Book review: It’s hard not to love Roddy Collins after reading The Rodfather

Collins' self-awareness is impressive

Paul Howard and Roddy Collins

• The Rodfather: Inside the Beautiful (Ugly, Ridiculous, Hilarious) Game
• Roddy Collins with Paul Howard
• Sandycove
• O'Mahonys, €20.99

This autobiography of Roddy Collins, the football player, club manager, and media personality (and much, much more) is a rollercoaster ride and a great read.

The book zips along from the opening pages, from his happy Cabra childhood in the 1960s (nine in a tiny two-bedroom house) to the present day, and co-author Paul Howard does a fine job. 

As a 15-year-old Collins fell in love at first sight with Caroline Hanney, whom he happily married and together they have five children and four grandchildren.

His highs and lows as a young striker foreshadowed his troubled time as a manager — none of his trials with Fulham, Arsenal and Wolves worked out. 

Which meant he began to earn his living as an apprentice plasterer, swapping one dog-eat-dog environment for another.

While Collins doesn’t sugar-coat personal tragedies like the early deaths of his father and Caroline’s father and other setbacks (he broke his legs four times as a player), the book is liberally laced with laugh-out-loud passages.

Whether it’s stories about Roddy in Penneys’ Y-fronts jumping out a window, lying to the Evening Herald that he was scoring hat-tricks for Bohs, convincing his wife they had won millions in the Lotto (they hadn’t), pretending he had a gun on a building site to ‘persuade’ a developer to pay him, or hiding prawns in a team-mate’s hotel room before a hot date, he’s clearly a natural wit.

The book is enhanced by not being the usual rags to riches and fame football tale. 

He’s very open about his financial troubles, and how he and Caroline lived from hand to mouth at times — about the meagre salaries (or no salaries), as a journeyman player and manager, how his plastering firm went into insolvency, and how in 2001 he couldn’t get paid his (measly) £200 a week wages by Carlisle United because he didn’t have a bank account.

But when he was flush, the money went towards suits in Louis Copeland, dresses in Brown Thomas, and holidays in Vegas or Florida. 

Roddy Collins when he was announced as the new Cork City manager in 2009.

Memorably, several nightclub door staff get a special mention in his ‘Acknowledgements’.

Collins’ honesty about his own volatility is another impressive feature. He never lets himself off the hook when his plans don’t work out. 

At 17, Johnny Giles brought him into the Ireland under-18 squad. 

He expected to play at centre-forward, but when told by Giles he was 12th man, he said “Fuck that” and walked out of the hotel and went home — which he immediately regretted. 

Twenty years later, when he met Giles again he said: ‘Johnny, you destroyed my life.’ 

Giles replied: ‘Ah, Roddy, you were full of yourself.’

His self-awareness is also impressive. 

When he lost his job as Bohs manager, he lashed out and staged a protest rally.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says. 

“It was cheap and shabby. My pride was hurt. I should have walked away with my held head high.”

While he isn’t easy on himself, he doesn’t spare others: the Bohs board; The Rovers 400 Club; John Lewis, his assistant manager at Carlisle; John Courtenay, his chairman at Carlisle and the main bête noir, John Delaney himself. 

All slated, and all with good reason.

Again the putdowns are often hilarious; when John Courtenay got into a fist fight with a steward at the Carlisle ground, Collins comments, “Courtenay thought decorum was a deodorant by Lynx.”

It’s hard not to love Roddy Collins after reading The Rodfather. 

You’d certainly want to be in his company, he’s a gifted storyteller and a real family man.

What a life, what a book. I highly recommend it.