Armed with a clunky tape-recorder and a refill pad full of notes, I arrived at the Sports Bar in UL having barely slept a wink, and hands clammy with sweat ahead of my first ever interview with a sportsman.
A few weeks into the first semester of college in 2008, our assignment was a 1,000 word feature on something and anything. Our call.
After days of phone-calls and emails looking for someone in the know, it was Andrew McNamara from Shannon rugby club who gave me the magic digits. Anthony Foley’s phone number. He was expecting my call. The interview was set.
Wanting to be professional about it, I arrived 20 minutes early, enough time to gather my thoughts and shake off the nerves. He was already there though, sipping a coffee and staring out the back window towards the Bowl and running track, the training pitch he’d spent many an afternoon on. He may only have been giving an interview out of courtesy to a young fella, but that didn’t seem to matter.
We were both so early that the interview was over before it was even due to start, as I nervously rattled through questions while barely listening to the answers.
If you were an 18-year-old sports fan in Limerick in 2008, Anthony Foley was the man. He’d just retired off the back of a second Heineken Cup title and more than 200 appearances in the red of his province, before swapping his trademark scrumcap for a whistle on the Munster coaching staff.
Long before Munster-mania took off at the turn of the century, Foley’s footprint was buried in Irish rugby.
On Saturdays in the 90s, club rugby brought Limerick to a halt. You couldn’t go anywhere in the afternoon hours.
Living just up the road from Garryowen rugby club, cars would be dumped from the Ballykeefe estate right up to Raheen foodstores whenever Foley and the all-conquering Shannon were coming across town.
They’d be packed in like sardines, young lads sneaking in through the gap in the hedges on Mulcair Road and Lawndale Drive. Foley played in all 48 games as Shannon lifted four All-Ireland League titles in a row from 1994 to 1998, captaining them in the last of those wins, winning becoming so normal that he was probably singing ‘There is an Isle’ in his sleep.
If the All-Ireland League turned the boy into a man, the professional game, and the European exploits of Munster turned him from a man to a legend.
The Munster brand was built on passion and pride, but Foley had that and more.
While the pitches of Coonagh and Dooradoyle and Greenfields gave him the physicality, there was a rugby brain and a subtle skill-set that set him apart from other number 8s.
He had the hands and feet and the grace of an outhalf, and the confidence to go and use them, summed up by a gorgeous try against the Newport Gwent Dragons during the victorious Heineken Cup campaign in 2005/06. (36 seconds into below video)
Anthony Foley was taken from the world just two weeks shy of his 43rd birthday.
The news was only a few minutes old before sport showed its beauty, the couple of hundred or so Munster fans in Paris gathering outside the Stade Yves du Manoir, singing ‘The Fields of Athenry’ and ‘There is an Isle’.
An impromptu book of condolences was opened up, surrounded by scarves and flags. Teary eyed men and women queued up in their doves to jot down their thoughts, thanking Anthony Foley.
Some were thanking him for being an Irishman and for being a Munsterman. Others were thanking him for being a Shannon man or for being a Munchins man. All of them though, were thanking him for being a rugby man.
