Still rising above the tumult

Munster Club Football Championship final: Tom Humphriestalks to Colm Cooper about the highs and lows of a very eventful year for the Dr Crokes clubman.

Just a memory, well worn by now. . A wraith-thin kid at the gateway to the pitch in Croke Park. Voices arguing over his head like St Peter and a tribe of supplicants. Too feisty to be supplicants really. If the kid can't go on the field, the team won't be going out either, say the tribe. You decide St Peter.

A head shaking in resignation. St Peter in a blazer waves his hand, 'g'wan, in ye go'. Next they are all bounding out together and it begins. The Gooch, eight years old and already attached to the childhood sobriquet that he will never shake, the Gooch eight years old and warming up the goalkeeper, Peter O'Brien, for an All-Ireland club final.

After that it's a haze of warm and fuzzy memories. He'd hoped just to see Croke Park for the first time, he'd hardly an idea of everything else involved. The bigness of it all. The journey home, the parade in Killarney at a time when parades were a rare thing in Kerry football. Then the triumphant return to school a few days later, as usual accompanied by the football which nobody remembers seeing him without as he grew up. The boys were an instant hierarchy. Those who didn't go to Dublin, those who were there, those who had somebody on the team. And the Gooch. Two brothers with medals, a walk-on role as mascot and already busting with the moves which suggested that he was the future of the club and probably the county.

FOURTEEN YEARS ONand Dr Crokes haven't won a Kerry championship since, escaping the boundaries of the county this year by virtue of having been beaten by the divisional side South Kerry in the county final. Nevertheless Crokes, singular and defiant, are an astonishing story and the young team which plays in Páirc Uí Chaoimh tomorrow are just the advance guard for a club breaching the seams of its own amazing history and committing itself to an astonishing growth over the past few years.

Of an evening in Killarney in the little taxi office just past Tatlers you can see the Crokes members coming and going like worker bees to the hive. The club lotto has to be sold around the town and sold aggressively in a place which hosts two other GAA clubs and entertains preoccupations with soccer, basketball and just about every other sport known to man.

Crokes work hard. A major draw is under way. A third pitch has just been opened and floodlighting came in October. The Lewis Road clubhouse, not old enough yet to have lost its freshness, is already up for extension, the ground has terracing and there's a small stand going in at the moment.

Crokes crackle with energy and youthfulness and if not this year, then soon the gap to 1992 will be bridged and Colm Cooper, the last and most distinguished of five brothers to play for the club, will have another medal for his collection. One of the country's great clubs will be back on top of the pile. One of the game's greatest players will have another stage to perform on.

For the moment though, his long year has a couple of acts left in it before he can pause for perspective. Tomorrow it's The Nire in the Munster club final. Next weekend it's Kilcummin in the East Kerry Championship. Since the county final there's been one weekend off during which he scarcely drew breath. Even last weekend, having beaten the mighty Nemo seven days previously, they were out in hurricane conditions battling with Gneeveguilla in the East Kerry championship.

He's used to it. A county star since he was 18, the seasons are never short and the demands are never small. Last year when Crokes won the county league in December he'd been in bed with tonsillitis that week but he was needed on the Sunday. This year the season will stretch even longer, the highs have been higher and the lows lower.

"It's been a long year of ups and downs for me. Once you're winning you don't really mind but it will be nice when the break comes to relax and enjoy the Christmas, hopefully I can extend it to February."

NOBODY WOULD BEGRUDGEhim the downtime. This summer for the first time his form showed signs of slippage. He was still good enough to get picked for any forward line in the country - it was just that not scoring from play against Waterford and Tipperary set alarm bells ringing everywhere. By the All-Ireland final, in which he scored 1-2 and played very well, he had fought his way back to some form but the glass half-empty tendency were fretting for him.

When he mentions to people that at 23 he is one of the senior figures in a Crokes forward line which contains three 19-year-olds people laugh softly. Not because a team freckled with such youthfulness is riding high but because the Gooch at 23 occasionally allows himself the luxury of remembering that he is only 23.

