Tompkins: How coma nearly finished me
Football legend Larry Tompkins spent two days in a coma as a 20-year-old after a foul blow in a championship game in Kildare with his home club, Eadestown.
“It was a tricky time, a hard time for my parents. It was touch and go, being in a coma for that length of time, whether you’d come out of it,” Tompkins reveals in an utterlyfascinating Irish Examiner podcast interview, available from today.
Tompkins addresses the key chapters in a remarkable football life, including his controversial departure from Kildare, in a two-part special.
But in a career pockmarked by serious injuries, the GAA Hall of Famer says the sly elbow inflicted in 1983 in an Intermediate game against Castledermot almost put a full stop on a football career that had seen him make his Kildare senior debutat 16.
“I got really taken out of it after half-time. I got up afterwards, and took a stagger. Nobody knew what concussion was (then). I scored 1-10 and we hammered them out of the gate. But I don’t remember anything about the game and collapsed in the dressing room. I was in a coma for over two days. I was 20, playing the football of my life, and looking forward to an All-Ireland U21 semi-final against Derry.
“It was a real touch and gosituation. They were contemplating a lot of operations, there was a lot of hard talking done. It looked like it was over for me. A hairline fracture of the skull on the temple bone. I was told I couldn’t do anything for 12 months. But I was back playingwithin eight-nine months.”
Tompkins is frank, forthright, and detailed on the row with Kildare GAA which short-circuited his inter-county career with the Lilywhites. He had an agreement with manager Eamon O’Donoghue to travel back from New York for a Leinster SFC game against Meath in 1985 — on the basis that the county board covered his return flight to the US.
Tompkins says he had no issue with O’Donoghue’s guarantees that the agreement would be honoured, but added: “There was always that (issue) in my head that this wasn’t going to be plain sailing.”
He explains:
I played the game against Meath. I played ok, didn’t play great. It wasn’t one of my best games by any manner of means. I scored three points, went back into the dressing room after the game and Eamon came over to me and he was absolutely furious. He said the boys have told me that there is no ticket there for you.
“Eamon was gutted because Ihad been dealing with him. It didn’t surprise me. They said they would see me down in the hotel to explain it to me, it was the Beechmont Hotel in Navan. I’ll never forget it.
“I didn’t travel back on the bus — all the players including the likes of John Crofton, Paddy Donoghue, Shea Fahy, stalwarts of Kildare, played in that game that day and they all knew the story.
“I arrived back in the hotel, I was having no meal, I just wanted to get out of there. I just went down to see them (county board officials Pat Dunny and Seamus Aldridge.). They were in having their meal with the minor team that played that day as well. They never even lifted their heads. I will never forget the words that they said.
“I had never ever missed a training session and they said ‘look, we couldn’t get any ticket for you to go back to New York’, it was late booking or something like that. They never even looked at me when they said it. Dunny didn’t take his face off the table and Aldridge was talking as he was eating.
“I just said ‘F**king hell, ye are the great shower of whatever and I said it was no wonder that Kildare football is the way it is.’
“I said to them ‘Look, I’m badly stuck. How am I going to get back to America? And they made me make an agreement that if they wrote out a cheque, I would pay them back. They wrote out a cheque for £740 and gave it to me under the agreement that I would pay them back.
“I took the cheque anyway and a lot of things went on in my head. The senior players — I’ll neverforget — were coming in the door, some were in the bar before they went in for their meal and John Crofton was like a lunatic and I believe there was a fairly big schmezzole inside in the meal area when it came to light what happened.
“But I was gone at this stage with my brother. So I went home that night and I told my father that I would never play with Kildare again. I said I don’t know what is going to happen in New York or how long I am going to be there for — but I left under those circumstances.”
The Larry Tompkins Story Part 1: The madness, the passion, and the need to win
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