CIAN HEALY was once a ‘headbanger’ but is now a wise old head.
The Ireland prop will hang up his boots at the end of the season.
And he hopes to add a sixth Championship, third Grand Slam and fifth Champions Cup to his impressive collection.
Either way, he will exit the stage as an all-time legend.
Church is the record appearance holder with both Ireland — 134 and counting — and Leinster, clocking up 287 games to date.
The 37-year-old appeared on the scene as a young wrecking ball just as Michael Cheika was transforming Leinster from flashy failures to serial winners.
And he has been there ever since.
But not everyone thought the 19-year-old loosehead prop that broke into the team in 2007 would be around for long, let alone another 17 years.
And Healy, who won the first of his four Heineken Cup trophies in 2009 with current Blues head coach Leo Cullen as his captain, admitted: “I was a headbanger, I was wild, I loved it.
“Start rugby, start getting paid, start going into town, having good craic.
“You are still training well, you are still playing well, you don’t see a fault with it. I couldn’t tell when exactly I toned down.”
Asked to pinpoint it though, he reckons the neck injury he suffered a decade ago that almost ended his career — he had signed the papers to retire — changed his outlook.
In July 2015, the Dubliner underwent surgery on a disc in his neck but sustained nerve damage in the process.
And Healy said: “It could be somewhere in line with the neck thing.
“I ended up just under 130kg, not shocking weight, but I had to go on a weight-loss journey and that probably tidied me up a little bit and I got my act together.
“And then, I don’t know, just the natural progression of settling down a bit and figuring out there is a bit more to it.”
The injury made him reassess.
He continued: “You’re very thankful for the opportunity to do it and when that’s nearly been taken, you get a little bit more thankful for those opportunities and you enjoy them a bit more.
“I managed to squeeze ten years of enjoying it a bit more and more, so yeah, it’s all been good since then.
“Earlier on in the career I was very self-centred about how I wanted to be and how I wanted to just be an aggressive ball of energy that couldn’t be dealt with.
“And that was across the board. That was meetings, training, everything. It was probably a bit of a hindrance.
“Now I spend a lot more time trying to make people understand or help them understand some things that they might need to.”
EVERY ROLE
Healy has not always been a first-choice prop for club or country during his 17 years.
But these days, he has come to terms with that and is comfortable in a mentorship role.
It is not just his heir Jack Boyle, 22, who sings his praises. All of the front rows credit him for helping them.
Healy added: “I would have been up and down and all around the pecking order but still it’s better than not doing it.
“My challenge always to myself was to contribute and to be helpful to the team and squad. Wherever needed, that’s probably the application.
“To be able to share that knowledge or help someone with something I’ve maybe spent a bit of time to figure out our troubles with, I find that quite easy, whereas to stay relevant, to play myself has been more of a fitness challenge where I need to top up fitness-wise, I need to maintain my mobility, my flexibility, things like that.
“I can’t share fitness tips with people but I can share scrum tips and some positional tips.”
His technical knowhow around the scrum has led him to consider coaching.
Indeed, he already does a bit at local club Clontarf.
And he has not ruled out togging out for the next year too as he admitted that the aches and pains of professional rugby mean he will still have to hit the gym regularly.
But he is looking forward to not being on someone else’s schedule for the first time in his adult life from this summer.
KNIFE TO SEE
And that will mean plenty of time in his workshop at home where he makes his own knives.
He said: “All sorts of steel, exotic woods and mammoth tooth — it’s stabilised fossil, it’s very nice.
“There’s all sorts of stuff that I’ve been using to make the blades and the handles and knives and see what I can do and see how I can change what normal is.”
But life without rugby is also a step into the unknown.
He said: “I’m fairly snookered, it is all I have ever done. I don’t know what it’s like to not be on a schedule.
“It is about trying to find something that gives them that level of enjoyment that sport has given them.
“I like workshop stuff, doing things with my hands, making things, creating things, that gives me a huge sense of satisfaction and enjoyment.
“That’s a hole I could fill no problem, that’s something I’d hold on to equal to rugby in terms of how I feel come the end of the day.
“That should cover that off so your only problem then is you are spending a lot of time on you own.
“I would want to marry that up and that’s where something, like working with Clontarf or something like that, brings me into a broader group and still keeps a bit of team environment going.
“I’ve thought about those things and about how if I disappear into the workshop I could end up a bit of a recluse.
“It’s important to find a balance of what makes me happy and what I know I need.”
