Mack Hansen: The party animal who moved to Ireland ‘for a few beers’

He has come a long way – literally – since nights dressing up as Austin Powers, complete with false teeth, for raucous house parties in Australia.

Once the youngster who would perform in full make-up and wigs for his teammates, Hansen is now a key part of the best rugby team in the world. On Sunday the 24-year-old wing was man of the match in Ireland’s 22-7 win against Scotland.

He scored their first try, claimed a crucial high ball in the build-up to their second, and gave the tryscoring pass for their third. Hansen followed that by saying motivation for facing the struggling English this Saturday, with the grand slam on the line, would not be hard to come by because “everybody hates England”.

But Hansen never dreamt of all this. He moved to Ireland in 2021 with one basic ambition. “I remember him saying, ‘I like playing rugby but I’m never going to be a Test player. I just want to travel the world and have a few beers,’ ” says Nick Frost, the Brumbies and Australia lock, who was his flatmate when the pair played together in Canberra, the city of Hansen’s birth.

That went well.

Frost first met Hansen in 2019. They shared a narrow, yet tall, six-metre-wide, three-storey flat in Australia’s capital city until Hansen departed two years ago. In the early days, it was one big party.

“Not much planning, just a lot of ideas with Mack,” Frost says. “He’s very spur of the moment. We decided to have a house-warming party once, as we’d been in the flat for a bit. Mack is a Canberra boy born and bred and we had a pretty small flat. He ended up inviting around 200 people. It was pretty interesting telling people they couldn’t come. His thought was ‘not everyone will rock up’. We had to do some damage control.”

Hansen decreed the theme was Swinging Sixties, hence the Austin Powers costume. At the Brumbies, he was often dressing up. “Some of our punishments were to sing a song in team meetings,” Frost says. “Mack really took that in his stride, so if he was ever needed to sing he would put on a big performance for the boys. He didn’t do too much singing, it was just a lot of dancing and getting the crowd up. He had a wig on at one point and once did a heavy-metal song where he just screamed into the mic. That was some of his better work; he had eyeliner on and the full get-up.”

Before he brought his “King of Canberra” nickname to Ireland, Hansen was labelled “The Prince of The RUC”. That was because he was often found at a spot in the city called The RUC Turner, a sports bar that has the Canberra North Lawn Bowling Club out the back. “Honestly, I reckon we played twice there; we don’t go there to bowl, we go to have a few beers,” Frost adds. It was at the bar of The RUC where Hansen’s sliding-doors moment came.

It just so happened that the son of the Connacht coach, Andy Friend, Jackson, pulled pints there. He and Hansen became friends and over time it came up that the wing’s mother was originally from Cork so he had an Irish passport. In the summer of 2021, Hansen joined Friend Sr at Connacht and less than a year later he made his Ireland debut in the 2022 Six Nations against Wales.

By the end of last year Hansen was nominated for the World Rugby Men’s Breakthrough Player of the Year award.

“Mack was a big breath of fresh air when he came into our house,” Jordan Duggan, the Connacht prop, said. Hansen moved in with Duggan, 25, two years ago, joining a five-man house in the Atlantic Coast village of Barna, outside Galway.

“It’s a house where you can get eaten alive if you don’t stand up for yourself. He says he’s the King of Canberra but I don’t know about that any more. He’s a very good cook, although the mess that goes with it … I don’t think is worth it. He’d beg to differ.

“He made a big ham last year – pineapple and apricots with it – which we turned our noses up at but he pulled it off. It was a huge celebration for the house when he got picked in last year’s Six Nations. He’s taken it all in his stride.

“It was a massive move for him from Canberra to Ireland. To know no one at all, join a rugby club, and represent his country a few months later just plays to how Mack is. He’s so laid-back, he’s nearly horizontal.

“One of the last things we said to him before his debut was that he might need to learn the anthem. He never realised, it had slipped his mind. The night before his first cap he was learning it in his room. I was watching that game and he seemed to just close his eyes, so I don’t know whether he didn’t know the words or was emotional. I was laughing at him at home."

The Connacht boys were won over by Hansen from the start. Behind the long hair and the relaxed manner, they found a lightning-quick runner, with rugby intelligence and a work ethic to match. “We knew fairly early on he was just electric,” Duggan says. “He’s a raw player and goes off instinct very well. He looks like a Gaelic footballer with a different ball.

“He’s deceptively big. He’s 6ft 2in, so we thought, ‘How rapid can this guy be?’ But we were playing this big, open training game and he caught it in the back-field and just did two defenders and ran the length of the pitch to score. ‘Right, he’s absolutely rapid,’ we thought.

“He’s a hard worker, but he won’t let everyone else know about it. Some lads will make sure everyone else knows they’re working hard, but it’s nice when you keep a close eye on him to see he’s always working. The backs are usually kicking the ball around and laughing when we’re scrumming and mauling. He’s not just a pretty face, he can do it.”

So behind the chilled exterior, the wigs, make-up and moustache, there is more to Hansen than meets the eye.

-The Times

Originally published as Mack Hansen: The party animal who moved to Ireland ‘for a few beers’