Tom ushered in golden era at all levels of Irish rugby
Monday, February 11, 2002
A CAMEO in history of Tom O’Brien could start in November, 2001, when
as an Honorary Life Member of both the County Carlow Football Club and
Bective Ranges Football Club, Tom was honoured by both clubs to receive
a presentation and distinction to lead both teams unto the pitch at
Donnybrook to compete in the semi-final of the Leinster Senior Cup.
Between 1948 and 1952 -a-golden era in Irish rugby -Tom O’Brien
was
capped six times for Leinster and was acknowledged as a tenacious and
terrier like wing forward. During his rugby career with Bective
Rangers, Tom played with and against some legends of rugby -among them
the great Welsh outhalf Cliff Morgan who was a Bective teamate.
Tom played at inter-provincial level against
Jack Kyle of Ulster,
Ireland and Lions fame, a man still revered within Irish rugby circles
who played at outside half when the men in green won their only ‘Grand
Slam’ title in title in 1948, followed by the Triple Crown the following
season. Karl Mullen of Belvedere, hooker on that great Irish team
and Lions captain, was a Leinster colleague of Tom’s while the great
Irish full back of that era, George Norton, was a Bective club-mate of
Tom’s. Norton also won many caps for his country and was selected for
The Lions.
Then there was Jack Notley, who played for Wanderers, Kilkenny and
Ireland while Tom also played against Malone and Irish Triple Crown
player, the late R.D. (Bob) Agar, winner of the ‘Hall of Fame’ in 1994.
That Tom O’Brien played with and competed against such an array of
international talent at club and inter-provincial levels, speaks for
itself and there can hardly be any debate that the County Carlow
Football Club stalwart is a most worthy winner of the 2001 ‘Hall of
Fame’ in the County Carlow Sports Star Awards.
Although born in Dublin, Tom O’Brien inherited his passion for rugby
from his family roots in Limerick and Garryowen in particular. His
father, Kennedy O’Brien, was born in Fair Green, Garryowen. You could
not have a more Limerick address than that.
Kennedy O’Brien captained Young Garryowen to cup victories as a
second row forward in 1907 and 1909 and was so weaned on Limerick city
parish matches which are unique to Irish rugby. He imparted to Tom his
only rule of rugby survival and that was: ‘Never lie down when you are
hurt -don’t give them the satisfaction of feeling they got you’ As
well as Tom’s father’s rugby background he was a very committed GAA
supporter and when he lived for two years in Belfast he became one of
the good hurling players at inter county level for Antrim.
Tom began his rugby in Blackrock College and later went to complete
his education at Cistercian College, Roscrea. Also in Roscrea at that
time were two young men who were to be great servants of the black and
amber of Carlow - Billy O’Hanlon and Peter O’Gorman, both of whom now
sadly gone to their eternal rewards. After his school days
Tom joined his father’s leather business in Dublin and joined Bective
Rangers in 1945. Tom was one of four brothers who played for the
Donnybrook clubs. His older brother Kennedy O’Brien had won
several Wartime international caps and was the automatic choice of the
Leinster selectors at lock forward throughout the war years. Tom
O’Brien was the cornerstone to restoring Bective to a dominant position
in Irish club rugby, after they had fallen on very lean years.
Playing for a Bective 3rd. XV Tom was member of a team which won the
Minor League for Bective for the first time in the club’s history.
Dedicated, ambitious and forward-thinking, Tom O’Brien rose through
the playing ranks at Bective. He introduced a new concept of Sunday
training sessions, at which the players met to discuss tactics to try to
eliminate faults which may have appeared in the previous Saturday game;
all with the aim of upgrading the standard of play. Tom’s reward
was to be elected club captain in 1949, 1950 and 1952. The highlight of
his playing career with Bective came when they won back to back Senior
Cup finals in 1955 and 1956. In the ‘55 season Bective had obtained the
services of Cliff Morgan and Bective were dubbed Morgan Rangers. After
that win, the club’s first in a lapse of 20 years, the entire Bective
team came to Carlow as a tribute to Tom, who was now permanently
domiciled in Carlow Town. In 1956, without the services of Morgan,
Bective set about proving their detractors wrong and lifted the cup
again.
The 1957 season marked Tom’s first season with the Carlow club. He
had been commuting to Dublin to train and play with Bective for some
years but now put his depth of rugby experience in with his lot with his
adopted Carlow club. It was a union which continues to benefit Co.
