Barring the Weight

A STORY

by W. B. READY

I THINK that the only deep sorrow that Brother John ever had was that we were a pack of small forwards. There were always God’s plenty of big powerful backs, but his forwards never ran to much more than 150-pounders, which was just damned silly in a league where we were up against teams with lumbering heavy packs. We puzzled over it, but there was nothing we could do about it. Dinny Sullivan was a fine heavy man, but he was so lithe and dexterous and cunning that it was a sin not to make a three-quarter out of him, and Eddie Walsh was as wide as a door, but he was such a graceful swerving runner that to put him in the pack was to yoke a thoroughbred with a mule team.

It wasn’t just one season; year after year the same thing happened. The forwards were built like the backs, and the backs were big enough to be forwards. I remember Brother John’s eyes lighting up when Jack Cotter came to us from one of the North Country colleges. He was a fine figure of a man, well over six feet in height and weighing about 210 pounds. A second-row forward, he was proud and happy in that position. He nearly killed us packing down with him, but at last we were getting the ball in the tight scrums, and the backs were getting a chance to throw it around.

But it didn’t last long. Cotter was a good forward, but Brother John saw him fooling around after practice one night, and he saw that the big fellow could really kick and field a ball. He made him into J. Cotter, the great ALL-IRELAND fullback, but he still wanted his fine big bustling pack instead of the sharp little terriers he had in the likes of me. After a game, as we would limp off the field, bruised and battered by bigger men, we would wish almost savagely that we were huskier, because a burly pack was all that Brother John needed to win the ALL-IRELAND championship.

He was the greatest coach I have ever seen, and he never had to raise his voice. I can see him now, although he’s been under the sod these few years, God rest him. He was tall and gray, and stooped. He could only have been a schoolmaster, and even during the holidays there was always a dusting of chalk around him. His face was so Irish that it had a Spanish look, and his thick gray hair grew back from his forehead in the same sort of pompadour as did Jim Corbett’s, the fighter. He was viceprincipal of the school, and his gentle air fooled nobody. There was iron in the man, and sometimes bitterness would break out of him, so that the Principal and the Provincial and even the Bishop were wary of him. He was a hidden sort of man, and there are plenty of them in Ireland. History was his subject, but Rugby football was his delight. It was far more than a game to him: the strife and the checks, the teamwork and the play, were life as it should be to Brother John.

We’d nearly choke with temper as game after game we would be pushed off the ball by big agricultural louts with no more science than one of these bulldozers they are using now. In the dressing rooms after the game, Brother John would compliment us in his soft Kerry voice: “You played the grand game, Willie. . . . That was a grand tackle of yours, Con. . . . The big fellow never laid a finger on you, Terry. . . .” And all the time we would be glum, drying ourselves silently after the showers. Mick Yewlett, the trainer, would look up from the massage board, where he’d be rubbing one of us: “Ah, Brother, if we had the weight, these boys would beat the world; be God they’d even give Presentation College a run for it!”

But Brother John would never murmur against our flimsiness. “It’s the will of God, Michael,” was all he would say. But all the days of his life he’d wanted to train the ALL-IRELAND team, and we’d have been a team of champions, barring the weight. I was a member of that team, but I must see a better team before I yield to it. The way we got that ball back from a loose maul I’ve not seen equaled since. We had the heart, the almost functional perfection of a good machine. We had everything, barring the weight. We’d have gladly changed ourselves into big blond Saxons for the season if it would have brought Brother John the championship.

We were all in our last year in school, and had been playing together for five or six years. We were far out of the class of the average local team, and most of our opponents were University or town teams, but we had to struggle desperately to beat these lesser men, because they had the weight. After twelve games we were still the invincibles, but it was a struggle all the time. For us forwards it was our last season; we’d never make the weight for a University or town team, so that season had all the sweetness of a golden era departing.

Our football field was beside a ruined castle, and in the soft Irish evenings, when the quiet of Christ would be on everything, the thud of boot on ball and the grunts of the tackles would carry clear across to the pavilion where some of us would be sitting around Brother John as he explained some play. The plays he designed were to him not only for the football field, but contained his ideas about everything. He had been brought up on the old nineteenth-century nationalism, and he saw us as a bunch of Cuchulainns, small dark sad men, who would go down in glory before inevitable circumstance. I can see that now, though of course I didn’t then.

As the games went on, a faint dim gleam of hope began to flicker. We were the only undefeated team in the county, then in the province. There were good days and bad days, but we always managed to win, sometimes more by the grace of God than by anything else, and then Abertaff asked us for a game! They had beaten the Australian touring team; they had more internationals playing for them than any other team in Wales. Indeed it was almost as much of an honor to play for them as to play for Wales. They had an Irish tour every year, and apparently they had decided that they needed a preliminary loosener before tangling up with the tough opposition that led them such a dance every year. So they had picked a school team, and we were the team. We began to train with an intensity that worried Brother John; it was the only chance we would ever have against a first-class side and we knew it. Abertaff would surely beat us, but by God they’d play Rugby to beat us!

