How Axel’s passing had a profound effect on fellow coach Pat
PAT Lam’s media conference on Wednesday in Galway will go down in history as one of the most spell-binding press sessions ever in Irish sport, never mind just Irish rugby.
It was that good, that searingly honest and that riveting that its heart-on-sleeve content gave the day’s supposed big event elsewhere in Ireland at the very same time – Warren Gatland’s unveiling of his Lions assistants – the elbow in terms of interest and insightfulness.
Sports press conferences don’t usually amount to very much, the constant cat-and-mouse being more like a visit to the dentist than a situation where information is willingly volunteered.
Too often in this era of media management, where the aim is forever to promote a cosy message, you come away feeling hoodwinked that genuine difficult questions go unanswered.
Lam’s patter, though, regularly goes against this established grain. He is nearly always worth a listen.
Late September’s description of how his then out-of-sorts Connacht were performing like an orchestra slightly out of tune was typical of his entertaining gift of the gab.
However, Wednesday was cabaret with a deadly serious undercurrent. When you have a man of 48 who has the rugby world at his feet following last May’s PRO12 title triumph talking about mortality and fearing how his number in this life could be up at any time, you can’t but be taken in and admire his sincerity. How the event played out wasn’t even your typical Q&A conference format either, Lam walking into the upstairs Sportsground boardroom just past noon and proceeding to speak uninterrupted for a breathless 22 minutes, his 3,300-word delivery a gripping journey through his rugby story which champions so many successful underdog stories – his grubby 2012 sacking at the Blues in Auckland and the sad racial abuse that came with it, the admirable vision he and wife Steph have as parents for five children ranging in age from 24 to nine, his family’s worrying genetic history of heart trouble through his late grandfather and his father, and the juddering jolt that was attending the October funeral of the late Anthony Foley, a coaching contemporary six years his junior.
All were dots that convincingly connected together to leave no one present in any doubt his sole reason for quitting Galway for Bristol a year before his contract’s 2018 expiry was to secure his family’s future. Money had talked but it had done so with good grace and worthy intention. Fair play.
‘This offer allows me to look after and secure them if my number comes up,’ he said. ‘None of us know when our number is going to come up but when it does I will be at peace.’
The Lams are selfless people. Who else attending last weekend’s People of the Year awards in Dublin were up at 8.30 the next morning, having only arrived back home in Galway at 3am, to bake banana cakes and other delicacies for their youngest daughter’s Christmas craft fair?
Husband and wife are on the school’s parents’ association and this vignette about early-morning baking is indicative of how productive Lam’s work-life balance is, how he always finds time for varied non-rugby commitments. More power to him.
Family values were Wednesday’s biggest takeaway, the desire to raise his children the best he can – something which resonates with so many similarly minded Irish people.
‘We have three main things for our children,’ he explained midway through his now famous impassioned sermon.
‘Number one is they grow up knowing God, that they know they are loved, that they know people believe in them. Number two is they value relationships and value people because that is what this world is about.
‘And number three is that they have a really good education and we provide them a really good education.
‘Not because of the knowledge. Knowledge is important but you put all those three together and there is a great chance that they are going to have wisdom and the wisdom is the one that was important to me and to my wife.’
That’s a life lesson worth bearing in mind amid professional sport’s ceaseless, pressurised quest for winning results.