Division one semi-final Armagh v Laois: Keith Duggan on the dashing Laois wing-back who found the transition from minor star to established senior took a little longer than he expected
Kids. Hanging out on a glorious Holy Thursday afternoon, too cool for school. Sitting on walls, hanging outside shops, slouching under the April haze in baggy jeans and T-shirts with provocative logos. Clusters of kids, full of solemn bravado, kings of their domain in all the small towns that lead to Portlaoise. That lead to the house where Colm Parkinson is resting in the shade, waiting for you.
Parkinson was a kid once. Recall one of the most celebrated minors of the last decade, a darling of the new wave of Gaelic players. He alone made the half-back position hip, starring for the Laois minor team that swept the land and looking like a pin-up for the Britpop movement. All mop-top and gangly limbs and speed. That was 1996.
"I don't remember it all that well, to be honest," Parkinson maintains. "Just that after we won, we were literally treated like celebrities. That homecoming. Like, stewards there just to keep people away from us! And then we'd be going down to the girls' schools with the cup and you'd have the younger kids jumping all over ya. It was a really mad time."
To some of us, the story of Parkinson was one of more shadow than substance as half-truths filtered out of his leaving and returning to and leaving the senior panel with impunity. You could have been forgiven for wondering if Parkinson was just a rumour or a trick of the imagination, because when, after all, had you last seen him play? So it is a relief to find him sitting here, still popstar skinny and with a cut of the dude about him, flicking through the talk shows and MTV before telling how he came to be here with unapologetic honesty.
The lowest point of his life as a Laois footballer is not all that long behind him. Last year, he sat on the bench for the All-Ireland championship qualifiers against Clare. His relationship with the manager, Colm Brown, was strained at best and he was struggling to maintain any sense of joy when it came to Gaelic football. Citing a new-found desire to study, he had actually dropped off the panel, but decided to return in the mid-summer after his team-mates lost to Wexford. "That was the biggest mistake of my life. I don't know what possessed me."
Laois defeated Clare and Colm Brown used five substitutes, not one of whom was named C Parkinson. Seething and dismayed, Parkinson walked out of O'Moore Park and was back in his house before the final whistle even sounded. The next day he hit the pub, and when Brown called his mobile the exchange was fiery and X-rated. Three days later, Parkinson was in New York City, laying bricks. For all he knew, he had heard the cheering crowds for the last time.
"I thought that might be it and I didn't care, to be honest with you. I admit I can't handle being a sub anyhow. But I don't mind not getting on as long as you aren't playing well. But I really felt I was flying it in challenge games, so I walked out. I'd imagine a few people in the crowd saw me all right. But the whole thing had become a chore. Like, football is something you are meant to enjoy at some level. It's not supposed to leave you in a worse mood than you were in to begin with."
When you think about it, it was an extraordinary act, enough to leave Michael Davitt reeling in the grave. A player - a hero of sorts - exiting the ground in the midst of the championship fare; how far away from the cliché of parish loyalty can you go? It was stunningly courageous or stunningly selfish, depending on your perspective.
For Parkinson, though, it was the only thing he could do to stay true to himself.
Consider his football life in microcosm. His father, Martin, was his mentor when he was a youngster and Portlaoise were prolific, winning under-14 (twice), under-16, minor and under-21 titles, the backbone for the phenomenal crop of teenage players that would form this nursery, this academy of Laois minors that was the envy of the country. They lost narrowly to Westmeath in the minor championship of 1995, observed how the neighbouring sons claimed the All-Ireland and expected to emulate that the following September. And they did. And the people of Laois adored them for it. Loving football was easy for Parkinson then, but he was also bright and precocious, growing up in Portlaoise, a towny-town in what was a good period to be young in Ireland.
"The thing was, me and a group of friends, I suppose we were wild enough growing up. You'd have the crack, do what you wanted. Then, after that one year, everything you did was watched like a hawk. Everything. And I quietened down a lot after that minor year because I had to. But lookin' back, I can see how people might have got a bit pissed off seeing young lads walking around in Laois tracksuits. And we did go about in the tracksuits, must have looked a bit stupid. You know how you can milk it a bit when you are young. I can see it from both points of view a bit."
