Cian Healy: 'I was a headbanger, I was wild, I loved it'

WILD: Cian Healy's career has seen him evolve from wild headbanger to mature rounded player. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

From boy to man. Leo Cullen saw it all unfold before his eyes. Now Leinster head coach, he was a veteran 29-year old second row just back from a 24-month stint with Leicester Tigers when Cian Healy was running the first laps of a professional career that will stretch to 19 seasons by the time he retires this summer.

Cullen, like everyone else, could see that this was an “unbelievably explosive” prop but this brick outhouse out of Clontarf was still a teenager when he came off the bench for a provincial debut against the now defunct Border Reivers at a Donnybrook venue that Leinster have long since outgrown as a home venue for the senior team.

If that youth didn’t manifest itself on the field where he went from strength to strength then it played out off it. Cullen chuckled this week about how Healy wasn’t the most professional of pros back in the mid- to late-nineties. The man himself puts it more bluntly.

“I was a headbanger, I was wild, I loved it. Start rugby, start getting paid, start going into town, having good craic. You’re still training well, you’re still playing well, you don't see a fault with it. I couldn't tell when exactly I toned down.”

If he had to guess, he would point to the neck injury that led to loss of feeling in his right hand and almost ended his career a decade ago. It got so bad that he was close to signing insurance forms that would make retirement official and irreversible.

Healy ended up just under 130 kilos by the time the crisis had passed. Not a shocking weight for a man in his line of work but a warning light for someone had weighed under a hundred when making his debut and who clocks in now somewhere in the hundred-plus-teens.

This was when he began the process of settling down and figuring out there was more to all this. He evolved from a self-centred and “aggressive ball of energy” in everything from team meetings to media dealings and actual game time to something more rounded but still hugely effective.

The wild man is long gone. Jamie Heaslip, retired through injury a good seven years now, is still one of his great mates, but their social lives revolve around children’s playdates now rather than anything else. And that mellow turn is apparent in his work.

For so long a constant presence on Leinster and Ireland starting teams, Healy has had to reframe his place and sense of self in both camps as the game time has dwindled. Sharing his experience with the younger generation has become a core part of what he offers.

“I’m not running over to people and burning the ears off them either. I just try and be a very open book so that when lads feel they have a question for me I have an answer for them.” 

Coaching holds some interest going forward. And he doesn’t rule out the prospect of following in the footsteps of Sean O’Brien in turning out one day for his home club. Seeing Healy go at it in Clontarf’s Bull Ring would be fitting in so many ways.

The first priority when he leaves the arena at the end of the season will be a long break. Making distance from a life lived according to rugby’s schedule since he was a 14-year old starting out on the Junior Cup circuit with Belvedere College.

The only other item on his agenda will be time spent in a workshop that looks like a bombsite right now. Healy’s creative side has extended to painting and knife-making and he’s of a mind to work with everything from steel to exotic woods and mammoth tooth.

Yep, mammoth tooth. It’s a stabilised fossil apparently.

He doesn’t pretend that retirement will be easy. Rugby is all he has ever done, ever known, but tinkering about in the workshop gives him a satisfaction and an enjoyment that is the equal to anything he has ever found in rugby’s greatest cathedrals.

There will have to be something else though. Something more.

“Your only problem then is you are spending a lot of time on your own. I would want to marry that up. That's where something like working with Clontarf, which brings me into a broader group and still keeps a bit of team environment going, [would be good].

“So I have thought about those things, and about how if I disappear into the workshop I could end up a bit of a recluse, but it is important to find a balance of what makes me happy and what I know I need.” He's found balance once before. That should stand to him.