Former Connacht, Munster and Bristol Bears prop Peter McCabe.
Freenail the restart
'People think, 'Oh, you're grand, you played professional rugby for 10 years...' Am I f***!'
Peter McCabe, who has found his feet after struggling with retirement from rugby, has had ‘over 100′ players contact him for advice in the last 12 months.
PETER MCCABE HAS a tattoo on his right-hand side which bears the name of his late older sister.
When Sally passed away unexpectedly in December 2011, McCabe recalls being confronted by a fork in the road as he began college with his life upside down.
“I can absolutely lose the run of myself or I can take this as fuel and burn a path for myself.”
Sally became a major driving force behind McCabe’s professional rugby career, as did the chance to bring pride and joy to his grieving family.
“I remember being in showers after matches where people like, ‘Oh, what’s your tattoo?’
“And sometimes, you’d be thinking, ‘Ah, this is a bit of a mood-killer’”, McCabe winces, “but other times you’d just say it.”
McCabe would invariably think about his sister after matches, but he found a way to think about her during games, too, even when the tattoo was hidden beneath his jersey.
“I used to have the tape around my wrist with probably every single move written on it to remember it during a match”, he laughs. “But I always used to put her initials on there and a little cross just to remind me of her. It gave me power.
“It kind of gave me direction as to where I wanted to go in general.”
Munster's McCabe embracing his future Connacht teammate, Niyi Adeolokun, in 2015. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
Throughout a decade as a professional rugby player with his native province, Munster, with his adopted province Connacht, and at Bristol where he wound up starting his own family, McCabe made memories and friendships that will last him a lifetime.
But like most squad players even at the top end of club rugby, there were times when the juice wasn’t remotely worth the squeeze. There were several occasions — particularly around years six and seven — when McCabe would have packed it in were it not for his mother’s encouragement to the contrary.
“And the thing is, she was probably thinking, ‘This guy has got nothing else!’ McCabe laughs. “I had pursued professional sport over a degree — and fair play to anyone who can balance both, but if I tried to do both, I would have failed at both.
My mom was definitely thinking, ‘If he gives up rugby, he’s going to be living with his mother when he’s 50 years of age.’
As such, McCabe kept his head in the game until the game was finished with him. Or almost finished, anyway.
He had been informed well in advance of his departure from Bristol Bears in the summer of 2021 that the club did not have a contract for him to extend his stay into a third season. But two months after he departed Ashton Gate, he got a phonecall from the club asking him to return on a full-time deal, but at a reduced rate.
“And it was just so bad, the money, I was kinda like, ‘Alright, I’ve played 10 years. Do I really want to go and play professional rugby again when I could probably get the same salary working in a supermarket?’
“It was just clear to me that if I wanted to move on and have a family then, really, taking that contract would be the wrong option.
“I also had a contract on the table to go down to Pro D2 with Narbonne, I think just as a medical joker for three months. And I was more tempted towards that one but then I was like, ‘I’ll just be back to square one again.’
“It’s like, you do three or four months somewhere, grand, but where’s your next paycheque gonna come from?
People think, ‘Oh, you’re grand, you played professional rugby for 10 years.’ Am I fuck!
McCabe leaving the field injured for Connacht during their Challenge Cup quarter-final away to Sale Sharks in 2019. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
Somewhere during his month-long summer holiday to the Caribbean with his now-wife, Jazz, McCabe decided to stop training. He was done with rugby.
He had never seen more money land into his account than when he received his tax back after his retirement, but that windfall wasn’t long for lasting with wedding costs, rent, and the kind of random annoying expenses that bleed everybody dry in their early 30s.
Into the real world, then, and onto another fork in the road. McCabe needed to find a ‘normal’ job, but this time he had no idea which path to pursue.
“And I think that’s where the stress massively came in,” he says.
McCabe didn’t have a degree. He knew nothing about business. He began to look up local jobs in Bristol: policeman, prison officer. Something physical. Anything without a laptop.
He found himself looking into hydroponics — a means of growing plants without soil — with an eye towards taking over the family farm back home in Kanturk, Co. Cork.
