Made in Killarney
THE absence of fuss was evident and rather heartening. But for a quartet of gawking Cavan fans, the most exciting gaelic football talent in Ireland walked in and around the Tatler Jack pub on Killarney’s College Street without a second look.
Standing in the doorway, one local brushed past, enquiring of Celtic’s wellbeing. “3-1 in front” said Colm Cooper of Dr. Crokes and Kerry.
The waitress who served him an athlete’s lunch of burgers and chips with a pint of water was scarcely older than 22-year-old Cooper, but like everyone else in Tatler’s, she eyed the stranger with the suspicion of a mother hen. Patrick O’Sullivan, heir to the Tatler throne, and Gooch’s unofficial minder, shook his head at Cooper as he walked by. “Disaster” he sighed.
I waited and wondered but like he has a thousand times, Gooch stepped up with an answer.
“Seven a side final, Thursday night. We lost 1-0, couldn’t put the ball in the net.” You playing? “Naw, manager. It was all the boys. Luke, Cheese, Melon, Fox, Dodge, Messy. Dodge was the only non-Crokes fella.”
This was interesting. Cooper was less interested in identifying the fruit, vegetables and animals of his team than he was the only player not from Dr Crokes. Same as it ever was in The Tatler.
Some context. ‘The Tatler’ is Eddie O’Sullivan, the proprietor of the Dr. Crokes coop, a former Kerry selector, Crokes head coach and a man with a low threshold for bullshit. There is an established life path for half of Killarney and this is how it goes: school at the Sem (St Brendan’s), football with Crokes, basketball with St Vincents/Paul’s, work in The Tatler.
“It’s always been that way,” explains Pat O’Shea, now a coach of considerable nous who once donned the mantle of wizard Dr Crokes corner-forward with the razor sharp brain and left foot. He was also the finest basketball point guard in this country for half a dozen years. “The Tatler always looked after the Crokes kids, whether it was a summer job or just somewhere to hang out. And it had the added bonus for the club of bonding the youngsters.”
“It also meant we’d give them the time off for matches,” says Eddie. “Colm started very young, he used be picking up the glasses. You could always see he was going to make something for himself,” whispered Tatler. “As a person, mind.”
Now O’Shea and that All-Ireland club winning generation of Dr. Crokes footballers foster the next wave. There were four Kerry minors from the club on duty in last Monday’s All-Ireland quarter-final success over Laois, and a host of ex-players and club members in the stand. One of them was Colm Cooper.
“He would have been there for the club, but also because he just has a natural interest in going to games. He would never go because he felt he had to,” explains O’Shea, who, to prove the theory, ended up marrying Tatler’s daughter, Deborah Ann.
Back over the burger, Cooper is nodding. “If there was nothing happening on a Saturday night, I’d always stray out to watch a county league game, or some kind of game. Sometimes it’s nice to switch off.”
Except he never switches off during a game, irrespective of what side of the barrier he’s on. “I do look at players to see is there something I can pick up, learn off them. You’ll always have a look at the full back line, just in case you might be marking them down the road. I know fellas who wouldn’t go to a club game if they had nothing else to do, but they don’t know what they’re missing. You might just find that 1% that gives you an extra edge. You study every little detail if you can. That’s the kind of person I am, I like to know what’s going on around me, and if I can get that extra bit on my opponent, know where he’s weak....”
Understandably, there is the unspoken fear in Killarney and Kerry that it has all got too steep too quickly for the boy wonder from Ardshanavooly estate. “There’s been an awful lot of growing up for him to do very quickly,” says Pat O’Shea, “and that’s why it’s good for him to have people around him who will look out for his welfare. He is in the spotlight at a very young age...”
Eddie Tatler isn’t fretting. “He has his head well screwed on, and most importantly, he has great time for his own crowd, the same fellas.”
When he needs space, Gooch goes ‘missing’, which means absent with friends. “I need my space at times, to be in switch-off mode. I like doing things on my own, playing pitch and putt, golf with the lads.”
The lads? “Yeah, but they leave football out of the conversation. Ninety per cent of my waking hours are spent thinking about football, even when we’re not training or playing. Most of the lads would have an interest, but they’d know to leave it off for a while.”
Fleetingly, it crosses his mind to move on out of Dodge, see a bit of God’s work. Then the roar of the crowd at Croke Park laps over him and washes the thought away. “At the moment, I’m living for the day, but ten years down the road, there’s no way I’ll have the drive and passion to be still doing this. Absolutely no way,” he emphasises. “But for now I’m enjoying it. You dream of travelling, but the thing that keeps you around is playing at Croke Park, or Pairc Ui Chaoimh for a Munster final.”
Cooper has done both, and well. Last September, he claimed an All-Ireland final winning goal straight out of a Roy of the Rovers comic strip. Seasoned professionals in the press area stood up and applauded. But talking now, both of us remember the game’s other goal after four minutes, from Mayo’s Alan Dillon.
“Do you remember? The stadium almost shook. But there was no panic from us. Against Limerick (twice) and against Derry, we never panicked. Whereas before if we went down a few points, we tended to make rash decisions. We’ve matured.”
Cooper, Cinnéide and Crowley looked across and caught each other’s eye that day. “Time to go to work,” remembers Cooper.
