My struggle with alcoholism

This article first appeared in the Sunday Press on September 7, 1975

Nickey Rackard was one of Ireland’s legendary players. He and his brothers won seven All-Ireland medals between them - but for Nickey Rackard, the greatest struggle was off the field - because he was an alcoholic.

Now Nickey Rackard has told his own story for the first time – the great days of sporting glory and the gradual taking over of his life by drink until his whole life began to disintegrate. Eventually he was forced to recognise that he was an alcoholic and for the past five years, he has been sober. Nicky Rackard tells his story simply and movingly. He hopes that in telling what he went through, he may be able to help others face up to the disease of alcoholism.

THOUSANDS of delirious Wexford fans swarmed onto the pitch at Croke Park on that September day in 1956 and mobbed the whole team. I saw my brothers Bobby and Willie, Jim English and the others, almost submerged in the horde of delighted supporters. And I felt on top of the world.

I suppose I had reason to be. We had beaten Cork in the hurling final to take the All Ireland for the second year running, and the Rackard brothers had earned six all-Ireland medals between them.

But though I didn’t know it at that moment, there was a dark cloud peeping over the horizon of my life. For the aftermath of that triumph was to send me on the road to an incurable disease, one which brought me to the depths of misery and degradation - alcoholism.

Alcoholism is a strange disease. There are thousands of people in Ireland suffering from it and they don’t even know they have it. Yet, if they have one drink, the disease will spring into life and take over. There are others who have it and they know they have it. They know they cannot be cured but they can live a normal life, so long as they stay away from the first drink. Hysterical Jubilation. Medical science doesn’t know what causes it - the doctors are sure only that there is no cure for it. It has been defined as a physical allergy, combined with a mental obsession, but no drug, no treatment has yet been discovered which can combat the malady.

In spite of all the publicity given to alcoholism in the past 20 years or so, there is still a stigma attached to it, just as there is still to mental illness or as there was, until Noel Browne’s time, to tuberculosis.

This is terrible wrong. Alcoholism is a disease just like any other physical ailment.

In some cases, the disease manifests itself as soon as the first drink is taken; in others it’s a gradual process of social drinking leading to heavy drinking leading to alcoholism.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the ailment later on, but as the crowd milled on the pitch in Croke Park on that Sunday afternoon and I was caught up in the almost hysterical jubilation of Wexford’s All-Ireland double, I had no thought of what the future was to bring. Why should I? I had been dry for five years, having kept the pledge I had taken after the death of a dear friend, a priest. And I hadn’t even a thought of taking a drink at the evening’s celebrations.

Instead my mind flashed back over the years to the historic village of Killane where I had held my first hurley. Then through school in St. Kieran’s College, Kilkenny, where I had begun to acquire the technique of hurling, and to my years in the Veterinary College in Dublin during which I played with Young Irelands, and to the triumphs and disappointments on the county teams which had culminated in this glorious day.

THE NEED TO BE THE BEST

To every Gaelic footballer and hurler, the pinnacle of achievement is the winning of the All-Ireland championship. That had been my dream ever since I first held a hurley in my hands, and over the years I had trained hard and practised had to improve my skill. It was all worth it when in 1955 and again in 1956 I reached the pinnacle.

Deep down inside me there had always been the need to be the best.

I was never content with second best, and in every game in which I took part, I always strove to the be the top man. Yet, I was always honest. If we were beaten by a better team or I was beaten by a better player or boxer, I gave him credit for it. I didn’t like it but I was honest enough to recognise the truth.

I believe this instinct, desire, drive, call it what you will, is a good thing. I have no respect for the competitor who only goes through the motions, but now I feel that this urge can be

a dangerous thing. If it is not kept under control and allowed to reach the proportions of an obsession, especially if carried over from the sphere of sport into job or profession. I believe that if a man does an honest appraisal of his abilities and weaknesses, then accepts his limitations and strives up to them, he will lead a happier and fuller life.

I think that since I became sober five years ago, mental and physical, I have become a better human being.

It took me a long time to come to that philosophy, from the time I was nine, at home in Killane, riding out with the hunt, when I remember, I still wanted to be the best, until a few years ago.

Horses dominated the early yars of my life and indeed are still a great interesst of mine. There was always a horse at home in Killane, where my father had settled in 1908. Though I have tried to trace back the family, I can only go as far as my grandfather.

That’s a bit puzzling since we are the only family of the name in Ireland. Apparently, it is a Norman name, and my grandfather came from the Barony of Forth in south Wexford, where today still lives an old Norman dialect unintelligible to the outsider. He came to work on a big estate and had three sons, Nick, Robert and John. Robert was my father and he worked for years in Dublin.

Eventually, he came to Kilkenny and bought the house, then a pub with a bit of land attached, which was once the home of John Kelly, the Boy from Killane.

It was in that house I was born with my four brothers and my four sisters, and it was there I grew up, hitting a hurling ball with Jimmy, Bobby and the others, for entertainment, working around the farm and helping out with the business.

My mother, God rest her, she died only two years ago, was a grand type of the old Christian hard-working country woman whose main purpose in life was her family. In recent years, I have thought how much anguish I must have caused her in my ‘wild’ spells for she would not have understood the problem of alcoholism, nor, to be fair to myself, did I until much later.

