CHRISTY Fleming’s sense of humour was unique.
In the bosom of hurling country, the very heart of north Antrim, he carved out a love of football by infusing its joy and his own personality with Dunloy’s youthful soul.
Originally formed as a football club, they’d won seven Antrim championships and losing seven more finals between 1924 and ’41, but hurling had taken over as first choice in the early ‘40s.
Football was always there but not the centerpiece, like an extra with a couple of lines.
Then Christy set up a parish league at U12.
It became the Saturday morning ritual for every young boy in Dunloy, and a few sleeper agents from Loughgiel and Cloughmills that might have been ex-communicated if they’d been found out, to go down to the pitch.
They’d be split into four teams – Antrim, Cavan, Donegal and Down.
And they just kicked ball for hours. Endless games, endless fun.
If there were a pair of the old Mikasa gloves on show, chances are they were a gift from Christy.
His party piece was to walk around effortlessly soloing a 50p piece from hand to toe.
Days he’d stand at the front of Brigid Dooey’s shop and entertain an audience with imaginary commentaries from All-Ireland finals in Croke Park.
There was never one that the great Shea Fahy didn’t play in. Fleming was obsessed with the former Kildare, Cork, Sarsfields and Nemo Rangers star, to the point where that’s all they called him in Dunloy – ‘Fahy’.
“He had this white van with blue stripes up the side of it. He used to come and lift boys to take to matches,” says former dual player Mickey McClements.
“One time we were going to a match, and he had this phrase he always said: ‘This is gonna be the mother of all battles’. This night he punched the windscreen and sure didn’t he crack the whole screen, taking a crowd of U12s to Cargin or somewhere.
“He was great craic, a great personality and a great man. But for Christy, I don’t know how many young boys in Dunloy wouldn’t have been involved in Gaelic games.”
And he’d sing Right Said Fred’s most famous hit, personalising the lyrics in great innocence.
“I'm too sexy for this van…”
Christy was loved deeply in the community.
He made people laugh, made them feel the warmth of his quirks, and that made people want to play football.
* * * * *
LAST January, Christy passed away.
When it had come his time to hand the baton on, it was a small queue waiting for it.
Paddy McQuillan (known around the place as Paddy Murphy) was at the head of it. His sons Anthony and Kevin are the current manager and captain respectively.
You’d Adrian Dooey there too, and Don Maguire, men like those. Don is Nigel Elliott’s father-in-law, so his grandchildren are Seean and Nigel junior.
And yet the lineage is not what has brought Dunloy footballers to the point of a very winnable senior football championship quarter-final against Lámh Dhearg on Friday night.
There are a few sons of fathers in either code, but only a few. Of the household names that brought the green and gold to Croke Park three times between 1995 and 2004 for All-Ireland finals, very few have offspring that have yet passed into senior. They’re all yet to come, scarily.
Nigel Elliott senior, father of Nigel junior and Seaan, was perhaps the pick of them.
Tony McGrath, who pulled the 1990 drawn Antrim hurling final out of the fire, was capable but gave it up fairly young. His sons Eoghan and Anton (currently travelling) both play now.
Conal Cunning’s father, Martin Doherty, is an avid football man and former player with Kilrea.
Keelan Molloy’s father Paul and uncle Malachy dabbled in it.
“Malachy Molloy would have been one of the best footballers in Antrim if he’d concentrated on it,” says McClements.
“He had the physique, he had the athleticism, he was brave, he was a good footballer.”
Gregory and Gary O’Kane, aka the Pappys, Martin Curry (a nephew of Christy Fleming’s), Sean ‘Patch’ Mullan, McClements himself - when Dunloy’s best hurlers put their minds to it, their football team could be fearsome.
It was just that they were so close to an All-Ireland, winning seven Ulsters in ten years and losing those All-Ireland deciders to the greats of Birr (’95 and ’03) and Newtownshandrum (’04).
Twenty years on, they are back in the same boat. The second-best club hurling team in Ireland, on some small level buoyed by how they’d stuck to the task against Ballyhale and made them sweat for a long time.
They had to wait 13 years to win the Ulster title back and Dunloy provide as much of the bone structure of the Antrim team as Loughgiel and Cushendall beside them. Thus it’s been for generations.
The hills and valleys of their footballing fortune were at the behest of how much their dual players felt they could offer to it.
When it meant either cutting back on hurling or doubling your time commitment to the club, there were inevitably times when it just couldn’t be done.
