The former Ireland rugby international talks physical and mental damage he suffered from playing professional rugby during a ‘Wild West’ period and explains why he has joined legal proceedings against the IRFU
The one that really gets me is, ‘You knew the risks before you picked up a ball’. We didn’t know the risks
“At the start of my career I was fine. Living the dream, I suppose. Capped at 21. You know, flying high. The game meant so much to me as well. It was all I knew. I didn’t have a college education. I didn’t have a third-level qualification. I just loved the game. I loved winning. It was the be-all and end-all. But then, as I got older, I felt myself coming under more and more pressure – especially emotionally. I just wasn’t able to handle certain situations.
“I probably should have gone to Gloucester – which was more like Munster. Bristol weren’t ready for the professional era. We were given gym programmes to be as big and strong was we possibly could. So, I got up to over 20 stone with a 22-inch neck. But I lost all my flexibility, all my speed. If you ran at me, grand, I’d kill you, but if you ran to the side, I couldn’t catch you. In training it was constant collision, collision, collision, collision.
“Then there was the injections. I’m not going to lie, I did take injections just to go training, let alone play in a game. You were pumped full of cortisone. You broke a finger – you got it shot up and you played. And it was my choice. That was the other thing. I could have said no. And I wanted to play. But, like, you were taking shots just to go training, not alone to play matches.
The impulse to carry on was just as strong after a bang on the head as it was after a knock to any other part of the body. Carrying on was rugby’s bottom line. “Or, nine times out of 10, you went off the pitch for 10 minutes, you got a bucket of water over the head and you went back on. I remember on one particular occasion I was seeing three of everything. ‘Just hit the guy in the middle so.’ That’s what I was told. That’s what was said to me. So, you’d go back on – and you were bulling to go back on. You’ll do anything to get back on the field. But that shouldn’t have been the player’s choice. It shouldn’t have been.
“If I had known that at the time, would I have played? I probably don’t think I would have. Why would I want to see myself have a diagnosis of early-onset dementia? Why would anybody do that?”, a couple of days before he got married. He had amassed 27 caps during the most miserable decade in the long history of Irish Test rugby. Even in that distressed environment he stood out as a player of high quality and endurance.
Starting again in life, though, was difficult. He had no plans. He would have continued if he could, but in the end it was just impossible. He had come through a six-month rehabilitation from an Achilles injury when the other Achilles ruptured off the bone at a Cork Con training session. “No matter what I did, or what success I had [with teams], there was always just a deep, dark hole. There was no positivity. There was nothing there. My emotions, I couldn’t control them at all. If I was speaking to someone on the street, I’d feel my eyes well up and I’d say, ‘I have to head away there,’ or whatever.
“How are you?” was how the conversation started, simply, and whatever Corkery said in response, or whatever O’Donovan saw, it prompted a follow-up phone call. O’Donovan invited Corkery to his house for a 10-minute chat that went on for an hour-and-a-half. He had found somebody to listen and understand. To this day, that contact continues.
Last year a Dublin-based law firm, Maguire McClafferty , picked up the thread on behalf of Irish players. It was put to Corkery that his long-term depression was consistent with symptoms exhibited by other former rugby players in the UK class action. He was invited to go for tests. What emerged was incontrovertible evidence of brain injury, caused by repeated blows to the head.
“The doctor [in Birmingham] was able to show me the parts of my brain that had been injured through impact. I said is there any chance it could be genetics, or something else? He said, ‘Have you ever been in a car crash?’ I said no. He said, ‘Did you ever fall off a horse?’ No. ‘It has to be rugby.’ “I feel like I’m being villainised by the whole rugby community because I’m taking this action. That I’m jumping on a bandwagon. Has that been expressed to me? Yeah, on social media – more by people that I don’t know than by people that I do know. Rugby gave me so many friends and some of those friends have now disappeared since the whole concussion thing broke and the names were publicised. They’re just gone.
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