IRELAND v CANADA: Gerry Thornleytalks to Ospreys' Tommy Bowe who, having failed to make the cut for the 2007 World Cup squad, is on current form in the running for a Lions place
AMID ULSTER'S flight of wild geese proportions, he was the one that got away. Rumour has it Tommy Bowe needed a new wallet when he went to the Ospreys, one of the most eyebrow-raising moves abroad by any Irish player, and that it was a frustrated reaction to being overlooked by Eddie O'Sullivan at the outset of last season's Six Nations. Not the way he tells it, though.
His decision has already been vindicated. Such have been his lines of running, playmaking and finishing that not only has he not seemed out of place amongst the Ospreys' galacticos, but Sean Holley has said Bowe has been one of the first names on his teamsheet.
No less than the esteemed pundit Stuart Barnes has said that were a Lions back line picked now, Bowe would have to be one of the names on that too.
Bowe, revelling in his return to familiar surrounds amongst ex-Ulster team-mates in Dublin this week, spoke of "a new freshness" to his game. "I'm really enjoying my time over in Wales. I think it's pretty much brought on everything that I was looking for. I was looking to play in a few different positions. I wanted a challenge, I wanted to bring a new freshness and I think it's pretty much ticked all the boxes."
He had been a little concerned about having to leave the Ireland camp last Wednesday week to prepare for the Ospreys' EDF Anglo-Welsh Cup game against Wasps, but final vindication came by way of his selection to play Canada today.
"It's down to me working a bit harder. I'm having to bust my b***s all the time."
He stops short of saying that would always have been the case with Ulster last season, for he saw plenty of ball there too, but adds: "I come off the pitch every week coughing, and I can't breathe hardly because of the type of rugby we're trying to play over there.
"We have people like Shane Williams who gets the ball into his hands over 20 times a match, turning up everywhere and we're pretty much given a free rein. Playing that sort of rugby gives me an opportunity to try and keep my eyes up, and to either suck in defenders or else somebody puts me through a hole."
At a stroke, unlike other jobs, he says he has 30 new friends, and is either out for dinner or around in a team-mate's house four nights a week. He has an apartment on the marina five minutes from training.
Regularly hosting friends or family, his parents have hardly missed a match this season, much to the disbelief of his Ospreys team-mates, and have already formed good friendships with the other parents of players in the squad.
"Whenever things haven't been going well for me on the football field, you'd look up to the crowd and see him (his father), shaking his head at me, or scream something out, and I knew it was directed at me. A bit of a kick up the arse. I think that's something everybody needs and certainly when not making the World Cup last year it was more a talk with himself and my mum that has given the added edge that I've taken to my game since."
His hockey mum, Anne - "she claims she played for Leinster schools or something like that," he says mischievously - would be more of a horse rider nowadays. She was also a keen athlete, which is just as well, for as he says himself, "I definitely didn't get my speed from my dad."
His father, Paul, was a secondrow who won a Leinster Schools' Senior Cup medal with the Newbridge team captained by Mick Quinn in 1970.
Team-mates and opponents of Paul Bowe at the time, recall him as a fairly left-field, easy-going, almost bohemian type. "I think once rugby didn't start to get too serious he enjoyed the social side of the game. I think he looks back and regrets it in a way. He enjoyed university, played a bit of rugby, played a bit of colours. He had the long hair, he said he didn't have a jacket, he had a curtain that he wrapped around himself. He would have been fairly left-field, all right.
"They were both massively into sport, and very competitive in their own way. Talking to my dad, he wouldn't seem competitive but put him onto a pitch and he was a different animal, and my mum would have been the same. Even now, once she gets on a horse she turns into a different person," he reveals, assuredly giving an insight into his own temperament.
His father, from Waterford, studied engineering in UCD and his mother, from Kildare, studied physiotherapy (in which she now has her own practice) in Trinity before they met in Monaghan. Her career initially took her to Craigavon Hospital, while his father was stationed in Silver Hills as an engineer (he now has his own company, BD Foods, distributing fine foods to restaurants).
They married and moved to a house in Emyvale. Family life wasn't so much rural, rather, as Bowe puts it, "the middle of nowhere", adding: "we had gardens, fields and woods. I think my nearest neighbour would be about a kilometre away."
Growing up Bowe played Gaelic football, rugby, soccer, tennis, golf and horse riding. "He (his father) always said the Bowes were jacks of all trades and masters of none. But you grow up with an eye for the ball then, and my mum took me sprint training."
His sister Hannah played hockey for Ireland prior to giving it up for two years while studying in Oxford, but now plays in midfield for Slough. "She's got the brains of the family too, unfortunately," he observes. His younger brother David, also an outside centre with Royal School Armagh, was a keen rugby player and is now studying in London Imperial University and also looking to break into coaching.
