Out of the blue last week an email from Séan Lowry landed in Séamus O’Rourke’s inbox. It was a warm salute from long ago. Lowry had come across the passage in Leaning on Gates, O’Rourke’s bestselling memoir, where he recalls the day they marked each other in a Connacht semi-final, separated by the full width of fame and accomplishment, but joined briefly at the hip.
Lowry had won three All-Irelands and two All-Stars in a glittering career with Offaly, and he had landed in Mayo for a final spin on the carousel. O’Rourke was a young buck whose career as a footballer had been fired from a canon in his teens. His father, whose approval never reached his son’s needs or wants, was lying in hospital with prostate cancer.
“It was my mother’s birthday, and Séan Lowry was a hero of mine,” he writes, “and now I was expected to hammer all kinds of shite out of Séan Lowry and my father wouldn’t be there to see it.”
Mayo beat them by more than treble scores, but O’Rourke had held Lowry scoreless and in the prosecution that follows every championship defeat O’Rourke was found not guilty. Word had reached his father in hospital.
“‘There was a man here earlier, said today’s paper gave you a good write-up. Said you played well. If you could believe the paper ...’”, O’Rourke wrote of the post-match debrief in the hospital ward, watching the compliment skid into the ditch immediately after it left his father’s mouth.
“I was 20 at the time,” says O’Rourke now. “That game was 40 years ago.”
In the Hollywood treatment of his life, O’Rourke’s career as a footballer would be shimmied into an origin story, before he became an award-winning writer, director, actor, storyteller and poet – though he insists that his poems disqualify him from such a label.
In that other world he was a child star. At 15 years of age O’Rourke was picked for the Leitrim minors, the same year that he quit school. The panel was announced on the pages of the Leitrim Observer “and to me it was one of the most magical things ever”. The honour was not index-linked to Leitrim’s prospects; it had its own standing.
“I left school at 15 so in lots of ways Gaelic football was my education,” he says. “I was very quiet and shy, actually. We were all backwards at that time. But getting to play for the county opened things up hugely. And I was all up for it, like. In Carrigallen [where O’Rourke grew up] the GAA was everything.”
When O’Rourke was 18, he played minor, senior, junior and under-21 for Leitrim in the same season. The rules wouldn’t allow it now, but even when it was permitted something like that was against all odds. Growing up, he was bigger than his peers and his size gained him notice; but if he was no good, his size would have drawn attention to that too.
In the 16 plays O’Rourke has written one of the recurring themes is the conflict between hope and hopelessness. In his early life, playing football for Leitrim hosted that battle, endlessly. If there was no hope, why would you do it? But if there needed to be hope, where would it come from?
“In my first year Mayo beat us by 25 points, you know, and the thing was, it was going to be the same every year. Everyone thought that. The manager would say the right things, but you knew he didn’t believe it. But then Tony McGowan came in as manager, with a big optimistic smile, and he said, ‘Lads, I think we can win this.’ He gave us so much enjoyment. He brought us down to play challenge matches against Kerry and good teams. And it was the first time I had hope.”
In the end they blew a minor Connacht final against Galway, butchering four goal chances in the first 10 minutes and losing by three points. In defeat, though, their hope had been vindicated.
His father had never been a footballer, but he went to every match O’Rourke played, unlikely to be impressed, or unlikely to say so. The difference made no odds. In an appearance on the Tommy Tiernan Show recently O’Rourke read an affecting passage about him from Leaning on Gates.
It captured the simple complexity of a father-son relationship in rural Ireland, where feelings were choked and gagged and never said aloud. The clip has been viewed over 1.3 million times on Facebook, and you can imagine how many people saw themselves in its reflection.
“My father was not quite a farmer nor a fool but came close to proving me wrong on both counts at different times in my life,” he wrote. “He’s gone over 20 years now, and there’s not a day goes by that I don’t talk to him or quote him or feed from his legacy. A true man and a father of his time ... Awkward and straight at the same time.”
“You weren’t as bad as I often saw ya,” his father told him after one match, flirting with a kind word, without knowing how to make the next move. “I suppose what it was,” says O’Rourke, “he couldn’t bear the thought of you failing. It wasn’t that he didn’t wish you well.
“The reality of it is that until I was 25, the GAA was everything, and there was a five-year period in my life where I had to come to terms with not being good enough to play beyond that. Like, I never got to play in Croke Park, but I thought at one point I was going to get there.”
He started to have intimations of his mortality as an intercounty footballer as he climbed through the grades. The game was quicker at higher altitudes, and he lacked the pace to keep up. O’Rourke was still only 29 when Leitrim won the Connacht title in 1994, their first in 67 years. Many of the players he had soldiered with were still on the team, but he was long gone.
There’s a line in one of his plays that captures how he felt. “I was delighted with myself for being so delighted for them,” it reads.
He was in his mid-20s when he first dipped his toe in amateur dramatics in Carrigallen. Part of it was replacement therapy. “After I quit with the county, I had a big gap, a big hole in my life. And also, the big dream was gone, you know.
“I was lucky enough to be pulled into the theatre mostly because I was a carpenter and I might make the set – and also, I had access to a van. But I also got a wee part in this play and I’d never been on stage before. I got such a buzz out of doing my little piece in front of an audience and I realised, ‘I’m getting back to the same buzz I had when I played for Leitrim.’”
He had started to write poems around that time. At first, he didn’t write them down. He would compose the lines in his mind, and there they would sit, hidden in storage. But with the local theatre group it was customary for one of the cast to write a poem about their season and one year he was asked to do it.
“I wrote the poem and did it in front of people and it went down really well. It was a bit of a performance. And, you know, I often wondered was that what I was looking for in my football career as opposed to actually winning medals? Like, in my head, it wasn’t always about winning, it was also about a bit of style. You know, you’d love to be kicking the good points.”
O’Rourke was in his mid-40s when he took the plunge and committed to a life of theatre work and writing. His first gig carried the promise of six weeks work. He convinced himself that carpentry was his safety net, when really it wasn’t; there was no going back.
“When I’m writing I’m not one of these people that it floods out of, but I love the prospect of a blank page. I love a deadline. I write plays because I have to have something to perform. There was one instance a few years ago where the show in Dublin was sold out for three weeks and I hadn’t written the play yet. I was in the Cork Opera House doing Philadelphia [Here I Come]. But I had the play in my head, and I knew the structure of it and I wrote it in three days.”
Last Sunday he finished a run at the Blackwater Festival in Cork. For the first time he performed his six one-man shows on successive nights. At the Palace Theatre in Fermoy, he walked on stage in a white Panama hat and sandals and jeans that were folded in a cuff at his ankles, shape-shifting from one character to another for an enchanting hour. He left the stage to a standing ovation.
“When I was playing with the county, when the weather was good and it was a championship game, and you were running on to a lovely pitch, you had this doubt, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to have the pace for this.’ Now, when I go out on to a big pitch, whether it’s the Gaiety Theatre or wherever, I’m not frightened of the pitch. I think, ‘I’ll keep up here.’
“That’s the difference. I’ve found something that I have the pace for.”
