A pitch-perfect attitude to life

Shane Hegarty

IT IS A beautiful day; a beautiful corner of the world. Bryansford sits at the foot of the Mourne mountains, a couple of miles outside Newcastle, Co Down. A narrow road of a village, officially it has a population of 391 people, but does a good impression of a place only half that busy.

Today, with spring bringing a little warmth, the mountains are smudged by haze and the road is quiet. Jack Kyle lives just off it, in a small development, almost empty of cars. The address is 13, but the house numbers end at 12. I call to one for directions.

“Number 13 . . . ” ponders the occupant.

“Jack Kyle’s house,” I prompt.

“Who?”

Kyle’s house is tucked away, the driveway curving past a small brook that’s straddled by a miniature bridge. The steps to the front door are flanked by a white handrail, but as soon as he comes to the door it’s clear that he is in fine health. He is 83 now, one of the seven surviving Irish Grand Slam winners from 1948, once the most-capped player in the world, declared the greatest Irish rugby player of all time, and described as the finest out-half by most who saw or played alongside him.

The sports writer Frank Keating saw him play twice, and still believes him to be unsurpassed. On Kyle’s 80th birthday he wrote of “the pre-eminent majesty of freckled, gingery-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.”

Who, indeed.

Not that Kyle would ever be so self-laudatory. People talk of his humility with as much awe as they talk of his talent. Of course, they are in awe of his humility because of his talent. He soared, but his feet never left the ground.

Kyle retired to Bryansford in 2000, returning home after three and half decades in Zambia. He had never emigrated, he says. He was planning his return even as he carved out his life there far from Ireland, so far from news of home that for a couple of decades he rarely saw a rugby match. And when he saw this house – private, quiet, a view of stone-walled fields rising gently away from the back garden – he knew that this was where he wanted to retire to.

It is here that we sit, in the sun room, half facing towards that view, the only noise coming from the chirp of finches crowding the bird feeder. And from the regular interruption of the phone.

There are five calls during our conversation. Six if you count one that stops mid-ring. Jack Kyle reacts to each with polite irritation. “Oh, for God’s . . . ” He pushes himself out of the seat, just a touch gingerly, leaves the heavy heat of the room and walks to the phone. “Hello . . . aye . . . yes . . . well, let’s see . . . ”

Four of the calls are from the press: Reuters, UTV, BBC Radio 4 and a return call from one of those confirming some details. The final time (“Oh, for . . . ”) it is his son calling from Kildare, to see how he is, to talk about the trip they’ll be taking to Cardiff today. Jack explains that he’ll need to do a radio interview over the phone before they leave for the airport. He signs off. “Okay . . . bye now . . . lots of love . . . ”

WHEN HE RETURNED to Ireland, retiring from his career as a doctor, divorced many years ago, his son and daughter had been a little concerned. “One of the interesting things about being away for so long – I was away for 34-and-a-half years and I was working full-time until I was 74 – is that when I came home the kids were thinking ‘what’s going to happen to dear old dad? He’s been away and he’s lost contact with a lot of his friends’ and so on. But it was amazing to come back and take up with old friends as if I hadn’t been away.”

There are occasional gatherings of former internationals. Sir Anthony O’Reilly brought a group of former players to Paris for the World Cup final in 2007. He visits his friend and former team-mate Jim McCarthy at his Lahinch holiday home. Queen’s University has a rugby bursary in his name. He plays golf at Royal County Down every Tuesday, with the “old guys, they call us the Teddy Bears”. They play for a pound a game. It is hotly contested.

“And the kids thought I was going to be on my own. They thought I was going to be a pain in the neck.” He chuckles. “Now it’s almost the opposite. ‘Dad, how about coming to see us sometime?’”

This week, he should have hired a publicity agent. In 2003, the last time Ireland went into a Grand Slam showdown, he was sought after, but not to this extent. Perhaps it’s because of his appearance alongside the RTÉ panel following the English match, when the delighted grins on Hook, Pope, O’Shea and McGurk were brighter than the Croke Park lights. If younger viewers had little idea of who this old guy was, the panel’s valedictory applause would have woken them up to his stature.

The house would give you little idea. There’s a framed cap marking his induction into the International Rugby Board’s Hall of Fame, but a house fire 30 years ago destroyed his memorabilia. He doesn’t mind talking about the old days. He would dearly love if this generation had their chance to silence his phone in future years, but “it’s pleasant for us to reminisce in a way. And you find yourself sometimes discussing things with people that you wouldn’t normally discuss or think about.” He sits up a bit. “And can you imagine in your old age if you were sitting here wondering if somebody’s going to call and what am I going to do.”

