Andrew Slack article from Irish Independent

Andrew Slack article from Irish Independent
12/11/2009

PETER BILLS

Thursday November 12 2009

He still remembers the cold, the bitter, penetrating chill of a Dublin winter. Yet he will recall to his dying day the warmth of the Irish hospitality. It spanned every day of the four months he was here, a period he called this week "an education in generosity."

Andrew Slack continues to marvel at his time with the Wanderers club. We're going back some way, to the 1980/81 season and then a second visit in 1983/84. The memories they elicited when we chewed the cud this week -- on rugby, on Ireland and on life -- threw up such immortal names as Richard Healy, Mother Teresa and Michael McLoughlin and such strange tales as Donal Spring and his turnip, plus the Dublin estate agents with the curious directions.

But first things first. Slack had an Irish ancestry. His grandfather, Richard Healy, who hailed from Ballyduff in Co Kerry, sailed from the west coast sometime in the 1890s, taking with him his wife and their eight children. After the long sea voyage and journey inland from Brisbane, they found themselves in the middle of a Central Queensland summer, where temperatures can be somewhere between 40 and 50c. There they settled.

Just less than 100 years later, young Andrew Slack, by then 25, but by his own admission hardly experienced in overseas travel and a world where he had to fend for himself, made the journey in the reverse direction, albeit a lot quicker. First, there was a Queensland tour to England, Scotland and Italy, from where he would fly on to Dublin.

As he waved his pals farewell from Rome airport, he glanced across to where there was a queue for the flight to Calcutta. There stood Mother Teresa waiting to board her flight. A propitious omen? Andy Slack always thought so, when he reflected later on a period he was to call "the best time of my rugby life, without question."

So, he landed in Dublin, called up the Wanderers doyen of that time, Michael McLoughlin, whom he'd met out in Australia some months earlier and who had set up Slack's visit. From there on he experienced four months of fun and friendship the like of which he's never known.

The first weekend, they stuck him in the Wanderers second team. There was nobody there, it was a terrible match and was cold and wet. 'Slackie' saw the ball just twice. "I'd never played reserve grade in my life. But I hadn't trained and there was something about that match that made me appreciate it all the more when I did get into the first XV the next week."

And they had a fantastic night. "They took me for a meal and then to Maxwell Plums, which was the nightclub of choice at that time. A couple of the Wanderers people I met there that night, Jack Hayes and Liam Stones, became lifelong friends. Likewise, Joey Burke and Liam McDermott. That was the way it was over there.

"I wasn't really a drinker until I got to Ireland, but I reckoned I had more drink in those four months than the remainder of my 54 years.

"Anyway, as I couldn't remember anything much about the night before, I felt I ought to go to mass in case I had committed a few more sins I didn't know about.

"I was wandering around this part of Dublin where Michael lived and I saw this elderly lady. I asked her directions to the nearest Catholic church. I'll never forget -- she turned to me and just said: 'I'm a Protestant.' I couldn't believe I'd found a Protestant in the middle of Catholic Dublin."

The rugby of those days was, he admits, "pretty dull, largely 10-man stuff." But then, as he mused later, perhaps they didn't play much between 3.0 and 4.30 because they played so hard all Saturday night. Doing both might have been too much. "The rugby was really only incidental. The overriding thing was the depth of the friendships you made. They have gone on for almost 30 years.

"In four months there, I don't think I bought a single drink; the generosity was astonishing. There was always someone to insist they paid. You could argue, but you never got anywhere."

Ireland intrigued him, not least the advertising sign he spied on a lamp-post. He took a photo of it. "It gave the name of an estate agent and said: 'If you are reading this, take the previous turn on the right.' There was definitely a quaintness about Ireland then. I wasn't there to further my rugby career, but I learned so much about life."

The club found him a job doing bits and bobs on a building site in Fitzwilliam Square. "I got £100 a week and was the very bottom rung on the ladder. I even had to make the tea for the apprentices. One day I went to fill the kettle and no water came out of the tap. It was so cold, the pipes had frozen. I used to wear four beanies and seven layers of clothing. I'd never been so cold."

Nor as happy and as entertained. "One evening, there was a knock on Michael McLoughlin's door where I was staying. It was Donal Spring, who of course was with Lansdowne. He'd heard there was some Aussie in town and wanted to say hello. I think at that time he was a trainee solicitor and he arrived in an immaculate suit with a lawyer's briefcase, out of which he pulled...a turnip. I'd never seen a turnip before in my life.

"Back home, if you go for dinner, you'd take a six-pack of beers or a bottle or two of wine. I couldn't believe it when I saw this turnip come out of the briefcase."

But it was Spring who laughed last. Although Wanderers and Slack reached that year's Leinster Cup final, they got "flogged" in the final. By Lansdowne...

Special times, special people.

- PETER BILLS

Irish Independent

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