BRENDAN FANNING – 30 OCTOBER 2005
BACK at the start of this season there was a sponsors' night in Wasps, where the players had to fetch up and shake a few hands, meet a few corporate clients and put the best side out. It's in the contract. This wouldn't be Johnny O'Connor's chosen form of interaction, but he got through it well enough - he may be a bit mad, but he is courteous and helpful with it.
When it was done and dusted, he walked out into the carpark with some of the suits as they headed to their pristine clean hire cars, whose hazard lights flashed obediently on the touch of a button. Across the way himself and Peter Bracken climbed into a heap of a machine - the ultra chic Toyota Carina E, 1994, decorated with parking tickets. "I know," said O'Connor, shrugging his broad shoulders and looking back to the gawping suits. "Living the life, eh?"
The car is Bracken's, but O'Connor was only too happy to get on board. He slags the prop about the state of it, but hopes secretly that it chugs along for the foreseeable. As a status symbol it is perfect. It's not far from Carina Es that either of them was reared.
Johnny O'Connor will check into the Citywest Hotel in Dublin tonight, hopefully in one piece after this afternoon's Heineken Cup game with Toulouse, and ready to pick up the next phase of his Irish career in a fortnight. Already he is a different animal to the one let loose against the Springboks this time last year. And at the time, that landmark was a different country.
At Wasps they call him Johnny Concrete. It's a peculiar English thing that they leave out the 'h' in the Christian name; the surname refers to his hardness. It's a part of the club folklore now how Lawrence Dallaglio was so irritated by O'Connor in a pre-season friendly with Connacht three seasons ago that he urged Warren Gatland to sign him. After that game Dallaglio enquired of Eric Elwood about the number seven. It was like in the good old days asking Mr Eastwood about Barry McGuigan.
It was a good six years ago on a boiling hot day in Athlone, and Connacht were about to do some target practice. A pile of flotsam and jetsam had been collected from around the province and was scattered in front of the senior team, waiting to be kicked further out of shape. The state of their preparation was best summed up by their supplies: instead of regular water bottles they had glass bottles, some with the whiskey labels still on them. The taste of liquor still lingered when you took a swig.
"They were a makeshift team and we stuffed them but this lunatic of a number seven was everywhere," recalls Elwood. "He was onside, offside, robbing ball, stealing ball, cheating. And I said to him: 'You're going to get f***ing killed.' The lads were shoeing him. But it had no effect. Not with Johnny. He was only a young fella, thrown in."
His moods took him on a scenic route through second level institutions of Galway
They became good pals after that. Elwood saw in O'Connor a wildness and unrelenting anger that had an impact on a rugby field. The kind of impact that opposing outhalves didn't like. And he was blown away by the kid's lung power. They would train together in the gym and on the roads, and keeping a lid on him was always a challenge. He always wanted to do more. A mate of O'Connor's was in the IRFU Academy and he got hold of his fitness programme. That it wasn't designed for him was irrelevant. He launched into it anyway.
The fuel for this engine came from between his ears. O'Connor reckoned he was always too small, and still does. He looks back in frustration at the time spent out injured when he was in Ireland - not just that it kept him off the field, but that he didn't know how to use the hours to bulk up, especially his legs. If and when he gets the bottom half of his body to match the top, he will be like something from a comic strip. Johnny Concrete - Man or Mixer?
The other recurring message in his head was harder to clarify, but the gist of it was that everyone else was wrong and he was right. All the time. And in these circumstances it wasn't easy to be even tempered. His moods took him on a scenic route through second level institutions of Galway.
"I left (St) Enda's because there was a bit of trouble in the school," he says. "I didn't get thrown out of there - the principal was quite nice. Then I went to Garbally and I got thrown out of there for being a f***ing idiot. Then I went to Yeats - no Park College first - then Yeats College, and did my Leaving Cert there. That was actually quite good. It was one of those 'studying' schools. I know it sounds like a lot of schools, but I can only laugh at it now.
"You realise how much of an idiot you were when you were younger. You think you know it all; you get to 16 or 17 and you know everything. Then you go: 'Actually, I don't.' Then you get to 18 and you think you know it all again. Then 21 and the same thing. It's the same now as well. I think my parents had a hard time. I'd say my oul man just laughed it off behind my back because I was a f***ing eeejit. I know I was. I don't know what was going on in my head at the time."