“And that just shows the scale of…” McCabe pauses. “I was veering from becoming a police officer to growing hydroponic strawberries, like, y’know what I mean?
“It was just madness. Brain mushed. I just wasn’t prepared for life after rugby. Somehow, I didn’t see it coming.
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“I was lost. I was absolutely lost.”
It helped that McCabe’s partner, now wife, Jazmin Carlin, was to an even more celebrated extent an elite sportsperson. A world-class swimmer, Jazz won 12 major international medals for Great Britain, including two Olympic silvers at the Rio Games in 2016. She also owned her own home in nearby Bath — she had based her training at the city’s university — meaning McCabe wouldn’t be out on his ear, at least, if worst came to worst.
McCabe and his wife Jazz Carlin in Saint Lucia in 2021.
But whereas Jazz made for an “incredible support unit” as McCabe joined his partner in leaving top-level sport in his rearview, there were still major bumps en route to civilian life.
“It’s incredible the degree to which you can lose your identity,” McCabe says. “Like, you’re gone. The next guy is in. And slowly, you’re no longer ‘the rugby player’, even to people who know you. So, who actually are you? What are you to them? What are you to yourself?
“Even in terms of your social life, there’s a serious shift.
The invites are going to stop. I remember going out with Bristol lads, we’d have great craic, and then the next year, because you’re not in that bubble with lads, you just kind of vanish from the picture.
“And to be clear, there’s absolutely no malice in it,” McCabe says. “People forget, like, when you’re in that team bubble, everyone’s schedule is the same. Your days are laid out for you to a tee together, there’s a camaraderie to the work. If you go on to become a gardener, a policeman, work in tech sales, whatever, your schedule is obviously going to be very different. You go down a different avenue in life and you just lose connection with a lot of your teammates organically, and it’s tough.
“It’s a harsh reality and I don’t think players themselves realise it until they’re out of it.
“But where I struggled massively,” McCabe continues, “and I know loads of players are the same, is I didn’t have anyone to talk to about what actually comes next professionally. I just didn’t know.” (McCabe clarifies that he did speak at one point with the RPA, or the English players’ association, which led to his brief flirtation with hydroponics).
McCabe saluting Connacht fans in 2018. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
But as the pressure increased to find a new purpose, and a fair wage, during his first year out of rugby, McCabe caught a lucky bounce of a ball.
Through an American couple whom he and Jazz had met on their Caribbean holiday, he was eventually introduced to ex-Harlequins lock George Robson, who has carved out success in the business world since retiring from rugby. Robson pointed McCabe in the direction of a contact of his from Dublin, who “took a punt” on the former loosehead.
Daragh Kelly wasn’t long finding common ground with his new protégé: Kelly was ex-military, and he contended that the similar characteristics demanded of somebody who had lasted 10 years in pro rugby — resilience, work ethic, team focus, even punctuality — had left McCabe better equipped for a start in the real world than any newly fledged university graduate.
“Just an unbelievable mentor for me,” McCabe says of Kelly, who has helped the former prop rise through the ranks of cyber/tech recruitment and business development for the last four years.
Ready for the push, though, McCabe has removed the stabilisers: he has this week launched his own specialist recruitment and high-performance consultancy company, Gainline Consulting, describing it as “a move I’ve thought about for a long time” but one from which he has “always held back”.
“My world for the past 15 years has been all about working in high-performing teams,” says the 33-year-old. “So, stepping out on my own is scary and exciting in equal parts.”
On Wednesday, he confirmed that his former Connacht and Bristol team-mate, as well as his one-time housemate, Kieran Marmion has joined Gainline as a part-time high-performance consultant.
Former Ireland scrum-half Marmion, who signed a new deal with the Bears last March, already owns multiple properties and recently completed a degree in Commerce.
In that regard, his attitude towards ‘the real world’ during the earlier stages of his rugby career was antithetical to that of McCabe’s and so many of their peers.
McCabe and his close friends Darragh Leader and Kieran Marmion during their Connacht days. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
“Marms is an example of someone who was switched on from day one, investing money,” McCabe says of his dear friend.
