Irish generosity knows no bounds

IN SANTA CRUZ, 80 miles south of San Francisco, a lady decides to hop on her bike and head north.

The weather in that part of northern California is just right for a nice cycle. But a 160-mile round trip?

Her parents are Irish and she is so moved by the story of a young Fermanagh footballer whose life was almost taken away from him on the field of play that she wants to meet the family which has flown from Ireland to be with their son and kid brother.

She arrives at San Francisco General Hospital with freshly made sandwiches from a nearby deli and asks for the Mc Govern boy, a boy she’d never met. The receptionist has no information about former patients.

A man overhears the conversation and gently interrupts.

Mark has been moved to a rehab clinic, he tells her.

He hasn’t known the Mc Governs long, he admits, but he’ll never forget them. He and his wife were on holiday in California but not long after they landed, she had been run over by a cyclist.

As she recuperated, he was left alone in a strange city and a strange hospital. He got chatting to the Mc Governs during their darkest hours, when they didn’t know if they’d ever get Mark back the same way, if at all. In spite of all this, they took him under their wing.

The Mc Govern family, parents Danny and Josie, sisters Connie, Helen and Grace along with Mark’s girlfriend Jessica Turley had enjoyed the incredibly generous care of the Irish community in San Francisco since that horrific phone call towards the end of June.

And so they didn’t have to search too far within themselves to pass on the favour to the stranger from Washington DC. He had a place to stay because they had a place to stay. He had food to eat because they had food to eat, prepared fresh every night by people they could never have imagined knowing.

Not like this.

Sometimes we’re told winning is more important than living and yet losing can bring with it an enormous sense of relief. On Thursday night, the still relatively new GAA facility on San Francisco’s Treasure Island played host to a senior football championship game which filled everyone involved with sickly apprehension.

A cloud hung heavy over the Bay Area and over this match in particular. The Ulster San Francisco club had not met the San Francisco Celts since June 25. In fact, they had only managed two games — a win and a draw — since Belcoo native and intercounty player Mark Mc Govern was felled by an off-the-ball incident which sent shockwaves all the way back home.

Former Tyrone minor and three-year San Francisco native Terry Tracey, goalkeeper and club secretary, also operates as a one-man welcoming committee for the young, mainly Ulster-born, footballing talent which arrives every year to make a summer home on the west coast.

“I picked Mark up from the airport the Monday night before it happened,” Tracey recalls. “He was looking forward to coming to the city. He got two nights training in. I didn’t get to know him that well but he seemed like a good lad and a great athlete. He has a great physique for a Gaelic footballer. The day of the game, I picked him up and we had the usual pre-game preparation. We were having good craic going over the Bay Bridge, just talking and laughing. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Two of Mark’s best friends from Belcoo, Ciarán Flaherty, a Fermanagh panellist, and Emmett Scollan were in the car too. They had arrived 10 days before him, preparing the town for his arrival, relishing the three months of football and sun that lay ahead.

“Mark and I had offers in New York and Boston,” Scollan, 25, tells me.

“We weren’t really sure what to do and then Ciarán got the call about going out to play for the Ulster football club.

“Myself and Mark had a good think about it and then we spoke to (club chairman) Joe Duffy and he made us want to come out and play football here. We looked online and it seemed like a good set up. The city also looked like a cool spot to be in so we just went for it. We were getting settled in. You couldn’t ask for a better bunch of lads to live with. They were all Tyrone lads and we clicked straight away. I couldn’t wait for Mark to arrive. Mark and I have a really good relationship, we’ve a lot in common, a lot of banter.”

Flaherty, a 23-year-old who was one of the 11 Erne men to withdraw their services from the county panel back in March, needed the break more than anyone. “We had been getting settled in, working our way around the city and we were just looking forward to Mark getting in and enjoying it with us. Then that happened and it wrecked the whole thing.”

Tracey recalled: “He was hit in the opposite goalmouth to the one I was in. People didn’t realise what had happened. It took me five minutes to get up there. I saw that he was completely unconscious and he was breathing very unusually through his nose. Really deep breaths. It took me a few moments to realise there was something really wrong and it was starting to dawn on us that he had probably been punched. It’s the worst thing that I’ve ever seen having played football for 20 years. He started getting seizures. I couldn’t believe what I was watching.”

News travelled home fast but nowhere near as lightning quick as it passed through the close-knit Irish community of what is a relatively small city.

Scollan will never forget the moment the two doctors told them their best friend wouldn’t make it through the night. But then the morning arrived and from then on, as much as he could, he never left his buddy’s bedside. He even moved house to be closer to the hospital.

