IT WASN’T YET seven and Ken O’Connell was still asleep. The previous day had been a good one. He’d passed his bus-driving test at the fourth attempt which meant one simple thing: craic.
Throughout the winter he and his close pal, Gary Halpin, had been hatching a plan to set up their own golf tour company to make a few bob and have a few laughs. “Think about it Ken boy,” Halpin would tell him, “we’ve got the contacts, we’ve got the time and most important of all, we both feckin’ hate golf; it’s made for us.”
A long time ago they lived a different life, pioneers when rugby went professional, room-mates, Irish internationals, world class messers. Halpin was a mimic, O’Connell a regular recipient of his impersonations. “Not the only one, trust me,” he says. “Ah, Gaz – he gave me the biggest laughs of my life.”
He tells a story about this Premiership match from so long ago that London Irish were still operating out of Sunbury, Harlequins, their opponents, the place jammed with fans. It was scrum-time, O’Connell hearing the words ‘pause and engage’ just as Halpin’s head rose.
Across the loudspeaker, the man on the PA was getting increasingly irate, repeatedly reading out the registration number of a car that was blocking the main exit. “Ah bollix, Ken boy, that’s my motor – I’d better go.”
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And off he went, the captain of London Irish, their talisman, their Irish international prop, away to the dressing room, fiddling through his pockets for a set of car keys which were duly handed over to the team’s bagman – before he raced back to the pitch for the scrum.
“Thanks for waiting, lads,” Halpin said upon his return, Jason Leonard looking across at him bemused, O’Connell bent double with laughter.
“That was Gaz,” he says. “He was a law onto himself.”
Yet when O’Connell or any player was at his most vulnerable, stuck in the wrong position of a ruck or a maul, it was Halpin inevitably who was there for them, always ready to help. “He got me my first professional contract,” recalls O’Connell. “The game had just turned pro; Clive Woodward was coaching London Irish and they were looking for players. I was playing over in Sydney when Gaz rang. ‘Ken boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a scheme for ya; get yourself across to London’.”
By last February Ken was no longer a boy but a middle aged man. Halpin too had just turned 55 when he started talking to O’Connell about his latest scheme, something to fill the time during their summer break from teaching. ‘GazzaKenBoyTours’ aimed to attract customers from England. They had the plans and the bus, they just needed the license. One Tuesday afternoon last February, O’Connell got it.
“Yes,” I thought, “yessssss! I’ll ring Gaz.”
But there was no answer. He tried him again a couple of hours later. Again, no one picked up.
That night he slept soundly before waking when his phone rang. He remembers looking at the clock, half-registering how early it was. He picked up his mobile; saw Malcolm O’Kelly’s name on the screen; then looked at the digits on his alarm clock again. It wasn’t yet seven. “Something bad has happened,” he remembers thinking, “something awful.”
**
O’Kelly knew he had to call O’Connell because, well, the three of them were a tight-knit crew. A quarter of a century earlier, the younger pair had arrived in London on their own, Halpin already settled, captain of London Irish, the link between a community of ex-pats and the players who represented them.
“Gaz could chat to anyone; a club’s hierarchy, the poorest person in London, and be at their level,” says O’Connell. “He was such a one-off character, not made for mass production,” says O’Kelly. “A loveable rogue,” is Willie Anderson’s take. Halpin was Anderson’s captain at London Irish. “He was a great person,” Anderson says, “and to me, that’s a vital part to being a great rugby player.”
Anderson was driving south when he heard of Halpin’s passing last February. The shock hit him hard, forcing him to pull in to the hard shoulder. It was Trevor Brennan who’d called Malcolm O’Kelly; Keith Wood who’d told Brennan about Halpin’s fatal heart attack. “Trevor and Gazza would have been tight,” says O’Kelly.
So many were. Wood, Gabriel Fulcher, Liam Toland, Neil Francis, the list goes on. “We couldn’t believe it; it was such a shock,” says O’Kelly.
O’Connell took the day off work, lost in a private world of pain. He remembered the player, a hard man who was good enough to win 11 Ireland caps and get to two World Cups. “Unlucky not to have won more,” he says. “Oh, he could play alright,” says Anderson.
“Those 11 caps, well, he was up against Des Fitzgerald, Jimmy McCoy, Peter Clohessy, Paul Wallace. Remember, subs didn’t get a run in those days, either.
“Gary had athleticism; toughness; skill. He was well able to mix it.”
Keith Wood paid his own tribute, praising Halpin’s speed and the power of his hit in the scrum. “Gary had heart,” Anderson said, “on the pitch and off it. Jeepers, that feller had character, alright. He was a winner.”
