Limerick is a tribal city. But the tribal markings are not clan tartans, family names or even places. The tribal markings are rugby colours. Rugby is an English game, born on the playing fields of their great public schools. Its greatest exponents are the southern hemisphere teams – the All Blacks, the Wallabies and the Springboks. But Limerick calls itself the rugby capital of the world, and no one seriously disputes that claim.
The game is like a religion in the city. When the All Ireland League was set up, Limerick teams won for the first several years on the trot. There is an old expression that soccer is a game for toffs, played by ruffians, while rugby is a game for ruffians, played by toffs. In Dublin and Cork that is true. But in Limerick, rugby is played by everyone, and followed by everyone.
The city has a number of thriving clubs – Bohemians, Old Crescent, Garryowen, Shannon, and Young Munster among the better known. Each club has a strong structure, with its own playing ground, club house, even its own traditional pubs. Rivalry between the clubs is intense, but when Limerick men get together, either to play for Munster or Ireland, then the rivalries are put behind them and everyone gets behind the team. In his famous feud with the McCourt brothers, Harris invoked tribal loyalties in order to have a go at them. In a radio interview with Limerick local radio he said:
When Malachy McCourt played rugby he didn’t play with his own people. He didn’t play with Young Munster, St Mary’s, or Presentation, which were the clubs around his area. Instead he played for Bohemians, and in those days they were the snobs, the most right-wing club in Limerick. Malachy elected not to play with his own class, but to upgrade himself and play for Bohemians.
Dickie conveniently forgot that he also togged out for a number of teams, before turning away from his own to support the amber-and-black army of Young Munster.
Although Harris was a late convert, he became a loyal supporter. He often appeared at matches, especially if he was home visiting. He would visit the club house the day before a game, hanging out and chatting with the other fans. He was down to earth, with time for everyone. The following day, probably either still drunk or hung over from the night before, he would be on the terraces, singing and waving his scarf with the others.
Despite this intense loyalty, he had never played for Young Munster. Although he regained his strength and fitness after the TB, he knew his days as a top-flight player were in the past. Rather than become a weekend warrior, lining out with the seconds – or even the thirds – he switched his passion to acting, but remained a committed fan.
The closest he ever came to playing again was when he starred in This Sporting Life, which was shot in 1962. Aged 32, and almost a decade from his sporting glory days, he felt that he needed to match brawn with the extras, hardy footballers drawn from the rugby league clubs of the north of England. They were the type of men he enjoyed back in Limerick, and he desperately wanted their respect. The only way to earn it was to match them on the field. He went into training.
‘I take my roles extremely seriously, despite my reputation in the press, which is Rabelaisian. I went up to Leeds and Wakefield, and I studied with the players for three or four weeks. I togged out with the second team, and it was hard,’ he told Parkinson. He continues:
These football players from up the north, they always maintain that actors are poofs, with their long hair and their mascara on their eyes. When I went up first there were odd remarks – ‘Better watch him, lad. Don’t turn your back on him, I tell you lad.’ What was I going to do? I had to play football with them.
I went back to London, to Richmond Rugby Club. They had a great goal kicker there. When I was at school I was pretty good at football. And I had a great facility to kick a goal. But years had passed since then. So I went to this goal kicker, and I asked him to teach me to kick a goal, to get the precision of it right. And I went to a gym, worked on the legs, got the precision timing like clockwork. I went every single night for six weeks before the movie, just to kick a goal.
Now came the first day of shooting. I said to them: ‘Is that what you have to do to make a living? Chase a ball around a field like that. You’re a strange lot. I was watching you last night. All of you getting into the tub together naked. I was watching. Can’t fool Harris. I know what’s going on. And you have to kick that little ball over the bar?’
‘Aye, bloody hell you ’ave to,’ they said. ‘Simple,’ I said. ‘Give us a decent kick.’
The players put the marker down about 40 yards out. Harris’s outward bluster belying his nervousness, he took the ball and placed it.
Six weeks training. I placed the ball on the ground. I took a step back and they were all waiting. And I closed my eyes and I said a little prayer. I said if there ever was a God in heaven, put wings on that ball and carry it over. And I stood back and I kicked it and it went over. And from that moment on, I was in. I became a chum of them all. Fantastic.
Respect gained, the film became a pleasure to shoot, and was the breakthrough that made him a star.
In his early years he had had to concentrate on building up his acting credentials, and on his young family. But as the wealth increased, his opportunities for travelling home grew. He often took a flight to Dublin for the big games. He told Michael Parkinson during an interview in 1973 about a typical trip home for an international game. Ireland was playing New Zealand on 20 January 1973 in which the southern visitors won an undistinguished game. Harris arrived at the airport in typical dishevelled style. He never wore a shirt, preferring to bulk-buy cheap football shirts. They could take the spills and knocks of his lifestyle:
They are cheaper than wearing suits when you go out for the night, and fall down in the street. I hate to see something out of order, unless I did it myself. So if I see a wet bar, I will wipe it with my sleeve. And that would ruin a jacket. I took to wearing football jerseys, which were cheaper, at thirty bob a time.
