People will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
- Maya Angelou
COLLIE McGurk was Derry hurling manager for two years. Some weeks they won, some weeks they lost. They ended up pretty much where they’d started.
But boy did they have some craic along the way.
They could all tell you stories for days.
There was the time coming into Croke Park for the Nicky Rackard Cup final. The techno music’s blaring through the speakers as Drumcondra approaches.
Collie stands up.
Gimme a houl’ of that speaker!’
“Took the speaker off us, took the phone that was running it,” says Naoise Waldron, the laughter tripping up every sentence somewhere along the way.
“Everyone kinda went real quiet, thinking he wants us to get serious now, no more of that. Next thing, no noise, and all you hear is do-do-doo-do-do-doo…. on the speaker.
“He gets up and starts going ‘come on, let’s hear it’, and the whole bus bursts into Come Out Ye Black ‘n’ Tans.”
The way home was an even greater adventure.
Trophy in hand, they stepped back on to one of the yellow Chambers buses that have transported Derry teams for years. Rodney Gallagher was the driver and he’d just taken receipt of a brand new bus that week.
Not a hope was he letting drink on board, Nicky Rackard or no Nicky Rackard.
Glum faces from Croke Park to the Carrickdale, where they stopped for food. There, resourcefulness kicked in.
Two players commandeer a two-litre water bottle off pioneer Brendan Rogers and fill it with vodka. There are beer bottles tucked down socks and all that.
Collie McGurk arrives on and the players can hear the conversation. Rodney’s not happy.
“Collie goes to him, ‘don’t you worry, I’ll sort this out’,” says Liam Hinphey.
“He comes walking down the bus, big stern head on him, and lifts the t-shirt - his whole waistband filled with wee bottles of red wine!”
Waldron picks it up with his own version: “Next thing Collie comes up to me.
‘Where’s your drink?’
‘Sure I couldn’t get one on, he wouldn’t let me on’.
‘Ah I thought you’d have more man in ye than that!’
“He shows me all this red wine. ‘Take one…take two!’
“I’m drinking red wine on the way home and he’s up singing songs. Next thing I was singing one, and he goes ‘you can go louder than that’ and boxed me into the stomach, I swear. I nearly hit the floor.
“All go, he was just a gas character. Day-to-day, hour-to-hour, you never knew what you were gonna get from him but you knew it was coming from the right place.
“He just loved hurling and loved Derry, loved being with the lads. You just knew from him that he would have loved to have togged out, pulled on a helmet and played.”
Or there’s one of his first games in charge. A cold, wintry, pre-season night against Down.
The players are in full January mode. Go out, get the miles into the legs, get showered and home to bed.
But McGurk didn’t like Down, going back to an incident from their playing days when one of the brothers got a bad head injury.
So he starts getting revved up. The words line up to race out from behind his teeth. Next thing he’s lifted a hurl and is telling the lads they’d better be prepared to put their legs in where they’re gonna get hurt.
“But he didn’t realise he’d lifted one of those fibreglass hurls,” laughs Hinphey.
“There was no bend in this thing. He just welted himself across the leg with it. You’d have heard the echo off it.
“The whole changing room was in shock at the slap he’d hit himself – then to prove the point, he must’ve hit himself another ten times.”
That was the way he was. He could go to the gym in Magherafelt or the leisure centre and swim 50 laps of the pool before work. He had enough to be at but was eternally involved in teams, whether it was Lavey or Derry or even Magherafelt, whom he helped coach to a minor football championship in 2010.
A member of Derry’s 1993 All-Ireland winning squad, he won more medals with Lavey than any man could ever need. Yet he was fiercely proud of each and every one, football and hurling.
McGurk Architects, of which he was director, have helped shape landscapes around towns and cities and GAA fields in Ireland and beyond. Collie McGurk’s mark is everywhere.
When Kevin Lynch’s drew with Cushendall in the Ulster Club hurling final in 2006, just as Lavey had in ’99. McGurk was in the bar with the Dungiven men afterwards.
Bearing in mind that them and Lavey half killed other every time they went near a pitch for 15 years, here he was grinning ear to ear with the thought of them winning Ulster. So he hatched a masterplan to help.
He ran through the bar telling everyone that would listen the Lynches had to get Cushendall out of Casement Park for the replay. He allowed that Lavey, where Dungiven had been training under their lights, would take the game.
“He’s running about telling everybody ‘take that replay to Lavey, we’ll take it and we’ll move them to the bottom pitch, and when everyone’s in, we’ll lock the gates behind them and them f***ers aren’t getting out with a win!’”
But it’s not the mark you leave on concrete or your medal haul that counts.
Liam Hinphey senior was in the thick of a lot of those bad Lavey-Dungiven rows, and the two teams mortally hated each other. When all was said and done, even beyond the constant joking about, there was a real, innate goodness in Collie McGurk.
Liam jnr’s very best memories of Collie McGurk aren’t in the bar at Casement or on the bus from Croker. They’re in his father’s front room, where religiously Collie and his brother Joe would call to visit.
“The mark of Collie was how he treated my Da over the last 10, 15 years. Them boys were fairly bitter enemies and Da was fairly much a part of it and probably added to it a lot. It was fairly mad stuff.
“But he was brilliant to Da over the last few years, especially when his health wasn’t great. Collie was always ringing him, checking in on him, and as soon as Covid restrictions allowed him and Joe were straight over to see him and called with him regularly.
“Da appreciated that a lot, it showed that mutual respect that they had.
“Collie could have been the busiest man in Ireland but he always had time to check in, and that was very appreciated. He was fairly cut up about the news yesterday because he had so much respect for Collie.”
Naoise Waldron describes him as having lived life “with the spirit of a teenage boy”.
When Collie McGurk sat down with this reporter and Seamus Downey six years ago to recount Lavey’s 1991 All-Ireland club success, the very last thing he said that night came back when I’d heard the news of his passing on Tuesday.
Speaking about the £1m hall he’d taken personal pride in helping build both as a Lavey man and through his architecture, McGurk was eschewing what it brought to the community beyond just Gaelic Games.
“There’s an event here in the hall on a Thursday, where the pensioners come. They use the machines, they go in and get their lunch, and it’s brought a lot of people that had left the club back in.
“And I’ll be the treadmill champion when it’s my turn.”
It’s brought enormous shock and sadness to the whole community in Derry, GAA and beyond, to hear that Collie McGurk passed away this week. He was just 56.
He seemed interminable, a man built to live forever despite living every day at full-tilt.
Unthinkably, he’ll have to settle for being treadmill champion of the sky instead.
And when he achieves it, because he surely will, that’s when the craic will start.
