Jack Kyle crowded several realms of excellence into single life

One of Jack Kyle’s favourite stories was about the brilliant and untameable Richard Burton. Like most Welsh men of his era, Burton was enthralled by the national rugby team and when he bumped into Cliff Morgan at the Cardiff Arms one afternoon he confessed, “Ah Cliff, if I could have played rugby for Wales, I would have given up playing Hamlet.”

The actor's wistfulness always confounded Jack Kyle. "I find this incredible, as I cannot understand how a man with the talent of Burton could, as he puts it, want to exchange his incredible acting talent for running around a field with a rugby ball," he tells his daughter Justine in Conversations with My Father: Jack Kyle, a valuable book for which the pair sat down last winter to riff about an extraordinary life which, sadly, ended yesterday. It probably never occurred to Kyle that he managed to achieve what Burton had wished for, which was to crowd several realms of excellence into one mortal lifespan.

Because Jack Kyle stopped playing rugby in the late 1950s, several generations of people never got to see him playing in the flesh. But his name has become a kind of shorthand for sporting talent, and for attitude and manners which both reflected a certain era and transcended it. For much of this week, Irish sport has revolved around a debate on the right way and wrong ways of conducting yourself.

Jack Kyle instinctively knew how to do things the right way, always and effortlessly – although his father, a rock of Ulster practicality, assured him that "if you were to make your way in the world of business, you would starve."

Dip of the hip

Instead, Kyle was nudged towards the world of medicine and while at Queens, his sporting and professional life opened up a path that was international in scope, while steadfastly Ulster in values and humour. When Kyle turned 80, Frank Keating, the godfather of English sports writing, was moved to dream up once more the vision of the Irish outhalf in his pomp: “the pre-eminent majesty of freckled, ginger-haired Jack in his old brown boots: patient, calming, unbothered serenity: a pass here, a kick there. Till in a sudden blur of intensity, a dip of the hip, a glinting change of pace – a trout in a pool – and the game has been snapped open and free with defenders sprawled, rooted as trees.”

That quotation was used in a terrific interview Shane Hegarty of this parish conducted with Kyle shortly before Ireland’s Grand Slam in 2009. Hegarty made no bones about the fact that he was travelling north a little awestruck by the man he was about to meet but was soon put at ease by the brightness and lightness and easy sense of fun Kyle lent their conversation, poking fun at himself, talking about the game, answering the telephone and even quoting Yeats on Eva Gore-Booth.

And he was brilliant on his cluelessness as to how he did what he did on a rugby field, which was to make what looks unfathomable, simple.

“In many ways for me it was a humbling experience,” Kyle said. “That is not quite the right word but when somebody says, ‘how did you score that try?’, all you can say is, ‘I haven’t a clue, a space opened.’ You’re not working at a conscious level. You’re at a low subconscious level where there is a basic instinct or whatever it is.”

He lived in the era when recorded footage was rare and scratchy and so most of his achievements live in the mind’s eye, prone to occasional exaggeration. He always enjoyed how his lone international drop-goal, popped over from the 25 yard line, had magnified into a geometrically impossible kick from the sideline as the decades passed. He delighted in never contradicting people.

The facts and achievements of his rugby career are so dense and glittering that there is simply no space to record them here but the interesting thing about Jack Kyle’s life is that rugby may not even have been the most remarkable aspect of it. In 1964, restless after a period working in Indonesia, he applied for a position as a consultant surgeon in Zambia. With his wife Shirley, he moved his family to Chingola, a copper mining town. They thought of it as an adventure that might last a year or two: it lasted just short of 35 years. Of all of his reminiscences with his daughter, the conversations on those decades are arguably the most fascinating because they fill in the gap on what Kyle was up to when he finished being a rugby star. One of his initial tasks was to perform multiple emergency operations on a group of Zambians whose truck had crashed into an elephant on the main road.

Going to pass out

He advised one woman he treated for obesity to eat regularly for two weeks and then skip a day and was alarmed when she reported back a fortnight later having dropped 20 pounds. The patient was delighted but admitted that she felt she was going to pass out every third day. “From hunger,” Dr Kyle nodded in sympathy. “No,” the woman replied in confusion. “From skipping.”

The Kyle children, Caleb and Justine, loved Zambia but their parents’ marriage fell apart during their time there, an episode that father and daughter talk about with disarming frankness in a chapter dedicated to ‘Shirley’, wife and mother. It is important because it illustrates that Jack Kyle’s life was not entirely charmed, not without its hurts and difficulties. He operated as the AIDS epidemic swept Africa in the 1980s and came to love the country and rarely mentioned his previous life as an idol for rugby fans. He returned to live in Bryansford in Down in 2000, just when rugby’s professional era was beginning to roar and for the past decade and a half, he has remained unassuming about his status in the game.

The more you learn about Jack Kyle, the more you sense that he would have loathed the professional era and the limitations it imposes.

His mind was simply too curious to become locked into the cycle of repetition and routine. He was, of course, present in Cardiff when Ireland finally bridged the Grand Slam gap – although not, it was surprising to discover, as a guest of the unions but because a family friend had arranged tickets and transport.

The famous photograph in which he greets Brian O’Driscoll, a medal around his neck, was one of those incandescent moments when two worlds collide.

He hadn’t been well of late. Yesterday’s news would have brought a huge sigh from those who had seen him with a rugby ball in hand. He had 88 years and even if he didn’t play Hamlet, he didn’t waste so much as one of them.