Colm Cooper had nothing more to prove to anyone
IN THE summer of 2001 Johnny Crowley was playing football of such a high order that the mention of his name would automatically trigger that of John Egan.
If Mike Frank Russell’s finesse and finishing made him the then equivalent of Mikey Sheehy, then Crowley’s game and form was reminiscent of Sheehy’s great compadre, a man that introduced the rest of the world to the existence of a place named Sneem.
All through that summer All-Star calibre corner-backs were routinely brushed aside by Crowley’s strength before he’d either point from any angle or power through for a goal. At one stage that summer I called Egan as part of a profile on Crowley and Egan said if anything, he was the one flattered by the comparison. Maybe he had longevity on his side, but his best could hardly have been better than Crowley’s best.
The following summer of 2002, Johnny Crowley, a reigning All-Star, could not make the Kerry team.
Dara Ó Cinnéide was at full forward; as the best freetaker on the panel and someone having a career-best season, there simply had to be a place on the team for him.
As the most dead-eyed finisher in all of football at the time, Mike Frank was an automatic.
And then in the other corner, keeping Crowley out of the team, was a rake-thin teenager called Colm “Gooch” Cooper.
There was no way he could be left off either.
So prodigious was Cooper’s talent, he even usurped Mike Frank in the pecking order that summer. Only minutes into Cooper’s fifth-ever senior game for the county, an early-round qualifier against Wicklow, Darragh Ó Sé could be heard imploring his teammates, “Get the ball into Gooch! Every time!”
On what other team in the country would Mike Frank Russell’s corner not be your number one option?
As it transpired, Russell would finish with a goal and three points that day; Cooper, with just the solitary point. But everything had gone through him because the likes of Ó Sé knew he’d get everyone involved.
Over that summer Cooper would evolve into a finisher as much as a playmaker. “I think he recognised that if he was going to make the inside line for Kerry, he’d have to add another dimension to his play,” Pat O’Shea would tell me for a piece on the eve of that 2002 All-Ireland final.
“I suppose when he saw the likes of Mike Frank throwing points over from all over the place, the kid in Gooch said, ‘I’ll try it from there too.’” He was a sponge that way. He became the best of Kerry and football by absorbing and observing all the best of Kerry and football. Twenty-five years ago, in the lead-up to Dr Crokes’ All-Ireland club final appearance, Marty Morrissey visited the club and felt compelled to include the eight-year-old club mascot and resident field rat in his piece. When Morrissey asked who his favourite player was, Cooper mentioned Maurice Fitzgerald.
His other role model was much closer to home. The GAA picture of 2017 has to be that which featured on the front page of the Irish Examiner the day after Crokes finally won another All-Ireland club title: the final whistle gone and Cooper’s eyes meeting Pat O’Shea’s on the touchline, their arms outstretched, about to embrace one another.
Outside of that of a father and son, it is hard to think of a more intense bond between a player and coach in all of football. That moment caught on camera was over 25 years in the making.
Harry O’Neill was a selector to Crokes last month as well as being the manager who gave his club senior debut, back in 2000, when he came on as a raw 17-year-old and immediately helped the club to the county title. A few years earlier than that again, work had taken O’Neill away from Killarney. The first time he set eyes on Cooper, he instantly thought, “That’s a redhead Pat O’Shea.”
Light but so smart, so skilled. As an international basketballer, O’Shea was two-handed; so was Cooper. And then there was the movement. If Maurice had inspired him as to what he could do on the ball, O’Shea had opened him up to what he could do without it.
As the former Kerry goalkeeper Eamonn Fitzgerald put it, he had this rare “ability to get lost and found”, a quality which only last week Steven McDonnell highlighted as one of the qualities which made Gooch Gooch.
CDONNELL and his Armagh teammates would ultimately win that 2002 All-Ireland and so the summer would be deemed theirs. But right up until the last couple of minutes of that Sunday in September when it dawned that Armagh were on the verge of their first-ever All Ireland, that summer had felt like the summer of Gooch.
It would turn out to be the decade of Gooch, if it belonged to anyone in football at all. Yeah, he didn’t win every championship but he adorned virtually every single one.
Take 2013. The year he went to centre forward. That game and that pass for that goal against Dublin in the semi-final. Kerry did not win that day — something that would anguish Cooper — but in possibly the best game of football ever, he was the best player on the field. Even when he couldn’t guarantee Kerry would win, he’d help make sure football won.
Cooper was always about something more than something as mundane as to whether he or someone else won the All-Ireland. The man won eight All Stars. Only two of those All-Stars coincided with him winning an All-Ireland the same year. For the first dozen seasons of his inter-county career, there were only two years — 2003 and 2012 — that he didn’t win either an All-Star or an All-Ireland. Six times he won an All-Star in a year he didn’t win an All-Ireland, a record only the Limerick hurler Joe McKenna has matched.
For all the silk and skill, there was true steel there as well. That rolling ball with his marker ready to thump him or fall on top of him; he never shirked it. His response to the death of a close friend was to humiliate Cork into submission only 20 minutes into an All-Ireland semi-final. Within days of his father’s death, he came off the bench to kick two points and seal a draw against Dublin to put him in line for another league medal. O’Donoghue Cup in December, National League up in Crossmaglen in February, a county league on a delightful May evening, Croke Park – only Mikey Sheehy has scored more goals on All-Ireland final day: Whatever the stage, the biggest stage or off Broadway, didn’t matter; he’d grace it, he’d make you famous, conjure up a moment you’d never forget.
In truth, he wasn’t quite the same after the layoff in 2014. He knew it too which is why he’s finishing it up now. Of course he could still do a job for Kerry, like he did last year. But he could read the signs of slippage, especially playing Dublin. Having to try to contain a Johnny Cooper and a Philly McMahon when it used to be a case whether they or anyone could contain him.
That attempted point last August that Stephen Cluxton took off the crossbar would have anguished him as well; in his prime — and few players have had quite as elongated a prime as him — he’d have nailed it.
He had nothing more to prove to anyone. No one has been better at the game than him. Nobody has loved the game more than him — another reason why he’s going now, instead of prompting the possibility of feeling sick of it. The game was a joy to him.
It’s our blessing that the pleasure wasn’t all his.
