Colorado-based Corkman Colm O’Neill still feels old Kerry rivalry
Boulder, Colorado, suits Colm O’Neill and his family. The climate’s agreeable, and so is the lifestyle.
The sports suit them, too, but not just because Shane togged out for the US in soccer and Darragh is a punter for the University of Colorado Buffaloes.
It’s less tense than if they were in the black and white jersey their father wore.
“It’s good in one sense,” says Colm, “Because if I were back in Midleton and the lads were playing hurling and football, then there’d be arguments every second day.
“I’d be pointing out what they were doing wrong and they’d be arguing with me. At least with the American football I’d know the difference between a good punt and a bad punt, but in general play, the positions and the moves and plays in the sport... I haven’t a clue. I sit there in blissful ignorance.
“With soccer it’s different, you’d have seen a lot more of that as a kid or played a bit of it, you have a notion of what’s going on, but it’s Shane’s sport. I didn’t play soccer at that level.”
Still, you know the name.
O’Neill pere won two senior football All-Irelands with Cork and collected All-Ireland club honours with Midleton. Boulder is a long way from the usual Irish locations, places like Dorchester and Woodlawn on the east coast, though. How did O’Neill end up there?
“We moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I played for a team called the Wolfe Tones in Detroit. The Murrays were the family involved in the club and ran the team, and we became close.”
The O’Neills went in with one of the Murrays in a pub in Ann Arbor, Conor O’Neill’s, but when a native of Boulder, Colorado asked them to organise a similar venture in his home town, they headed west.
“This’ll be our 15th year out here, and Boulder’s nice. Denver is nearby, it’s the size of Dublin, and Boulder is 20-odd miles outside it.
“It’s a good-sized Irish community here, but not so big that you’d be falling out with anyone. There’s a GAA team in Denver, and it’s a nice crowd compared to going somewhere like Chicago or New York. Sometimes in those cities where there’s a huge Irish population, you can find that someone says ‘well, that’s a Kerry pub, a Cork guy wouldn’t go in there’, or ‘that’s a Connemara pub’.
“It’s different out here, it’s just Irish together, which is enjoyable.”
O’Neill was just 29 when he went to America. Young enough to keep going with Cork. Old enough to have amassed plenty of memories.
“To be honest, it was easy enough going, in sports terms,” he says.
“I had an All-Ireland medal; Cork had played in four All-Ireland football finals and I played in three of them.
“The likes of Niall Cahalane and Anthony Davis were lads I’d played minor and U21 with, we had minor, U21 and senior medals, so by any standards we’d had a very good run.
“With Midleton we won the county and the All-Ireland club, and UCC were very strong in the Fitzgibbon that time, so in terms of silverware, I couldn’t complain. There were no regrets sports-wise, certainly, in going to America. The nice thing being involved with Cork is that you made great friendships, but the thing abut winning an All-Ireland is that it made you realise you were lucky, too — with UCC you’d have played Sigerson with Waterford or Tipperary lads, and the difference was where you were born.
“Before you realised that your thoughts might have been ‘oh, if I win an All-Ireland I must be a hell of a player’, but the experience of meeting lads from other counties in college brought it home that you were really just in the right place at the right time.
“In that regard winning the All-Ireland was nice, but in terms of pure enjoyment, winning the All-Ireland club with Midleton in 1988 was the most fun. My brother was involved, they were all lads you’d grown up with — that and winning the county in 1983.
“Those were the great days.”
And not so remote, either. O’Neill recently tracked down footage of Midleton’s 1988 win over Athenry on YouTube: his kids knocked plenty of craic out of it.
“YouTube is mighty. Our gang would have seen plenty of the Kerry Golden Years team and so on, and when they saw the Midleton-Athenry it was great craic. They’re well tuned in.
“What gets most play on YouTube, though, is their uncle’s point against Dublin in 2001, particularly when that popped up on RTÉ’s greatest GAA moments a few years back.”
Ah yes, the uncle: Maurice Fitzgerald.
With bloodlines like those, it’s no surprise that the O’Neill boys are so proficient in the keen competition of American sports. Not that their father sees that competition being quite as cutthroat as people say, mind.
“In my opinion, it’d be no more competitive than secondary school competition in Ireland. When I think of playing county finals for Midleton against the Glen or Na Piarsaigh, that was as competitive as you could get, honestly.
“What’s probably hardest to get your head around — for me anyway — is the business side of children’s sport. We have lots of family still at home and their kids play away at home, but it’s different here.”
O’Neill has had experience with the full spectrum of US field sports.
“Soccer would be the big sport for our kids, and to me, it’s the best-organised.
“You equate America with baseball and American football, and we put down a few years in Texas before coming to Boulder. The kids played under-10 baseball, and it was viciously competitive, but it’s a niche sport. To me the family would have to be into baseball, really.
“The difference with American football is that it seems to take off in high school. Obviously the GAA revolves around the club, and the school to a lesser extent, but here high school football is the key to everything, because you don’t really have American football clubs the way you’d have GAA clubs.
“When our kids started playing competitive soccer around 11 years of age — regular club, with games played locally — then you might have to fork out a thousand dollars for them for the season. For me the big deterrent for America progressing at soccer is the expense that kicks in at that stage. All the coaches are being paid at that competitive underage level; and for those guys to be paid, someone has to pay out — the parents.”
The expense makes soccer a middle class sport, then, by default.
“Big time,” says O’Neill. “On top of that then again you have the ‘soccer mom’ phenomenon, where the mothers are involved in bringing the kids to the games and say to themselves, ‘this is a good sport, I don’t want my kid getting busted up playing American football’. And if they pursue the soccer there’s always the chance of a college scholarship at the end of it. Sport is an investment in the kid’s education. The difference is that kids don’t pay for American football, because it’s all provided by the high school, so you see kids from families which are less well off making it through football.”
Son Shane has attracted plenty of attention at soccer, getting called up by US manager Jurgen Klinsmann for recent friendlies, though he wouldn’t be averse to wearing green either.
“I spoke to Noel King a couple of years ago,” says O’Neill.
“He rang the house and asked if Shane would be interested (in Ireland), and I said he would be.
“I can’t remember exactly how we left it, whether it was ‘I’ll get back to you’, but we didn’t hear from him again.
“Then, last summer, Shane was over training with Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough, and someone called him from the FAI and asked if that number was the best one to get him at, but he never heard from them again.
“He’d be enthusiastic about talking to the guys in the FAI to see what opportunities are there, really, really interested, but they’ve never contacted him properly.
“I got the impression someone in the FAI was interested in talking to him but they didn’t follow through on it. He’d definitely like to talk about that, but I suppose it’s hard to be interested when it looks like they’re not interested.
“If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, ‘would Shane ever be interested in playing for Ireland?’ I’d be a rich man, but I always say it’s a moot point because we’ve never had a real conversation with them about it.”
Darragh, meanwhile, caught the eye with a spectacular catch a couple of weeks ago in an All-Star college game.
There’s more quality on the way up, by the way — Grace, Kate, Enda and Mark are all talented athletes — but the biggest question of all has to be asked.
Who do they shout for when Cork play Kerry? O’Neill laughs.
“There were doubts early on about their allegiance, Kerry or Cork, but I straightened all of that out. Sure, I had to put a stop to that.”
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