Ronan O’Gara
With a big move planned for the new year, rugby icon Ronan O’Gara talks to Donal Lynch about regrets, his rivalry with Johnny Sexton, and the real reason models love rugby players
Regrets, rivalry and rugger huggers
You expect acres of brawn when a rugby player takes his shirt off, perhaps. But this compact, slim physique before me is a reminder that brawn was never particularly what Ronan O’Gara was about. You need to be quick and lithe out on the wing. Huddling in the suite of the InterContinental as he changes for a photo shoot, O’Gara seems like a throwback to a pre-creatine past.
He is built, in fact, more like a soccer player — all tensile strength and balance in the legs. He has the athleticism of a man who still spends most of his days on the pitch. Though now at an age — 40 — when many men presume another KitKat is their Dad-given right, O’Gara will never run to fat. He has a youthful quality still. Together with the light winter tan, it helps you see why Clarins — he’s an ambassador for its men’s range — thought he would be a safe bet. And you could hardly ask for a more manly endorsement than his rationale for using moisturiser: “I’m not at all vain, but if your skin gets really dried out, it’s nice to put something on. It saves me taking [my wife] Jess’s stuff.”
The new year brings a big new move for him. His French adventure, which saw him establish himself in top flight coaching and banish the ghosts of the Johnny Sexton rivalry, is over. He is off to New Zealand, where he will take up his new position with reigning Super Rugby champions, the Crusaders. The local press in New Zealand has reacted ecstatically, while the Irish rugby press has noted what a loss it will mean to French team Racing 92, and RTE, for whom he does punditry.
For the large O’Gara clan — himself, wife Jessica, and the five kids, Rua, Molly, JJ, Zac and Max — it means upheaval; the kids speak French already, and the older ones are in the school system in France. O’Gara calls Crusaders “the holy grail”, and there’s no doubt ambition drives the move, but there is perhaps a sense too that, for all his success at Racing 92, he has never really settled in France. He’s spoken before about the difficulty of making friends there, of the rare visitors to his Paris apartment, and explains that while his time there has been a detox from the relentless scrutiny he endured toward the end of his career, it also seemed to represent a type of loss.
“Leaving won’t be tough,” he explains. “Moving to France was good because it took me out of my environment and the whole celebrity thing at home, and it sort of underlined that you can’t live on your past glories. The show goes on; there is always a new kid on the block; that’s the way sport and life works. It’s hard to get used to the buzz being taken away. I massively miss the camaraderie with my teammates. I miss the lads from Munster and Ireland, and achieving something with someone you really cared about. They wouldn’t die for you, because we have our families, but we would get seriously injured for each other. Where else in life can you find that?”
‘Taint of aftermath’
Perhaps when you have been what O’Gara was for Irish rugby fans, everything else that follows has what novelist Joseph O’Neill calls “a taint of aftermath”. O’Gara came of age at a moment when rugby was the burgeoning sport of the boom, and his timing was immaculate. A few hundred people would show up for Munster games in the early 1990s, but by the time O’Gara had established himself on the team, they were packing Thomond Park.
He emerged as part of a golden generation of Irish rugby players who helped Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Ireland to incredible success in the 1990s and 2000s. For a team player, his career had something of the texture of an individual sport. The one-on-one rivalry he enjoyed with Johnny Sexton was at least as fierce as any two nations produced during O’Gara’s playing days. The tense moments — Sexton bellowing triumphantly at O’Gara on the ground; O’Gara jumping onto the pitch a few moments early as he substituted for Sexton — are all there for posterity on YouTube, but O’Gara explains the two men “parked” the tension once their playing days were over.
“If the two of ye are going for the one spot, usually there is only one winner, but in our case I think we were both winners, because we drove the best out of each other; [we were] not prepared to give an inch,” he says. “It to-and-fro-ed for a few years, and then, naturally, the younger one is going to take over. And actually it was great from my point of view, because he drove me on and got the best out of me, and I had the bar already set high for him.”
At times it felt like our national self-worth hung on the accuracy of O’Gara’s golden right boot, and he was as regular a fixture in society columns as he was in the sports pages. If BOD was God, ROG was something close to the Holy Spirit. And the pressure of all this sometimes bore down a little heavily on him.
He often used sports psychologists, he tells me, and would be plunged into despair if he felt had not performed. “I don’t know what real depression is, thankfully, but I know what sports depression is, because I’ve suffered it a lot of times. And that really is as horrendous. Thoughts come into your head where you’d be happy if your world just ended. You think about it, and I realise that would be a selfish thing to do, because I’m mentally sane. This would be afterwards, if you haven’t performed, and you feel like you’ve let other people down. In 2000, we could have a won a European Cup and I missed four kicks; it meant that Peter Clohessy and Mick Galwey didn’t get a European Cup medal. At the time, it seems like there is no way forward. There was personal stuff that came out around the time.”
There were scurrilous stories, spread by French journalists, that O’Gara had accumulated substantial gambling debts and that he was having trouble in his marriage — a suspicion fuelled when he released a statement dismissing the gossip and saying he “hoped” Jessica loved him. To his horror, it was the ‘hope’ aspect people seized upon and the rumour mill went into overdrive. All these years later, they have endured, stronger than ever, but people still seize on anything that seems like an insight into their union.
