Pat Spillane: A Great Comeback
By Owen McCrohan
The world of sport is littered with the names of men who have
fallen prey to the scourge of serious injury. In the twinkling
of an eye, careers have been wrecked and lives have been changed.
A sudden twist; a crude tackle; a freak accident has often been
the catalyst that has sent many a good man to sporting oblivion.
In
Gaelic games, the tragedies of Matt Connor and Frank McGuigan
are too recent to bear repetition. Tom Walsh of Kilkenny lost
an eye in an All-lreland hurling final. Pat Hartigan of Limerick
almost suffered a similar fate.
Pat Spillane, the Kerry footballer, went close to becoming another
chilling statistic - a man who ought to have been finished in
his prime. Eight days before the All-lreland final of 1981, Spillane
sat on the edge of a table, his body racked in pain, his face
set in a mask of wretchedness. Out on the Fitzgerald Stadium,
his team colleagues went through the motions of playing football,
their reflexes numbed by a shattering incident which saw the great
wing-forward stretchered off the pitch in excruciating pain.
In
those black moments of quiet despair when his whole world had
collapsed around him, Spillane cursed his misfortune before hobbling
off to the showers. What followed is a story of one man's crusade
against odds that would assume frightening proportions as time
went on.
The
six weeks that had elapsed between his original injury, sustained
during a club game, and his latest mishap in Killarney, is illuminating
because what transpired tells much about the tenor of a man who
does not know the meaning of defeat.
Initially, it would appear that his injury was no more than a
simple ligament strain that would have come right under normal
conditions. But normality plays little part in the chemistry of
a man who makes his own rules in a game he has adorned with a
unique brand of frenetic activity and single-minded determination.
When the great Kerry trainer, Dr. Eamon O' Sullivan, wrote a book
entitled. How To Play Gaelic Football, his thesis was based on
the principals of good positional play as decreed by the conventional
norms of that time. In the 6 years that had elapsed before his
injury, Pat Spillane threw that book out the window. He played
anywhere and everywhere.
In moments of dire peril, he came out of defence with the ball
in his hands and he scored goals and points at the other end with
consummate ease. He slung the ball far and wide but he kicked
it, too, at prodigious length and always with unerring accuracy.
Without a doubt, he was the most exciting and original Gaelic
footballer of his generation - perhaps the greatest Kerry footballer
of all time. And they don’t come much better than that.
In an obvious frenzy to shake off his injury, Spillane ran the
full gamut of the medical experts in Ireland, moving around from
Billy to Jack, seeking the magical cure that would get him right.
The end result was that nobody could give him can accurate diagnosis
and much of the advice that he got was both useless and conflicting.
Previously, his injuries had been remarkably few so that he was
not equipped, mentally, to handle a serious setback. Unwilling
to rest his damaged knee and give the healing process a chance
to work, Pat Spillane would learn the hard way that injury is
a merciless leveller. It was a salutary lesson.
Immediately prior to the '81 All-lreland final, he sought the
advice of a Dublin orthopaedic specialist who - quite inaccurately,
it must be said - gave him a 50/50 chance of playing against Offaly.
On the morning of the game, a trial run on the lawn of the Grand
Hotel, Malahide, had told him all he wanted to know. The knee
was not right.
That winter, he worked out assiduously in a Killarney gym, shifting
massive weights in an effort to build up the quadriceps muscles
that stabilize the knee-joint. It was a waste of time. By now,
exploratory surgery had revealed that the cruciate ligament was
completely severed.
Although the prognosis was bleak, the injured Kerry star pursued
the course he had set himself but the bubble burst before the
Munster Final of 1982 when he was back on the sideline, this time,
it appeared, for good. The knee had broken down irretrievably,
leaving him shattered after a whole Winter’s work.
As Kerry progressed through the championship, however, he would
make one last bid to regain his place. On the run-in to the All-Ireland
final, he had declared himself fully fit. However, his appearance
during the second half of that game was less than inspiring. Judged
by the high standards he had set, his fall from grace was complete.
In November 1982, Pat Spillane did the sensible thing by taking
his medical problems to a renowned orthopaedic surgeon in Oxford
who had got George Burley of Leicester back into professional
football after a similar injury. But the Kerry player’s
troubles were far from over. Immediately following surgery, he
fell victim to a virus infection which left him dangerously low
with a loss of almost 3 stone in weight.
By now, the ongoing medical saga of Spillane had begun to pall.
Back home, the phone had stopped ringing and the callers dropped
off. Moral support was at a premium. Three thousand pounds out
of pocket and with a gammy leg, one of the bravest spirits that
ever wore a Kerry jersey was left to his own devices, abandoned
like an old hulk on a Lee shore.
Such are the fragile loyalties of fame.
At that point, Spillane threw his hat at it. He would not start
all over again, he said. But he did, going back to the weights,
the cycling, the swimming, the harrowing grafting to get himself
match-fit. Even for a man of such strong mental fibre, it was
a daunting task after 2 ½ years of a hellish nightmare
that saw his hopes raised and lowered with ever-increasing monotony.
Irrespective of how he plays in this year’s All-Ireland
final and regardless of which team wins the match, Gaelic followers
who have seen the sporting life of an extraordinary man splintered
and mended again, are entitled to ask two very pertinent questions:
1.Was
there ever a man like him before?
2. Will there ever be a man like
him again?
Pat Spillane