Except for one summer – when he captained an emerging Ireland side on the tour to hell.
EMCEE HAMMMERED
AS NIGHT FELL and the bus pulled out of Whangarie, the most northerly city in New Zealand, the rain came down from the banked grey clouds and the streetlights soon disappeared from view.
That Ireland tour had started badly, North Auckland putting 69 points on them. Next stop Albany, four hours away. “Whoever dreamt up the itinerary, decided in their wisdom that on our down days, we’d travel,” says O’Kelly. “That was their idea of getting us to relax. We’d land in some town; then start training right away.”
This was 1997; two years after rugby had turned professional. O’Kelly was 23, coming back from two seasons of injury hell. A broken ankle had ruined his season, limiting him to just two appearances for London Irish – and for a young fella who by his own admission “had a pretty high opinion” of his ability, this dream job he’d landed was failing to live up to expectations.
“I’d say it took me years to realise that I wasn’t really that good a player back then; yes, I had plenty of potential but on that tour, I was tormented by my own pain. The ankle was at me; I was anxious to get back but struggled to get going.”
Sitting on a bus bypassing the kind of towns you don’t see on the tourist maps wasn’t doing much for his mood.
The ankle, the defeats. The bus, the road.
There was no Wifi back then; no Netflix, no PlayStation. No, there was only one source of entertainment: the team captain of that tour, Mr Gary Halpin.
“On those bloody awful bus trips, Gazza would grab the microphone and just be emcee for an hour or so,” says O’Kelly. “No one was off limits for Gary, especially the management. He had a great way of impersonating people and an even better way of getting everyone on the bus to spill the beans on the fellers sitting next to them. Nothing was sacred; no secrets kept. Those comedy routines kind of saved a lot of us on that trip.”
They needed rescuing because the results were brutal. North Auckland 69-16 Ireland; New Zealand Academy 74-15 Ireland; Bay of Plenty 52-39 Ireland, New Zealand Maori 41-10 Ireland, Samoa 57-25 Ireland. And after each beating, the boys rode the bus to the next small town: Rotorua to Paeroa; Paeroa to Taupo; Taupo to Palmerstown North – which with a population of 82,000 was the biggest place they stayed in.
Six out of seven matches were lost, an average of 48 points conceded.
And time after time, Gary Halpin would take the mic, and then take the mick.
“He was that kind of guy, generous of spirit,” says O’Kelly. “Like, when you think of modern-day captains, he probably wouldn’t fulfil a lot of those requirements. One of his lines on that tour was ‘I really don’t give a f**k, lads’.
“He wasn’t trying to motivate you, he was just being himself and he could give out (about things) as good as the next feller. That was a tour of tired and emotional people but Gary was just incredible, an inspiration to us. We loved him.”
So did Anderson. He was a young coach trying to make his way in the mid-90s, just as O’Kelly, O’Connell, and a posse of young Irish players, Victor Costello, Kieran Dawson, Jeremy Davidson, Gabriel Fulcher, David Humphreys, Mark McCall, Conor O’Shea, Niall Woods, were trying to make a go of it in professional rugby. All of them had moved across the pond, taking a leap of faith together.
We tend to overlook the positive impact that London Irish team had on Irish rugby, largely because their results were indifferent, but also because no one could be bothered to join the dots. Ultimately five of that squad ended up in Paris in March 2000 when Brian O’Driscoll got his life-changing hat-trick; McCall coached Ulster to their last-ever trophy; Woods headed up Rugby Players Ireland for a while and is now a leading agent; Davidson became a Lion.
Would all that have happened even if they hadn’t come together for a couple of seasons in Sunbury? Well, we just don’t know.
What we are conscious of is the fact the game had turned pro and while the rest of the rugby world embraced professionalism, the four Irish provinces were dieting on rations of six to eight games per year. Ireland’s results may still have been bad in the ‘90s but without London Irish providing an outlet for 25 of our best players, it would have been worse.
“It was like being on a tour, that first year as a professional rugby player,” says O’Kelly. “We trained hard.” It’s fair to say they partied hard, too. All except their captain, who had been at the club since the pre-professional days and who wasn’t just a rugby-man.
“No, first and foremost, Gary was a family man,” agrees Anderson, remembering how Halpin would go out of his way to arrange for Anderson and his family to come across to their suburban home for Sunday lunch. “He looked out for everyone,” remembers O’Kelly. “I lived in a rugby house where we did everything together, trained, ate, went on nights out.