When he went on the Late Late Show a couple of years
ago and said: “I wouldn’t be nervous getting up on Jessica but I would be nervous kicking a ball” the Twittersphere had such a prurient field day at picturing Ronan having sex, that he eventually issued an apology to his wife and “anyone who was offended”.
“To be honest, my memory of that was that it was like Italia ’90 in the studio. It was Valentine’s Day and everyone was a bit hyper and demented. I think maybe I got caught up a little bit in that and was playing to the crowd, who were out of control. I kind of forgot that there are normal, sensible people tuning it at home to watch this. It’s a bit like when people watch rugby on telly, and they can’t get a sense of what way the wind is blowing or how wet the pitch is. Jessica has a great sense of humour and there was no problem; we had a laugh about it.”
A sense of humour was also key to dealing with the jersey-puller culture — women who target young rugby players. Jessica has previously spoken in an interview with the Sunday Independent about noticing how forward certain women could be with her husband on nights out, and he says this kind of attention was part and parcel of socialising in those years.
“There were times when there were team nights out, and there were always one or two girls trying to make a name for themselves,” he says. Were there rugby groupies? “It got bigger as the years went on, that’s for sure, but for our generation it was very different, because the camera phones and the videos, they were still to come along. It’s an interesting new dynamic that these models can kind of make careers out of it if they have a rugbyplayer boyfriend. I was talking to [Racing 92 teammate] Dan Carter about it recently, and a lot of the rugby couples seems to have become brands now. I’m not on Instagram, but maybe that’s just the way the way the world is going.”
O’Gara has weathered better than many of his contemporaries, and tells me that seeing so many of them die in recent years made him wonder about his own health and mortality.
“In Ireland, in rugby circles, there have been a lot of good men who have passed away recently. It affected my perspective massively. You can chase all the money you want, but health is everything. After Axel [Munster coach Anthony Foley] passed away, I went into the Mater Private to get checked out myself.” Moving away from Axel, he says, “I took creatine and all that stuff, but I don’t think there are really issues with that. There is a difference between juicing [taking anabolic steroids] and taking supplements. I never saw people juicing, but I do think rugby has a problem. When you see South African schoolboys getting caught for it, you know it’s there.”
Photos of the young O’Gara show a ruddy-cheeked young man as far from this image of steroid-enhanced muscularity as it might be possible to get. He was born in San Diego, where his father, a microbiologist, was working, but the family moved back to Ireland within a year. ROG grew up in Bishopstown, a middle-class suburb on the south side of Cork city. The family was, overall, very academic — one brother is a dentist, another a noted psychiatrist — but O’Gara staked out a different identity quite early. “My dad was good from a strategy point of view, because he understood the game. My mum would have worried and prayed all time. Academically, I would have been alright. I just did the bare minimum; I was a crammer. I did Arts because I didn’t know what to do in UCD. I was in my own bubble, my head wasn’t in the family.”
These days, his head is very much in his own young family. His five children are all under the age of 10. He is a modern, hands-on father, he tells me, balancing the nappy changes with training sessions. “It’s a special time, because your kids need you so much. We have a Filipina lady who helps us in Paris. It’s hard for Jess at times too, with five kids, but she’s an unbelievable mother. We don’t try to get away from our kids. You see a lot of people who do that, but we don’t, and that’s maybe down to the fact that I missed out a bit on them when I was playing rugby.”
He has always leant on the advice of older people — he tells me his mentors “know who they are” — but
“I don’t know what real depression is, thankfully, but I know what sports depression is, because I’ve suffered it a lot of times. And that really is as horrendous”
sometimes he didn’t always have the best counsel. His playing days could have set him up for life, financially
— he was always an advertiser’s dream, and money flowed into the sport during his pomp — but the last few years have been somewhat difficult on that score, he explains.
“I’m not set up for life. I invested very badly when I was playing. I am essentially sorting all of that out. I started investing in 2000 — it was all about location and where you bought, and I was way too trusting of people at that stage. But at the same time, I look back at it all the same way that looked at stuff on the pitch
— I take the full responsibility.”
A part of building his way back has been establishing multiple strings to his bow, including his punditry, for which he has won warm reviews. “It’s wrong to say I shoot from the hip, I don’t do that,” he explains. “My mother said to me, ‘You have to remember every player you’re talking about has his own mammy and daddy’, so I’m careful about what I say. But when you can’t play any more, commentating is the next best thing.” What does he think of women’s rugby? “Women do understand rugby, but if I speak to some of the players’ wives or my own wife, and you talk about, say, a line-out peel, it goes over their heads, and lot of that forward defending stuff would go over my head, too, as well. The women’s game will never become what the men’s game is. I mean women’s soccer is big on the continent, but it’s never going to surpass Real Madrid, for instance. That’s not stating an opinion, that’s just a fact.” New Zealand is, of course, Women’s Rugby World Cup champion, so maybe O’Gara will encounter a different strain of fandom on his Antipodean adventure. And perhaps he will find new peace in the Land of the Long White Cloud. He turned 40 last year, but he says it hasn’t felt like middle age, so far. “I’ve been very lucky in my life,” he says. “I’ve the same group of great friends I’ve had since I was a kid. I have my family, my health; what more could you really want? This doesn’t feel like the half-way point — it all feels like it’s going too quickly.”