"He enjoys the concepts of rugby and all that crap, but it doesn't really bother me," he jokes.
Bowe had always been a stand-out talent for Ulster and the Irish schools, and he's proud of being the first Monaghan man to play for Ireland since one Robert Disney Gray, from Ballybay, won four caps in the 1920s. Like so many Ireland players, his own Ireland career quickly had its ups and downs.
Having scored a try on his debut for Ulster against Connacht at the end of the 2003-04 season, he made a try-scoring debut for Ireland against the USA four years ago this month and he briefly became a regular in 2005-06 before being one of only two players dropped after the 43-31 defeat to France, left to watch the subsequent Triple Crown on television. "I lost my place to (Andrew) Trimble and didn't get it back again for two years. He's got 20-odd caps. It was very frustrating for me."
His next chance came in the Sante Fe Test against the Pumas in the summer of '07. Suffering "a stinger" in the first ruck of the game , Bowe played on until the 79th minute. "I shouldn't have," he now concedes. "I fired in a load of painkillers and I didn't even know where I was."
One more opportunity came in the World Cup warm-up defeat to Scotland in Murrayfield. The next morning, in the same Killiney Castle Hotel where we spoke last Tuesday, he was informed he hadn't made the 30-man cut for the tournament, but would be obliged to hang on as cover for Shane Horgan pending his recovery from a knee injury.
"The worst thing was that because I was 31st man everybody else was able to have a chat with Eddie (O'Sullivan) and be told why they weren't being selected."
Furthermore, at least the likes of Jamie Heaslip, Rob Kearney, Luke Fitzgerald, Bernard Jackman and Mick O'Driscoll could hop in their cars and head home.
Awaiting his inevitable culling once Horgan proved his fitness, Bowe travelled to the south west of France with the remainder of the squad, and to his own puzzlement, even came on in the Battle of Bayonne ahead of Brian Carney. He returned to Belfast with the squad for the week of the Italian warm-up game, before they headed off to France the following Saturday without him.
Then Ulster coach Mark McCall phoned him up immediately. "If you fall off the horse the best thing to do is get straight back up and he gave me the opportunity to do so."
Working hard on his game, and benefiting from a few runs at centre, he went looking for more ball off his wing rather than stationing himself so much on the sidelines. His dynamic ball-carrying was the stand-out feature of an Ulster campaign that began to implode all around him.
Overlooked for the opening two Six Nations games against Italy and France, he denies he promptly signed for the Ospreys the day the latter 22 was announced, instead confirming his decision following his two-try return for Ireland in the win over Scotland.
"Obviously going away to the Ospreys you're paid very well but that wasn't a big deal to me. The way Ulster were going was obviously a concern but at the same time I'd been through good and bad times with Ulster, and I think there's a great talent there.
"I've lived in a small area in Monaghan. I don't know whether I'll end up living there or not, but when I went to school there were people who lived next door to their grandparents and their sons build on the plot of land they have out in the back, but that's never been me.
"My grandparents are down in Kildare and Dublin, I have cousins spread all over the place and one of the things I've wanted to do from a young age was travel round the world. It's the one regret I have about being a rugby player. I'd love to take a year out and go, go, on my own and see how I end up."
Even when he signed his four-year contract with Ulster in 2004 he had an idea that he might then move on. "And I've always been excited by teams that play great rugby and play in big competitions."
Surrounded by stars, you couldn't imagine him becoming one himself, at least not to the extent of shaving his body hair or gelling his hair.
"I'll leave the rug intact, although I'm growing a moustache for a testicular cancer charity in November. All the Ospreys are doing it. It's called a 'Mouvember'. We'll see it how it goes. For those guys who can grow a nice handlebar moustache it should go well, but mine mightn't be the best."
With Warren Gatland and Rob Howley based in Wales, the move can't do Bowe's Lions hopes any harm either. One step at a time, though.
"I drove past Thomond Park the other day and it looks class. I watched Munster when they played their first home match and to be able to sell out 24,000 is something else. It's something that the Ospreys are so jealous of, the way Leinster and Munster are able to get great crowds. It's going to be great. I can't wait."
Being supported in Thomond Park will, he admits, be a strange feeling and one he is eagerly looking forward to. He might as well enjoy it. It could be a while before it happens again.
Tommy Bowe
Born:February 22nd, 1984; Monaghan.
Height: 1.9m (6ft 2in).
Weight: 92kg (14st 7lb).
Educated: Royal School Armagh and Queen's University.
Honours: Ulster Schools, Irish Schools.
Clubs: Queen's University, Belfast Harlequins, Ulster and the Ospreys.
Magners League: 29 tries.
Heineken Cup: 6 tries.
Ireland: 15 caps (5 tries).
IRUPA Irish Players Player of the Year : 2007-08.
