After Ireland lost to New Zealand in the 2023 World Cup quarter-final, Andrew Porter blamed himself for the defeat. It was a kangaroo court. Only the prosecution laid out a case. For weeks Porter descended into a state of self-laceration.
In the off-season, he cut himself off from the other players. His sleep was thrashed. Fragments of the game danced on a loop in front of his mind’s eye. Not the highlights. There was no forgiveness.
“It felt like a form of sleep paralysis,” Porter writes in Heart On My Sleeve, his stunningly reflective new autobiography, “where you wake up at night constantly thinking there’s something lurking in the corner of the bedroom. A shadow that I couldn’t grasp.”
The only person who harboured these thoughts was Porter. Nobody else had reached that conclusion about why Ireland had lost. In his career, though, this had been a recurring pattern. After big defeats he couldn’t excuse himself. He would shoulder the weight of the loss. “Instead of understanding that I had simply made mistakes,” he writes, “I was thinking that I was the worst player ever.”
READ MORE
In the aftermath of the New Zealand defeat these thoughts reached depths that he couldn’t fathom. He went in search of help.
“Eventually I went to a therapist to figure out and explain why I was feeling the way I was feeling,” he says. “The therapist put it in a really good way that I could understand. Because of the fact that I had lost my mother so young it was like that stress response. It equated to being close to the loss of my mother back in 2008. At the time when she said it, I said, ‘No, it couldn’t be that. It wasn’t as bad as that. No one died or anything.’ But it was just the way your mind relates to it.
“She said that when you have lost someone close to you and you have another loss your mind goes back to the first [loss]. It’s like muscle memory. You think that’s how loss should feel. Your brain relates things to other things.”
The central thread of the narrative is self-discovery. Not just who he is now, or who he was then, but how and why. The death of his mother Wendy from cancer when Porter was just 12 years of age has radiated through his life in ways that he didn’t always understand. “There is no right way to grieve,” he writes.
In his early teens Porter developed an eating disorder that he believes now was a manifestation of his grief. He slowly stopped eating. He would avoid breakfast, not take his lunch to school and skip his dinner with fibs about what he had eaten earlier. If he was offered an apple, he says, he would nibble on the skin and leave the flesh untouched.
“Eating disorders are such an insidious thing,” he writes. “You almost don’t see them creeping up on you, but before you know it, you become accustomed to not eating, to not feeling hungry. To let an entire day pass without the thought of food. The only thing I could think about was that I had it all under control. And having something I was in charge of was essential in a life that was spinning rapidly out of control. I was lost, angry and missed my mum more than I thought was possible.”
Looking back, he can imagine how hard it was for his dad and his sisters to witness his struggle. In different ways, all of them were suffering. Their father had to provide for three young children and find a way to cope. His pain was out of their sight. “My dad, who would have done anything for me, didn’t have the words to deal with an illness like this,” writes Porter.
In the midst of all Porter felt alone. He had no compass to navigate his feelings. In ways he couldn’t explain, the grief was overwhelming.
“Grief obviously affects people in different ways,” he says. “I didn’t want the book to be a pity party about me. I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. I just wanted to be fully open. Given my age at the time when I lost my mum, it’s very hard for a young man to articulate themselves and pull themselves out of a tough situation.
“I suppose at the time I felt like I had to figure it out myself. I think that’s what a lot of young men feel – they have to figure it out by themselves. I’ve said in the book that I felt I was completely on my own, but it was the complete opposite in reality. I had my whole family around me who were going through their own grieving process.
“We all dealt with things in our own way. I had to figure it out myself and I did eventually with the help of my family, my friends, therapy. It’s one of those things I look back on now and I’m like, ‘yeah, there was a better way of doing it – completely better ways of doing it.’ But I came through the other side and in a sense, I mightn’t be where I am today without that. Without that struggle I might not have built the mental resilience that I have now.”
When he was writing the book Porter wanted to excavate old ground. Alison Walsh, the novelist, was the ghostwriter on the project, but he also enlisted the help of Richie Sadlier, the RTÉ soccer analyst and former footballer who also practises as a psychotherapist. “I was told he didn’t want to skim the surfaces [of his experiences],” writes Sadlier in the foreword. That attracted him.
