Hey Frankie: the rugby star who keeps bouncing back
Former Ireland hooker Frankie Sheahan has endured some difficult days over the last decade, both physically and financially, but now organises one of the biggest events in Dublin. He spoke to Donal Lynch
MY phone glows with a message from Frankie Sheahan. I presume it’s something to add, some detail forgotten in our long conversation of a few hours ago. Instead it’s a photo, taken 20 years ago this week. You can just make out the corner of his face, as he holds Brian O’Driscoll, who had just scored a hat-trick against France, aloft on his shoulders. In a star-crossed career with Munster and Ireland, it seems an unexpected moment to underline, with someone else taking centre stage — but humility is Sheahan’s secret weapon.
While necessarily speaking the language of promotion, he self-consciously peppers our conversation with the phrase “self-praise is no praise” and says things like, “I would do any work, I just hope it would be something I’m good at”. And in some ways the picture is just right. The metaphor of him lifting other people up is woven throughout his career, first as a rugby player and now as the organiser of the Pendulum Summit, a business and leadership conference, which, under Sheahan’s stewardship, has become one of the most exciting yearly events in Dublin, drawing the likes of Boris Johnson, Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins to the Convention Centre.
The event, and its international iterations — there is now a Pendulum Summit in New York — represent another phoenix-like comeback for Sheahan. “Never waste a crisis,” the former hooker tells me as we discuss the ravages of Covid-19, and, while this might be something of a cliche from most people, Sheehan speaks from experience. Over the last decade he has dealt with his fair share of crises and come back stronger each time.
When his rugby career was ended through injury, he reinvented himself as a businessman, investing aggressively in the property market. And when the economy collapsed and bankruptcy beckoned, he kept fighting and, eventually, turned things around.
“You get confidence from it in a funny way because it’s only money,” he says, looking back at it all. “I didn’t really fear for myself because I know that I will always be able to work. I was never afraid of work. And I would always back myself.”
That self-belief began early. His parents, both Irish, had met while working in Canada, and Frankie was born in Toronto in 1976. They moved back to Cork when he was an infant. Coming in the middle of the family, he felt in the shadow of his more academic siblings.
“I had a type of spirit, we’ll call it,” he says. “I enjoyed having a laugh and I often didn’t get the balance right, and my parents were called in and I got into a huge amount of trouble. My mother was in tears, she said to herself, ‘what did we do wrong with this guy?’. I was suspended and there were a couple of hairy moments.”
His saving grace was his rugby talents, which were apparent from an early age. Another stroke of luck was the presence in his life of Declan Kidney, who was then a teacher at Presentation Brothers College in Cork, which Sheahan attended. He ensured there was discipline among the rugby prospects, and by the time, Sheahan was on his way to UCC, Kidney was a coach at Munster. The game was slowly becoming professional and the older generation at Munster, the likes of Mick Galwey and Peter Clohessy, were giving way to younger men like Ronan O’Gara and Sheahan. The competition was ferocious and, like many rugby players — O’Gara is another — Sheahan speaks of it almost as a one-on-one sport; his rivalry with Leinster hooker Shane Byrne was especially intense.
“There were personality clashes,” he recalls. “It’s very hard to get on with the competition. At the time there are varying degrees of hatred and if you didn’t hate (your opposite number), you’d create the hatred, it was fuel. It helped drive me.”
He was capped 29 times for Ireland, over a seven-year period, but he feels he underachieved. “I never made things easy on myself. In my own head I could have gotten a lot more caps. I think I had the record for the most amount of time sitting on the bench without getting a run. That was painful. I would have given it all up just to be a part of it. But I had some perspective too: I knew there are other people, players, who weren’t even there on the bench.”
In 2003 Sheahan was banned from rugby, after testing positive for the prohibited substance Salbutamol, which he used to combat asthma. It took nearly four years for him to clear his name and have the ban lifted. “If anyone takes anything performance-enhancing in sport they should be banned for life,” he says. “I was taking an inhaler every day; I had never been told how many puffs I could take. I had exercise-induced asthma; I have no idea how much difference it made. I had taken it [since youth] and in the early days of my career the admin was all over the place. It was banned from one year to another.”
Sheahan also endured some terrible injuries, including snapping a ligament in his neck against Sale Sharks. “I was in a lot of pain when that happened. I was told that I could have been killed on the pitch but in my heart I felt it wasn’t as bad as they were letting on. I got back (to playing) eventually but in the meantime I had lost my (Munster) place to Jerry Flannery.”
It was another injury, a tear in his chest, that helped to convince him it was time to hang up his boots. “Failure is a very final word; it’s a learning that there is a way of doing things,” he says. “I think that a lot of the shitty harsh lessons I got, things going against me, have really stood to me. Those things made me hungrier, post-rugby.”
