“As a matter of fact, I’d never heard of it either, but it’s – you know – it’s supposed to be a good school.” – Richard Yates, A Good School
What is it some people say about a sport choosing you, not the other way around? Maybe sometimes the same goes for a school. If they’re not already chosen as one and the same.
There was never any question that we would go to De La Salle Churchtown. My elder brother first, two years ahead of me, followed then by my younger brother, four years behind.
Our four uncles had all paved the way and left a mark. The exquisitely black-haired Charleton brothers, who back then lived just around the corner on Landscape Road, all played rugby, and the second-eldest, Manus, was on the De La Salle team that narrowly lost the 1968 Leinster Schools Senior Cup final to Belvedere, 14-11.
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That was just over 10 years after De La Salle first fielded a rugby team in the Junior Cup, and in 1975 they made a second Senior Cup final, losing that too, 11-7 to Blackrock. History took note.
Where we lived, on Weston Park, was originally named Churchtown House Estate, and coming down from the mountains not far above I drove by that way on Friday morning, to attend the annual De Le Salle Day. A time out of mind.
Traditionally a morning Mass for all in the school, followed by vanilla ice cream, this year was made a wider and special occasion as it also marks the 70th-year celebration of the school, which first opened in 1952, moving five years later to its present site on Churchtown Road Upper.
Walking inside the gates (gates never change) and straight away my earliest memory is a sporting one: we were just a few weeks into First Year when Jim Stynes walked into our classroom carrying the All-Ireland minor football trophy.
That was September 1984, at that age and stage in our lives where any distinct influence could and usually did have a lasting effect. Stynes, already a giant of a man, seemed to open a world far beyond the gates of De La Salle. Two months later he replied to a local newspaper article looking for recruits to Melbourne Football Club, and they chose him.
Between 1987 and 1998, Stynes played 244 consecutive games for Melbourne, still an AFL record, still the first and only non-Australian to win the Brownlow Medal. In 2012 he died from cancer, at 45, his ashes carried home and scattered on a mountain spot nor far above.
De La Salle was by then labelled a rugby school, history now noted in wine and gold before arriving there. What unfolded at the old Lansdowne Road in March of 1983 made sure of that – De La Salle beating Castleknock 13-6, thus becoming the first (and last) non-fee paying school since the so-called free scheme began to win the Leinster Schools Senior Cup.
That team feared not the obvious: their scrum in fact dominated Castleknock and two game-closing tries, one converted, sealed their win – thus breaking through the super elite and status quo, captained by Michael McArdle.
It didn’t matter if you played squash or badminton, basketball or football: that lasting impression on all of us was that we may not be better than everyone else but were were just as good
As if to prove that was no fluke, De La Salle won it again two years later, beating Blackrock in the 1985 final. Almost as unexpected again, they then lost the 1986 final, to Blackrock. With a little more luck the crazy truth is De La Salle might have won four-in-a-row.
Most of that 1983 winning team were back at their old school on Friday, 40 years later, including their coach, Brian Farley, and also the 1985 winning captain Brian Glennon, who played on both winning teams, and the only one to later win an Irish cap. Glennon was a gem of a player, coming on as a replacement against France in the then Five Nations in 1993, when, as some of his old team-mates like to remind him, he faced up to Philippe Sella, so they now had 112 international caps between them.
Something and everything about that success also left a lasting impression on all in the school at the time, as if that team were all chosen by De La Salle as one and the same, the only explanation perhaps for why they could have won.
It didn’t matter if you played squash or badminton, basketball or football, or went running out those same gates not because you were forced to, but because you enjoyed it: that lasting impression on all of us was that we may not be better than everyone else but we were just as good.
Not just on the sporting field, but the musical field too, where something else happened in De La Salle around our time to make a lasting impression on that front too. Listen to Republic of Loose.
[ When we were kings: two great upsets in schools rugby never to be repeatedOpens in new window ]
Some of us may have been shaped by these sporting experiences above and beyond anything else, but we were well shaped by what happened inside the classroom too. Walking out the end of the main building on Friday came a reminder of that, seeing the classroom where Pat O’Sullivan taught us maths, for all six years, although his unassuming wisdom and philosophy went way beyond that subject.
Because O’Sullivan’s great intellect left an impression in other ways: he knew a thing or two about sport too, rowing included, well before that became fashionable in the Irish psyche.
“Listen now, lads,” he would tell us, as his class frequently shifted from lesson to sermon, “if it won’t come easy, it won’t come at all.”
While he may have been referring to the theorems of Pythagoras, I’ve often wondered since what exactly he meant by that “if it won’t come easy…”
What it did, and maybe still means, is what we loosely term as talent is one thing, but it is nothing without practice and hard work, which ultimately takes you to that point of it coming easy.
Some things have changed since our time there, but they are still playing rugby in De La Salle, and it’s changing in other ways too, going co-ed from next term. A good school, you know.
Fógra: De La Salle Churchtown is inviting all past pupils to a special 70th-year celebration in the college on Saturday, May 27th at 5.30pm, followed by entertainment in the Glenside Pub, Churchtown.
