The Bull on the field and farm

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: JOHN HAYESHe may have just turned 36, but Ireland's most-capped player's appetite for rugby is as strong as ever – though he can live without the celebrations, writes KATHY SHERIDAN

FOR AN INTERVIEWER, the challenge is not the subject who lies, dissembles or reinvents himself. The worrying one is the star without ego, the man who can’t fathom why anyone would want an interview, then explains away his extra-ordinariness by saying he got there by instinct and . . . eh, that’s it. A man like John Hayes. “I don’t make conscious decisions to do it. I just do what comes naturally . . .” This could be the shortest interview in history.

In John Hayes’s world, it’s a good day when he can slip away entirely unnoticed. Then he can fold his mighty 6ft 4in frame into the Mondeo and trundle on home to the family farm in Cappamore, Co Limerick, to the same fields where he and generations of Hayeses grew up and learned to be judges of cattle, where he and Fiona are now rearing the next generation in a newly built home, cheek by jowl with his parents. As Keith Wood put it: “Never has so little been said about an international sportsman. He has the persona of a ninja, if not quite the stealth.”

So self-effacing is Hayes that his absence hardly registered at the carnival homecoming after Ireland's Grand Slam in March. By the time Tommy Bowe was rocking central Dublin with The Black Velvet Band, Hayes was already home in Cappamore. Is that carrying self-effacement a bit far?

“I just had a new little baby,” he says. “I asked Declan and I knew it was a big ask not to go to a civic reception in Dublin. Roisin was two weeks old and I’d only seen her twice – the day she was born and a bit of a day the week after that – and that was it. So I just wanted to go home. So I said it to Declan on the plane and he said ‘grand’, and I got a taxi organised from Dublin to the hotel to get the car and drove home. I was home by the time they got to the stage and I was watching them on television.” And happily sending jokey texts to his pack mucker, Donncha O’Callaghan, telling them to quit making a fool of young Tommy up on the stage.

Hayes has never been a feature of the big-match homecomings and celebrations. Sitting in the Ballykisteen Hotel and Golf Resort in Co Tipperary – where the Munster team has been encamped this week, a short drive from the Hayes homestead – he’s as relaxed as he could ever be. But it doesn’t come easy.

“I don’t know why,” he says. “It’s just the way I am. I don’t make a decision to do it, it’s for no reason. I’m probably a bit shy compared to the other lads. I’m probably more comfortable in these surrounds, around the lads and not out in public. But yeah, I’m most comfortable at home.”

The woman who keeps him happy at home is Fiona Steed, Ireland ’s most-capped women’s rugby international. They married five years ago after meeting in Shannon RFC and their juggling act is as frenetic as any couple with two tiny daughters, his travelling schedule and her work as a physiotherapist at Nenagh regional hospital while coaching Munster women’s rugby. It’s just as well Fiona wasn’t desperate to live in Tipperary or somewhere.

“I go to get milk and bread in the shop in Cappamore and you meet fellas that you went to school with or grew up with, that know your father – and you just chat away,” Hayes says. “That’s just where I’m happiest.” Those close to him say he would have been as discomfited by the public attention surrounding his recent suspension for stamping on Leinster’s Cian Healy as by the investigation itself.

“He’s quiet, fierce honest, the heart and soul of the team,” says Donncha O’Callaghan. “I try to use him as an example. He’s the kind of guy who, whether he’s out there in a cup match against Perpignan or in a friendly against London Irish, gives the same performance. It’s that mental strength he has over everyone.”

After the incident, friends say that Hayes’s disappointment at letting his team down would have been foremost in his mind. For every fair-minded rugby fan, the first thought was the uncharacteristic nature of the offence. After 12 years in the furnace of professional rugby, playing the most physically demanding position on the field and presenting a 6ft 4in magnet for ear-biters, eye-gougers and worse, the man nicknamed “The Bull” had incurred a couple of sin-binnings and no red cards. So what came over him?

“I didn’t intend to do it,” he says. “I said to Cian after the match that I didn’t mean to do it, and he said, ‘I know you didn’t’.”

The disciplinary committee believed him too, and said so, but it handed down a hefty suspension, veering towards the top end. He will never say it himself, but though he had the option of pursuing a dismissal on a technicality – a line successfully taken by others – he was determined to fight an “honest” case. Having done so, it is said, he felt poorly served by the system. Today there is no sense of victimhood or self-justification, just a reiteration that he didn’t mean to do it. What’s done is done.