“It was the best league in the world at the time; Saracens had spent big on Francois Pienaar and (Philippe) Sella; Leicester had (Martin) Johnson, Bath had (Jeremy) Guscott; Richmond built a super team. We lost a fair few games and we’d really beat ourselves up after but Gazza reminded you life wasn’t all about rugby; it was about people, about having fun. He’d take us out to his home on a Sunday after a game, offering us a sample of ordinary family life.
“Ah, he was such a funny fellah, such a generous person. To not have been able to see him and appreciate him one more time is just so very tough on everyone. We’d all loved to have seen him. It’s heartbreaking what happened. Heartbreaking.”
SAYING GOODBYE
O’Connell had the privilege of being at his funeral last February, lockdown restrictions limiting the numbers. He was one of three close friends chosen by the family to represent some of the key phases in Halpin’s life, his childhood, his athletics career, his life in rugby.
Hearing Halpin’s three children, Bentley, Leonie and Lenka pay an eloquent and heartfelt tribute to their parents brought mist to his eyes. “Mum,” they said, “we had the rare privilege of watching a true romance play out in front of us every day, teaching us what real love and companionship looks like. While Dad paved the way for us, you are the endless supply of cement. Dad taught us that life is for living.”
He taught others the same lesson, whether in a professional capacity as an educationalist, or as the fun-loving character who’d terrorise his team-mates in a dressing room, hiding their towels when they’d head to the showers after training, firing buckets of iced water at them if they made the calamitous error of going to sleep on tour.
Anderson first met him on Halpin’s inaugural tour, to the US. “He was a brilliant singer; and whenever we’d head through security at airports, he’d get us all going. We were dressed in these horrendous, gaudy shellsuits and all the while this big feller was singing The Leaving of Liverpool with all his might.”
Anderson recalls one woman querying whether they were a Gospel choir, another – noting the garish white uniforms – wondering if they were astronauts. “Well, Gary was certainly from another planet,” says Anderson.
“He was central to the craic, just a great guy, someone who always made you laugh and who sometimes made you laugh when you didn’t want to; like when you were giving a team talk. Gary would mimic your voice or something. In that sense he might not have been the best leader but make no mistake, he galvanised a great team spirit. You were lucky to have him around.”
**
In playing terms, he’s best known for what he did at the 1995 World Cup, scoring an early try against New Zealand in Ireland’s opening match, following it up with a two-fingered celebration in the direction of Sean Fitzpatrick.
Yet there was a lot more to his career than that moment. Wanderers, Leinster, London Irish, Harlequins, they all got the best out of him. He’d represented Ireland in the hammer at the 1987 World Athletic Championships and was able to bring that big-game mentality across the sporting divide. “Despite being fond of a laugh; he could be serious when he had to be,” says Anderson.
But he knew when to switch off. “He definitely influenced me,” says O’Kelly. “He had this saying, ‘win or lose, I feel exactly the same five minutes afterwards’. It was a good way to think. Like, we hear a lot about mindset in professional sport but there is a lot to be said for doing your best on the pitch and then afterwards just getting on with things.”
Winning, for Halpin, wasn’t just about results. It was about forging friendships. “He looked out for me, boy,” says O’Connell, “he got me my move into professional rugby, got me the best years of my rugby life.”
As time passed, as the muscles tired and the hair thinned or greyed, the boys of summer moved off into the autumn of their lives. Children came along but the spirit of that London Irish dressing room never disappeared. Halpin would move the family back to Kilkenny, getting work at home. “He’d always made a point of calling,” says O’Connell. “He stayed close to so many.”
That’s why, a quarter of a century after he played in the Premiership, a group of former English and Irish pros came together last night to play a match in his honour at The Stoop, Shane Byrne captaining the Irish side, Leonard – the player who saw Halpin run from a Premiership pitch to move his badly parked car – leading out the English team. For those 30 players, there won’t be bigger game in London this weekend.
Then two weeks from now, at noon at Rockwell College, there’ll be another gathering of rugby greats, when the Halpins hold a remembrance service, celebrated by Father Jack Meade. His London Irish family will be there too. “We need to grieve together,” says O’Connell, “because over the last year, it has been very hard to deal with it by yourself. Hearing Gary’s passing was the biggest shock of my life, an extraordinary feeling. Awful. Your thoughts all through this are with Carol and the kids.”
Twenty-five minutes into our conversation, he pauses. “It’s hard to even talk about it,” he says. “It’s still very tender, still such a shock. I’m expecting him to call any day. I miss him, boy….. I really miss him.”
So many do.
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