Jonny Cooper: ‘I miss the lads. I think about them every day’

Jonny Cooper grew up in the rag trade. His mam is a Cavan woman and her family had a wholesale clothing business. When he goes back, when he thinks about who he was on the way to becoming who he is, those days are the cloud he lands on. The four Cooper kids enmeshed in the thing. Easter holidays, summer holidays, weekends.

It was a job, yes. But it was more than that. Or at least he looks back on it now as meaning more than that. The fact that it was a family endeavour meant that there was a deeper connection. Something shared, something profound.

And if you think that’s all a bit weighty and solemn when it comes to describing the act of packing school uniforms into cardboard boxes, that’s fine. He only brings it up as an example. People are made in a million different ways. This is one of the ways he was.

“I suppose to a degree I look for the road-less-travelled,” says Cooper, who will be writing for The Irish Times throughout the football championship. “The nature of the family business was picking orders, packing boxes, delivering boxes all around Dublin – to Roche’s and Guiney’s and all these places. So that type of ‘something-just-needs-to-be-different’ feeling – that’s probably where it came from initially.

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“There was a lot of that personal touch involved. You’re literally packing the trousers, skirts and pinafores that somebody in Monaghan or Galway or Cavan, some schoolkid is going to be wearing. It was a lean enough business so attention to detail mattered.

“Something like the way in which you pack the box. What was the experience of the customer opening it up going to be like? Was it going to be messy? Postage at the time was crazy money so how could you fold things in certain ways to maximize the space to save a pound or whatever? And because it was a family business, the connection was really there.

“I think it would have been a massive influence on me, unbeknownst to myself. Dealing with customers fed into sport later on – you’re dealing with people, getting the best out of yourself, showing up on time. You’re focusing on the details of making sure the order is correct, then packing it in the correct way and then going again. Obviously it’s a bottom-line business so there’s a clinical sense there too. It’s very personal in terms of experience – you’re doing your very best in that moment and then trying to move on to the next one.”

In time, all those small things fed into the Jonny Cooper we saw in a Dublin jersey. He won seven All-Irelands on a diet of small details. Bernard Brogan’s book called him the squad’s “process ninja” and once your toes stop curling at the phrase, you can see pretty clearly what he was getting at. Break tasks down into their constituent parts. Work at getting better at each one of them. Progress.

In his day job, Cooper works for a consultancy company. His speciality is people and change. A mid-size company is looking to merge or expand or downsize, whatever it may be. Rather than the staff finding out that their working life has changed in the ping of an email, Cooper comes in and works with them through the transition.

“You’re trying to take the experience of somebody in an organisation and supporting their journey from A to B without too much volatility or with as much stability as humanly possible. It’s all basically about team, people, performance, cultural leadership.”

This is who Jonny Cooper has always been. He tells a story, half against himself, of the time he and his Na Fianna team-mates were heading to the Féile under-14 tournament back in the early 2000s. The final training session was in Johnstown Park in Ballygall and in the days running up to it, he came up with a plan for something special to mark the journey they were about to go on.

“I distinctly and vividly remember asking Mam to bring home 20 little small envelopes. This will tell you how anal and serious I took things as a 13-year-old. There was a speech by General George S Patton. He had plenty of speeches but he had this one about work ethic and getting to your destiny and all that sort of stuff. I got them printed out and put them into these envelopes before going training.

“Now, it didn’t work because we got knocked out in the group stage! But I have a clear memory of putting them into envelopes and at the last training session, I dropped them into the lads’ bags. So that’s how strangely obsessed with it I was, even back at 13 or 14.”

Why, though? He tells the story with a wry smile, fully aware of how bananas it sounds. But it didn’t come out of nowhere either. Why did he, at 13-years-old, feel the need to assume that sort of role?

“I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it in any way at the time. But if I wanted to dig into it now, I think that care, connection, personalisation probably just came from the wholesale family business. That’s what it was all about. Making connections, role modelling behaviours, trying to influence people.

“I was very aware that for whatever reason, what I did, what I said, how I acted, how I behaved – that could potentially support somebody else or nudge them in a direction. And obviously, you’re playing on a team so the more you give away of yourself, hopefully the more you get back in time.”

On the day we meet, he’s parked in the corner of a hotel lobby reading a book on psychology and leadership. Our chat is peppered with the language of performance, learning, personal growth. He wasn’t much of a student in secondary school but the Sports Science course in DCU wrapped itself around him like bindweed.

Cooper describes it now as opening a Pandora’s box for him. Sport was suddenly laid out in front of him in all its flavours and he found he was ravenous for it. Psychology, physiology, diversity, disability. Brilliant facilities, a world of personalities, role models everywhere.

He learned plenty of lessons, the most important of which was that he had a lot to learn. His time there coincided with his emergence on the Dublin panel. But he bristles ever-so slightly at the suggestions that Jim Gavin’s Dublin must have been a type of finishing school for everything he was learning on campus.

“I wouldn’t even say it’s near finished,” he says. “And that’s no disrespect to that group in any way. It’s a high-performing, cut-throat, relentless, diverse, interesting, stimulating, provoking place. It is all of that more.

“But there will always be, I think, a piece of the jigsaw missing on purpose. From my point of view, there is definitely no finish line. The capacity to grow is always there. If my race is 100 metres long, I’d hazard a guess that I’m five or 10 metres into it. I know I know very little. And my perspective is a very slim perspective.

“And I probably have a little bit more of an appreciation of that in the last couple of months. You don’t allow yourself to look too much beyond the bubble. Which is great because it’s all-consuming and because you’re investing fully in whatever, whoever, what’s next, what’s more to do, etc.

“I think it’s definitely a massive platform to go and suck up everything you can and throw it into that pot of ingredients and see what you can make of it. But I know there is probably a bigger pot somewhere. There’s more exciting, different things that will come for all of us.”

He went to see Dublin play Derry last weekend, his first step back into civilian life. He finds he still watches the game as a Dublin player. Can’t help it. When the ball is up one end of the pitch, he’s instinctively looking at the other to assess things like shape, distance between players, body angles. It will take a while for retirement to flush through his bloodstream.

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“I do miss it. I miss the lads. I think about them every day. I think about possibly what I would have thought about every day. But, on the flipside, I’m not at the level. I’m not good enough. And that is the exam answer for me. There’s no romanticism. There’s no fairytale, emotional side.

“In my perspective, the Dublin thing is too big for somebody to be fluting around and going, ‘Maybe I could do it or maybe I couldn’t’. The average person, they wouldn’t see that but it’s pretty simple – the standards that group have set, I couldn’t hit them. So even though you might have this kind of wondering, ‘Aw, what if?’, it comes back to, ‘Can you do the business?’

“If I was to ask all the current players, at the moment, ‘Would Jonny beat you?’, if they’re to be straight and honest I’d say 90 to 95 per cent of them would say no. There’s a level and a standard there that I just can’t get to and I’m happy from that point of view.”

So on we go. He finds himself a mile outside his comfort zone, writing about the game he played at the highest level possible, trying to give a perspective that isn’t out there. He’s not in the bubble any more but he’s lived its shape and its make. He built a career by drilling down into the component parts of intercounty life and now he’s going to write a weekly column informed by them.

“Does it have to be called a column?” he asks. “Does that sound a bit pundity? I was thinking more in terms of an insight piece.”

Done.

Read Jonny Cooper every Saturday in The Irish Times