SATURDAY PROFILE/Eddie O'Sullivan: Can obsession and drive carry Eddie O'Sullivan's Irish rugby team to his first victory as coach tomorrow? Johnny Watterson on the man with a big job
Call it a defensive mechanism, bravado or boring truth but Eddie O'Sullivan has always maintained breezily that he doesn't care if people don't like him. As they say in rugby circles: that's a Big Call.
The Big Call will be put to the test tomorrow in Lansdowne Road where Ireland face Wales in O'Sullivan's first match in charge of the team.
An Irish defeat, which would not be seen as a paranormal event, would generate a long and loud chorus of disapproval. It would last two weeks until Ireland travel to Twickenham for their second match of the series against England, arguably the strongest rugby side in the oval ball world.
If they lose in London, O'Sullivan will face Scotland in March, the only team to beat Ireland in last season's championship. O'Sullivan will then understand pressure and will become acutely aware that people in many quarters and for a variety of tenuously connected reasons don't like him. He will understand abuse. He will understand what urges ordinary middle class rugby folk to call for his head to be presented instead of the trophy at the Leinster Schools Cup final; he will understand rugby's heart of darkness.
Prepared as he is that the job is difficult and that all sensitivities be best left in a dark cupboard alongside the old pair of worn boots, personal privacy and all of the other nerve endings and sympathetic material that make him an essentially decent human being, the 43-year-old from Youghal will also realise that something fundamental will have changed in his life since he was controversially appointed Irish coach eight weeks ago.
Perhaps those pressures will drive rather than arrest O'Sullivan. As a coach he has always shown an obsessional drive and frightening commitment to the game, characteristics that have allowed him string together a sequence of successful steps up the rugby ladder to the top job.
"If I can't sleep then there is obviously something on my mind. Maybe it's a video that I haven't finished analysing or a new move that I'd just thought of and that I hadn't written down. I'd have to do all that before I could go back to bed, which would be about 4.00 a.m. That would be a fairly normal night for me," he said after his appointment at the end of November.
His introduction to rugby came at an early age with Youghal RFC in Cork. Educated at CBS Youghal, he played underage for the club before moving to Limerick to take up a place at Thomond College where he left with an honours degree in physical education, mathematics and science. A subsequent encounter with former Irish out-half Tony Ward and O'Sullivan found himself in Garryowen where he played his club rugby throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
He was a 10 stone fly half with aspirations. Munster and Irish shirts were his goals. He realised one of them after a determined and prolonged dedication to pumping iron long before it was considered fashionable. O'Sullivan reconstructed his body, building himself into a 13 stone Munster winger.
"I knew I had to get bigger if I was going to play for Ireland," he said. "The lads at Garryowen used to slag me about it, nicknaming me Beach Boy. On the day of the game they might put sand on the pitch."
Untroubled by the muscle image and its attendant suggestion of vanity, O'Sullivan was more interested in the positive effect his physique had on his rugby. But the Munster wing is where he remained, an international cap remaining frustratingly out of reach. It was success but not beyond his expectations.
But Beach Boy had a latent talent that lay dormant and when he became a teacher in the Holy Rosary College, Mountbellew, he took up the girls' basketball team and coached them to an All-Ireland title.
He subsequently took up an invitation to become a rugby development officer with the Irish Rugby Football Union in 1988 and embarked on a coaching career with Galway Club Monivea. Seán Murphy, the former Monivea captain was one of the first to greet O'Sullivan when he arrived at the club.
"Occasionally when Eddie's wife (Noreen) needed their car, I would tip down to collect him," said Murphy in December. "The first night was typical. Eddie got in the car and said nothing for five minutes, no 'howryas' or anything . . . so we stayed quiet half way up the road to Monivea.
Eventually he spoke. He said he was going through that night's drills in his head and I started to wonder what sort of a fella we had here. We weren't very serious about our rugby at that time."
From there his coaching career took off. He guided Blackrock College back to division one of the All Ireland League and became assistant coach with Connacht. Galwegians and the Irish under 21s followed, the Irish side winning a Triple Crown in 1995-96.
O'Sullivan positively craved knowledge about the game. What he didn't know about forward play he would pick up while feeding balls into scrums on the training ground, listening and watching the front row players. From former Lions and Irish captain Cairan Fitzgerald, he learned about lineouts.
A move to America where he became Director of American Rugby raised his profile further before returning briefly to Ireland for the 1999 World Cup with the US eagles team. In November of that year after Ireland had tumbled out of the competition with a dispiriting loss to Argentina in France, O'Sullivan was invited into the Irish coaching hierarchy with an assistant's seat at the shoulder of Irish coach Warren Gatland.
From there it was just a short leap into the principal coaching position at the end of last year following the IRFU's decisive termination of Gatland's contract.
Portrayed as Machiavellian, O'Sullivan's first task was to explain how he became Beach Boy and his second, as far as Gatland was concerned, to explain that he was no Macbeth. The feedback from various sources suggested he was as good at moving in IRFU political circles as he was at coaching successful sides. Ruthless was a word often used, one O'Sullivan denies because it implies an essential cruelty. He prefers to be described as being honest or someone who is unafraid to "front-up" to people and tell them what he thinks.
"I have never aspired to be liked but I have always aspired to being respected. If you tell me you don't like me then I don't really care. Am I ambitious? Yes, I am. If you don't have ambition you better ask yourself where you are going in life."
Married with two children, O'Sullivan, at least in the public eye, is now chasing Gatland's mark of four wins from five matches in last season's Six Nations Championship. Regardless of how Gatland's sacking was executed or who was central to it, sympathy still lies with the former coach.
It might be unfair to O'Sullivan that the public see blood on his hands even if his only sin was to have appeared overly eager for the job. But that's the pressure, misplaced or accurate.
The results over the next two months will determine if that eases or increases.
Either way, Beach Boy appears to have a broad enough back to shoulder both.