“So many rugby players just aren’t. I certainly wasn’t. It’s sad to see, and that’s where mental-health issues creep in. You see lads struggling and you see sad cases here, there, and more often than people realise.
I’ve had, honestly, over 100 professional players reach out to me in the last 12 months. That’s not an exaggeration.
Considering he has a lower profile than many of the players who have contacted him, McCabe believes he initially became a point of reference primarily because he has documented his business milestones on LinkedIn for several years. From there, it spread through rugby’s sprawling grapevine that Peter McCabe was worth sounding out for his two cents in the event that a player found himself at a career crossroads.
“And these players who have contacted me aren’t just lads working within the Irish union,” McCabe says. “There’s Scottish lads, there’s Welsh lads, there’s lads from all over, all of them just saying, like, ‘Can I have a chat? I’m kind of lost.’
“The big thing for rugby lads is to go into, like, accounting. It’s like it’s ingrained in them that they should throw on a suit and tie. Whether or not they really want to, nearly everyone seems to think they have to. But it’s a massive transition from working on grass to working behind a desk. Some people will love it but loads won’t.
“I’ve had really experienced, household-name players onto me ahead of retirement being like, ‘Pete, can you tell me about business development or sales, because this is what I want to go into,’ but they’re often not actually sure when you chat with them a bit more.
“Ex-players are struggling way more often than people think. And of course, Jesus, I’ll have a chat with anyone where I feel I could help them in any way, but I’m also wondering, like, ‘Why isn’t your union, a players’ union, helping you a bit more?’”
McCabe during a Connacht huddle in training. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
McCabe is keen to stress that Rugby Players Ireland, and particularly Connacht’s “incredible” player development manager, Dr Deirdre Lyons, provided him and his teammates with ample support during his own playing days. He laments that he and so many others just didn’t recognise the value in those extracurriculars at such a carefree stage in their lives.
For a young athlete at the peak of their physical powers, the concept of networking belongs to a far more boring world.
“Deirdre is a legend,” McCabe says of Lyons, who is now also a personal development consultant for the global players’ council, International Rugby Players. “But I remember around 2015 or 2016 in Connacht, she was advising us to spruce up our LinkedIn profiles and make more connections on there for our future careers, and most of us were just like, ‘This is like college. Fuck that. I just want to get on the teamsheet every week.’
“But Deirdre was so right, like. It was us not wanting that help was the problem.
There would be stuff put on after training — learn about pensions, learn about project management or something — and most of us would be like, ‘We’re wrecked.’ Into the car, get home.
“The option was there, and some lads like Marms did absolutely utilise it. It’s just that I’d say 95% of lads didn’t.”
Before setting out on his own this week, McCabe worked with Dr Lyons to onboard Rugby Players Ireland with an online facility designed to help rugby players to plan for their futures beyond the game. Through this program, which was designed by Shift Group, active players who identify their professional interests or curiosities will be pointed towards a relevant educational course, introduced to a mentor and, later, paired with a pertinent company to gain experience.
This facility, sent to every RPI-registered player’s email inbox, aims to help pros of all ages to sidestep the pitfalls into which McCabe and countless others have walked blindly.
But the former prop firmly believes that players’ associations from every country should shift more of their personal resources towards players who have already recently departed the game.
“I’ve been retired five years and I don’t think I’ve gotten one message to see how I’m doing,” says McCabe, who stresses that he retired in England, outside of the jurisdiction of Rugby Players Ireland.
“I did have one message from Connacht — I think it was through Rugby Players Ireland — which asked me if I wanted to come down and do a talk before a Munster match.
“I obviously live in England, so I would have had to travel over. So, I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah — what’s the craic? Is it paid?
“I was told it wasn’t, ‘but we’ll give you a ticket to the match.’
“I was like, ‘Are you mad?’” McCabe laughs. “‘I have bills to pay.’”