Slaughtneil, the current team’s hurling nemesis that they finally broke out past last winter, are rightly lauded as being the standard-bearer for a dual club.
But you’ve heard Shane McGuigan come out earlier this year and question whether he might have to knock hurling on the head at some point to prolong his football career.
The clocks in Dunloy cycle the same 24 hours that they do in south Derry or Cratloe or anywhere else you might find the type of borderline-insane loyalty.
When it came down to it, football was often seen as a release.
It was also something they were far better at than they ever got credit for.
“I grew up playing it, loved playing it. There was less pressure playing football than there was hurling,” says McClements.
“Similar to our current crop, that team was full of fantastic dual players.
“They focused on hurling, they got to All-Ireland finals, but they were fantastic footballers, well capable of playing senior and Division One football, and did so regularly.
“They got to semi-finals and ran some of the top teams in Antrim really, really close to get their place in a county final.
“They loved playing football, similar to the Keelans and Cobys [Cunning] and Ryan McGarrys of the current team.
“There’s a freedom playing football in Dunloy and they play it almost for the pure joy of the sport.”
* * * * *
DUNLOY had lost five intermediate football finals in eight years before they finally got over the line against Glenravel last year.
That propelled them back into senior football for the first time since 2009, when they’d stayed up for two seasons.
They were beaten by Rasharkin and St Brigid’s in their knockout championship games at the time.
Mickey McClements, a championship-winning captain with the hurlers, had just started a family and pulled the plug on football at the end of the previous year.
Current players Kevin McQuillan and Kevin McAllister were on the team that had sent them up as intermediate champions in ’07.
Anthony McQuillan would have been too only for working in England at the time. He flew home to help fill out the bench for the final.
By the time he quit playing eight years ago, they were going nowhere in Division Three, stuck in eternal purgatory.
Then Dominic Dillon came along. He was friends with the players and drew them out in a similar way to Christy Fleming, by making it lighter and more relaxed than the serious business of chasing big dreams with a hurl in your hand.
He brought Paddy Bradley in along with him and that gave the thing a spark.
McQuillan had retired but in the footsteps of his father, the club’s former football chairman, he took into coaching.
As it always had been, the young boys played both codes. Whatever they might do at senior level, there was no question of not going to their football at underage.
This crop would win two Antrim minor A football titles in three years, adding to a South-West Antrim Féile at U14, a Breslin Cup at U16 and a Laverty Cup at minor. They lost an U21 final to St Brigid’s and a ‘B’ grade final as well.
They knew the footballers were there, but they were such obviously talented hurlers that the uncertainty lay in whether they’d ever get them to play senior football.
Such worry subsided very quickly. They hopped and skipped out of Division Three and spent the next few years hammering at the door of that intermediate title until it came off its hinges in grand style last autumn.
In their first senior championship game for 14 years, they cut down St Gall’s in their own back yard.
People might look at it and think ‘Dunloy beating St Gall’s in football? What?’
An earthquake on paper was little more than a mild tremor in reality. Dunloy went there knowing it was well within them.
There are striking similarities to when the reverse happened in hurling 12 years ago.
The Milltown Row men dumped Dunloy out of the 2011 championship after a replay. It was classed as one of the biggest shocks in living memory.
“That St Gall’s match would be one of my biggest disappointments in hurling,” says Mickey McClements.
“But similar to our boys beating them [in football this year], is see when you play a group of men that are winners, they know how to get over the line when the opportunity presents.
“The opportunity presented for St Gall’s to go and beat us in 2011 and they weren’t fazed by it. They could refer to the success they had in football and use that experience to get themselves over the line.
“Our boys were exactly the same against St Gall’s, playing a big team with that tradition in their home pitch, game level going into injury time.
“The fact that we haven’t competed at senior football for so many years, that didn’t even enter the equation. It was another game and they know how to win matches whenever matches are there to be won.”
If they’re able to stay with Lámh Dhearg until the final bend on Friday night, Dunloy might very well steam past them on the straight.
And if they do, it won’t matter whether it’s Loughgiel or Rossa or whoever next in the hurling, the football will continue to have its place in the only place near them that offers it.
“Those senior [football] championships were a long time ago but they are embedded within the tradition of Dunloy, that we have been a competitive senior team.
“In the heartlands of north Antrim, it is something that we wear as a badge of honour. Whilst other clubs might be focusing on one sport, we’re carrying the flag into two battles.”
How Christy would approve.