In my boyhood days, Wexford was more a football county than a hurling one, although there were pockets where the hurling tradition had lived on for centuries. One of these was my parish, Rathnure, and I suppose that’s how I came to concentrate on the hurling. I was to win my first championship medal years later, in 1940, with Rathnure.

We led the usual life of country young fellows, making our own entertainment, dancing and singing at the crossroads, going to hooleys in houses, playing hurling and listening to the old stories and some of the new ones.

STRUCK BY TYPHOID

Horses, as I have said, were my passion, and it was a horse which nearly putpaid to my hurling career before it started. We always rode horses on the farm, especially when we were supposed to be bringing in the cows for milking, and, naturally, we often had a race. One day we had, and the consequences may have been serious.

Away we went, Bobby and I, galloping like mad, and then his mount stumbled. Mine crashed into his and I was thrown. I came down heavily but felt alright except for a sore knee. Bobby was carried home semi-conscious and as we daren’t tell our parents we had been racing the horses, we made up the fiction that he had fallen from a tree.

So far as I was concerned, the knee was to give me trouble on and off during my sporting career; even yet I still get a twinge and have to press the cartilage back into place, but I still wonder if that fall was the cause of a much more serious consequence to Bobby in later years, which I shall relate in due course.

It’s almost 40 years since I really started to learn about hurling. That was when I was a boarder in St. Kieran’s College, Kilkenny, which I entered in October, 1936, a month later than the other pupils. My tardy arrival at the college was caused by a disease which is almost unheard of in modern Ireland, Typhoid. All the family except my father and one sister were struck by it but we recovered. By a coincidence, last June I met the nurse who had ministered to me and one of my sisters through the attack, at the 25th wedding anniversary of a mutual friend.

A LONELY SCHOOLBOY

Schoolboy books always have tales of the misery and loneliness of the new boy at boarding school. I was no exception. As I was a month late arriving, all the boys had already made their friends before I came. As my head had been shaved as a result of the typhoid, and as I was the only Wexford boy in the place, I was the butt of jokes and uncomplimentary nicknames. The first fortnight for a boy who had never been away from home was sheer hell, so bad that I contemplated running away.

Gradually, however, I began to take part in the games, particularly hurling, and thanks in a large measure to an enduring friendship which I formed with Tommy Maher, now Fr. Maher, the president of the college, I survived and settled in.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

The hurling coach at the time was the almost legendary Fr. Dick Lowry whom I rate as the best coach and judge of a hurler I ever came across. Fr. Dick really loved and game and spent hours patiently coaching us and supervising prctice. I credit him mainly with the unparalleled record of Kierans - from 1937/38 right through to 1939/40 no St. Kieran’s hurling team was ever beaten!.

Only recently, I learned that Fr. Lowry had noticed me before I myself began to recognise my potential. Irish Press writer, Padraig Puirséalwas chatting with him in 1937 and asked what kind of team he’d have. ‘Ah’, said Fr. Dick, ‘not too bad, not great, but there is one big lump of a lad named Rackard and when he learns to use himself, I think he will be really good.’

When I heard that story in the last few weeks I laughed, but had I heard it at the time, I think I might have been a bit insulted.

It was in the autumn of 1937 that I started to make the college junior hurling team, and late in January 1938, I scored five goals in our win over Ballyfin in the junior semi-final at Nowlan Park.

I thought I was a great fellow, and later was a sub on the senior team which drew with Coláiste Caoimhin in the final at Carlow. That match was a draw, but because we had injuries, I came in to the team for a replay which we won.

That year, 1938, was a good year for me. Although it was the year of crises, when world war threatened, like most youngsters at 16, I was too busy with studies and sport to take much notice of world events. Sure, we all thought it had nothing todo with Ireland. Let the rest of the world go mad, we had our hurling to occupy us.

Of much more importance to me was April that year when I played in Croke Park for the first time. Kieran’s met and beat St. Vincent’s in the junior final and I didn’t disgrace myself.

I must have impressed the Wexford selectors because I was picked for the minor, junior and seniorcounty teams in that year. Though I didn’t know it then, the year 1938 was to be a crucial one in my life.

I had always wanted to work with animals, particularly horses, and my father, knowing this, had agreed that I could go to the Veterinary College in Dublin, when I had finished by leaving.

Sometimes, I ponder on what might have happened hadI not gone to Dublin as a student. I know it’s fruitless to look back, but had I not become a student, the disease from which I was to suffer, alcoholism, might have lain dormant all my life. It was towards the end of my first year in college that I started to drink, and although I wasn’t aware of it, I was on the way to becoming an alcoholic.

NEXT WEEK: Nickey Rackard’s student days in Dublin, his passionate involvement with sport and sadly how his drink problems finally began to catch up with him. He also tells of an event in 1953 which should have made him change his way of life but didn’t

I believe that if a man does an honest appraisal of his abilities and weaknesses, then accepts his limitations and strives up to them, he will lead a happier and fuller life. I think that since I became sober five years ago, mental and physical, I have become a better human being