Carlow Rugby Club to this day.
When Tom joined Carlow he was dismayed to find that the club had no
permanent tenancy to its grounds and that since its foundation had
played all its matches on no less than nine different grounds around the
environs of Carlow. This had also been a major problem in the Bective
Club. It was fore-front in his mind. On December 5, 1960 and unknown to
the club members, Tom O’Brien entered negotiations with the Irish Land
Commission for a considerable area of non-arable land which he had
already selected situated immediately inside the main gate of Oak Park
House.
For four years Tom deftly piloted the club’s case through the
corridors of power in Dublin. The happy result for Carlow rugby was that
the club got title to 12 acres of land on June 19, 1964. Then the real
hard work of development began which was cheerfully shared and
undertaken by the committee and members in the future seasons to come.
In his first season with Carlow - 1956-’57 - Tom helped Co. Carlow win
the Provincial Towns Cup under the captaincy of Paddy Nolan. Carlow’s
last Towns Cup win had been in 1933. In 1961 Tom captained the
Carlow team which won the Towns Cup again.
That brought the curtain down on Tom’s playing career but marked the
dawning of a complete new involvement for him. He became deeply involved
in the project to purchase the Oak Park grounds from the Irish Land
Commission. The area was full of tree stumps and held little interest
for farmers. Tom ran fund-raising dances over a wide area, with
great assistance from T.J. Byrne, then manager of the Royal Showband
from Waterford. The finance raised enabled the rugby club purchase the
land at Oak Park in the early 1960’s.
Today Co. Carlow is one of Ireland’s leading provincial clubs - with
playing, training and social facilities second to none. At all stages
Tom O’Brien’s hand was close to the helm. For decades now Tom has
been involved with the promotion of schoolboy rugby and, in earlier
years, along with Pat O’Mahony, Brendan Moore and Robbie Fennell,
organised teams and arranged fixtures. This was the beginning of the Oak
Park club’s present day Youth Section, one of the club’s strongest
asset. Tom is to be seen on Saturday mornings with the very
youngest set on the mini pitches near the main gates, passing on his
love and knowledge of the game.
It was a great source of justifiable pride to Tom that his son
Kennedy O’Brien, also won a Provincial Towns Cup medal with Co. Carlow
in 1977, when they defeated Athy in the final at Oak Park. His son
Kenndy later became club president. Tom O’Brien’s first sporting
love has always been rugby but he is a great follower of all sports and
appreciates the involvement in youngsters as character builders. He is
keenly interested in the Tinryland under-age Gaelic football teams with
which his grandsons play. Tom would always support Éire "g and
other local GAA clubs by making the Rugby Club facilities available for
training and the helping out of Carlow Hurling Club for their
high-profile national tournaments.
In 1977 Tom O’Brien undertook to commit to print the history of
Carlow rugby. His contribution in this regard is perhaps
best summed up in an article by the late Aidan Murray in that splendid,
hardback production entitled ‘County Carlow Football Club Rugby History
1873-1977.’ His enthusiasm to compile the history of the club was
prompted by an article in Carloviana by the late Harry Fennell that the
Carlow Rugby Club was founded in October 1873 at the Clubhouse Hotel and
was thus ranked as one of the very oldest rugby clubs in Ireland, even
older than the I.R.F.U. itself (1874).
Aidan stated: “It was typical of ‘Bloody’ O’Brien (to use Paddy
Ryan’s appellation) that in addition to all the development work he
instigated within the club, he took on the Herculean task of correlating
all the printed facts of the early years of Carlow rugby; these he
obtained from the files of the local and national papers and a plethora
of other publications - he even spent part of his holidays in the
library of the British Museum in London tediously copying out any
reference to Carlow rugby he found therein.
‘But more important he set about interviewing all the older
generations of Carlovians or anyone he could find that had some facts to
relate about rugby in Carlow, particularly before 1900. ‘I often
wonder how many countless hours he has spent transcribing it all into
narrative. Only for Tom’s persistence all the invaluable parts of
the early club history which he put together, would never have seen the
light of day.
