The Big Interview: After the darkness, Ronan Clarke now sees only positives

In August, former Armagh All-Ireland winner and All Star Ronan Clarke collided with a goalpost and spent five days in a coma. The accident has changed his outlook on life ...

If it had been the usual kind of injury, his mind would be tormented right now, the game having been again taken away from him. You’d probably some idea alright that Ronan Clarke loved football when you’d have heard his coma-inducing injury happened in the middle of his honeymoon. That himself and Michelle were back from ten days in melting Malta so he could get in a training session ahead of the club’s quarter-final championship clash with Maghery and play the match before the pair of them were supposed to head away again for a few days in Rome.

What you probably wouldn’t have known was his obsession with the game meant that on the night before his wedding, he headed straight from the rehearsal to play a league game against Dromintee. While anyone else would have skipped it for fear of injury, he was desperate to play because of injury. After missing out on four years of football he just wanted to get in as much of it as he possibly could.

And as for when he finally stirred after five days in the darkness?

“Honestly,” he says, “the first thing that came into my head was ‘How the f*** am I going to go back to play football here?’ That’s all I could think about.”

“But then you could tell by people’s expressions — your dad, your mum, your wife, all looking at you — ‘Please don’t be coming out with this word ‘football’ anymore.’”

That’s why this time he’s not seeking any all-clear from the medics to resume playing. At 33, he knows his time is up. And what’s more, he’s accepting of it. After what happened, he’s far more tolerant and accepting of everything. Gratitude informs everything.

The other month he walked a mile to the local shop and resisted the urge to get a taxi back. When he arrived home the sense of tiredness overcame him, sending him straight to bed and to sleep for hours, but a sense of achievement and relief was even more overwhelming.

So was all the goodwill out there. At the time he was in the dark for those five agonising days back in August, he was oblivious to all your tweets and prayers, but when he awoke, he was engulfed by all the mass cards and letters and relics. They were from everywhere: Cork, Kerry, Donegal, a letter from Jim Gavin’s Dublin.

“It really stirred me. I couldn’t believe all these people I didn’t know would know me. I hadn’t played football in years, like. The game had moved on so much. Why would someone in Cork want to send me a card?”

Those of us from a more objective distant remove can maybe explain: for as fitful and a short career as he had, when Ronan Clarke played football at full-forward, hardly anyone had played it better.

In 2002, he burst onto the scene, the same year Gooch, Cluxton and Sean Cavanagh all did, yet he was the one that ended up as the Young Player of the Year and the All-Ireland winner, tormenting All Star full-backs like Seamus Moynihan and Paddy Christie along the way.

In 2006, he was an All Star while picking up a third Ulster title on the trot, and then after a year out injured with a cruciate injury, he’d return in 2008 to win another All Star and Ulster. Armagh were maybe no longer the side they were when they’d McGeeney, but he and Stevie McDonnell remained one of the best tandems in all of football.

He wasn’t just big and strong; he’d skills. When he was 13 his best friend, Peter Quigley, had both the remarkable maturity and the grace as a rival Armagh Harps clubman to suggest to Clarke he needed to start kicking with his left foot. To this day Quigley will never fail to remind him, but, Clarke smiles, could you blame him? “Imagine, a boy of 13 coaching me how to kick the ball with the left? But he did.”

Clarke’s father Adrian, as one of the most prominent coaches in Pearse Óg’s, would hone his game as well. Show him there was no need to take five steps to get a shot off; one step could do. With two feet, you didn’t need to even take a step; just pivot and swing and that was it: over the bar. You couldn’t stop that.

And by the end of the last decade, Clarke seemed to be unstoppable. Until in 2010 an Achilles injury stopped him. That March he’d come off in a league game in Portlaoise and never play for Armagh again.

It wasn’t that he gave up on the dream; it was just his body would continue to give up on him. He’d push to get back to break down again. He was struggling to even play with the club, being only an intermittent presence, coming off the bench usually whenever he was fit to tog out.

It was highly frustrating. At times, even depressing.

“You’d been so used to being so active in your life. Training, training, training; loving life. Next thing [clicks fingers], it’s taken away like that there. Suddenly, you can’t drive, you’re off work.

“You could fall into a rut very easily. You could be drinking a lot, trying to deal with it and cover it up. Because you can only lay up in the house in Plaster of Paris for so long and only watch so much TV.