IT’S THAT SAME perspective he brings to notorious incidents such as Thierry Henry’s handball against Ireland and the occasion when Leicester’s Neil Back arguably denied Munster a European Cup victory in 2002. It’s a presumption of honesty.

“It wasn’t premeditated with Henry, that’s the only thing you can say about it. It was an instinctive thing he did. I wouldn’t go after him personally for it, not at all . . . It was an instinct – 99 out of 100, he’d have got caught,” he says. “I don’t think Neil Back either was thinking: ‘When Stringer puts out this ball now, I’m going to knock it into the scrum.’ If he’d been caught, he would have got a yellow card, there would have been a penalty, we would have won . . . He got away with it, but it wasn’t premeditated. Premeditated stuff is different to instinct.” What’s done is done.

He is a beast of a man, as Keith Wood put it, and exudes the mildness often observed in big men who have no need to assert themelves. He barely makes it under the door-frame. He’s “a human fork-lift”, to quote Gerry Thornley, a sight capable of rekindling the optimism of the most defeatist rugby fan. For Munster supporters in a hard-knock run, there are few more cheering spectacles in a hostile stadium than the unfurling of the massive red banner with the words: “Go on Bull, ’tis your field.”

Shifting around in a chair built for less heroic frames, he is every inch the farmer/ welder he set out to be. Apart from the ears. They look like they’ve been rebuilt after a fashion, with shiny plastic. “Yeah, they’re cauliflower ears,” he says, grinning benignly under the slightly appalled scrutiny. “That’s the scar tissue from when your ears get crumpled from scrums and it builds up.”

But what do you do to each other out there? “Ah, it’s just from getting bangs.” Bangs ? “Ah, you get a bang from shoulders or hips in the second row. Some fellas don’t get them. I get them, I have to put up with them. I get fresh cuts on them every week, but they heal up. It used to hurt, but it doesn’t any more.”

And that interesting scar above your eye? He laughs. “That’s from years ago, when I was a child. Not rugby.”

As a boy, neither he nor his schoolmates in Doon CBS could have dreamt of making a living from sport. “I was huge into GAA,” he says. “When I was young, rugby wasn’t widespread, it was just in Limerick city. There were towns like Clanwilliam and Bruff that started it – like Bruff is a great little club in a little country village – and they’ve spread it.”

But GAA was all he played until he was 19. He recalls watching the Ireland-Australia match in the 1991 World Cup and something stirred. A year later, he lined out in the back row for Bruff in a scoreless draw against Newcastlewest. Legend has it that he was applauded off the pitch – “it was only some of the boys,” he says – and that it happened at an ensuing Tuesday-evening training session.

A cuter lad might be suspected of sniffing the promise of the professional era, but Hayes says it never even crossed his mind. “At that stage, there was no indication of it – not in this country or hemisphere anyway.”

So, for the boy from a rural, staunchly GAA heartland, what was the big attraction? Curiosity, he says. He’d tried everything else, including soccer. “I knew the way I was playing rugby first that I was going to stay playing it. Straight away, I just clicked with it. Yeah, I was more bruised and battered than usual, but there was just something about it.” But what? “I suppose, as a forward , you’re always involved in something, but if you’re playing GAA, you’d be up at one end of the field and you mightn’t see the ball for a few minutes. In rugby, you’re constantly into something, so I think it might be that.”

After his Leaving Cert, Hayes trained as a welder and made a contented living at it until June 1998. In 1995, at the age of 21, he struck out for New Zealand , in the company of Kynan McGregor, a Kiwi who had played rugby for Bruff and was heading home. “I went to play a bit of rugby, just to go some place for a while,” he says. “I was out there working as a welder, just playing some club rugby .”

It sounds relaxed and homely. In fact, you have to delve to discover that he went out to New Zealand a boy, weighing 15 and a half stone, and came back a man, two and a half stone heavier. There are unsurprising intimations of loneliness and challenge, as a rural Irish boy living alone in a strange country, playing rugby against “hardy boys” with boots flying and no touch judges putting out flags or mimsy citing commissioners.

THE YEAR HE came back was the year rugby went professional. “It was still nowhere remotely my intention that I would end up pro,” he says. “I was still learning the game at that stage. As it happened, I was lucky I did that.”

He had sharpened his skills at Shannon, under coach/mentor Niall O’Donovan, had then got involved with Munster and Declan Kidney and had “done a few squad trainings” when he began to wonder. “I suppose I did start to get a bit of a drive to play pro because I’d been playing with and against pros and was thinking I wanted a piece of that.” Because you were that good ? “No. Just that I wanted a go at that.” Right.