I went home to Ireland last week to see Ireland playing New Zealand. I had this bunch of football jerseys – four or five dozen. And I put three or four in the bag because I knew it was going to be one of those weekends. I call Dublin the glue pot – once you get there you cannot get out of it! I prepared myself for a long, long weekend.
But he put no consideration into what jersey to wear:
I put a jersey on, got on the plane. I took my coat off. I was talking to a chap, he said: ‘How is it now an actor who is obviously extremely wealthy wears a thirty shilling football jersey?’ So I went through the whole thing. ‘Oh I see,’ he said. ‘But don’t you think you have picked the wrong colours?’
Harris had put on a red, white and blue jersey – the England colours: ‘Could you believe it? I am going back to Dublin for a football match wearing red white and blue. So quickly I jumped up, dashed down to the toilet, stripped it off and put my coat on, and arrived back in Dublin naked. Naked but safe.’
Many of the trips home became extended drinking sessions. On one famous occasion he had left his home in London to get some cigarettes, but instead had a few drinks, then got the notion to fly to Dublin for a game. He arrived home about four days later.
As one of his Limerick drinking buddies recalled:
He came over, and he went back home about four days later, after being on the piss. Knocked on the door, langers drunk. He saw the shadow coming down – the missus, the first missus (Elizabeth). ‘Jesus Christ, what will I fucking say to her, being gone for the last four days. I told her I was only gone for the newspaper.’ Then she opened the door.
‘Why didn’t you pay the fucking ransom money?’ he says. Very quick, very witty man.
Some of the stories are exaggerated in the retelling, but in his drinking days the trips to games were extended drinking sessions. He loved going to Dublin and staying in the Burlington – which was managed by his brother-in-law Jack Donnelly for many years. In Limerick he often stayed in Dromoland Castle, the height of regal luxury.
Confusingly, he decided to call his Bahamas property ‘Kilkee’. So when he announced he was going to Kilkee he could be slipping over to Ireland for a few days, perhaps catching a rugby game, or he could be heading to the sun for a month.
As the years progressed, the trips home to Limerick became more frequent.
‘It was only later on in life that we saw Harris at matches,’ one Young Munster fan revealed. ‘We didn’t see Harris at Young Munster matches in the 1960s as such. It was only later on when he came to prominence that he was seen to be a Young Munster man.’
But his commitment was total when it came. He even wore the Young Munster tie in the movie Patriot Games in 1992. He played an old IRA man opposite Sean Bean and Harrison Ford. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Harris became a fixture at Irish internationals, and he also followed Munster and Young Munster.
‘He might come over for the odd game. If Munster were in a final he might be there. It depended on what was on. But if he was home, he would come out for the game,’ said Tommy Monahan, who was president of Young Munster in 1996/97:
He used to come out to the club house and enjoy the craic on the morning before a Senior Cup game. He’d mix with everyone out there, kids, the whole lot. He enjoyed the craic. But when the fucking match was played, we fucking lost. He was a fucking Jonah. He was bad luck for us!
This was a common joke in Limerick rugby circles. Harris was considered to be jinxed. Whenever he showed up, the team underperformed. When Munster lost in the Heineken Cup Final in 2000 to Northampton, Harris was spotted walking out of Twickenham with his friend and fellow actor Peter O’Toole. One of the disgruntled Munster fans shouted at him: ‘You’re back? With a Man Called Horse and Lawrence of Arabia, we still couldn’t fucking win.’
One of the actor’s proudest moments came when he was made an honorary life member of Young Munster, at a ceremony before a game in 1990. He swore at the time that he would be cremated in the club jersey; a promise he fulfilled in 2002. And he was prepared to show his commitment in a more practical way, by digging into his pocket.
‘He kept promising us money,’ said Monahan:
Then, in 1994, our centenary year, a fellow introduced me to him. And he said – the very words – he’d have it to me within two weeks. I had my doubts – there was a guy asking for ten years for that donation. But within two weeks I got a call to go down to Charlie St George’s, that Richard Harris was down there looking for me.
Charlie St George’s is a popular rugby pub on Parnell Street, and Harris’s favourite watering hole when he was in Limerick. To this day one of the walls is festooned with memorabilia of the actor.
When it came to rugby, Harris was an anorak. He lived and breathed the game. He wrote in the Telegraph:
The heroes of Limerick rugby are my heroes. Gladiators, square-jawed warriors who represent us on the battlefield. They are also heroes off the field - men who can drink, sing and talk of great deeds. I am intensely proud of individuals such as Peter Clohessy, Mick Galwey, Anthony Foley and all the boys. Keith Wood, whose father I used to play alongside, is another hero. He lives the rugby life we all dream of.
