Day O'Reilly missed out on Hollywood

WHEN he last spoke in public, at his old Dublin rugby club a few hefty punts from the church where they held his funeral mass on Thursday, Tony O’Reilly summed up his extraordinary life in one sentence:

- PETER JACKSON

“You win and you lose and if you don’t know how to lose, you don’t know how to live.’’

Long before he began making millions by the hundred running the Heinz ketchup empire from Pittsburgh, before Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton began beating a presidential path to his Irish mansion, O’Reilly knew what it was like to be humiliated by defeat.

That it took place at a packed Twickenham made the humiliation infinitely greater. On February 11, 1956, when O’Reilly was still in his teens but all the rage after his exploits for the Lions in South Africa the previous summer, England hammered Ireland 20-0, a veritable rout by the low scores of the time.

One third of the Irish XV were dropped never to return, among them the captain, Jim Ritchie of London Irish. On top of the missed tackles, O’Reilly missed something else that day, a meeting which might have shot him to stardom on a universal scale as a movie star.

In Hollywood, plans were being finalised for a blockbuster which would break all box-office records for any film since Gone With The Wind.