That was the thing about the last meeting between tomorrow’s quarter-finalists. The blueness of Kerry’s focus. Ice-cold. “There were no nerves, we knew what we had to do. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it was like we knew we were ready, we knew there was a big performance in us. Even around the team hotel beforehand, there was no visible tension.”
Two months later, bleary-eyed from a good winter, Cooper pulled the curtains and watched the final, on his own, for the first time. He liked what he saw when he had the time to pause and rewind, when he wasn’t cradling pints and dreaming of the New Year in Las Vegas and Cancun.
Sharpness. Aggression. “We were ten points up late on, and there was a ball down in the corner, and Aidan O’Mahony was diving on some sub’s boot down. Guys were so up for it.”
HE ONLY had time to change his suitcase between Cancun and the All-Star trip to Hong Kong. His off-season, Cooper remembers, finished on a Wednesday in January. Friday night he was back training.
“It was real shitty weather. The training was down in the Legion field, and ordinarily you’d hate the thought of it, but it was cool to meet the lads, everyone again. Get back together. Once you had sampled the rewards, you never feel as bad doing the work that gets you there.”
The training helps, the variety that Pat Flanagan brings to sessions. Last year it was the harness chasing, this season it’s the open parachute. “It’s hard because you are being blown from side to side when you’re soloing, like being buffeted on the pitch. It’s good practice.”
Does Colm Cooper need practice at being buffeted? Being the most mercurial talent in the Championship brings its own shoving and shuntin, but Gooch, who works in the local AIB bank, understands and he’s getting better at dealing with craw-thumpers.
“You have to mind yourself a bit more, but if I was on the opposition, and you saw a threat, wouldn’t you try and mark him that bit tighter? It’s there in club games, at all levels. You know it’s coming, and must be prepared for it.
“I’m a small bit wiser, I think. I know when to back away from things. If I get stuck in, it’s taking away from what I’m there to do, they’ll force you into things you normally don’t do. You lose the run of yourself.”
He dodged the disciplinary dock against Limerick this year and amid the calls from his manager to protect football’s crown jewels, pledged to use the experience beneficially. “You can say every day you will be cool, but there’s so much at stake out there, you don’t know how you will react to the pressure, the crunch.
“I try to go into my own little zone, block out the side shows, zoom into what you want from a game. The booing doesn’t faze me, it’s water off a duck’s back, I’ll have no problem if that continues.”
Neither does he get twitchy or nervous nowadays. Last September, he didn’t get an All-Ireland final touch against Mayo for fifteen minutes and pilfered 1-5. He “knows the score” when he starts feeling the rub of studs on the back of his calves, and knows the boys are always there for him ‘if something needs to be said or done’. “But at this stage I’d be confident enough I don’t need any help.”
AND now back to Croke Park for the Sunday stroll with poor Mayo. “Crazy isn’t it? I’ve seen some bookies giving short odds on three in a row! That’s pressure we don’t need, but you have to block it out. We’re playing a team that destroyed Tyrone at this stage last season, and people will say ‘ah that was last year’. Well, so was our All-Ireland win.”
Whatever. Cooper did his thing this week. The groin is good again. Slight worry there, bad memories from before. “We lost to Tyrone in one of the worst performances I can remember and then I went to see (Dr) Gerry McEntee and he said I needed an operation. It put me out for a long time and it was the same groin I felt a twinge in against Milltown-Castlemaine. But I was kicking with it Friday and there was no reaction Saturday.”
Tomorrow he’ll slide unnoticed into his corner of the dressing room, just like the Tatler. Bottom of the bar, on the right. Old habits. “I don’t bang on tables or confide in anyone special. As a group, the forwards, especially the inside line, we’ll talk about plays, what we’ll switch if things aren’t working.” There’s no protractors or clipboards. “It’s really about influencing the play, what works best for us.”
I mention Jack O’Connor and his lieutenants, Ger O’Keeffe and Johnny Culloty, the legend from the other half of Killarney, the Legion half.
“You talk about me knowing every player in Kerry. Now Jack DOES know every player. He’s ticked all the boxes,” Cooper stresses. Schools, colleges, Under 21s, seniors, and a player with Dromid Pearses until a year or two ago.
And you can tell Gooch likes that, admires attention to detail. It will slip through the cracks of this piece, but the sidebars, the references to players from other clubs - “you know he broke his hand”, “he was a Kerry minor two years ago” - creates its own impression of a young man in love with his trade.
“When we were preparing for the 1992 All-Ireland club final, he was there every night. Every single night, kicking around,” Eddie O’Sullivan recalls.
When he was 14, he was advised to develop a right foot. He spent two years with the Kerry minors (2000, 2001), losing the latter semi-final to Dublin. He still had the time and diary space to practice ‘til it ached.
“I’d bring ten balls up to the Crokes pitch and work from every angle, always out of my hand. I was never good off the ground. Then I’d do it with the right foot, and keep going til I matched my left.”
He’s not quite Maurice Fitzgerald in that regard, but he’s got time. Before he’d manoeuvre it over the bar off the outside of his left foot.
Nowadays he’s happier on his right side.
But those traumatic defeats in Croke Park to Armagh and Tyrone are occasional visitors when he’s alone and in space. “They left scars on all of us. And we’re one defeat away from being down there once more. As Jack said, all we did last year was wipe the slate clean. Those things keep you on your toes.”
And if they don’t, he can always call into the Tatler.
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