After the latest sudden death of a sportsman, former Irish hockey international Johnny Watterson recalls a tragedy that hit his team
It was a freezing morning when we arrived for a light training run on Strathmore Road, Dalkey, in late December 1985. The Irish hockey coach at the time, Terry Gregg, was a believer in teams, not unduly suffering together but trying together, putting in effort as a unit: a jog in the rain, an extra circuit of running. This morning, it was shaking everyone out of their beds to run up a hill in one of south Dublin's suburbs. Nothing strenuous on the body, it was a squad getting up early to be, well, a squad.
The lampposts on the narrow lane which wound its way up towards Vico Road from close to the Killiney Court Hotel, lined the side with the footpath and marked out the distance we were asked to run. Easy stuff. From one pole at the start, we ran past the second, stopped and turned at the third and jogged down. Maybe 60 yards up the hill, granite stone walls both sides, the Canadian Embassy and its eucalyptus trees stretched the length of the avenue. Once up, we returned, lined up and did the exercise again.
It was one of those crisp mornings in the days between Christmas and the New Year. The clearest memory is of a remarkable stillness as everyone silently went through the drills, half asleep or just in the normal thoughtless stupor you engage to get through any running session. There were no cars and the freezing hoar rose from perspiring backs and steamed out of panting mouths. We had completed a few of the runs each and were thinking towards a Four Nations Indoor competition involving England, Scotland, Wales and ourselves in Crystal Palace in a couple of weeks' time.
After three or four repeats, we noticed Frank Green taking a rest on the way down the hill. Frank was from Lisburn, Co Antrim. We knew each other well from university. He went to Queen's in Belfast with his close friend Jimmy Kirkwood, who was also running in the group, and was, like Kirkwood, still very much the student joker.
This training wasn't designed to be strenuous but here we were watching Frank on one knee taking a break. The usual taps on the back going by, a few encouraging mumbles and everyone kept going, caught up in the demands of doing the exercise.
Coming down the hill the next time, we all noticed that one of the squad goalkeepers, Peter McCollum, had stopped and was crouching beside Frank. Gregg was walking over. McCollum was a surgeon, Gregg a dentist. McCollum appeared to be speaking into Frank's ear, then eased him gently to one side, his hands automatically feeling for a pulse. Gregg arrived and within seconds the two doctors' only concern was to revive Frank. His heart had stopped. He was 24.
I knelt beside Frank doing all I was capable of doing, shouting his name.
McCollum and Gregg went through all of the medical procedures. A blanket arrived from a woman in a large gated house nearby called Undercliff. She also rang for an ambulance. We kept Frank warm and the doctors kept working.
McCollum remained in charge even when the medics arrived and in that professionally heroic way in which doctors conduct themselves, he did what he could. Most of the squad kept a helpless distance away. Distressed, staggered and afraid, we watched in the chill as Frank was taken away dying.
The hospital could not revive him and he was pronounced dead later that morning.
I learned from Jimmy, who had spent most of his 24 years with Frank at primary school in Harmony Hill, at Friends' School, Lisburn and in a rented house while they attended Queen's, that Frank had collapsed once before in the Queen's University sports hall. On that occasion, he was attended to by David Irwin, a doctor and former international rugby player and was forced to spend a night in hospital. Frank had been born with a congenital heart problem; although, no one could have known it would be the cause of such a tragic outcome.
In 1985 no one had ever heard of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. There was no term to describe how a young international athlete could die on the ground despite the best medical assistance.
The Irish under-19 players in Durban, South Africa, who were present when their colleague John McCall died last weekend, or the Tyrone football team-mates of Cormac McAnallen, will know that even though there is now a term, it makes little difference. For them, as for the Irish hockey team that morning and more acutely the families of the athletes, there is a physical space left unoccupied that is very tangible and real. In the absence of reason, there is also an accommodation to be made, a shocking and perplexing one.
Jimmy Kirkwood, a unique and mercurial Irish talent who went on to win an Olympic gold medal in Seoul with the best hockey team in the world at the time, the 1988 British side, says now that he probably thinks of Frank a little more than he used to. He travelled to Dublin not so long ago and sought out Strathmore Road and the stretch of eucalyptus trees and the road that ran up the hill just past the big hotel on the seafront, where Frank died just after Christmas almost 20 years ago. Just to be there again. To remember it how it was, maybe in the hope that it might bring back something he had missed, a memory that had survived the years, or a moment of private consolation.
Those gestures by friends are probably important for a family to know about, for Frank's, John McCall's or Cormac McAnallen's. It is important that they don't take the journey alone. That they do it the way Terry Gregg expected his squad to do things that morning, always together, with a binding, collective effort.
• Johnny Watterson is an Irish Times journalist