On the face of it, he doesn’t buy into the tooth-rattling Munster-Leinster rivalry, saying: “There’s always a great atmosphere, but no hostility.” Did the semi-final loss at Croke Park hurt more because it was Leinster ? “No. It was bad – but it was bad because we lost by a good score. In a big semi-final we didn’t perform, and that’s the upsetting thing. The bar is rising every year. You just have to keep going. Even if you’ve set the bar last year, that doesn’t mean it’s where it’s going to stay for this year. Someone else might raise it. It’s obvious the way to succeed is by being really intense and catching up with each other.”

He laughs at the notion of the cultural divide. “I get slagged here in Munster for being a country fella, by lads who’re from Limerick.” (That would be townie Keith Earls). “But Leinster is Leinster, not Dublin. They’ve fellas like Sean O’Brien, who are from the province of Leinster – he’s from Carlow. Or Shane Horgan from Meath, or Gordon D’Arcy from Wexford . . . There’s no great difference any more.”

The world of rugby is taking on quite the rural tinge. Sean O’Brien is a working farmer, as is Rory Best. “He came down to Roscrea to buy pedigree Angus cattle there recently. Trevor Hogan, John Fogarty – they were born on to farms.” In fact, there is a theory – not expounded by Hayes – that Leinster ’s more recent outreach to rural and farming stock accounts for at least some of its recent success. Or did Munster spill too many secrets at that famous Enfield meeting designed to stir the internationals’ souls?

“No,” Hayes says, grinning. “There’s too much altogether made out of that meeting. It was a good meeting, like any other goal-setting meeting you’d have before any tournament. That’s all it was.” After a nudge, he concedes that “we just understood each other better”.

Is it a cruel business, where every public appearance is a fresh job application? “That’s the nature of what we’re doing . . . The young fellas live for it. They’re mad for it. They’re so full of enthusiasm that fellas like me can feed off it. You can look on it as a threat for your position or as a fella you can just play with.”

His modest, deliberate, farmer ways might suggest that his lean 130kg build and stamina come easy. In fact, he is as disciplined as any athlete. He never indulges in fried food (beyond the odd stir-fry) and gave up alcohol about four years ago. “I used to drink pints, never too much, but stopped because I’d be waking up in the morning after a match sore from the match and sore from drinking. I didn’t know which was worse, so I thought one would be enough. And I stopped.”

His top advice to boys is born of observing the human body’s fragility. “The main thing would be to go to college and get a qualification. If you want to get into professional rugby, you can do that as well. It’s hard to do both but I know some of the younger lads at Munster who’ve done it and I think it’s a great thing to have because of the danger of injury.”

Just turned 36, the oldest player in the Munster squad, he is miraculously injury-free himself. “I didn’t start young – that’s stood to me now. I’d be sore the day after an international, sore every place: your neck, your back from scrummaging, your shoulders from tackling, from where you’re hitting people or people are hitting you. It’s just the way the game is. People have said that rugby has become more and more professional, fellas are getting bigger and stronger, they’re getting bigger younger and younger . . . Smaller fellas are bulking . . . And it’s just getting harder and harder. You have to move with it.”

He takes a philosophical approach to the risks that have landed some young men in rehab. “There’s a lot more people in there from car accidents going down the road than rugby.”

By now, he’s shifting a bit more in the chair. Farm and family are waiting. It’s a suckler farm, run mainly by his father, but “there’s always the fodder and the feeding to be done, and cleaning out the yards.” The question about retirement is batted away with a poker face. Any notion of it? “None. I’m going to try and enjoy it as long as I can. I’m loving it still.”

Will he know when the time has come? “I’ve heard from other players that they just didn’t want to go out on a cold day training any more, or didn’t want to do this or that, and I haven’t felt that yet. But apparently, you just know.” Pause. “And no. There’s no sign of it.”

Go on Bull, ‘tis still your field.

EARLY YEARS

Born John James Hayes on November 2nd 1973. Grew up on a farm in Cappamore, Co Limerick. Attended Doon CBS and trained as a welder.

CAREER

Nicknamed “The Bull” (and “Pillar One”), he is the most capped player in the history of Irish rugby. Started playing for Bruff at 19, was nurtured at Shannon and Munster, then made his first international appearance against Scotland on February 19th, 2000. Has helped Ireland to a Grand Slam and four Triple Crowns, and has won two Heineken Cups with Munster.

PIVOTAL MOMENT

A suggestion by Bruff man Willie Conway that the 19-year-old Hayes go up to Shannon RFC.