- Carlow Rugby Team
c1900
- From an ebay seller c2008
|
In a tribute to Tom O’Brien entitled ‘A Man For All Seasons’,
Maurice
Mortell, the former Bective Rangers, Leinster and Irish wing three
quarters wrote: ‘It is probably only those who were club members of
Bective Rangers in the latter years of the Forties and early years of
the Fifties really appreciate the contribution made to Bective by Tom
O’Brien. ‘In 1950 Bective had been in the doldrums for some 15
years. No Senior Cup since 1935, one Junior League and Metro Cup in 1939
and only a Metro Cup and a Minor League trophy to show for the 10 years
of the 40’s. ‘There was very good reason for this calamitous state
of affairs. Old Belvedere, a junior club since 1930, gained senior
status in 1937 resulting in a massive exodus of the many Belvederians
from Bective Rangers. Coupled with this was the formation of Greystones
RFC in 1937 which cut off a flow of skilful players from Presentation
College, Bray.
This double blow had knocked out the spirit of the club
and resulted in a relapse into the national pastime of reliving the
retelling the glorious feats of previous years. ‘This was the
prevailing climate when Tom O’Brien arrived in 1945. He was the youngest
of four brothers who were club members. Tom, in a most unobtrusive
manner, set about turning the fortunes of the Bective club around. He
was elected vice captain to George Norton in 1948. He then somehow
prised open the Greystones door and re-established the flow of Pres Bray
footballers into Bective commencing with players like Brian Keogh, Noel
Moore Larky O’Brien and Jim Madden, followed a year or two later by
Joey
Molloy, Maurice Mortell, Rick Walsh, Louis Meckin and Paddy O’Reilly.
Organised training, unheard of for years, took place every Sunday and
players were expected to train twice during the week. ‘In today’s
business world Tom O’Brien would have been immediately recognised as an
expert in personnel relations and a superb practitioner of man
management. He saw to it that he got the club committee he wanted, the
selectors he wanted the players he wanted and all this was achieved
without stepping on anybody’s corns. Between 1949 and 1956 Tom was club
captain three times. He could have been captain each year had he wished.
He built a superb rugby machine which lasted for over a decade and won
three Senior Cups and the club also dominated junior rugby in Leinster.
He re-established recognition of Bective as a great Irish rugby club
in the eyes of the English and Welsh followers, filling grounds and
inflicting regular defeats on sides like Cardiff, Neath, Newport,
Northampton and Leicester. It was indeed a golden era. ‘Tom
O’Brien played with a well controlled ferocity. He took his rugby very
seriously and saw to it that all his play-ers did the same. He had a
very astute rugby mind and could be quite ruthless. He was also
extremely skilful and while playing all his rugby at wing-forward, could
handle and kick as well as any half-back.
His delicately placed
kick for Jerry O’Dwyer’s winning score against Lansdowne in the dying
seconds of the 1956 Cup Finial is a treasured memory we will never
forget. ‘Tom was primarily interested in winning and playing he
always and he always preached to play the opposition in their half of
the pitch. The wingers and centres in his team enjoyed their rugby.
Equally, he insisted on very tight defences. There was a post mortem on
each try we surrendered - this in turn resulted in extremely efficient
defences.
“In the 145 games played between September 1950 and May 1956, only 29
(20 per cent) were lost - only two in each of the cup winning years of
1955 and ‘56. It was very difficult to beat Bective in those seasons.
‘Tom was unique among his playing contemporaries of that era in that in
1951 he married Joan Plunkett. It was usual at that time that marriage
was invariably followed by retirement. We didn’t know whether to fell
sorry for him or envy him in his wedded bliss but Tom took it all in his
stride and Joan never interfered with his rugby. ‘Tom O’Brien was
an extremely good wing forward. In his 10 years playing there was only
one wing forward position open on Bective teams. He was capped six times
for Leinster, a paucity of honours that puzzled his contemporaries.
He
was respected and feared by opponents. He was fast, abrasive and
fearless and was always probing for weakness in the opposition. If he
had a blind spot, if it could be called such, it was his positive
obsession with beating Lansdowne. His team talks prior to Lansdowne
games were incitements to mayhem. His cup was filled to overflowing with
the defeat of his bete noire in the cup campaign of 1955, followed by a
repeat performance in the final of 1956.’
Maurice Mortell finished his tribute to Tom O’Brien by stating: ‘The
Tom O’Briens of this world come very seldom. It was a grievous loss to
Bective but what a wonderful gain for Carlow rugby, for he has repeated
there the miracle that he wrought in our club, Bective. It was only in
retrospect we come to appreciate the scale of all his achievements.’
Source: Carlow Nationalist
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