckons that was probably the eldest of them, Henry, who played underage for Ireland in the amateur days before focusing more on a real career. But what Richie had was a voracious appetite for training hard and weights in particular.
“Richard was a professional athlete back in amateur days,” says his kid brother. “He had a weights room up in the house and was always training. There was nobody telling him what to do, back then he was just playing club rugby, he was doing all the fitness and weights training himself. He learned a lot then playing with the Lions [in 1993] and he brought back a lot of knowledge and experience which would have rubbed off on me.”
Up to then, David wasn’t consumed by rugby. He was also talented at sailing and was invited to a camp in Spain with a national underage squad, only to decline. Training and competing at that level of sailing was going to involve a huge investment of money and time and Richard’s exploits in rugby had sold him on the virtues of rugby and hard work. Richard’s little brother then became his little apprentice, learning how to do power clean lifts when few of his peers were doing anything like it. Soon he could see himself making powerful gains from it, even though international schoolboy rugby honours would elude him.
He would endure all kinds of setbacks during his career. He was one of the most impressive performers on the 1997 development squad’s tour of New Zealand but a few years later still hadn’t broken onto the full senior squad.
“It’s funny how training and testing has changed,” he smiles. “We’d have used the bleep test a lot in the early years and I would always have been in the bottom 5% in it. Then later on we’d changed to a shuttle test and I would have been in the top 10% in it. In 1999 I missed out on the Australian tour. David Corkery and myself had to go up to Dublin and the way it basically worked out was whichever one of us did best in the bleep test would go on tour!
“But missing that tour was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. While they were gearing up to go on tour at the end of that season, I could really work on my pre-season fitness. I was put in touch with Giles Warrington to work on my endurance and we did some goal setting: short term and long term. Back then I still wasn’t holding down my spot with Munster so I put down that I wanted to be a regular with Munster and play for Ireland and then long term, the Lions. Within two years I’d achieved them all.”
That hardly sated his appetite, of course. Though he would score Munster’s try in the 2000 Heineken Cup final, Northampton still beat them. So would Leicester in 2002. By 2006 it had become an obsession to close the deal. On the eve of that final Declan Kidney told them a fable about a man crossing a stormy river. At the halfway point he could go one of two ways, both banks were equidistant. The first two times he was in the river he’d retreated. What was he going to do this time? Return to the old bank or drive on through waters new and over to the other side? For Munster, this time there could be no turning back.
“By the third final it just to the point that we weren’t going home without this. It was a bloody-mindedness, almost a kind of hypnotism. I don’t think it was ever openly said but I certainly felt driving into the ground that day, under the tunnel, getting off the bus, that ‘Right, that’s it, we’re not coming back without this cup’.”
Glory days like that in Cardiff may seem a distant memory now for Munster but Wallace believes those days could be back sooner than people think.
“I think the fact Leinster and Ulster reached last year’s final will bring Munster back up. I actually think Munster are in a very good place. I remember when I was coming through, there was 15 or so of us all about the same age with the same mentality. Most of us weren’t married, we’d go out and socialise together and have a good time, we were very tight. I see that now with the younger guys coming through. There’s a big batch of them all around the same age who’ve played with each other up through the ranks, they’re very tight knit and they’re all on the same page.”
He’s been impressed with how Rob Penney has gone about developing the younger players and a squad, but has concerns that the team’s style of play can be occasionally too expansive, too removed from the Munster tradition.
“I commend him for the way he wants to play but there is a time to play like that. Sometimes you have to earn that right to play like that. Bringing it through the pack has always been our bread and butter. Maybe then we can play the wider game as well, but I always enjoyed it when the pack took it on and were involved in the game. We’re not as comfortable out on the wide wings yet. We want to be going through the pack and making the space and earning the right to go wide.”
He’s kept going to their games. While Bull Hayes has made a point of staying away from UL and Thomond, just to ease and de-mark the transition into retirement, Wallace has taken in a lot of their games, most recently the win over Zebre. He’s even found himself going back to his roots, watching Garryowen. When he was still playing pro in recent years, he found he couldn’t do that. He was watching enough rugby as it was. Now a part of him is enjoying watching the game as a fan again, just for the fun again.
Of course there are days that he misses it, days like today in particular. The southern hemisphere teams, particularly South Africa, seemed to bring out the best in him. He scored a great try against them in 2006, was man of the match when Ireland beat them as world champions in a packed Croke Park in 2009, started all three Tests against them for the Lions that same year.
“I loved playing the southern hemisphere teams, especially in the cold, wet wintry weather. It becomes more of a cauldron playing them when the mist and rain comes down and the lights come on. It’s not like playing them in the sun in Brisbane or Durban. They’re in our backyard now. I always felt that whenever you put on the Irish jersey that if we played well, we could beat anybody. I know Ireland have injuries but I think they’re in a great position for an ambush.”
It’s nearly time to leave him and the Crescent, but as you watch him mixing with the customers and the public here, it strikes you just how at ease he is with it all, particularly himself. Part of it from him is that not everyone recognises him. Though he is very articulate, he wasn’t vocal within the Munster or Ireland team and though he’s immaculately groomed and good looking, he wasn’t highly visible or audible to the general public either. He never wanted to be in the public arena like his brother Paul, who always wanted to work in the media long before he was ever a Lion, let alone started working with Sky. He never resented that the likes of O’Connell and O’Gara took up the limelight, that even someone as reticent as the Bull registered more with the public.
“I liked that, being under the radar, being able to walk down the street and most people not know who I was. The likes of ROG and Hayes were all household faces as well as names but I loved having that privacy. I suppose that’s helped me step away from it all. It’s not like I have to be weaned off all the attention because I never really had it in the first place.”
In a way he’s never been busier. During the summer he did a charity cycle from Mizen to Malin Head with his brother Paul. He hasn’t got to the gym as often as he had intended or liked — being at home to help Aileen get their two kids, Andrew and Harvey, to preschool and the childminder has somewhat scuppered those early-morning loans — but he still makes a point of it getting to it once a week and getting in a cycle around home.
Sport remains very close to his heart; he’s now on the board for the Special Olympics. As well as the sweet shop which Aileen owns, he is also a shareholder with School Direct who distribute school uniforms throughout the country.
In the coming weeks he and the other recently-retired Munster players will all meet up for a Christmas meal with their partners. Munster are also talking about having an ex-players’ bar in Thomond, another way of expressing their gratitude and keeping that link to that glorious past alive. But should you see him in there, don’t expect him to bore with you talk of glory days.
He cherished them but he’s cherishing this side of the white line as well.
