Balls.ie recently sampled the atmosphere at a Leinster Senior Schools' Cup game and wondered why alumni continued to follow the results of their former schools years after leaving. You can read that here.
We discussed this on our daily sports podcast, The Racket:
On that topic, we decided to dig through the archives to highlight some famous faces who you may not have known played schools rugby.
Eamon de Valera
Dev was a big fan of rugby, saying that "there is no football game to match rugby. If all our young men played rugby not only would we beat England and Wales, but France and the whole lot of them together". He is believed to have been quite a good rugby player in his day, and played with Blackrock College (in Shannon) and Rockwell College, and apparently to have played at full-back for Munster, per this post by Seamus J. King.
Christy Moore
Moore has been synonymous with football since writing the anthem for the new, outward-looking Irish football fan in 1988, but before writing the story of Joxer in Stuttgart Moore played some rugby with Newbridge College.
He told the Irish Times that he made his rugby debut in 1959, playing second-row with the Newbridge College Under 14s. A year later he played with the college in the Leinster Junior Schools Cup, again in the second row. He played in three games against Castleknock, and scored a try in one of those ties, describing himself as "never as high since".
From there he played some club rugby, migrating to tighthead prop with Corinthians in Galway and Cashel. Moore recalls his retirement in 1966 as his "promising career as a tighthead prop was cut short by a bank strike and by my being a short arse. I had to settle for being a ballad singer.".
David McWilliams
Economist David McWilliams played in the Leinster Junior Schools Cup with Blackrock, and has written about his own recollections of that time here. McWilliams played in the Junior Cup final replay at Landsdowne Road against Terenure, and this is how he recalls it:
My darkest memory of schoolboy rugby is being isolated, petrified, deep in my own 22′, waiting for a massive “up and under” to come down in the first minute of the schools’ cup final in Lansdowne Road. I sensed the Terenure pack coming up at me like a thundering herd, intent on clobbering me. The ball took ages. The wind caught it and seemed – cruelly – to suspend it above me, swirling. And still they advanced. I could feel my Blackrock teammates looking at me.
Don’t drop it; please don’t knock-on, not now, not here.
This was the final.
Worse still, it was Terenure.
Michaels, Belvo, Clongowes, Marys – they hardly mattered. What mattered was ‘Nure. We knew it, they knew it, the crowd knew it: the greatest rivalry in schools’ rugby was ‘Rock v ‘Nure.
It was Dublin v Kerry, United v City, Kilkenny v Tipp all rolled into one. It didn’t get bigger than this and now I was the last line of the Blackrock defence, being targeted by the ‘Nure out-half. He knew I didn’t like getting hurt; they’d watched the video and they’d done their homework!
I thought about volleying it in to touch like a soccer player, which I had done before, but never in a final, and what would the purists say? I could see the lights of old West Upper in Lansdowne Road as it then was as I waited for this dot in the sky to get bigger and bigger, closer and closer.
Gravity got the better of it and miraculously, there it was, the match-ball in my hands, both hands, no fumbles, no knock-on. I could hear the ‘Rock boys cheering.
Game on. Time to fly.
Blackrock eventually won the game, 12-9.
Des Bishop
Comedian Des Bishop played some rugby with Blackrock College, where he moved to from St Peter's in Wexford to repeat his Leaving Cert. Bishop didn't play some rugby while at Blackrock, but as this Herald article slightly harshly points out, without making the Senior Cup Team. Bishop did play once for the senior team. He played prop forward against St Michael's, where he was knocked out cold from a punch to the jaw.
Mark Vaughan
Peroxide-headed Dublin forward Mark Vaughan played schools' rugby with Blackrock. Vaughan told the story of his brief rugby career to the Irish Times:
At JCT level I was on the seconds, well, I got dropped to the Bs so I quit after that. I was a fullback. In sixth year I played on the soccer team but might have been good enough for SCT if I had repeated my Leaving Cert in Blackrock, which I very nearly did. I might have got on the team at wing or maybe even fullback. I used to play outhalf as well but at the higher levels I struggled in that position. You have to be playing there consistently to really excel.
In sixth year I went back and played rugby for a while, on the thirds, which is really a collection of decent players who have not been playing all the way through school, but it helped my Gaelic game so I enjoyed it.
You can see it when you go back up to Crokes, it helps your handling skills but most notably you have no fear going in for a ball after playing rugby. The collision is never as brutal.
Vaughan is just one in a long line of Dublin inter-county footballers to choose GAA following a schooling in Blackrock, along with Cian O'Sullivan and Michael Darragh Macauley.
Ger Brennan
Another Dublin footballer to turn his back on rugby in pursuit of Gaelic football is Brennan. The defender played as at blindside flanker with Old Belvedere, lining out in a Senior Schools' Cup team alongside Cian Healy in 2004. Brennan said that he "always preferred Gaelic football", although Healy believes he turned his back on a good rugby career:
played senior rugby is school with Ger Brennan, he was a serious operator at BS flanker... great athlete!
— Cian Healy (@ProperChurch) September 18, 2011
Kevin Barry
Barry, executed in 1920, attended Old Belvedere. He originally went to St Mary's in Rathmines before making the move to Belvedere. It was during his second year in this school that Barry secretly joined the IRA.
The above is a rare photo of the then 15 year old Barry scoring a try for Belvedere against Blackrock in the 1917 Leinster Senior Schools Cup, via the Irish Times.
A profile of Barry on Jesuit.ie expanded further on his rugby career:
In his first year at Belvedere, he played on the Junior Cup rugby team. They won the Junior Cup in 1917, with Kevin as first substitute. He even kept press cuttings of matches which involved Belvedere and stuck them in the Belvedere Prospectus which his mother had obtained.
The same profile claims that Barry would often cycle from rugby training to pass on messages to the Volunteers.
Brian Cowen
Former Taoiseach Brian Cowen attended Roscrea in his school days. His biographer Jason O'Toole writes that Cowen immersed himself in the culture at Roscrea, and this extended to the rugby squad. This quote is from Brian Cowen: Path To Power, by O'Toole:
Cowen played on the schools team in rugby and hurling, in which half-back was his best position. At a Leinster Schools rugby trial in Donnybrook he played full-back opposite Hugo MacNeill, who was already school's captian from the previous year.
'Obviously, Hugo got the job!' recalls Cowen.
Further opinion of Cowen's rugby career comes from this opinion piece in the Sunday Independent from 2010 by Terence Cosgrave. Cosgrave went to school with Cowen, and recalls Cowen - as prefect - beating him up for failing to meet the standards required by the school. The writer insists he has no ill-feeling towards Cowen from the incident, and writes that the spectacle of Schools' rugby helped lend him revenge:
Also, I had my revenge. I attended many of our senior rugby team's matches, which inevitably featured giants from Blackrock, Rockwell, Terenure, Monkstown and Clongowes leaving him the colour of their rugby shirts -- blue, black, purple and red.
It is an enduring memory of mine -- a mucky field, torrential rain and a solitary (much lighter) figure standing there at full back peering through thick glasses at a ball high in the air as a stampede of big men ran at him.
He would catch the ball and a nanosecond later that stampede would hit him with a loud thwack and he would hit the ground.
Our supporters would gasp and I would grin to myself. What goes around, comes around.
