The gym was secreted down a lane behind Paul Street Shopping Centre in Cork city. No signage outside advertised its wares. Nobody ever wandered in by accident. Far removed from the Instagram-friendly chrome and steel palaces of mirrors where today’s youth hone pneumatic physiques, this was a place of serious business.
Nothing fancy. Mats around the floor, a couple of machines, and weights, lots of weights. The UCC soccer squad had been brought in to undergo assessment by Kevin Kehily, local fitness guru and Gaelic football legend, radiating calm authority as if still patrolling the small square in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
We marvelled at his Magnum PI moustache as he put us through various stretching exercises, strolling around with a clipboard in hand. Occasionally, he stopped at an individual and took notes. Highly technical stuff back in 1990.
For some reason, Kehily took an inordinate interest in my efforts and quizzed me. “What position do I play? Do I play any other sports? How long had I been playing?” As I answered in the cocksure manner of the 19-year-old fool, he set me more elaborate tasks, nodded sagely at my contorting, and repeatedly muttered the word, “Fascinating.” Eventually, I had to ask what intrigued him so much about my impressive athleticism.
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“Well,” he said, “in all my years doing this, you are the least flexible fit person I’ve ever met. Truly a remarkable specimen.”
I never felt the same way about stretching again. Kehily was one of my first heroes, a reassuring beacon in the darkest days of the Kerry hegemony. When merciless beatings in Munster finals were part of summer’s ritual in Cork, his annual joust with “Bomber” Liston always offered hope that one day the yoke of oppression might be lifted.
A decade before he laid waste to my ego, I’d met him under happier circumstances on a field in Bishopstown. Handing out tiny marble trophies after an under-11 street league final, he playfully tousled my hair, I think, because I was small and had pilfered a corner-forward’s goal with a sneaky fist.
Both those interactions came immediately to mind upon hearing news of his death one muggy New York afternoon last August. This is what we do when heroes die. We feel something because we really think we kind of knew them. Sifting through our memory banks, we try to recall the slightest association we may have had.
If I touch a star, will I twinkle too? A sweaty cameo of wonder on a pitch at 10. A moment of undergraduate mortification in a gym some long ago winter night. Or all those Sunday afternoons suffering alongside my late father, watching Kehily defiantly manning the ramparts as marauding green and gold hordes invaded.
Like the bands you discover in your teens, the first wave of boyhood sporting heroes is destined to resonate with you for the rest of your days. Those men colonise your imagination and remain giants forever.
So much else changes but their names, even photographs of them in their pomp, retain the power to instantly transport you to the simplest time in life. When parents were indestructible, and everything about games and the men who played them was still new and thrilling. No feats are ever quite as wondrous again as those glimpsed through the fresh, wide eyes of the impressionable child. Growing up clouds that vision. Growing up is overrated.
None of the multiple international newspaper subscriptions of cantankerous middle age yield anything like the instant joy of handing over 18p to buy SHOOT! magazine at the Read and Write newsagents every Thursday as a kid. In an era when televised football was strictly rationed, we pored over every page, inhaling the impossible glamour of the muddy pitches and Admiral kits of the old English First Division.
Hours were spent guffawing at Football Funnies, pondering officiating conundrums in “You are the Ref”, and trying to persuade hard-up parents to buy Gary Shaw shin pads, just £2.20, by mail order.
My hero worship of Shaw, the precocious young striker on the Aston Villa team that won the title and European Cup (elder speak for Champions League), bordered on the obsessive. He wrote a weekly column for SHOOT! that I parsed with the avidity of a Talmudic scholar, before carefully cutting out any accompanying pictures and Blutacking them to the bedroom wall.
When I stood next to him in the Villa Park pressroom one Saturday afternoon in the late 1990s, I thought better of confessing that I woke each morning for much of my formative years in a claret and blue shrine to his blonde-thatched, injury-ravaged greatness.
My brother Tom, who shared that bedroom, texted me news of Shaw’s death in Birmingham back in September, provoking similar emotions as Kehily’s departure weeks earlier, and dredging up Thomas Gray’s elegiac assertion, “The paths of glory lead but to the grave”.
You have no real right to mourn the passing of these people you didn’t know, no matter how much you idolised them from afar. But you still do. Because a little fragment of your childhood disappears with the demise of every hero. Another grim reminder of long-lost youth, of creeping, insidious mortality. Once vivid colours in the highlight reels of memory start to fade and the pictures in your mind blur a little more around the edges.
Growing old, like growing up, is overrated.