I adore Thomond Park, which I could see and hear from my bedroom in our house on the Ennis Road. It is the citadel of Munster rugby; we have never lost a European Cup game there in seven years. If Ireland played there we would never lose.
I would give up all the accolades of my showbiz career to play just once for the senior Munster team. I will never win an Oscar now, but even if I did I would swap it instantly for one sip of champagne from the Heineken Cup.
But living in London, he couldn’t make every game. However, he had a plan B. One of his old schoolmates – who had played with him during the Schools Cup competition – was Vincent Finucane. After leaving school Finucane had gone into the electronics business, eventually setting up a very successful television and electronics shop on Upper William Street. When video technology became available, Harris asked Jack Donnelly to find someone to tape the games in Ireland and post them over to him at the Savoy Hotel in London. Finucane got the job:
Seventeen years I was sending him videos. Seventeen years – that’s a long time. The girl in the post office would say to me, ‘The usual?’ From 1985 to his death. VHS was very big at the time. I would faithfully put the full match on the three-hour tape. I could only get one match to a tape. Then wrap it up, bring it to the post office, and off to Richard Harris, the Savoy Hotel.
I went over to the Savoy Hotel at least four or five times, and I met him there three times. First morning I remember, eleven o’clock, big tray came down, teas and coffees, all that kind of thing. Lunch there another time with him. He was so grateful; he was thrilled with the tapes. All the Munster finals and the international matches. He would bring friends of his into the Savoy Hotel, and they would all sit down, drinking and watching the tapes.
Any time he would come to Limerick he would call in to me, to thank me.
Finucane bumped into Harris once when he went to London for a rugby international. One of his old teachers from Crescent College, Fr Bates, asked to go with him. A third man, an elderly pharmacist, also travelled with them. The two men latched on to Finucane because they had never been abroad before or dealt with modern complexities such as the tube system. Finucane recalls:
The match was on at three o’clock. The two old men had me out to the field at a quarter to twelve, and we having three stand tickets! Luckily enough I had two English papers to kill the time. I sat down on the stands, and all I could see was Fr Bates and the chemist, no one else, only stewards tidying up the field. We had to wait until half two before any action happened, or anyone else arrived. Unbelievable.
They enjoyed the match. On the way out we met Harris. Ireland were after winning, and he just said hello to us. He had a great welcome for Fr Bates, because he had taught him.
‘Rugby was his passion,’ said Harris’s brother Noel:
When Dick was an established actor, naturally he could be any place in the world making movies. He arranged to have every international match recorded and the tape to be sent out to him in the Bahamas, or at the Savoy. He built up a library of all these games, and he became an authority on matches. You couldn’t argue with him. You daren’t, because he was always right on rugby and those matches.
As has been mentioned, towards the end of his life Harris became great friends with Australian hellraiser Russell Crowe. On the set of Gladiator they struck up an instant rapport that developed into a deep friendship. While they were both clad in full armour Harris strode up to Crowe saying: ‘Am I correct in saying you were born in New Zealand but chose to live in Australia?’ When that fact was confirmed the Irish actor continued: ‘Then you don’t mind if I yell abuse at the Wallabies and talk in hushed tones about the All Blacks?’ There followed many deep conversations on a range of topics, including rugby, and Harris expressed his undying love of Limerick and his passionate association with Kilkee. They bought tickets for the Ireland-Australia match scheduled for Lansdowne Road, Dublin, in 2003 but Harris died in the interim. When Crowe got a break from his film commitments he undertook a sentimental journey to Ireland in memory of his friend.
Crowe recalled his pilgrimage:
I went to Limerick and had a pint of Guinness in Richard’s local, Charlie St George’s, and went on to sample pints in several others of his favourite pubs. Then I visited the Cliffs of Moher. I found myself in Dublin on the day of the match. The Australians couldn’t do a thing right and the Irish ran rings around them. Tears flowed down my face at the final whistle and I was saying silently, Richard you are not dead. You’re here to see what you have waited thirty-seven years for, you are here to see Ireland beat the Australians.
This was an incredibly touching tribute to the departed Irish acting giant from an international star who not only shared his passion for the game of rugby but also clearly appreciated an extraordinary man and artist in whom he recognised a kindred spirit.
In 2000 Crowe played a kidnapping expert in Proof of Life – and he also wore a Young Munster tie, in tribute to Harris. During his acceptance speech for the BAFTA award for Best Actor for A Beautiful Mind, he pinned the producer Malcolm Gerrie to the wall for cutting off his recitation of a Patrick Kavanagh poem in honour of the terminally ill Harris. He would get his opportunity to recite the poem after a memorial service in a hotel with the Harris family, and later to unveil a statue of Harris in Kilkee. A true celluloid soul brother and a recognition of one great actor by another.