Brian O'Driscoll's autobiography 'The Test' came out in the autumn of 2014, five months after his retirement from rugby.
It was ghostwritten by Limerick Leader editor Alan English, though inititially, Paul Kimmage had been the man putting O'Driscoll's words on paper.
Kimmage resigned as ghostwriter in January of 2014 with English then taking over.
Speaking to Jarlath Regan on his An Irishman Abroad podcast, O'Driscoll explained what caused the falling out between him and Kimmage.
With the book, with Paul Kimmage, we obviously did a couple of years... three years, I think. We did a lot of interviews and I didn't know when I was going to retire. I wanted to make sure it only came out when I had retired. So I didn't know if you was going to be after 2013 or subsequently 2014.
An ultimatum was put to me regarding doing an interview. I had promised an interview to a sports journalist - one of my last ones in my final Six Nations - who had been very good to me and pretty understanding and I felt as though I owed it to him.
I had gotten a request from Paul to do a piece with him instead for his column. I said that I'd promised it to someone else and I couldn't renege on that.
Then, pretty much an ultimatum was put to be that 'I don't think that I could continue working if that journalist was chosen ahead of me'.
That was it. I'm not a good ultimatum guy.
Speaking at a public event in the days following his resignation, Kimmage relayed a similar story to the one told by O'Driscoll.
I was due to meet him (Brian) on Saturday but heard through the grapevine that there was a possibility he was going to give a big interview ahead of the Six Nations weekend opener to a newspaper. I spoke to him and said ‘Brian if you are giving an interview before the weekend it would be a big help to me if you could give it to the Sunday Indo’. Him talking to another paper wasn’t going to compromise the book or the Indo but that wasn’t a concession he was willing to make. I felt he was being unreasonable, He felt I was being unreasonable, so we decided to go our separate ways.
