Beckett described him as a genius but former Lion Ollie Campbell remains as modest as ever.
HE PLAYED for Ireland for four full seasons only and bowed out with a relatively modest 22 caps but that was sufficient to make him unforgettable. In the woebegone 1980s, the former Belvedere man lit up winter Saturdays at the hooded Lansdowne Road and across Ireland.
He was the architect-in-chief of Ireland’s 1982 Triple Crown victory that brought to an end three decades of international impoverishment in the sport and left his mark on the Lions tours of 1980 and 1983 and then he was gone. He had that whippet athleticism: as bright as tungsten wire and in his early years had about as much flesh on him. Copper-headed and pale-limbed and the sleeves of his baggy green shirt rolled up, he was a study in concentration and poise and even through a period when rugby union was as choreographed as set-dancing – but with punches – his game was about pure feeling and instinct.
In no time, everyone knew his name. “Ollie Campbell,” the playwright and miserabilist Samuel Beckett is said to have declared to an acquaintance in a pub in Paris. “Do you know him? He’s a genius.”
Years after his retirement that exchange filtered down and was eventually told two-hundredth hand to Campbell, who was baffled and flattered. He never made any claims to his own place in the pantheon: when he eventually conceded to retirement, in November 1986 after two years of crushing struggles with hamstring injuries, he was good manners personified, thanking everyone, vowing that it had been marvellous and dedicating what was left of his sporting life to helping his club, Old Belvedere. He had not yet turned 30. No regrets - at least none he made public.
“I am slowly coming to terms with it,” he said in good humour from his office on the outskirts of Dublin.
“But it was a wrench and it did take a long time to get used to, going from being a seven days a week rugby player to a club person. It left a void. The toughest thing and this is something I have rarely even said to friends is that I felt that my best rugby lay ahead of me. Easy for me to say, of course, but I always believed that if I could just get fit again, the experience I had gained meant that my I might have played my best rugby in the years ahead.”
These days, Campbell can be found in what he airily calls “the rag trade.” Although he has a natural broadcasting voice- warm and clear – he rarely does media work. “Haven’t the time,” he says, holding his hands aloft and looking at the row upon row of fine shirts hanging on rails in the showroom. Clothing has always been the family business and that made it easier for Campbell to step out of normal life for the three months duration of the Lions tour of South Africa in 1980. Unlike many sportsmen, Campbell retained a sports fans’ enthusiasm for the history of the Lions. What began as a schoolboy fascination with the quixotic nature of the tours deepened with his own involvement and persisted long after he had finished playing.
“Our predecessors didn’t even rate our tours,” he says now. “We only played 18 games – the ’66 Lions played 35. Karl Mullen’s team in 1950 were away from these shores for seven months. Can you imagine? But yeah, going on those tours was a big undertaking blessed in terms of working. I suppose players were out of pocket but that never seemed to matter. In South Africa, we got an allowance of eight pounds a day for incidentals – and a phone call home cost more in those days.
“But you didn’t want for anything. And to be a Lion . . . there is a magnetic attraction about the Lions – particularly for people in South Africa and New Zealand. You are treated just a step shy of royalty. And I do think that it is an experience that changes your life in a way that no amount of money would pay for.”
Just a year before that South Africa tour, few would have bet on Campbell as a candidate for number ten. Prior to June 1979, he had been awarded just one cap for Ireland, against Australia in 1976. (Oddly, his first three caps were against the Wallabies). He was too young and, at ten and a half stone, too light and presaged nothing of what was to follow. “A perfect kicking record; four penalties and four misses. For the first time in my life, I was dropped from a panel and Irish rugby moved on without me.”
He played for Belvedere and Leinster in the following seasons, battling the early occurrences of the injury that would haunt him. But during Ireland’s tour of Australia in 1979, he impressed selectors with a 19 points haul against Queensland, so much so that they opted with him for the first Test. The news was reported with incredulity: Campbell was understudy to Tony Ward, the European player of the year in 1978 and 1979.
This was a period when television coverage was minimal but the press reported the story as if it was a diplomatic incident. The Irish Press ran a front-page headline: Campbell In, Ward Out. Below it was a story that Pope John Paul II would visit Ireland later that year. So began a public feud that engaged everyone but the two players.