Only 23 and with fame constraining him to varying degrees since he was an eight-year-old mascot. Only 23 and last August 12 months he suffered the loss of his friend Kieran Cahillane in a drowning accident. Only 23 and on a Monday morning this April, having watched Crokes play Rathmore the evening before, his Dad, Mike died, leaving another great gap in his life.

A dip in the line of constant excellence was inevitable perhaps but scarcely allowable in an environment which places football above all else. "It's very difficult in Kerry." he says. "Any game you lose, to the best teams or a lower-ranked team it's failure. Even if it's only a league game. It's tough to live with that expectation. If you're winning they want you winning well and with a performance too The expectation is difficult."

"It's a difficult one. Anytime you lose somebody close to you it's tough. Your routine has changed. You expect to be doing different things with your friend or with your father and that's gone out of your life. There's a hole. Things move on. Initially after my Dad died I came back a little bit too soon, I was back within a week. That affected me a little bit. I wanted to just get back into the business of normality I think. Playing football, training with the boys.

"In a way it was a relief. There was so much going on in my head, if you go to training and switch on for training it's a relief not to be dealing with the other stuff. Looking back though, maybe it was too soon and I needed to deal with it all first."

THERE'S A SIDEto being a footballer in Kerry which you can't know unless you've lived it. It's a different sort of celebrity. More claustrophobic. You live and perform, succeed and fail in the same place. You love it because it's about the place and the people after all but it closes in sometimes like a trough of grey weather.

Killarney swells happily in the summer with its tourists and the transient workers (chefs, pot scrubbers, waitresses and bell boys) who cater for them. There's always the wise guys who watch everything though and whisper out of the side of their mouths. Fathers to every rumour. Take two drinks of an evening and the town will be humming with texts and whispers.

"Sometimes you get a little sick of it," says Cooper. That's not the right word, not sick, just mentally drained by it rather than physically tired. Working in Killarney, training here, living here it's a bit claustrophobic. It's something that I enjoy, though overall, if I didn't enjoy it I wouldn't do it. I'll look forward to the break but come February, March, April again it's good to get going. If the chance is there to have a go at winning an All-Ireland it's hard to walk away from it.

"It's a bit claustrophobic though, everybody knows your every move. So much is expected of a Kerry footballer, that you have to expect it. It's hard to switch off in Killarney, everyone knows you, you're facing the public in work. It's hard to juggle the right mixture. I don't take too much notice. I smile and laugh away but if you're out people always throw a second glance of the eye over at you. Some people might think they own you. I try not to pay it too much attention."

He's not the only one in the boat this time either. A good club run through the winter months involves everyone. Of the Crokes half-back line Bat Moriarty is a guard in Dublin and the other two Eanna Kavanagh and Brian McMahon are in London. Different problems. Corner back Mike Maloney was a minor this year and hasn't had a weekend off since the All-Ireland final. He's studying in Limerick, played with Crokes to the East Kerry minor semi final (beaten by Spa) and has been out with the seniors every weekend.

It's an adventure though, even for a 23-year-old who has seen more than many men twice his age. This annex to his season has given him back his scoring form, and in recent times little splashes like his 2-3 against Mid-Kerry or his 2-6 against Spa have reassured everyone the Gooch hasn't gone anywhere.

They didn't know quite what they had in them until a couple of weeks ago when they turned over the seven-time All Ireland winners Nemo Rangers. They got out with six points to spare in what was probably the club's best performance since the 1992 season. The Gooch scored 1-4, the goal being archetypal. The second last of the Cooper brothers, Vince, made a substitute's cameo appearance.

"Playing Nemo was a jump into the unknown for us. None of us had played Munster championship. The fellas trained well, put in a big effort. We're just trying to keep the show on the road now."

Eight more days and the year is done and down, last entry entered into the record books. Time for breath and perspective before it all starts again with Kerry's trip to Australia in January. He's uncertain about what thoughts the pause will bring.

"Yeah. I'm not too sure, I'm lucky though, we're a big family and we're all living close together. We're all around at the moment. Christmas will be tough because Dad was such a part of our lives but we'll be around together, that will be half the battle. We'll remember the good times that have gone by and we'll battle on." One family. One club. The Gooch soldiers on, steadfast.