MALACHY CLERKINtalks to Dublin full-back Rory O'Carroll, a 22-year-old All-Ireland medal holder who knows he won't be so young for long
THE SPORTS Café in Belfield, late on a Friday morning. Brian Mullins spots Rory O’Carroll picking out a quiet corner for us to sit down. The UCD head of sport has got with him a former Notre Dame quarter-back who’s over in Dublin on a recce mission, nailing down training facilities for when the Fighting Irish come to play against Navy in September. When Mullins sees one of the college’s crown sporting jewels saunter by, he can’t let the opportunity pass.
“Here, Ross,” he says. “Come here till I introduce you to this man . . .” The lesson as always is – never get ahead of yourself. Win all the medals and awards you like, but this is still Ireland, and somebody will still mix you up with the brother. Even though they know you for years. Rory O’Carroll doesn’t blink, of course. Far too polite. He meets and he greets and the three of them share a little sportsman’s small talk before he leaves them to their meeting.
The faux pas hardly registered. Life’s way too short for that kind of bother and, anyway, het-up isn’t really his style. He’s a quiet and thoughtful sort, as unruffled by life off the pitch as he is on it. In the hamster-wheel world of the modern GAA player, it’s not often you come across someone who can easily step outside the cage – but a while in his company tells you he gets it. Dedication is all about 5am starts some days, no doubt about that. But it’s about living a life too. The one feeds the other.
Shortly after Cork had beaten Dublin in the 2010 All Ireland semi-final, O’Carroll rang Pat Gilroy’s number. He’d seen a bit of paper tacked to a notice board in Belfield offering seven- and nine-month contracts teaching English in France. He was a couple of years into an arts degree, with history and French his main subjects, and here was a chance to immerse himself in the language and grab himself a little Depardieu-style living in the process.
Gilroy knew O’Carroll wasn’t asking for permission, more just informing him of where he’d be for the winter. “He was fine about it,” says O’Carroll.
“He just said, ‘Come back in May and we’ll see where you are at that stage.’” So off he went. Headed off on his own, no friends or college folk to surround himself with. This wasn’t a short hop over to Paris either, no quick plane ride away from getting home for league matches at weekends if needed. His school was in Gien, a small three-trains-a-day town on the banks of the Loire, about 50 miles east of the city of Orleans. A trip home took 12 hours door-to-door, which meant Dublin would have to survive spring without him. He was okay with that, although it does pick at him now that it meant leaving Kilmacud Crokes behind too.
“I was worried about missing things with the club,” he says. “We were in the club championship and I was away for that. I came back for the All-Ireland semi-final against Crossmaglen and to be honest I’ve never had a worse loss than that, ever. Sometimes I think that if I wasn’t in France, I could have been better prepared for that game. I didn’t start but I did come on, and I wasn’t exactly happy with my performance. That one has lingered with me, more I think than any other loss I’ve had.
“We could have been in an All-Ireland final. I’m not saying that if I’d been around all winter I’d have made a big difference. But I do look back and think that my contribution wasn’t enough. Overall, I’m still happy I went, but that’s one aspect of it that I don’t enjoy looking back at.” He moved in with a family that had four boys around his age and a mother who was a volleyball coach. So there was plenty of sport for him to play to balance out the mountains of food they made him eat. A little badminton, a little five-a-side, a little volleyball obviously. But that was about it.
There were no training plans sent over that he had to adhere to, no early-January sympathy runs at six in the morning that he had to go on. He just got on with living a life, teaching a class, learning a language.
“I loved it,” he says. “The advantage of doing it like that rather than going to a university was that you’re forced into speaking it the whole time. When you’re in a small town and you have to talk to people on the street or in a shop or whatever, you get a much better handle on it than if you’re in a university with other students. It’s probably not the most conventional way to do it, but I enjoyed it.”
When he got home, he jumped right back on the hamster wheel without missing a step. Gilroy put him straight back into the team for the Leinster Championship opener against Laois, a toll-booth guard in a full-back line that was in no mood to give out change. What might have looked like a brave call to an outsider hadn’t particularly cost the Dublin manager a thought. Although Dublin had topped Division One of the league and only been mugged on the line in the final by Cork, they’d been leakier at the back than he was comfortable with. O’Carroll was his full-back, and the fact he spent a league abroad didn’t mean a need to change that.
Gilroy knew his player. Back in 2009, he’d given O’Carroll his debut for Dublin after he’d played only two and a half senior games for Crokes. He’d actually played a championship match in Leinster before he ever played one in Dublin, coming off the bench at half-time in the 2008 final against Rhode to mark Niall McNamee and hold him scoreless for the rest of the game. By the following summer, Gilroy was handing him the No 4 shirt against Westmeath. Where everyone else had to take the stairs, it seemed like he could just hop in a lift that went right to the roof.
