“Brendan's youngsters go to school in Maghera. They had another school visiting and the young lads had a game of football. This wee boy emptied somebody and the teacher was giving him a telling off, saying ‘that’s not allowed, you can’t do that’. The young boy turned and said ‘you can so Sir, do you know what that’s called?’ The teacher says ‘no, what are you on about?’ ‘That’s called The Patsy’. That’s the reputation he’s got for himself.”
John Joe Kearney
THE week after the All-Ireland club final eighteen months ago, Patsy Bradley could have been seen around Slaughtneil sporting not one space boot, but two.
Not for the first time, he was ravaged by injury, staring down the barrel.
Not for the last time, he would beat it.
An All-Ireland minor winner with Derry in 2002, Bradley quickly progressed to the senior ranks. He turned in a couple of colossal shifts when they reached the last four of the All-Ireland series in 2004, making a crucial late block from Alan Mangan to deny Westmeath a goal when they were hanging on in the last minute.
In a generation that didn’t have the success it should have, when Bradley and Fergal Doherty – or Patsy and Doc, as they were commonly referred to – were fit, they were a formidable pairing.
Injuries haunted the pair of them, though. Bradley, for instance, suffered damaged vertebrae during a challenge game for Derry against Errigal Ciaran in early 2010.
Bradley played through the pain barrier at the end of that season, but after an operation he suffered a slipped disc that set his recovery back.
It looked like curtains at that stage. That’s six years ago now.
There were days even since when he almost had to be physically lifted off the pitch. Even then, he wouldn’t stop.
When Derry played Down in Ulster in 2013, he was nowhere near fit to be playing a game of that magnitude. That was during the worst injury spell of his career, tormented by his back and groin and Achilles.
His discomfort was evident from the first run he made. The mind wanted to do it, but even the strongest of bodies wouldn’t carry him.
Yet he made it through 67 minutes, until there was no more left to give.
Four weeks later when the two teams met again the Qualifiers, he remarkably produced one of his best displays in an Oak Leaf shirt. Kevin McKernan had run the first game but Bradley produced a textbook defensive performance, putting up a human shield on the 45 that Down simply couldn’t get past.
The ounce of breeding he had were worth more than a tonne of feeding. His father Mickey fulfilled the same leading midfield role during his playing days, back before this Slaughtneil juggernaut really began to roll.
“I’d have played with big Mickey,” recalls John Joe Kearney.
“I would always have said that over an hour’s football, his Da would have caught more balls in the air – and that’s saying something given what Patsy would have caught.
“Mickey Bradley was a good fielder of a ball too. Patsy, when he fields one, it’s spectacular. But over an hour’s football, Mickey Bradley caught a lot of footballs too.
“Willie Hampson told a story, it was at a carnival match somewhere and Mickey Bradley was playing at midfield.
“The opposition, one boy says to the other ‘you stand down and I’ll knock her down to ye’. Big Mickey went up and clamped her. The other boy never smelt her!
“He had a great spring. To me, he was an Enda Muldoon of a footballer as regards his physique and his ability to catch a ball.”
And in club colours, Patsy Bradley was something else altogether.
When Slaughtneil played Ballinderry in the 2012 county final, the Shamrocks started like a whirlwind. Knowing the threat of their opponents’ midfield colossus, Martin McKinless put a wall of four men across the middle.
Wherever Patsy Bradley was, Mickey Conlan was to kick it the opposite direction. For 15 minutes it worked a treat, until Bradley could stomach no more.
He rectified the situation the only way he knew how: by releasing the inner madness. He took to standing slap bang in the middle of the field and when the ball was airborne, he charged like a raging bull after it.
A great photograph taken that afternoon captured his aerial assault perfectly. The ball falling into a crowd of white and blue shirts and there’s this man in maroon, flying almost horizontal through the air after it.
He was absolutely huge in Slaughtneil’s All-Ireland club semi-final win over Austin Stacks in early 2015, but by that stage he was already riddled.
On Croke Park’s almighty surface, when he won the first throw-in with a big clubbed fist, it looked this was his stage. The injuries finally manifested themselves, but he died with his boots on.
And then he took them off and put his space boots on.
“Last year after the Scotstown game we just said to him: ‘Look Patsy, you need to have a bit of sense here and not be playing through the pain barrier. Take six months rest, and come back a better player for it’,” is how John Joe Kearney describes their conversation last winter.
“Thank God he listened to us, and that’s been the case. He came back and maybe his first game or two he was rusty, as you’d expect after a layoff of six months. At the minute, he’s flying.
“He’s sensible enough. Very difficult to get him to put his hand up during a game and say ‘I’m hurt’. I think he realised himself he had to have a break, because he was going nowhere.”
He has entrusted his body with Ollie Cummings for almost all of the last 11 years.
Barely a couple of hundred yards from the main Derry to Belfast line, at the very foot of the Glenshane mountain, the renowned strength and conditioning coach has spent as many an hour piecing Bradley’s frame back together as he did helping form it in the first place.
It wasn’t just his career, but his livelihood. Working for his father’s construction firm all his adult life. Shovelling all day. His job title is listed in the county final programme as ‘Site Foreman’ but that’s never been his style.
There were many attempts made to get him to take an office role and take the strain off his body, but he wouldn’t have it.
“That’s just not in his genetic make-up. He has to be doing something,” says Cummings.
But as determined as he is, Bradley would also listen. So he did take the six months off football. He never touched leather for Derry this year, instead working religiously inside with Cummings.
From the day and hour they lost to Scotstown last November, he was effectively banned from the pitch.
He played his first game this year against Glen on July 24, just a few weeks before the Championship began.
“Patsy’s as hard as nails. He doesn’t want to let club or county down, which is a massive character trait, but unfortunately that can kick you up the arse long term,” said Cummings
“It was March or April time when he was feeling good and moving well, but there was no point putting him on the pitch to play games. Mickey and John Joe just wanted him ready for the Championship.
“A lot of people last year were saying Patsy was done. If you have any aspirations, one thing you want to do is prove people wrong.”
And when Micéal Aherne read out the team for Slaughtneil’s Championship opener with Lavey, there was only one man for the job.
Uimhir a h-ocht: Patsy Bradley.