McCabe scoring against future club Bristol in a 2017 friendly. Tommy Grealy / INPHO
Tommy Grealy / INPHO / INPHO
“This is just my opinion”, McCabe continues, “but I speak to a lot of lads and I think they feel the same: the support will be there from a players’ association if you want it and if you pick up the phone. They’ll be great with you. If you want to become an astronaut, they’ll honestly point you in the right direction.
“The problem is lads go into ‘shell mode’ when they’re worried about their futures. They don’t want to speak to anyone. They’re stressed, they see other lads doing well and they feel like it might be a sign of weakness to have to reach out for help where others haven’t needed it.
“That’s where I think the players’ associations need to be a small bit more proactive than reactive. If I was them, I’d be checking in on the guys who have just stepped into that real world with mortgages and with families but suddenly without the big paycheques. Just see what they’re up to, how they’re getting on. That’s where I would really ramp up the support, based on my own experience and lots of the players who have been onto me.”
McCabe, though, also believes that there are more basic, player-led solutions that his generation of players don’t avail of enough.
As somebody who now mentors younger rugby professionals, and as a businessman who has himself been mentored in his new line of work, the former Kanturk RFC man has come to recognise the value of a simple check-in.
The LinkedIn messages he has received from ex-teammates in particular have struck a chord. De facto career-guidance conversations have quickly morphed into trips down Memory Lane. Long-lost lines of contact have been resuscitated. McCabe has gained plenty from those chats in his own right.
“When you think about it, it could be just one text that you send someone who’s having a bad week or a bad day, and ‘bang’, it just changes their mindset from being really negative to, ‘D’you know what, this might be a good option.’
“Like, don’t be afraid to ring someone that you played with if you need a bit of help”, he says, “but also don’t be afraid to ring a fella you played with just see how they’re getting on.
“I’m like this myself, but I think when lads are out of the loop for a while, they feel like it’s weird to contact someone that they played with for, like, six or seven years — and realistically that person would love to hear from you.
McCabe and Darren Sweetnam after Munster's 2016 win over the Maori All Blacks at Thomond Park. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
“I lived with Sweets (Darren Sweetnam) for I dunno how many years between Cork and Limerick. Best friends. Then I lived with Niyi [Adeolokun] in Galway for four or five years, and then we went to Bristol together.
“Then, life takes over. You have a family, you move clubs, you have a new job, whatever it is. You’re not in that bubble anymore.
“And like, to me, it’d nearly feel a bit weird now to pick up the phone and call them. But why is that? They were my best friends that I had such good craic with. We lived through every moment together for years.
“If I was to text Sweets now or he was to text me, one of us just saying ‘How’re you getting on?’, it’d nearly be like, ‘This is a bit random — why’s he texting me?’” McCabe laughs.
“Whereas in reality, if I spoke to him now, we’d probably chat for five or six hours and have great craic.
“It’s as if, when you go down different paths, you forget. But we should just make that little bit of effort: there’s no weakness in reaching out to people like that. It could actually make a world of difference.”
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'People think, 'Oh, you're grand, you played professional rugby for 10 years...' Am I f***!'
PETER MCCABE HAS a tattoo on his right-hand side which bears the name of his late older sister.
When Sally passed away unexpectedly in December 2011, McCabe recalls being confronted by a fork in the road as he began college with his life upside down.
“I can absolutely lose the run of myself or I can take this as fuel and burn a path for myself.”
Sally became a major driving force behind McCabe’s professional rugby career, as did the chance to bring pride and joy to his grieving family.
“I remember being in showers after matches where people like, ‘Oh, what’s your tattoo?’
“And sometimes, you’d be thinking, ‘Ah, this is a bit of a mood-killer’”, McCabe winces, “but other times you’d just say it.”
McCabe would invariably think about his sister after matches, but he found a way to think about her during games, too, even when the tattoo was hidden beneath his jersey.
“I used to have the tape around my wrist with probably every single move written on it to remember it during a match”, he laughs. “But I always used to put her initials on there and a little cross just to remind me of her. It gave me power.
“It kind of gave me direction as to where I wanted to go in general.”
Throughout a decade as a professional rugby player with his native province, Munster, with his adopted province Connacht, and at Bristol where he wound up starting his own family, McCabe made memories and friendships that will last him a lifetime.