That hunger translated itself into a certain daring in terms of investment during the dying years of the old boom. “I invested in properties and took a lot of credit on, and it was easy to get,” he recalls. “I bought about ten or 12 properties. Then everything went a bit wrong and I got caught. My father had put in personal guarantees and the bank wanted to get at his portfolio, so we fought tooth and nail for five or six years.”
Eventually he had to enter bankruptcy, which he describes as “a massive learning curve”. His rugby fame ensured that the whole process made headlines, but he shrugged them off. “My peace of mind was that, in the end, even with all that property, it was only about €500,000 in negative equity and would probably have recovered if given another few years. That might sound like a lot, but in the scheme of things it really wasn’t. Anyone who has been in litigation knows there are no winners, only survivors, that’s the truth of it. If you could quantify the amount of time that businessmen and women spent fighting in court in the years after the crash, you could probably measure it in tens of billions. It was an enormous waste of time.”
Throughout this long fight, his wife Norma was a rock for him. They met while they were both in their early twenties; she is of sporting stock: her father was a golf pro in Monkstown. They have five children together: Frankie Og, (nearly 13), Cali (11), Arabelle (9), and five-year-old twins Kai and Taylah.
Even during the dark years Sheahan maintained his optimism and industry. From his teen years he had been fascinated with self-help, especially the work of Tony Robbins and Tony Quinn, and he sought to bring that interest to his business. He and Norma began working on Front Row Speakers, a company which brought motivational and leadership speakers to companies such as Google. It was from this that the idea for Pendulum came. “There was such a cloud of negativity over the country at the time that I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have one event that wasn’t just for the pharma or tech or finance guys but for everyone?” he explains. “We wanted the best-known speakers in the world, giving the ultimate wisdom that they had learned, the type of things they’d tell their families on their deathbeds. In year one we had 600 people attend and brought over the astronaut, Chris Hadfield. The following year we brought Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson and Tony Robbins over.”
‘Anyone who has been in litigation knows there are no winners, only survivors, that’s the truth of it’
Perhaps Sheahan’s most controversial speaker was the current occupant of Number 10 Downing Street. “I took a punt on Boris and I was attacked on LinkedIn, which is a fair enough place to be attacked because at least you know who’s attacking you, unlike on Twitter,” he says. “I responded to everyone who had a go. It just seemed like the right time for Boris; 18 months ago Brexit was consuming the world and our 7,000 customers were obsessed by it. In Pendulum we’re not asking the people who come to agree with the speakers, but if we could prepare them for the challenging times ahead then why not expose them to all viewpoints? Boris was the man basically responsible for Brexit, so hearing his voice on it all was important. We said we’d give him the platform for 25 minutes and then bring in Bryan Dobson, who refused to go on a call with Boris or to meet him before the interview. He unleashed on Boris when it came to it, but for Boris to come into the lion’s den was impressive.”
Getting the biggest names often involves managing some fairly large egos. “Generally what happens is that you deal with the Rottweiler first, who deals with the contracts, and then by the time you meet the speakers themselves they are lambs,” Sheahan says, chuckling. “But it sort of has to be a bit like that. With Tony Robbins, for instance, he didn’t want to stay at the Marker Hotel because he said it was close to a river and that there would be security concerns. Eventually I just said, ‘you are staying there’, and eventually they agreed.”
Norma is one of the directors of Pendulum and she and Frankie work closely together. “We get on great but of course we have our moments too. She has been involved in the business at all times but she does much more than that too. I’m in the office from 6am to 6pm and Norma is dropping the kids and then in the evening she’s working on the computer. It’s harder, in many ways, what she does, and I’ve so much admiration for her. People look at us and think we’re doing very well, but there is great risk involved in this.”
Sheahan and Norma are responding to the difficult times we live in by offering 100 complimentary Pendulum Talks memberships. “This is open to the first 100 individuals to contact us after reading this on welcome@pendulumsummit.com,” he says. They are continuing to work towards putting on a great event next year. The Obamas are on their hit-list — they’ve been in touch with representatives for both — as is Oprah Winfrey; they had her long-term partner, Stedman Graham, over this year.
The wisdom Sheahan has picked up through years of adversity is standing to him now as he and his family cope with the lockdown.
He echoes the poet Rilke, whose lament “we wasters of sorrows!” seems apposite for the times. “When you’re feeling really down, really bad, don’t waste that,” Sheahan says. “In a crisis like this, emotions are high, which can be painful but in fact can also be very helpful in changing a habit or making massive change. Your worst days can be your best days. You can be in tears but you can say ‘I’m changing the way I look at this’. That’s how I’ve tried to live my life.”
The Pendulum Inspired Leadership Programme is a leadership development programme available online. Created in partnership with academics and industry experts, this cutting-edge programme explores the fundamentals of leadership. Pendulum are offering 100 complimentary Talks memberships, open to the first 100 individuals to contact them on welcome@ pendulumsummit.com. For more information visit pendulumuniversity.com