And no sooner was he there than he abseiled down the side of the building and made his escape. Between the semi-final against Westmeath and the final against Kildare, O’Carroll left for southeast Asia. He and some mates had arranged it months in advance – Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, the works. They were 19 years old, and this was what he had wanted to do. There’d be other Leinster finals.
“I was in first year in college when we won the All-Ireland with Crokes in March and then I went to play under-21 football with Dublin. I was on the hurling panel at the time but because the Crokes had gone as far as they did, the hurling sort of fell by the wayside a bit. If you’re not hurling every day, you’re going to be no good to them. And then I was called up to the footballers, which I wasn’t expecting at all because I’d played so little senior football for Crokes.
“I told them that I had this organised already and that’d be heading away.
“I was really lucky that Pat is the sort of manager he is. Once I told him I was going to be away for the summer, he just said, ‘No problem, come in anyway and we’ll see how you get on.’ A lot of other managers would have just sent me away and never come looking again. But he was very good to me.”
Others weren’t so kind. This was pre-Sam Maguire Dublin, don’t forget. The city ached for an All-Ireland, and shoulders that were less than fully planted against the wheel tended not to be treated with a whole lot of sympathy. Even though Dublin had blitzed Westmeath that day, O’Carroll hadn’t played particularly well, so some of the talk was of the away-with-you variety. Then there were lots of people who hadn’t even noticed he’d arrived, much less that he was leaving so soon. And every once in a while, he’d get buttonholed by a die-hard who couldn’t fathom how a kid just walks away like that. Shouldn’t he be trying to make his mark? Pay his dues? Be a Dub? “I never really considered giving up the trip,” he says now. “I’d had it in my mind since the previous March and it was just the right time to go away.
“I would have got a bit of hassle for it, you know, people saying you can’t be closing the door on Dublin or whatever. But I didn’t really mind.
“Anyway, you’d be more likely to hear it second-hand. Nobody would really say anything bad to your face. I would hear back that there were people who weren’t too happy with me, but if they weren’t going to say it in front of me, it didn’t bother me.
“I didn’t really realise how much attention it would draw. It was something that I had arranged ahead of time but then when you’re asked to come and play for the Dublin football team, you really want to go and see what it’s like. But I was always going to go travelling. I know some people were expecting me to back out and a few people were saying they didn’t think I should go after only being there a short while. But I was always going to go.”
This is something worth understanding about O’Carroll. It isn’t that he can take or leave being a Dublin footballer. It’s more that he doesn’t see why taking it has to mean leaving everything else to one side. If this makes him sound feckless, well, that isn’t the intention. He knuckled down to Dublin’s bleary-eyed January dawns this year just the same as everyone else – maybe more so, in fact, since he had to come from Stillorgan over to Clontarf for training each morning, robbing him of the precious extra minutes in bed the northsiders got. But he was up and at it every morning, his Under Armour gear keeping January at bay, and once he was through he headed back across town to UCD for the day. There’s balance in all things.
It’s the rare 22-year-old who understands that he won’t be 22 forever. That he won’t always be able to escape for a couple of months in Thailand or spend a winter flitting around the patisseries by the Loire. But not only was he able to do it as a young man – he still found time to win an All-Ireland medal. And not as a passenger either but as a safe-as-houses Dublin full-back, a rare animal that hasn’t been seen since Paddy Christie. He is proof that you can be consumed by the game without being burned by it.
Part of him still would like to be a Dublin hurler, but it won’t happen anytime soon. When he came back from Thailand, he could have thrown his lot in with either code but he felt it only right the footballers got a whole year out of him this time instead of just a couple of months. Gilroy had been so accommodating that it wouldn’t have felt right to swan off to the hurlers upon his return. It hasn’t happened since and the further removed he becomes, the less likely it looks.
“I don’t know if I’d be good enough to go playing at that level,” he says. “Ideally, I’d love to get there someday, but I’m not thinking about it at the moment. I’d be a long way short of the standard with all the time I’m giving to football.”
There were no phone calls over the winter, nobody keening at him to come and join up with Anthony Daly’s crew. The brother went though. After spending the best part of two years injured on the fringes of the football panel, Ross O’Carroll threw his lot in with the hurlers this time around – as much for a change of scenery as anything. It is with barely disguised glee that Rory reports he came home with a broken finger last week.
Maybe it will happen someday. Or maybe he’ll settle in and keep the No 3 shirt for the footballers all the way through the next decade. Either is a possibility. Neither could well be, too.
Whatever he chooses, you’d have to imagine he’ll go his own way.