He seems pretty straight now. The angry head hasn't quite disappeared, but the instances of losing the run of himself in a traffic jam are less frequent. "When I came over here I tried to sit back and take it all in - there's nothing wrong with being opinionated but I sat down and learned my role and eventually you find you're just relaxed. You don't even know it. Maybe it's just about getting older. You train, you do your bit, you go home and chill out. Plus everybody's very easy to hang around: there's no hierarchy or status in terms of older players or younger players."
There is more to occupy his mind these days. Back home there is the prospect of a second season with Ireland, after a first which gave him seven caps. In the club, where O'Connor is in his third year, there is the usual array of silverware that Wasps want to chase. There is also a young pretender - England under 21 captain Tom Rees - after his hide. Off the field he has just moved into a new place a few miles from Richmond, and he's busy getting it straightened out. His 26th birthday is coming up in February. He's beginning to sound like a solid citizen.
It's not that hard to see him coaching when the concrete business collapses. O'Connor knows exactly the way he wants the game to be played, and it is not how Bath plugged Leinster last weekend. "I don't know how you can get enjoyment out of playing rugby like that sometimes. Not moving the ball: kicking it and tackling the whole time - what the hell's that about? Big deal if you make 20 tackles and clean a load of rucks - you want to do something with the ball.
'When they say they don't need me anymore, or it's time for me to move on, I'll be upset'
"I like to enjoy winning games instead of kicking the arse out of the ball all the time. I know sometimes we've got to be a bit cuter and kick the ball a bit more intelligently - like last week in Edinburgh, and last year against Biarritz I think we learned the same lesson. Maybe we've learned it properly now. We'll see on Sunday. Toulouse is really a massive game for us."
Then there is how you prepare to play the game. He reflects on his training loads in the early days as "ridiculous." Now he is a disciple of less being more. So if he has a game on a Friday night he might not be expected back to work until the following Wednesday. It wouldn't work like that every week, but often enough for it to matter. The science of it is something he is getting a handle on through a correspondence course from Manchester Metropolitan University. "It's 15 hours a week and I'm trying to stay on top of it," he says. "I enjoy it but I haven't passed anything yet."
And lastly there is how you manage those who play the game. For much of his life O'Connor has been as easy to handle as an electric fence. If he wasn't such a talent his wildness would have seen him cut loose long before he made it across the Irish sea: there would have been no move from third division Corinthians to first division Galwegians; to Connacht; to Ireland A and over to England. It would have been bucking bronco Johnny O'Connor, out of the corral and over the horizon, and nobody would have been rounding up a posse.
We should be thankful then that he was blessed with ability to start with. And that his move to London came when he was going stale in Galway. They helped focus his mind and broaden his game. And they did it largely through demanding high standards on the field and decency off it.
"At the time Connacht got in touch with me (to return) last year I felt I wouldn't mind going home - I kind of did and I didn't, but I decided to stay on another year and see where I was and how I enjoyed myself. It's always going to be a hard club to leave and when they say they don't need me anymore, or it's time for me to move on, I'll be upset. And I don't know how much home has changed since I left, if it's going to be the same thing? I don't think I could find any better than here - sometimes you're pissed off and they look after you and put you back in the right place, in the right frame of mind. You're not left to stew on your own and try and sort it out by yourself.
"Outside of the club it's good how anonymous you are. It keeps people's feet on the ground. It's no big deal - it's only rugby. It doesn't give you any entitlements to anything - to be rude or to be full of your own s***e. When you're talking to people at the club it's like everyone makes an effort to mix with everyone else.
"Even in the office it's: 'how are you going, how are you?' You don't just walk past people. Even the young guys you'd stop and ask how their game went at the weekend. There's that conscious effort by everybody. There's a hundred and one things I could go through. And it's the way it should be. It's definitely been a good experience."
When the interview is over, and we're walking back along the streets of Richmond, O'Connor's girlfriend arrives at the appointed spot to collect him. She is driving his car. It's a Mini Cooper. And it's clean and cool and far removed from the wreck of his mate Peter Bracken. "Sporty, isn't it?" he says. Well of course it is. Living the life, eh?
