DAY IN A LIFE SERIES:BERNARD JACKMAN, retired rugby player
A MAN walks into a coffee shop. It’s a crystal-skied spring morning and the man is feeling tremendously well-disposed towards life. He’s practically jaunty, in fact. He’s just finished the 25-minute power-plate session that makes up his morning work-out, a change in pace from the days of dumbbells and bench-pressing but the most his murderous knees can take any more.
He orders a coffee and a nice, rich chocolate treat. When lunchtime comes he’ll stick to the steamed salmon and boiled veg but for here and for now, we’re in Bridget Jones territory. No qualms, either. Hardly much point being retired if you’re not going to indulge once in a while.
On Saturday, it will have been exactly a year since Bernard Jackman last took the pitch as a professional rugby player. By the end, he was having to bump his way down the stairs of his house sitting down because his knees couldn’t take the stress. And even then, he was retired by the Leinster doctors without having very much say in the matter himself. It killed him at the time and part of it kills him still but he got any wallowing he had in him over and done with pretty sharpish and went about finding another life for himself.
“I was never really worried about having something to do,” he says. “Retirement didn’t scare me too much. It did a bit but probably not as much as it scared my wife. You’re doing a job for a dozen years and making a living chasing dreams, trying to win things, playing for Ireland. I think when you walk away from that, it’s important to throw yourself into something else straight away. I know some guys take a break but I wanted to be kept really busy and really hectic. You know, go at it and go at it hard. That’s why I’m involved in so much stuff.”
Let’s go through the list, so.
Head coach of Clontarf RFC. Rugby development co-ordinator of DCU. Forwards coach at St Michael’s College, Ballsbridge. High-performance coach to the Wexford senior football team. Masters student of sports and exercise management in UCD. Motivational speaker. Internet and newspaper columnist. Radio and television pundit.
When you’re spinning that many plates, priorities change depending on the page in the calendar. The day we met, Clontarf were motoring towards the business end of the AIL season so they took top billing. With the devastating last-minute exit at the hands of Old Belvedere last Saturday though, the season is over and he’s that little bit freer now until pre-season starts in July. St Michael’s went out at the semi-final stage of their competition too. The UCD course is run off in 12 week-long modules so he makes time for that when he has to. His life is a jigsaw that sometimes needs the help of a hammer and some brute force to make the pieces fit.
We leave the coffee shop and head to DCU. On the way, he talks about Clontarf and their ambitions and what it means to him to get the chance to coach at that level. A couple of nights a week of training and then a match on Saturday brings him back to when he started out. You spend a decade as a pro and your life is all comfy cushions and everything being just so. The ebb and flow of life at grassroots seems a little more real somehow.
“It’s gone very young at AIL level. Guys are coming out of school, giving it three or four years to try and make it and then when they don’t they’re just quitting altogether.
“Up until a year or two ago, that was definitely the case. You were struggling to keep lads playing past the age of 22, 23. That has changed a little in the last couple of years, mostly because of unemployment. Guys are realising again that it’s a social outlet and numbers are starting to come back into clubs. I’d say it’s the same in all sports. Clubs are a way of keeping people sane, keeping them active.”
At DCU, a New Zealander by the name of Ken Lynch from the Irish Sports Institute is giving a lecture on the lifestyle of a high-performance athlete that he wants to hear. Parked up the front of a lecture room filled with wannabe basketball players and women footballers, Jackman sticks out like a throbbing thumb but no matter. If Lynch throws a question to the floor that hangs in the air, he pitches in with an answer. High performance is about improving lots of little things a little at a time. The Wexford footballers will likely hear some of the lecture repeated back to them in one form or other.
“I find a lot of GAA players are very shy, compared to rugby lads,” says Jackman, who has been working with Jason Ryan’s team since January 2010. “They’re elite but they don’t see themselves as being elite. It’s odd. I’m always saying to the Wexford players that any one of them could go into a Munster dressingroom or a Leinster dressingroom and stand in front of those squads to give a talk and have their undivided attention for half an hour. No question.
“The rugby lads wouldn’t be thinking, ‘What does this guy think he’s doing here?’ They’d be genuinely interested in how he prepares, how he structures his life, what he sacrifices to play at the top level. The rugby players see Gaelic footballers and hurlers as being elite, much more so than the footballers and hurlers see themselves in that regard.”
In the afternoon, DCU have a match against Coleraine. In terms of colleges rugby, this is way, way off-Broadway. The best players in the college are hardly ever available to him. DCU supplied four players to the Six Nations under-20 squad but they’re academy kids who have long since passed this level. Instead, his job is often about finding a home for the ever-expanding hordes who are looking to play the game now.
He takes all sorts, from lads who played a bit in school to others who like the look of it on TV and want to give it a go. It’s basement level stuff for a man who has real ambitions to coach at the top somewhere down the road. There were a couple of coaching positions at Leinster that he could have stuck his name in the hat for when he retired but the truth is he couldn’t bring himself to stick around. Never mind his knees, his heart was broken too.
“This job in DCU is part-funded by Leinster but otherwise I’m gone from there altogether and that’s deliberate. When you’re in that circle, it’s very tight. But when you’re gone, you’re gone. I would hardly ever go to the RDS now. I went back for a supporters’ club presentation and I was there for the Saracens match because I was doing some radio at it.
“Apart from that, I haven’t gone to a game. It’s very raw. You’re sitting there and you want to be playing. Like, I absolutely would have played this season if the doctors had let me. But the reality is that if you’re not fit to go 100 per cent, you’re no good to them. And it has to be that way because professional sport is ruthless. Eventually, I want to get back there and get back into the set-up. But I think I’ve learned more by doing it this way.”
Coleraine turn up about an hour-and-a-half late – their bus driver had reached his legal limit in terms of hours driven and had pulled in to take a break when they were halfway down the road. It’s worth the wait though as his DCU side chisel out a 35-32 victory. It’s not the most technically pristine game you’ll ever see but on a fine day in the fresh air, it’s all kinds of fun.
Maybe Jackman will coach his way up to the top level in time.
He surely has the energy for it and is doing all he can to build up the knowledge for it. But for now, fun doesn’t feel like a bad start at all.
DAY IN A LIFE
7.00am – With two young kids in the house, the day starts when they decide it starts.
10.00am – Work-out session at Body Smart gym in Grand Canal Square. Low-impact power plate work is easy on his knees and good for his joints.
12.00pm – Attend high-performance lifestyle lecture in DCU by Ken Lynch of the Irish Sports Institute. Lynch breaks down the hours in a week and asks the students what they do outside the time they are training.
1.00pm – Lunch in DCU canteen.
2.15pm – Arrive at St Claire’s Sportsground on the Ballymun Road for match against University of Ulster, Coleraine.
4.00pm – Game eventually kicks off after late arrival of the opposition. DCU pull off a 35-32 victory.
6.30pm – Leave Dublin for Carlow.
8.00pm – Guest speaker at the Carlow Sports Awards.
1.30am – Arrive back in Dublin.