But like most squad players even at the top end of club rugby, there were times when the juice wasn’t remotely worth the squeeze. There were several occasions — particularly around years six and seven — when McCabe would have packed it in were it not for his mother’s encouragement to the contrary.
“And the thing is, she was probably thinking, ‘This guy has got nothing else!’ McCabe laughs. “I had pursued professional sport over a degree — and fair play to anyone who can balance both, but if I tried to do both, I would have failed at both.
As such, McCabe kept his head in the game until the game was finished with him. Or almost finished, anyway.
He had been informed well in advance of his departure from Bristol Bears in the summer of 2021 that the club did not have a contract for him to extend his stay into a third season. But two months after he departed Ashton Gate, he got a phonecall from the club asking him to return on a full-time deal, but at a reduced rate.
“And it was just so bad, the money, I was kinda like, ‘Alright, I’ve played 10 years. Do I really want to go and play professional rugby again when I could probably get the same salary working in a supermarket?’
“It was just clear to me that if I wanted to move on and have a family then, really, taking that contract would be the wrong option.
“I also had a contract on the table to go down to Pro D2 with Narbonne, I think just as a medical joker for three months. And I was more tempted towards that one but then I was like, ‘I’ll just be back to square one again.’
“It’s like, you do three or four months somewhere, grand, but where’s your next paycheque gonna come from?
Somewhere during his month-long summer holiday to the Caribbean with his now-wife, Jazz, McCabe decided to stop training. He was done with rugby.
He had never seen more money land into his account than when he received his tax back after his retirement, but that windfall wasn’t long for lasting with wedding costs, rent, and the kind of random annoying expenses that bleed everybody dry in their early 30s.
Into the real world, then, and onto another fork in the road. McCabe needed to find a ‘normal’ job, but this time he had no idea which path to pursue.
“And I think that’s where the stress massively came in,” he says.
McCabe didn’t have a degree. He knew nothing about business. He began to look up local jobs in Bristol: policeman, prison officer. Something physical. Anything without a laptop.
He found himself looking into hydroponics — a means of growing plants without soil — with an eye towards taking over the family farm back home in Kanturk, Co. Cork.
“And that just shows the scale of…” McCabe pauses. “I was veering from becoming a police officer to growing hydroponic strawberries, like, y’know what I mean?
“It was just madness. Brain mushed. I just wasn’t prepared for life after rugby. Somehow, I didn’t see it coming.
“I was lost. I was absolutely lost.”
It helped that McCabe’s partner, now wife, Jazmin Carlin, was to an even more celebrated extent an elite sportsperson. A world-class swimmer, Jazz won 12 major international medals for Great Britain, including two Olympic silvers at the Rio Games in 2016. She also owned her own home in nearby Bath — she had based her training at the city’s university — meaning McCabe wouldn’t be out on his ear, at least, if worst came to worst.
But whereas Jazz made for an “incredible support unit” as McCabe joined his partner in leaving top-level sport in his rearview, there were still major bumps en route to civilian life.
“It’s incredible the degree to which you can lose your identity,” McCabe says. “Like, you’re gone. The next guy is in. And slowly, you’re no longer ‘the rugby player’, even to people who know you. So, who actually are you? What are you to them? What are you to yourself?
“Even in terms of your social life, there’s a serious shift.
“And to be clear, there’s absolutely no malice in it,” McCabe says. “People forget, like, when you’re in that team bubble, everyone’s schedule is the same. Your days are laid out for you to a tee together, there’s a camaraderie to the work. If you go on to become a gardener, a policeman, work in tech sales, whatever, your schedule is obviously going to be very different. You go down a different avenue in life and you just lose connection with a lot of your teammates organically, and it’s tough.
“It’s a harsh reality and I don’t think players themselves realise it until they’re out of it.
“But where I struggled massively,” McCabe continues, “and I know loads of players are the same, is I didn’t have anyone to talk to about what actually comes next professionally. I just didn’t know.” (McCabe clarifies that he did speak at one point with the RPA, or the English players’ association, which led to his brief flirtation with hydroponics).