In second year in school, when he was 14, Porter started “acting out.” He shut himself off completely from other people. If he wanted to disappear, he would switch off his mobile phone and his dad would have no idea where he was. According to Porter, he could go missing “for days on end”.
He started drinking from the cocktail cabinet at home, pouring vodka into a Ballygowan water bottle and sneaking it out of the house to consume it alone. By the time these behaviours stopped he still hadn’t got to the bottom of them. He had no grasp on why.
“There was so much that went on behind the scenes for me that I hid from my family,” says Porter. “I did a few interviews with Richie and he was able to get beneath the surface and ask the right questions to be able to bring up stuff I had completely forgotten or I suppose had pushed down.
“Your mind has a way of pushing things away to protect you from those thoughts. Those interviews were incredibly enlightening. To delve back into my thought process back then.
Ireland’s November squad: valuable rotation or more of the same?
“A lot of the stuff I talked about in the book I had never told my family. I sent them the first draft of the book and an email saying there’s a lot of stuff in this that I haven’t told you before because it’s not me any more. I have no association with that kind of thought process because I shut that part of me off and because I had come such a long way. I kind of felt a small bit of guilt in it – that I hadn’t told them. I suppose you want to protect your family from that version [of yourself] and I was comfortable enough in saying it now because I know how far I’ve come.”
Having a negative body image, though, preceded Wendy’s death too. He was the “fat kid” in school desperately wanting to fit in. He remembers being in a chemist’s with his mother once and asking the pharmacist if they had any weight-loss supplements for children.
After Porter overcame his eating disorder size became an issue again. For prop forwards the position comes with a certain spec as standard. When he went for trials for the Leinster under-16s, though, John Fogarty told him he wasn’t big enough.
“I had gone from the biggest kid in the class to the smallest and then had done everything in my power to make myself bigger,” writes Porter. “I took the criticism to heart. But I also thought, ‘So that’s what I need to do’.”
In 2016 Porter weighed 113kg; a year later he weighed 131kg. These days he can lift 325kg in the gym. Fogarty and Porter have worked together for years, with Leinster first and now Ireland, and they have often spoken about that devastating line of feedback and the impact it wrought on his career.
“We laugh about it now,” says Porter. “I suppose it was a huge motivator for me at the time. That pushed into that focus for training, that brought me that love of the gym. It was that setback that put everything else in motion to get me up to the size or the standard of getting to play rugby [at a high level].”
The book is peppered with lines from Stoic philosophy: Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus. Porter was introduced to the Stoics by Liam Griffin, the successful hotelier and former Wexford hurling manager. When Mick Kearney was the Ireland manager, he asked Griffin to mentor Porter’s “personal development outside of rugby”. In that vein, Griffin also advised him to read Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is The Way.
Griffin led Wexford to the All-Ireland in 1996 after years of excruciating underachievement and big-game failures. Under different circumstances, Leinster are in that place now. Winning the URC title last season offered some aspirin for the pain, but Leinster’s season is habitually defined by the Champions Cup. Only one outcome will do.
In sport, every season has a new beginning, but every blank page has grease stains, like chip paper. For Leinster, their last defeat in Europe is the unavoidable context for the following season. There are only so many lessons to be learned.
“It’s something that we’ve spoken about,” says Porter. “That feeling of coming so far and falling short. It’s never an easy thing to untangle. It’s tough. You’re going into games and you feel 100 per cent ready. You feel like you have really good momentum. You won’t know the answer until we get the monkey off our back. I suppose if one path is blocked by adversity it’s about making your own path.”
If you’re serious about looking, self-discovery never stops. A couple of years ago Porter was diagnosed with ADHD. In many ways, it was a relief.
“My sister would have pulled up school reports that my mother kept from primary school and sure they all point to it,” says Porter. “It probably wasn’t something that was as well known back then. It gave me a great understanding of how my mind works, and who I am. For years, I was in the dark. ‘Why am I like this?’ It helped me to be a bit easier on myself.”
From that kinder place the journey continues.
Heart On My Sleeve, by Andrew Porter. Published by eriu