“I found myself out drinking on a Saturday and then a Sunday again. But then the penny dropped. My body’s not used to this. This isn’t for me. I said it to a friend, ‘I think I’m in despair here.’ And he said, ‘Right, let’s get you fit so. Even with that leg injury we can be working on your upper body.’”

At the start of this year though, he’d resolved to give it one huge last shot, with the long shot of even making it back with Armagh. All that time, the frustration had stemmed from sporadic glimpses, tastes of how joyous playing the game could be. He recalls one pre-season challenge game against Carrickmore a few years ago. Came on with about 10 minutes to go and with his first ball stuck it right over the bar.

“It was like being in an Ulster final again,” he beams. “All the boys [teammates] clapped for me after that. You can’t get that feeling anywhere else.”

This year he was getting it more and more frequently. He was kicking six or seven points a game. Maybe not enough to make it back with Armagh but enough to make it onto the starting 15 and help the club through to the county quarter-final. Then he ran into that post.

A long hopeful ball from the wing had been lumped in, his team desperately seeking a goal. He jumped up between the opposing full-back and goalie, seeing only the ball, and before he knew it he was in the net and colliding into a goalpost.

He immediately got up, and played on but his only memory thereafter is of leaving the dressing room in a huff, raging his side had exited the championship so tamely.

What he’s learned since is that while he was walking home, he started to feel unwell and called his brother Ross for a spin. When Ross found him, he was leaning over, getting sick. He was taken immediately to hospital, lapsing in and out of consciousness, where shortly upon his arrival he went into a coma.

Everyone feared the worse. His brain was swollen. Emergency surgery was required.

“We’re going day by day, hour to hour,” his father Adrian would tell reporters.

The one person of course who didn’t fear or know anything was Clarke himself. He’s still kind of ignorant of all that was going on back then. It’s not something he’s dwelled on or asked his loved ones to expand upon. What he does know is that they went through enough. And that he couldn’t put them through anymore. Though his first instinct upon waking up was to get out of that hospital as soon as he could and get back playing football again, reality dawned. Don’t even mention playing football again.

No more hoping for the all-clear.

“I know myself that time’s up. I have no regrets over the years playing football. I know I gave it my best shot. Whenever I was playing, whenever I was rehabbing, I gave it my best. I enjoyed my football. I loved playing for my club, my county, for Ireland. I count my blessings. When I think of what I have and what I’ve had, I can sleep easy.

“My whole outlook is different now. Things that would have got me down in the past don’t get me down now. I just turn everything into a positive now and I will be alright. That’s the way you have to look at it.”

A few weeks ago, the gym club that he and his brother Conor own ran free classes to raise £3,000 for the ICU unit in Craigavon that helped save his life. He’s really thrown himself into the gym which he and Conor took over in January, while coaching is another serious outlet. That was another thing that sustained him through the injury-plagued years. He’d start out helping boys out individually at the club. Then he coached a ladies team, and then the Monaghan Harps senior men’s team. This past summer he was a selector with Tullysaran that won a local junior championship. The other week then he was appointed the new manager of the Armagh ladies team.

He’s not making wild promises, just setting some goals. Hopefully stay in Division One. Progress through Ulster. Make an impact in the All-Ireland series. More importantly, work on their basic skills.

“I say to every team I go into ‘I don’t know it all, I’m still learning, but I’m not here for my own satisfaction, I’m here to give you satisfaction playing football.’ “That means coaching them the game. I’d spend 30 minutes at the start of each session on the basic skills. Picking the ball up right. Taking your four steps to get out of the tackle. Left and right hand. Left and right foot. Kick- passing would be a big thing of mine. Especially into the chest.

“It’s a dying art in the game because people are getting bogged down watching county teams and the way they play. They see top teams getting men behind the ball and so put 13 behind the ball themselves but half the boys don’t know what they’re doing there. Focus on the skills. Get them right and you won’t be far off in any game.”

And with that, he has to go.

“I’ve 40 women to trial here,” he beams “I’m just trying to move on from all that [the accident]. I don’t want to be remembered as the boy who hit a f****n’ goalpost!”

For anyone who saw him play, or very likely anyone who’ll be coached by him, there’s little danger of that.