SCHOOL DAYS:His youthful development was cramped by sickness and self-doubt but he is living proof that it is never too late to blossom, writes Sean Kenny

HE DOESN'T mind admitting he bloomed a little later than most. Bad luck set a shadow across George Hook's school rugby career in Presentation College Cork.

"There was one thing that happened which affected my whole rugby career as a schoolboy. I would have been first choice at hooker for the Junior Cup team when I got jaundice. It meant I missed that whole rugby season.

"We won the cup that year, so I might have been the proud possessor of a Junior Cup medal. I certainly would have made the team; I've no doubt about that.

"It was heartbreaking. I knew the guy who took my place and never felt he deserved it. I stood in the ground when the team was playing against Rockwell in the final and I thought, 'I should have been there.'"

The months he spent in bed had drained him of the physical capacity his ambition demanded.

His exclusion from the side bruised him at the time. Still, there would be other teams. There were other sports, indeed, at which he enjoyed more success.

Games he would play at school, he first encountered in the streets of Cork city. The changing seasons brought with them varying shades of sport: cricket under summer sun, football and hurling as the championships reached their climax in the declining light of early autumn, rugby under winter's grey skies.

"The biggest difference between my generation growing up in Cork and the current generation there is that most sport was actually played in the street. The idea of a field was actually quite unusual. A match would stop for the periodic intervention of a motor car, but it was only periodic.

"But the biggest problem where I lived, on Albert Road in Cork, was that at half past five the Ford and Dunlop plants would disgorge literally thousands of people, all on bicycles, so sport had to be abandoned for the invasion of the bicycles."

Cricket was his first sporting love. Their street games equalled Test matches for longevity, yielding massive scores stretched across days. With Pres, he played more structured games in the Mardyke, displaying sufficient prowess as a batsman to be selected for the Munster schools first XI. He remembers rising early at home to listen to BBC radio commentaries on Test matches from Australia, crackling across the continents all the way to Cork.

"It was unusual in a sense, coming as I did from a poor area, to be involved in cricket. My father had given me that love of cricket. He would take me to a local park and he'd bowl to me for hours to teach me the game."

Track and field events also drew him in. He threw the discus and put the shot, competing in Munster schools events.

Nonetheless, despite these distractions, unfulfilled rugby aspirations still itched him as he became a senior at Pres. Obstacles of mind and body stood awkwardly piled on the path of youthful ambition. Hard to believe now as he spins out the memories with characteristic loquacity, but a lack of self-belief hindered his school rugby career.

"Where rugby was concerned, people might find it funny now, but I lacked confidence in my own ability. I was really in my middle 20s before I ever got confident in my ability to play rugby, which was too late, of course."

The coaching of the day perhaps did not help, it being a harsh, unflinching business, all stick and no carrot.

His active, youthful imagination was another hindrance. The vivid images flickering past in George Hook's mind told him a ruck was no place for a human head whose owner retained any vestiges of sanity.

"It's like in the novel Lord Jim," he muses. "Lord Jim is captured and his captor says, 'I know you're a brave man but the problem for you is your imagination. The imagining of the torture will be much worse than the actual torture.'

"I think a lack of imagination is a plus when playing contact sports. Again, I learned to cope with that by my middle-20s, but it was very difficult."

He trained hard for the Senior Cup, attempting to replace the weight the jaundice had stripped from his growing frame. His plan was twofold, involving diet and weight training.

"My father enrolled me in a weight-training gym. Interestingly, in those days it was hidden away on a back street, because people regarded weight training as voodoo. People believed it did all kinds of things.

"The other thing was that milk was the primary vitamin supplement. So I thought, 'Look, if one pint of milk is good, seven pints of milk have to be better.' So I started drinking seven or eight pints of milk a day."

The logic seemed mathematically impeccable. Alas, it was not so.

"It gave me a lifelong love of milk-chocolate goldgrain biscuits, which I ate with the milk. But the other thing seven pints of milk does is give you constipation like you've never known."

He did not make the senior team, and again he smarted at the failure.

"I think I came out of school, out of what I still think is one of the greatest schools in the country, with a sense of being a failure because I didn't make the rugby team. There was a sense I was a coward. I think that was a very damaging thing to a young psyche."

He went on to enjoy more success as an adult player and coach, with a hunger undiminished by his school experiences.

"I think that contributed to my longevity as a player. I played competitive club rugby over four decades, 50s to 80s. I still had that enormous energy and enthusiasm.

" I don't know, but I wonder, because we see so many young people giving the game up because of the intensity of schools rugby. I think many kids say at 19 or 20, 'I've had enough.' I never had that; I still had an enormous appetite."