Abu Dhabi: ‘In BOD we trust’ was the mantra that Irish rugby union fans swore by during Brian O’Driscoll’s illustrious career.
The nickname was a tribute to his greatness between 1999 and last May, when he retired from the game. A giant in the green shirt of Ireland, arguably the greatest European player of his generation, he scored 46 international tries in 133 appearances, during which he won two Six Nations titles — including the 2009 grand slam.
His stellar career also yielded eight major honours with his club side Leinster, including three Heineken Cup triumphs.
O’Driscoll’s celestial brilliance transcended the Emerald Isle, too, as he was a four-time British and Irish Lions tourist, captain of the 2005 squad and a series winner in 2013.
As such, the 36-year-old could be forgiven for having a gargantuan ego to match his garlands galore. However, in the flesh he is every inch the humble superstar, as Gulf News discovered last week.
On meeting him at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, he immediately points out that he is suffering with a sore back sustained in the gym the day before — and hints that it would be unwise to trust in BOD in that afternoon’s pro-am.
“I’m going to be swinging the golf club like my mum,” he says with a mischievous grin. “Obviously I didn’t stretch or warm up properly yesterday.”
It’s a disarming yet refreshing admission from the genial and thoroughly unaffected Dubliner, who exudes down-to-earth honesty and easygoing charm as if he were chatting to a friend over a pint of Guinness in his homeland.
O’Driscoll’s back injury is perhaps a legacy of the extreme physicality and unyielding commitment with which he played the game. For both club and country, he forever put his body on the line, in rugby parlance — not just a scintillating centre, but a scavenging, all-action back-row forward when required.
Happily, however, he reports that such ‘aches and pains’ are rare these days. “I have no regrets about retiring and I knew it was the right time to go,” he says.
He does, however, greatly miss ‘doing something you absolutely love doing’ and enjoying the laughs and camaraderie involved in a team sport, as well as the ‘irreplaceable’ feeling of celebrating a win in the dressing room.
O’Driscoll’s affability and stature in the game mean he has not been short of work since he hung up his boots.
He was an HSBC ambassador at last week’s golf tournament in the capital, alongside fellow rugby legends George Gregan and Gavin Hastings and Tim Henman, the former British men’s tennis number one. O’Driscoll will be performing a similar role with Coca-Cola for the Rugby World Cup later this year.
Otherwise, the in-demand Irishman launched his autobiography last autumn and is a television pundit on the British satellite channel BT Sport’s European Champions Cup coverage.
However, becoming a coach and dispensing years of wisdom garnered from playing under some of the finest tacticians in rugby history such as Sir Ian McGeechan (with the Lions in 2009) and Joe Schmidt (the current Ireland coach) is not ‘on my radar at the moment’.
The main reason for that, he points out selflessly, is that ‘this is not really about me at the moment’, as he stresses his staunch commitment to wife Amy and their two children, including two-month-old daughter Sadie.
“My wife is quite career-oriented,” O’Driscoll says. “We’ve just had another little kid and my hands are full with the kids. I suppose it’s her [my wife’s] time to go and enjoy what she does. She’s an actress and an author.
“She needs to be given time to do that. What I’m doing is very dependent on having flexibility to go and react to where she may go.
“For the time being, it’s [coaching] not really an option. But I am always open to an opportunity which may or may not arise.”
Yet the unfailingly modest O’Driscoll says that even if he does become a coach one day, he would struggle to emulate the incomparable supremo he worked with at both Leinster and Ireland – Schmidt.
Of the New Zealander’s greatest quality he would attempt to copy, he said: “I would try and take his attention to detail, but I genuinely don’t think I’d have the ability to know as much as he knows because he watches so much rugby.
“He’ll watch games a couple of times. The second time he watches it, he sees all the off-the-ball stuff that guys are doing or aren’t doing and he will make notes of it all.
“He’s the most thorough coach I’ve been involved with and you could do worse than emulate what he has been doing. But he has a very, very good rugby brain to boot.”
O’Driscoll is similarly magnanimous when discussing another Kiwi coach, Warren Gatland, who sensationally dropped him from the Lions’ series-clinching victory over Australia in the final Test in 2013.
Will the shattering snub from the man who ironically handed O’Driscoll his Ireland debut in 1999 gnaw at him forever?
It’s a question he has been asked on countless occasions in the past 18 months, but one he answers without a hint of irritation or angst.
“No, I am well over that,” he says. “I’m not really someone that brings the past with me. It’s very easy to accept now that I am a Lions series winner and Gats did make the right call because the team went and won the series and won it convincingly in the third [Test], so that’s what was the most important thing, not about whether I played or not.
“Obviously it I had personal disappointment at the time because I wanted to play in that third and final Test, but I didn’t and it’s water under the bridge now and thankfully I have on my CV that I am a Lions series winner.”
Another less-than-savoury memory for O’Driscoll — albeit a far more risible recollection — is when he installed a hot tub in his garden during a brief hedonistic period as a bachelor in his late 20s.
“It’s still there tucked away in the corner of my garden and the insects are enjoying having a field day on it,” he laughs. “I don’t know what we’re going to do there. Do any photos of me in it exist? Absolutely not. They have been banished to archives that will never be seen again.”
Such self-confessed lapses in judgment were few and far between in O’Driscoll’s majestic career, however, making him as impeccable an ambassador for his country as he was a player.
For O’Driscoll was never obsessed with chasing personal glory, but instead revelled in bringing joy to those who cherished his every scything run or sumptuous offload.
His reflections of his outstanding career highlight exemplify this perfectly.
O’Driscoll recalls: “Winning the grand slam in 2009 after 61 years of not winning it, of being so close, of having won three or four triple crowns and having finished second on six or seven occasions throughout the 2000s, to finally go and win a grand slam was a brilliant feeling. But the timing of it gave a great lift to the country, because we weren’t in a great place economically.
“And I think it gave a little bit of hope in people’s lives at the time and put a smile on people’s faces, so that gave me extra satisfaction.”
With the interview over, O’Driscoll gets up and looks in obvious discomfort again with his stiff back.
He jokes that he is worried he will embarrass himself in the pro-am alongside South African professional, George Coetzee, adding he has not played since October.
Later that day, such fears are emphatically quashed when O’Driscoll wins the longest drive competition with an impressive effort off the tee of more than 305 yards.
In BOD you can certainly trust, then, in whatever this phenomenon does — even with a dodgy back.
