could yis get it so wrong? Youse can’t know anything about football, youse can’t.’ I know this – the country knows this – as they report their roasting post-match. Out of the sports pages the following day I can hear his voice rising on the ‘can’t’, his South Derry brogue crackling in fury and triumph.
But seven weeks later I am at his side in Clones after Derry’s Ulster Final win. In fact, I’m round his neck and his shoulder and his back, and we’re up to our ankles in the mud of the pitch. I don’t know how I got to him through the victory-crazed throng but we’re jumping and hugging and shouting, delirious with delight. His sisters and my brothers are scattered all around but I’m off into the field and I reach him, just before the gathering press pack. ‘Coleman’, ‘Eamonn’, ‘Eamonn, how does it feel to be Ulster champions?’
‘Get away to fuck outta that will yis? Sure what do you want to talk to me for?’
And they fold with laughter, not with nervousness or embarrassment but with like, ‘Ah here comes Coleman’s craic’, the elite of Ireland’s sports writers facing this Ballymaguigan bricklayer. They soothe, cajole and coax, ‘Ach Eamonn, now, come on’, and I’m jostled back among the microphones, the jotters and the bustling pens. He’ll give them what they need but first he’ll give them hell.
‘Why do they put up with you?’ I ask as we relive the thunder of Clones. It’s a few weeks after the game in my tiny north Belfast home. We’re watching tapes of the great eighties Liverpool teams and talking about Brian Clough.
‘Must be the nice smile, I have’, turn of the head, flash, grin. He does that, he disarms you, devilment dancing from every pore, his smile is full frontal enamel and his green eyes wrinkle and spark. But on the sideline, he’s a demon, pointing and effing and roaring. He’s in front of the disciplinary committee so often, they tell him, ‘Just take your usual seat.’ But not this year, this year he has the best disciplinary record of any manager in Ireland because this year he has the best team. In the semi-final and five points down against the mighty Dubs, the roar of the Derry crowd lifts him out of his boots.
‘Aw God man, it was tarra’, he had thought, ‘it’d be no good if we didn’t win’.
I’d looked down the seats at my uncle, my mammy, my brothers, my aunt. They’re ashen with fear and I pray to my Granda, dead since the November before, ‘Ah Christ if you’re there, Tommy, do something’. A committed non-believer, in desperation I’m a devotee. Derry get their miracle and my family praise the day.
One month later we’re back in Croke Park for the All-Ireland Final against Cork. This time it’s standing room only and I can see nothing through the heaving mass. On my tiptoes, I twist and stretch, smiling frantically at a harassed steward, ‘Are there free seats around the ground anywhere?’ Fifty All-Ireland Finals he’s marshalled and someone always needs a better seat. ‘See that dark-haired man down there?’ I plead, ‘That’s my uncle Eamonn.’
He finds me a seat – among the Cork fans – and laughs, ‘I hope you’re as happy when you come out.’
I am. For the first time in 106 years Derry are All-Ireland kings and my uncle, my godfather and friend is the man to have them crowned. What a feat, what glory, what pride, I babble when I see him after the game. ‘Bullshit this about managers’, he says, ‘the players is the men.’
The victors stay in Dublin for their gala celebration and we file off into the homeward-headed hordes. Out of the capital into Louth, we’re the heroes along the way; the hunters home from the Hill. Kids fly makeshift Derry flags; we honk and beep horns in reply. On the steps of the convent in Drogheda, nuns wave cushion covers of red and white; across the border into Down and an elderly man flies a Supervalu bag, no doubt trailed from a kitchen drawer – the first red and white banner he could find. We know now that thirty-one counties have been at our backs all the way and as first-time winners of the Sam Maguire, they are letting us have our day.
For Eamonn, the next day’s triumphant return proves to be more precious than the trophy he coveted: ‘To come up through Tyrone with the Sam Maguire, I could’ve driv’ up the street again.’ We wait for hours in Maghera with the tens of thousands of others. Red and white. Then … silver. As the victory bus inches towards us, Sam is the masthead at the front. We see Eamonn on the top deck, turn of the head, flash, grin. Then he’s lost in a tumultuous sea as his boys carry him to the stage on their shoulders through the crowds and the crashing waves of unbridled joy. Not one for public speaking, we can hear little of him above the din except, ‘We needed this All-Ireland more than Cork ’cos they already have six.’ Red, white … silver. It’s all black and white to him.
But the elation soon fades to grey – he misses the training and the boys: ‘You feel there should be more, you should have someone else to play. It’s something you dream about all your life and then when you get it, your dream has gone.’
When the Championship of 1994 arrives, the All-Ireland champions are drawn to face Down. ‘One of the best games of football ever played’, he declares after Derry have lost their crown. For the first time in my life at a football match, I’d sank to my hunkers and cried. ‘You never celebrate enough when you win the way you grieve when you lose’: words of his I’d taken little notice of until that sunny day in May. He is more philosophical, although strangely cowed. ‘We were spent; we’d got what we wanted. Down beat us in a brilliant game. It wasn’t as sore as when we’d lost before for we knew we’d be back again.’
‘I always get the dirty jobs’, the county chairman whined as he sacked him. Just three months after that stunning game and Coleman was out the door. Men who he thought were his brothers-in-arms were still in and he was out. He had learned a bitter lesson. ‘I’d have trusted them with my life.’
The coup was followed by a mutiny when his boys refused to play, wouldn’t pull on the red and white or wear the Oak Leaf on their chests. Rumours spread throughout the country, speculation galore: ‘He must have done something’, ‘Ye know Coleman’, ‘No smoke without fire’.
‘Aye that’s how they wanted it.’ He’s gutted, ‘Saying nothing but letting all be said.’ This is a side I’ve never seen to him – bewildered and betrayed. His squat fingers splay in emphasis, the scar on his lip snarling into his cheek.
‘If they’d sacked me because I’d failed then, I’m a big boy, I could take it. But winning forty games from forty-seven, a National League and the All-Ireland, they couldn’t come out and say that; they left a cloud of suspicion hanging over me.’
He challenged them in the press, to their faces and through the GAA. The National League kicked off and still his boys refused to play. Then he blew the final whistle on it. He knew when he’d been beat. ‘If it was me, I’d go back’, he told them, ‘there’s no one person bigger than Derry.’ The officials won their battle but Derry lost the war, it’s twenty-five years later and they’ve never come close again.
A decade after his sacking and the phone rings on my office desk. My older sister Bernadette asks, ‘Can you come and sit with Eamonn?’
‘There’s not a trace of cancer in your body’, the doctor had insisted but now she’s on the phone telling me the doctor had been wrong.
‘He’s got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Maria.’
‘Non-what? What’s that? Lymphoma?’
‘Yes.’
My brain scrambles to make sense of it. Non is no, which is a good thing, right? ‘That’s a good thing, right?’
‘It’s