Then his life went into fast forward. In the winter of 1996, he pursued a further education in Waterford but bowed out at Christmas, exhausted, as no one had told him the party in honour of the Laois minor team had ended. On, so, to DIT.
"Laois were in an All-Ireland under-21 final on the Saturday and I had exams on the Monday. We were beaten by Kerry and I just never showed for the exams," he says.
The seasons rolled by. A local myth built up about the minors being unable to get over themselves. And it vexed Parkinson, because he knew he was still training his ass off and many of his former minor colleagues were running laps at under-21 sessions with him and, what's more, they were doing okay.
"Don't get me wrong, we partied after the minor, we definitely did. But I think we got over it fairly quick. People were going on as if we had gone feckin' mad. But we were straight into the under-21. I suppose what knocked the stuffing out of us was, at the end of it, there was no All-Ireland medal."
A strong Meath team clipped them in a controversial game at O'Moore Park. "Ah, robbed us. They got a penalty at the end."
But he can point to a Leinster medal and an All-Ireland final. By then it was time for the feted kids to lead Laois to Nirvana. And time for Parkinson to hit the brick wall.
When the snows drifted over the boroughs of New York last December, Parkinson came home. Mick O'Dwyer has been his salvation. The American city had been great to him: kicking football and labouring and wandering Manhattan by moonlight. When he had heard Laois were eventually drilled, humiliated in the championship by Meath in Portlaoise, he had felt sorry for his friends but was still too angry and numb to genuinely care. O'Moore Park seemed a lot further away than 5,000 miles and he had thoughts of Australia.
He insists still that he would not have played again for Laois under the last management, a feeling that probably ran two ways. Shortly after his appointment, O'Dwyer, in that masterful Kerry way, bumped into Parkinson outside of O'Moore Park following a county final Parkinson had flown home to participate in. A short conversation and Parkinson found himself erasing plans of saving and heading to Australia, plans of the wider world. Back came the prodigal son and through the league Parkinson's rebirth has mirrored that of his county.
He has been sleek and fast and inventive: worth watching. Echoes of the minor days but in the grown-up world. It is all down to the Kerry man, Parkinson reckons.
"He is just a nice man. Gas character. You'd have the utmost respect for him but he doesn't want that. His whole belief is the players are important, not him. It's hard to put a finger on it, but he just has this knack. Like, you could talk to Micko about anything. He'd tell these yarns about the Kerry players and you'd hang on his every word. You can't help but like him. And then he'd be down doin' squats and sit-ups with you. Like, you want to please Mick O'Dwyer. You want to win for him."
The thought of returning to Croke Park, land of his boyhood heroics, excites Parkinson. He last played there for the seniors in 2000 against Offaly but it wasn't quite the same. He believes he has not felt so serene about the game since his minor days, although he still has his quirks. Away from the Park, he still hangs with the same non-GAA crowd he grew up with.
"I hate that thing of sitting around talkin' about GAA all the time. It's fine for half an hour after a game but then I'm gone. I would be sitting in some corner in some place. Like, I am good friends with the lads I play with, but it's good to get away from it too. Most of my friends don't follow GAA that closely at all. They'd go the odd time but that would be it."
During his restless seasons, he weathered the disapproval of his father, who, he says, "was not too impressed" by his son's coming and going. And Parkinson can understand why. His relationship with the county jersey has not been conventional.
But despite the disappearances, he has never been heckled much. "Laois people . . . they say what they like to you. But at least they know when I am out on the field I play with a bit of fire no matter how it is going and I think they identify with that. They have never been too hard on me. I think they just say, 'ah, Parkinson's at it again'."
It is 6.30 p.m. and Parkinson is itching to get to training, a novel feeling. Although he sometimes finds his home town a bit claustrophobic, he makes a solemn vow that he is in for the long haul. But then, as if catching the piety in his tone, he grins and says: "But sure, I say all that now and I might be gone in the morning."
A degree from Maynooth now behind him, Parkinson has started a new job as a sales representative for a stone company. He is spending his free hours studying stone. On the streets of Portlaoise is a new breed of kids who care little for what he might have done in football at the end of the last century. He shakes your hand politely at his front door and wishes you a sincere farewell and all at once the mystery of what happened to the great Laois minors falls away. They grew up.