“He just started to fight, he fought off his pneumonia, he fought off the MRSA bug. Everything that was thrown at him, he just fought it off. I’ve never seen a more determined person in my life.”

It was all still very unclear. They couldn’t even entertain the possibility of rehab so sending out the rallying cry was some way off yet.

“Even before the fundraising started to get going, I was getting so many calls,” Scollan continues. “I had 50 private messages in my Facebook, I had to delete some because the inbox was filling up so much. People I didn’t even know, people from all over Ireland, were getting in contact.

“There are a lot of Belcoo and Fermanagh people in Boston and New York and they were ringing me up within a day or two of it happening, offering help, asking if there was anything they could do.

“Then the community within San Francisco were amazing. The club was fantastic, they couldn’t do enough for us. They were unreal. People were looking to give up their houses and giving us lifts wherever we needed to be. They’d want to feed you, whatever you needed, they were there.

“And that was before the Mc Governs arrived. When they got here, it went to a whole new level of generosity.”

Sean Canniffe, publisher and editor of the local monthly newspaper, The Irish Herald, agreed.

“As bad as this incident was, and it really was a terrible experience for Mark, the one silver lining is the way it brought the Irish community and the GAA community in particular together. There was a Mass three days after the incident and ever since, people have been falling over themselves to help out with the family.”

So many people clicked into gear. There was club committee member Seamus Canning who guided the Mc Governs through that first chaotic week. Club chairman Joe Duffy and countless others. Support would soon flow in from every branch of the GAA, from Belcoo O’Rahilly’s to the New York County Board and all the way to the top man Christy Cooney, who visited almost two weeks ago.

Mark’s youngest sister Grace, 25, who postponed her October wedding, has yet to figure out a way of showing her gratitude for the kindness of the countless strangers.

Like that woman from Santa Cruz. And the people who’d turn up on their doorsteps with offers of help and kind words. Unquantifiable gestures of humanity from home and all over the world that she firmly believes pushed her brother through the darkest days.

Grace kept a diary, chronicling the endless hours spent by his bedside during his four-week coma. She recorded everything, happy moments, moments of anguish, the various gifts and cards arriving by the truckload, who did what, who gave what. She would act as spokesperson with the media, for Facebook pages supporting her brother and with the doctors from who she demanded daily, sometimes twice daily prognoses, filtering out some of the worst-case-scenario predictions, keeping it to herself rather than worrying the family.

Through it all, nobody gave up being there for them.

Grace recalled: “One day we were out and about and it was really hot. We were suddenly worried about sunscreen and that was it, someone just ran off and got it for us. It was incredible, almost embarrassing.

“I honestly don’t know how I’ll ever thank these people. So many called around. ‘We’re here for you’. You always imagine that people would be supportive but this went beyond anything we could ever have expected.”

She continued with her scrapbook, chronicling every good deed but soon she was able to stop making note of Mark’s medical progress. Now he was awake and now he was communicating. And just over a week ago came the news that he could be moved to start the rehab process.

“He knows there’s a reward at the end of all this,” Grace reveals. “His dream is to go to Las Vegas and that’s where we’re going to get him. His improvement has been a miracle. That’s all I can say. One nurse went on holidays in the middle of this and came back and couldn’t find Mark in his room. ‘He’s right there’, we told her. She was shocked at how handsome he is.”

But the game goes on.

“The family gave us their blessing to go ahead with the season,” Tracey points out. “A lot of boys were in limbo about playing, I was one of them. I wasn’t sure if I was going to play again. After the family did that, a lot of the senior boys decided to go back and give it a go and see what would happen.”

Last Thursday didn’t go their way — Celts won 3-9 to 0-10 — with players having booked holidays prior to the schedule changing so dramatically.

“It was very emotional beforehand,” admitted chairman Joe Duffy, who shook hands with Celts management before the throw-in.

“We talked about Mark. It did effect some of the lads. But it was almost more important to get the game out of the way. We’re still very much in the championship because of our previous results. Thursday night was nearly more important for Celts. Of course it was important for everybody but they needed the win. We only need one more victory and we’re through to the semi-final.”

Ciarán was nervous but decided to play — for his team and for Mark. Emmett, in two minds until a few hours before the throw-in, decided against it. They go home on September 7, two days after Mark’s 23rd birthday. They hope and pray he won’t be far behind.

“Mark’s a character, he’s the one who keeps us entertained,” says Emmett. “We have a really close group of friends and he’s always the centre of the circle. He’s that funny, the way he goes on. And that hasn’t changed since he’s come out of the coma. Don’t get me wrong, Mark has a long road ahead of him. But when you see him smile, it does your heart good. He puts you in such good form. His facial expressions, it’s all still there. He’s still the same Mark.”