Campbell excelled against Australia and went on to prove he had the temperament to match the mercurial skill. It soon became apparent that Ireland were blessed - or cursed - to have two of the finest outhalves in the game vying for the one position.
It wasn’t quite civil war party politics but everyone had an opinion Campbell or Ward. Preference might have been facilitated by the fact that they looked so different - Campbell always looking like a man who had spend the previous four weeks swatting indoors for an exam with Ward appearing as if he had just returned from somewhere exotic.
The debate followed them on the ’80 tour of South Africa. Campbell was selected on the original tour but it wasn’t long before his hamstring saw him sitting for nine games. Tony Ward was among those drafted out and not only made such an impression that he started the first Test, he gave an exhibition of kicking in the Lions loss to South Africa, landing a record five penalties and a drop goal. Campbell could only shake his head.
“It never interfered with our personal friendship. In a way it bonded us for the rest of our lives and we accepted it. The debate raged. When we won the Triple Crown in 1982, our fifth ever and our first in Lansdowne Road – the big benefit for me was that, for the first time, it was as if Tony didn’t exist. The silence was deafening – well, for a few days. I remember that May, I stayed in Westport with friends and on the Monday, I pulled in to give a lady a lift. We got talking about rugby and eventually she tells me: “The only thing I don’t understand about rugby is why Tony Ward is not on the Irish team.” I haven’t given a lift since!
“I remember I told Jimmy McGee that story when he interviewed myself and Tony about a decade later on RTE radio. But the funny thing was, there was a message on my answering machine from the woman in question when I got home. Margaret McMenamin – 3 Distillery Road, Westport. She was a great woman. And you know to her eternal credit - despite a couple of visits, flowers, chocolates and Christmas cards, she remained a Tony Ward fan ‘til the end of her days. But I did my best.”
Campbell recovered to play the last two Tests in 1980, including the 17-13 win which ended the series 3-1 in the Springboks favour. The team won all their provincial games but never recovered from losing the opening Test to an injury time try. “The Tests determined our fate even though we had some great moments. We beat Western Province 37-6. And against the Junior Springboks, I was in the stands watching as we scored an unbelievable try from behind our own line; the ball was in play for three whole minutes, with 33 passes and Mike Slemen scored. This was replayed endlessly on South African television as one of the great Lions tries.”
But now, it is the episodes he remembers as much as the matches. Left behind in Johannesburg after his injury, a doctor took him into Soweto for the first ever inter-racial boxing tournament in South Africa: for a relatively sheltered Dublin man, the night time tour through the township was enough to render him speechless.
And it was the Lions culture: Campbell did not drink but the boozier faction of that tour allowed him to come along on a ‘Sunday School session.’ He remembers the late Ray Gravell, the granite Welsh centre who used to cope with big game nerves by putting on a Sony Walkman and singing along to Daffyd Owen’s Welsh rebel songs, alternating between crying and getting sick. “Against Northern Transvaal, he lost his gumshield in this huge dressing room. Ray went through his routine while the rest of the Lions went about on hands and knees looking for his gumshield.”
Strangely, for such a natural footballer, Campbell never took one kick in his Belvedere College years: when the school won the Leinster Senior Cup in 1972, Michael Hickey (brother of future Dublin football star David) took the penalties. Campbell’s talent was spotted accidentally and just four years after hitting his first conversion - against Clontarf at Anglesea - he was kicking goals for the Lions.
He says now that he took most of his philosophy of how the game should be played from the 1971 Lions; he was fascinated by Carwyn James, the Welsh purist who championed 15-man rugby. “They produced a great booklet afterwards called The Lion Speaks,” Campbell recalls. “Mike Gibson wrote the best piece I have ever read about outhalf play. And I read it the night before every match I ever played afterwards.”
Campbell’s last match for Ireland was against Wales in 1985. By then, Irish rugby was about to enter a grim streak. Campbell accepted the sporting afterlife with good grace. But he talks about the game and the current generation with such enthusiasm that there is something of the eternal schoolboy about him. He looks wistful when asked if he would like to be 22 years old now and starting out.
“Playing the game now, with the movement and the number of times an outhalf gets his hands on the ball…it would be heaven on earth, yes.
”But,” he adds, “I wouldn’t swap my own time in the game for anything.”
