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The 14-year-old boy who lost his arm to a machine and ended up playing European Cup football

At 14-years-old Jimmy Hasty lost his arm in a work accident but it did not hold him back

Jimmy Hasty receiving Dundalk FC’s footballer of the year award for 1965.
Jimmy Hasty receiving Dundalk FC’s footballer of the year award for 1965.
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Johnny Watterson
Fri May 31 2024 - 06:00

The Troubles book, Lost Lives, an encyclopedia of the people who died over 30 years in Northern Ireland, describes the last movements of Jimmy Hasty on the streets of North Belfast.

In simple prose, shorn of partisan leanings, it tells how the 38-year-old former Dundalk star forward’s life came to an end in October 1974.

“He was killed when a gunman opened fire on him at point blank range as he walked to work from his home in Hillman Street. He was shot in Brougham Street near the junction with Cambridge Street around 8.00am. The killing was claimed by the Ulster Protestant Action group, a cover name for the UVF.”

Last week a Uefa documentary on Hasty, One-Armed Wonder: The Extraordinary Story of Jimmy Hasty, was named Outstanding Short Documentary at the 45th annual Sports Emmy Awards in New York. What is uplifting and special about the 27-minute work is that it celebrates how Jimmy Hasty lived, not how he died.

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His killing, among the many other deadly sectarian attacks during in the Troubles, was an example of the aimless, everyday horror of Belfast at the time. But Hasty’s short life as a footballer with Dundalk was the opposite.

It was remarkable and scarcely believable as he demolished perceptions of what can be achieved and showed how a life of accomplishment like his can live on in the memories and affections of those people he touched.

Hasty was never a victim, he was not disabled. He died violently but it was his rich living that held dominion from the moment he was disfigured as a child in a catastrophic accident.

Home was the Sailortown area of Belfast’s docklands, then a poor but thriving part of the city. Not unusual in working class streets, Hasty was 14-years-old when he left school for the last time on a Friday afternoon. The following Monday he went to work in Belfast’s Jennymount Mill, one of Belfast’s austere industrial buildings.

Unfamiliar with the surroundings and in the job a matter of hours, the sleeve of his shirt became caught in a machine and his left arm was pulled into the workings. During his many weeks in hospital, the arm was amputated near the shoulder.

“He just seemed to take life as it came,” says his wife, Margaret, in the documentary. “Losing his arm didn’t seem to take over his life.”

Hasty went on to play for several junior football clubs in the Belfast area during the late 1950s, before joining Newry Town in the Irish League second tier in 1959. There he went on to be their top goal scorer with 38 goals.

Word spread. The following year accountant, Jim Malone, a board member in Dundalk FC travelled across the Border to watch him play and came back a convert. Addressing a sceptical board meeting in Dundalk, Malone pledged to cover the cost of the transfer fee if the club would sign his new discovery, a one-armed striker.

Hasty transferred to Dundalk in November 1960 and made an instant impact, scoring on his debut. The national press were also slow to believe in the Hasty phenomenon. Paddy Malone, son of Jim, remembers a published photograph of their celebrated forward.

“A sub editor in the Evening Press gave one-armed Jimmy Hasty a second arm because the photograph had to be wrong,” says Malone. “And he just painted in an arm.”

People flocked to see him as much as support Dundalk and in the 1962-63 season the club won the league for the first time in 30 years, earning a trip to Europe the following year. Drawn against FC Zurich, Dundalk lost the first leg 3-0 before travelling to Switzerland for the second leg.

It was Hasty’s first time on an airplane. When they landed former player John Murphy described the scene.

“Two players were injured. Davy McArdle limped down with a walking stick. Timmy Lyons came down with a plaster on his leg. Jerry McCourt, he was our trainer. He’d a limp. And the next thing was Jimmy Hasty with one arm. The officials, you could hear them, ‘is this the right plane or is it going to Lourdes.’”

Dundalk left Zurich 2-1 winners, Hasty with one assist, one shot off the crossbar and one goal.

There is a still photograph included in the documentary. It is of five children, all of them wearing the white V-necked Dundalk top of the Hasty glory years. Two or maybe three of them have the left sleeve of their top dangling, their arms tucked away inside as if missing. As kids do, they copy their heroes, mimic what they see.

At the time, there were schoolyards full of children playing football, their left arms tucked away under school jumpers, celebrating ‘Dundalk’s Maradona’.

On the morning of the killing, a passerby heard the shot, stopped his car and went over to Hasty lying on the pavement in Brougham Street. From point blank range, he had been hit once in the back. “He was still breathing. His eyes were closed,” he says.

In the lilywhite lounge in Oriel Park, the number nine shirt with Hasty’s name is framed on the wall. It’s in memory of the 14-year-old boy who lost his arm to a machine and ended up playing European Cup football. In Dundalk they remember his life, not his death. That is Jimmy Hasty’s greatest legacy.

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