He has travelled to the home games in recent years. Surely it takes him an age to get through the handshakes and to his seat. “Well, you know, sometimes you wear your specs and grey hair. People who remember your playing days don’t remember you with grey hair. They’re probably not expecting it.”

He will be in Cardiff today, on a private trip, leaving this morning, returning after the match. In and out in a day. “It’s amazing to think that in the 1948 year, our first match was against France and it was on New Year’s Day. And, you know, when you think of the travel. Those of us from the North travelled down to Dublin. I think we got the boat across the Irish Sea. Then the next morning we trained in London, stayed in London that night, then the next day took the train to Dover and a boat across the channel to Calais and then a train to Paris. The night before the game I think we were taken out to the Follies Bergère. That was our training for the next day’s game.”

In Paris, the banquets offered six different glasses, wines for every course. And when the waiter would come along with some delightful bottle dusted off especially for the occasion, Kyle and other tee-total players would ask for an orange juice. He enjoys a glass of wine every evening now, so laughs at the memory of the waiter scooting away, shaking his head, muttering something thoroughly French and thoroughly disdainful.

Then, a rugby tour doubled as an astounding global adventure. In 1950, Kyle went to the southern hemisphere with the Lions. Thirty players. Two managers. One reporter who lasted a matter of weeks before home-sickness defeated him. The tour lasted more than six months. At one point, they were a straight two weeks at sea. “Liverpool, across the Atlantic, through the Panama canal, to Hawaii took about a month . . . On to New Zealand, and three months travelling it by bus and train . . . Then a ship across the Tasman Sea to Sydney and a month in Australia . . . On to Sri Lanka or Ceylon as it was in those days . . . back home through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, via various ports including Marseille and Aden . . . ” And what he doesn’t mention as he details the trip is that he left the southern hemisphere having been acclaimed as one of the greats of world rugby.

HE WAS BORN in Belfast in 1926, discovered rugby at school, and entered medicine after the encouragement of his father, who recognised that he was a “dopey sort of kid” not cut out for the business world. “My father was a man of energy and getting things done and I was sort of a bit of a dozer; things happened to me rather than making them happen. I remember my father saying to me one time, ‘you’d be dead if you had the sense to stiffen’.”

Even as he began playing at international level – unofficially in 1945 against the British Army, but earning his first of 46 official caps in 1947 – it was always a sideline. He had a single training session a week. The international team would meet on the Friday before a match for a quick run around. Game over, they’d head their separate ways, back to their lives.

“Rugby was part of our lives but it wasn’t a big part. It was wonderful to have, but it was a sideline compared with our main aim. Those of us in the amateur era were fortunate that we had careers because if you had a bad game or lost a game, as we did on many occasions, I would be in lectures again on a Monday morning with an exam coming up in a month or two; it certainly concentrated your mind away from having a bad game on a Saturday.

“And when I think of the chaps today and what they have as far as coaching is concerned, looking at videos and being told what they should have done and shouldn’t have done, we had nothing like that at all. There were no check-ups and ‘you should have passed there and should have kicked there’. So it was very free and easy. So that naturally didn’t keep the game in our mind, because it wasn’t being talked about as much.”

He credits his natural sporting talent to the genetic alchemy created between his parents. His brother played rugby for Ulster and his sisters were fine hockey players, with Betty one of Ireland’s greats. But his parents played no sport beyond his father’s few games of soccer with a defunct team, the Black Diamonds, in a minor league.

“In many ways for me it was almost a humbling experience. That isn’t 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 gap appeared.’ Or ‘I got the ball and I started running and other gaps appeared and I got through them.’ I don’t know how I did it. You’re not working at a conscious level. You’re at a low subconscious level where there is basic instinct or whatever it is.

“And there were times – and perhaps this is a very corny saying but there’s an element of truth in it – sometimes people say you weren’t so much playing the game but that the game was being played through you. In other words you were just a vehicle there and you were fortunate that you did the things that enhanced your rugby prowess as well. You realised you were able to do these things just because you were born with the ability. Many a time I’ve made the analogy that it’s like a woman who wants to become a model. She’s got to be a certain height and a certain figure and have certain looks before she walks the old catwalk.

