HE’S NO BEAST. Andrew Porter is just a man.
Granted, it’s easy to think of him as the former. He’s a 21-year-old 125kg specimen. He carries the weight well too, not quite as well as Nemani Nadolo did when the pair were pitted in a foot-race this month, but plenty of backs have been burned off easier than he was. For Porter has already been marked Test grade quality just a year after switching positions.
That said, nothing made him feel more human than the early days of his switch from loosehead to tighthead.
“I was confused more than anything,” the big prop says with a big affable smile when asked how the decision to move across the front row came about.
“I thought I was going well at loosehead, but then John Fogarty came up to me one day and said: ‘look, we want to see what you’re like at tighthead, you have the size, you have the traits for it’ and then a few trainings later I was slotting in at tighthead…
“And then you probably heard about me getting my wings with Peter Dooley.”
We did, Andrew. But to jog the memory: ‘getting his wings’ was a rite of passage, the way Mike Ross tells it anyway, comprising of the embarrassing and rare occurence where a tighthead is out-scrummaged so emphatically that he ends up getting lifted off his feet and is carried back on the tide. It’s a valuable learning experience, but a memory you’d look back on with mortification rather than fondness.
“It’s been kind of learning curve from back then till now but I think I’ve come along a decent bit in a fair amount of time.”
‘Decent’ is selling himself well short. Porter is poised to pull up trees having won three international caps. His next landmark is to feature in a European contest. Fortunately, there’s one just around the corner.
“Certainly he’s of the standard that can play at (international) level,” says Leinster’s scrum coach John Fogarty, who admits the backroom team in Clonskeagh have been somewhat wary of putting too much on Porter’s plate too soon. But all signs point to the 21-year-old getting a shot at the Premiership champions next month.
“I would like to think that in the window we have to develop Ports, we have used him and we are using him… but there does have to be development. I’m all for pushing him out there because I think he’s well capable of it. But you want him to have good experiences and a few little bad experiences too to make sure he’s on the right level.
“You don’t want to push him out there to have a bad experience and then say ‘ah, he’s not ready’. You want to make sure he arrives in the back-to-backs against European teams and he excels and performs well. Because he’s capable of doing it, very capable of doing it and I’ve no doubt that he will.”
Incredibly, Porter says he didn’t truly get ‘serious’ about focusing on rugby until after finished school in St Andrew’s.
His dominant exploits for Nigel Carolan’s U20s side made the call of rugby impossible to ignore any longer though. He already had grown a love for the gym thanks to his school’s strength and conditioning coach David Jones, so he came into the Leinster setup with a reputation for challenging records.
“When I came in here,” he says, motioning that big right arm to his surrounds in Leinster’s UCD HQ, “you’re surrounded by everyone else, it was almost like a motivating factor to, I wouldn’t say out-lift them, but it’s great being with people driven by the same goals as you are.”
We’re getting back into beast territory. And Porter, remember, is just a man. A young man, who misses his mother.
He looks down at his arm when the question comes about his tattoos, below that massive bicep, the name Wendy. Above his elbow and rising around his shoulder, another indelible memory; a bridge in Rome where he and his mother travelled before she tragically died when Porter was just 12.
“My Dad (Ernie) was the one who got me into rugby when I was five, but she was very sporty herself and she always kind of kept me going that way,” says Porter, without a stutter, a quiver or a hesitation. The memory of Wendy brings a warm smile to his face the whole way through.
“When she passed it was a big driving factor for me. To keep the family proud almost.
“I guess, in a way, it affected my life in a lot of different ways. I kind of use it now… if she’s looking over me, I’d like to think she’s looking down, smiling down at me. That I’m doing her proud.”
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