2

WE PLAYED them on the Castle Ground. I remember it was in late February, the second Saturday in Lent. There was a great crowd out to see the game, the biggest crowd any of us had ever played before. The Abertaff pack were big burly men, steelworkers, County Constabulary, dockers, and the like. They were led by the great Lem Jenkins, who had led the Welsh pack for the past two seasons. He was a big bull of a man, and as I left my father, God rest his soul, to run on the field, he took another look at Lem and said to me, “Good God! He’ll kill you, my son. I’m glad your mother stayed home.”

Lem was my opposite number; he gave me a friendly nod, which I tried to return nonchalantly, but I had to chew my gum very hard to get any moisture in my mouth, although the palms of my hands were wet with sweat. Brother John was away in a corner of the field shaking. He thought he was sending us to glory, and it before our time, and we did look a puny pack beside that solid Welsh forward line. Also their famous red and black jerseys were clean and new, their ringed stockings matched, and they were wearing swagger ballooned shorts, so that we looked tawdry as well as scrawny beside them.

I saw Brother Principal grimacing as he compared us, and I knew that Brother John was in for another rollicking there, besides the complaints from our parents, who were already ganging up on him as they saw the logical result of the clash between Abertaff and ourselves. They knew that we were out for glory, and that because we could not bring him the championship we were going to be his small dark heroes who would solace him by dour struggle in a hopeless cause.

The whistle blew, and Eddie Walsh kicked off. Before the Abertaff man could gather it to find touch we were on him, the whole forward line. We swarmed all over him, and went on with the ball in a forward rush, only to be recalled for being off side. That was the game throughout. Abertaff was out for the exercise, and we were out for Brother John. They held us off good-humoredly at first, but gradually our panting silent tenseness communicated itself to them, and they began to play football with all their national genius.

At half time there was nothing in it, no score in the hardest game either team had ever played. It wasn’t the finest game, only the hardest, because in a fine game there is often a sort of careless rapture, when one time or another the unusual or bizarre play is tried. But nobody was taking any chances in this game. The orthodox passing movements would start cautiously and be smothered by furious tackling. Abertaff got the ball from every set scrum, and we got it from most of the loose mauls. The crowd was so excited that there seemed to be a blurred roar all the time, but I never had time to look at them.

At half time Mick Yewlett ran on the field with his inevitable sponge and bucket of water, and rubbed our faces clear of mud and spittle. Brother John was among us, murmuring, “Boys. . . . Oh, Boys.” I remember that we just grinned at him, and didn’t say anything. Somehow all of us felt more grown-up than we had ever felt before. It was evident to all of us that his coaching was paying off. Our lightness and speed were useless in the set scrums, so we were giving them to the Welshmen, and we were running them off their feet all over the field.

But in the second half the inevitable began to run us down. Our legs began to weaken. We couldn’t push all that Welsh weight around without beginning to feel it. And we were as bruised as we could be without breaking off, yet somehow we still managed to get there in time, until at last their Dai Evans got off on a clear run. Nobody ever caught Dai once he was away; he scored a try, and Gruffydd converted it for them. So they got five points, but no more, and Lem Jenkins was out of the game for weeks with a twisted knee. The final whistle went on two exhausted teams. The crowd was delighted with us, and friends crowded around us. But we pushed our limping way through them and gathered around Brother John. We didn’t say a word, and neither did he, but he knew, and we knew, that in our defeat we had won something greater than a championship.

We never were any good for the rest of the season; we played almost as dreamily as Brother John now coached us. The championship receded from our minds; we never really woke up on the field after that second Saturday in Lent. Abertaff never played us again; they explained that we were not quite what they were looking for. Mind you, we never expected to play them again. That once was enough to give us our experience, and to give Brother John the great occasion. We were on our way out, it was our last year in school.

There’s a photograph of the team hanging up over there behind the davenport, contagious to that aquatint of Galway Bay. The wee fellow holding the ball was the pack leader, and that’s Brother John sitting beside him. There’s myself, I’m heavier now, and alongside me is Tim Coghlan: he was killed, God rest him, at Anzio. All the small fellows are sitting down, and they are all the forwards. The man adjacent to Tim is Con Daly. Do you notice the grin on him? He was always bemoaning his bad luck, and he always ended with “ . . . and to cap it all I’ll probably marry a fruitful wife!” Our hooker used to ask Con, savagely and blasphemously, to push harder, and back would come Coneen, “Tom, Tom, me navel’s scarring the ground.” And so it went.

Brother John was retired the next year to the Brothers’ House at Waterford, and he died there early in 1940. The team was the right age for the war. Nine of them were killed, including poor Con. God rest them all. My memories of happier days are all tied up with them, and the great team we were, barring the weight.