“And that’s why in many ways you cannot all the time talk about ‘I did this’ or ‘I did that’. I did it but I don’t know how I did it. In fact, someone said to me recently ‘what initials would you like after your name? Would you like an OBE or an FRCS [Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons]?’ I said, ‘Don’t mention the OBE because I did nothing really for that. The FRCS I had to study and work for so if you must put any initials use them because I had to grind those out with my head down.’ And sometimes you feel that by sort of saying this that it’s false modesty or something like this. It’s not. It’s just the way I feel. This is the way I was able to play, I don’t know whether other good players feel the same way.”

Of course, he adds, there were 14 other players on the team, and the forwards did all the grind for his moments of glory anyway. Besides, he insists that his achievements have gathered a little exaggeration along the way. “I only dropped one goal in my life and it was against Wales and it was from the 25-yard line. But people say, ‘God that was a wonderful goal you must have been near the 10-yard line’. I don’t like to contradict them.”

In the version I’d been told, he’d kicked the drop goal from the sideline.

HE LAST PLAYED international rugby in 1958, and having trained as a surgeon he spent a couple of years working in Indonesia before returning home again for a year. Colleagues told him he needed to “get on the ladder” in the hospitals, but he wanted to go abroad again, just not somewhere cosy or familiar. He took a job in Zambia, a country where few knew about his rugby career, and fewer cared. “There’s no use when you’re operating on someone telling them, ‘by the way do you know how many caps I got?’ They’re not interested.”

In Zambia he was for a time “the only surgeon in this town. And the only surgeon in the next town.” The hospital was busy enough that people slept between the beds. Surgery was hair-raisingly varied. “You might have an operating list in which you had to do a burr hole in somebody’s skull for a brain haemorrhage and then you might have been operating on the abdomen and maybe operating on a big toe. So I was, I suppose, what the old surgeons in Ireland were 80 or 90 years ago, down the country, turning their hands to anything. It was a really interesting and fascinating life. Naturally, sometimes you felt worse about it, that you would have liked to have expertise in a field. But I suppose there was a consoling factor in a way in that if you didn’t do it, no one else was there to do it.”

He performed his last surgery less than a decade ago. More recently, he has been a patient. “Ach, I don’t . . . I don’t want to talk too much about my illness . . . ” Last March he discovered that he had a bone-marrow tumour but a lot of people, he insists, have suffered a lot worse. The treatment at Belfast City Hospital was “wonderful”; the drug they treated him with, a scientific wonder. It takes a little coaxing to learn from him that during the treatment he developed a back problem and was in hospital for “three or four months”, having to learn how to walk again as a result.

He refuses to wallow in it. “I’m now 83. When you’re this age, we all have the optimistic attitude like the guy who said, ‘I know everyone’s going to die but I was hoping an exception was going to be made in my case’.” He laughs. “We realise, I’m afraid, that there are no exceptions. But those of us who have reached this stage, I’ve had a good life, a very fulfilling life, and I’ve got to be very grateful and consequently I have to say how fortunate I am to have had these bonus years. I’ve had more time even after I’ve been ill. You know I think there’s a certain acceptance at this stage that time is running out, so, you know, enjoy it, make the best of it while you can. And this is what one hopes to do.”

He grins as he quotes WB Yeats. “When you are old and grey and full of sleep/And nodding by the fire . . . ” He has had a lifetime love of reading. There are classical albums and CDs under the window, but the sill is busy with books brought to him during his illness: guides to birds, illustrated artists’ biographies, Tim Butcher’s Blood River, Graham Swift’s Waterland, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an autobiography by former Munster captain Anthony Foley.

He prefers non-fiction to fiction these days and has just finished Máire Mhac an tSaoi’s memoir out of a curiosity with her husband Conor Cruise O’Brien, whom Kyle met and was greatly impressed by. He also watches the History Channel, especially a current series on great battles. “You know, to keep the neurons firing.” He keeps his French in good condition by watching Euronews en Français. But he retains a special love for poetry, especially Yeats. “I often think of what he wrote in Lissadell. ‘The light of evening, Lissadell/Great windows open to the south/Two girls in silk kimonos, both/ Beautiful, one a gazelle . . . ’”

Kyle lets the words sit for a moment. Continues.

“‘Many a time I think to seek/One or the other out and speak/Of that old Georgian mansion,/mix pictures of the mind, recall/That table and the talk of youth,/Two girls in silk kimonos, both/Beautiful, one a gazelle.’”

It is quiet. The phone, thankfully, has stopped ringing for a few minutes. Kyle looks out at the view. It is a glorious day.