But as the pressure increased to find a new purpose, and a fair wage, during his first year out of rugby, McCabe caught a lucky bounce of a ball.
Through an American couple whom he and Jazz had met on their Caribbean holiday, he was eventually introduced to ex-Harlequins lock George Robson, who has carved out success in the business world since retiring from rugby. Robson pointed McCabe in the direction of a contact of his from Dublin, who “took a punt” on the former loosehead.
Daragh Kelly wasn’t long finding common ground with his new protégé: Kelly was ex-military, and he contended that the similar characteristics demanded of somebody who had lasted 10 years in pro rugby — resilience, work ethic, team focus, even punctuality — had left McCabe better equipped for a start in the real world than any newly fledged university graduate.
“Just an unbelievable mentor for me,” McCabe says of Kelly, who has helped the former prop rise through the ranks of cyber/tech recruitment and business development for the last four years.
Ready for the push, though, McCabe has removed the stabilisers: he has this week launched his own specialist recruitment and high-performance consultancy company, Gainline Consulting, describing it as “a move I’ve thought about for a long time” but one from which he has “always held back”.
“My world for the past 15 years has been all about working in high-performing teams,” says the 33-year-old. “So, stepping out on my own is scary and exciting in equal parts.”
On Wednesday, he confirmed that his former Connacht and Bristol team-mate, as well as his one-time housemate, Kieran Marmion has joined Gainline as a part-time high-performance consultant.
Former Ireland scrum-half Marmion, who signed a new deal with the Bears last March, already owns multiple properties and recently completed a degree in Commerce.
In that regard, his attitude towards ‘the real world’ during the earlier stages of his rugby career was antithetical to that of McCabe’s and so many of their peers.
“Marms is an example of someone who was switched on from day one, investing money,” McCabe says of his dear friend.
“So many rugby players just aren’t. I certainly wasn’t. It’s sad to see, and that’s where mental-health issues creep in. You see lads struggling and you see sad cases here, there, and more often than people realise.
Considering he has a lower profile than many of the players who have contacted him, McCabe believes he initially became a point of reference primarily because he has documented his business milestones on LinkedIn for several years. From there, it spread through rugby’s sprawling grapevine that Peter McCabe was worth sounding out for his two cents in the event that a player found himself at a career crossroads.
“And these players who have contacted me aren’t just lads working within the Irish union,” McCabe says. “There’s Scottish lads, there’s Welsh lads, there’s lads from all over, all of them just saying, like, ‘Can I have a chat? I’m kind of lost.’
“The big thing for rugby lads is to go into, like, accounting. It’s like it’s ingrained in them that they should throw on a suit and tie. Whether or not they really want to, nearly everyone seems to think they have to. But it’s a massive transition from working on grass to working behind a desk. Some people will love it but loads won’t.
“I’ve had really experienced, household-name players onto me ahead of retirement being like, ‘Pete, can you tell me about business development or sales, because this is what I want to go into,’ but they’re often not actually sure when you chat with them a bit more.
“Ex-players are struggling way more often than people think. And of course, Jesus, I’ll have a chat with anyone where I feel I could help them in any way, but I’m also wondering, like, ‘Why isn’t your union, a players’ union, helping you a bit more?’”
McCabe is keen to stress that Rugby Players Ireland, and particularly Connacht’s “incredible” player development manager, Dr Deirdre Lyons, provided him and his teammates with ample support during his own playing days. He laments that he and so many others just didn’t recognise the value in those extracurriculars at such a carefree stage in their lives.
For a young athlete at the peak of their physical powers, the concept of networking belongs to a far more boring world.
“Deirdre is a legend,” McCabe says of Lyons, who is now also a personal development consultant for the global players’ council, International Rugby Players. “But I remember around 2015 or 2016 in Connacht, she was advising us to spruce up our LinkedIn profiles and make more connections on there for our future careers, and most of us were just like, ‘This is like college. Fuck that. I just want to get on the teamsheet every week.’
“But Deirdre was so right, like. It was us not wanting that help was the problem.
“The option was there, and some lads like Marms did absolutely utilise it. It’s just that I’d say 95% of lads didn’t.”
Before setting out on his own this week, McCabe worked with Dr Lyons to onboard Rugby Players Ireland with an online facility designed to help rugby players to plan for their futures beyond the game. Through this program, which was designed by Shift Group, active players who identify their professional interests or curiosities will be pointed towards a relevant educational course, introduced to a mentor and, later, paired with a pertinent company to gain experience.
This facility, sent to every RPI-registered player’s email inbox, aims to help pros of all ages to sidestep the pitfalls into which McCabe and countless others have walked blindly.
But the former prop firmly believes that players’ associations from every country should shift more of their personal resources towards players who have already recently departed the game.
“I’ve been retired five years and I don’t think I’ve gotten one message to see how I’m doing,” says McCabe, who stresses that he retired in England, outside of the jurisdiction of Rugby Players Ireland.
“I did have one message from Connacht — I think it was through Rugby Players Ireland — which asked me if I wanted to come down and do a talk before a Munster match.
“I obviously live in England, so I would have had to travel over. So, I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah — what’s the craic? Is it paid?
“I was told it wasn’t, ‘but we’ll give you a ticket to the match.’
“I was like, ‘Are you mad?’” McCabe laughs. “‘I have bills to pay.’”
“This is just my opinion”, McCabe continues, “but I speak to a lot of lads and I think they feel the same: the support will be there from a players’ association if you want it and if you pick up the phone. They’ll be great with you. If you want to become an astronaut, they’ll honestly point you in the right direction.
“The problem is lads go into ‘shell mode’ when they’re worried about their futures. They don’t want to speak to anyone. They’re stressed, they see other lads doing well and they feel like it might be a sign of weakness to have to reach out for help where others haven’t needed it.
“That’s where I think the players’ associations need to be a small bit more proactive than reactive. If I was them, I’d be checking in on the guys who have just stepped into that real world with mortgages and with families but suddenly without the big paycheques. Just see what they’re up to, how they’re getting on. That’s where I would really ramp up the support, based on my own experience and lots of the players who have been onto me.”
McCabe, though, also believes that there are more basic, player-led solutions that his generation of players don’t avail of enough.
As somebody who now mentors younger rugby professionals, and as a businessman who has himself been mentored in his new line of work, the former Kanturk RFC man has come to recognise the value of a simple check-in.
The LinkedIn messages he has received from ex-teammates in particular have struck a chord. De facto career-guidance conversations have quickly morphed into trips down Memory Lane. Long-lost lines of contact have been resuscitated. McCabe has gained plenty from those chats in his own right.
“When you think about it, it could be just one text that you send someone who’s having a bad week or a bad day, and ‘bang’, it just changes their mindset from being really negative to, ‘D’you know what, this might be a good option.’
“Like, don’t be afraid to ring someone that you played with if you need a bit of help”, he says, “but also don’t be afraid to ring a fella you played with just see how they’re getting on.
“I’m like this myself, but I think when lads are out of the loop for a while, they feel like it’s weird to contact someone that they played with for, like, six or seven years — and realistically that person would love to hear from you.
“I lived with Sweets (Darren Sweetnam) for I dunno how many years between Cork and Limerick. Best friends. Then I lived with Niyi [Adeolokun] in Galway for four or five years, and then we went to Bristol together.
“Then, life takes over. You have a family, you move clubs, you have a new job, whatever it is. You’re not in that bubble anymore.
“And like, to me, it’d nearly feel a bit weird now to pick up the phone and call them. But why is that? They were my best friends that I had such good craic with. We lived through every moment together for years.
“If I was to text Sweets now or he was to text me, one of us just saying ‘How’re you getting on?’, it’d nearly be like, ‘This is a bit random — why’s he texting me?’” McCabe laughs.
“Whereas in reality, if I spoke to him now, we’d probably chat for five or six hours and have great craic.
“It’s as if, when you go down different paths, you forget. But we should just make that little bit of effort: there’s no weakness in reaching out to people like that. It could actually make a world of difference.”
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