Football

Paradise by the bulkhead light... John Rafferty's journey from backyard to Croke Park

A treasured memory. With his dad 'Bim' after St Mary's won the Sigerson Cup in 1989. John was named 'Player of the Tournament'.
A treasured memory. With his dad 'Bim' after St Mary's won the Sigerson Cup in 1989. John was named 'Player of the Tournament'. A treasured memory. With his dad 'Bim' after St Mary's won the Sigerson Cup in 1989. John was named 'Player of the Tournament'.

THE new bulkhead lamp flooded the yard with light and meant playing football was now possible all-year-round for young John Rafferty.

With summer long gone, he played out another All-Ireland final in the frosty darkness. As his prized O’Neills ball bounced down off the barn roof, he leapt to catch it and then took off on a solo run down the yard, leaving imaginary opponents on their backsides.

Micheal O’Hehir commentated in his head: ‘A minute left in the All-Ireland final, a minute to go and here’s John Rafferty on the attack for Aaarrrr-magh… He beats one man, he beats another… Still Rafferty… He shoots…’

SMACK!! The ball hammered off the byre door and Croke Park erupted… Victory for Armagh!

Then he went in for his tea.

That story will not surprise anyone, from team-mates to neighbours, colleagues, club players, county players and generations of schoolboys at La Salle, the Abbey and St Paul's, who has been lucky enough to spend time with John Rafferty. His passion for football is insatiable, his energy is incredible, his career as a player and a manager has been remarkable and the seeds for it all were sown in that backyard behind his family home on Church Street, Poyntzpass.

And they were sown before John’s time. He traces his passion for football back to the sad day when his grandmother “took a turn” in that yard. She was taken indoors by his late father Benedict (affectionately known as ‘Bim’) but passed away shortly afterwards.

“Daddy carried her in and laid her on the sofa and as she was dying she told him: ‘You keep following the football son, it’s good for you’,” he explains.

“When I look back now, I think: ‘Lord God, I’m so lucky to have met the people I did through football’ and the luck that was brought to me all boiled down to the fact that daddy hung on to his mother’s dying words and kept following the football.

“And when he followed Armagh, he really followed them. When nobody followed them, when hardly anybody even wanted to play for them, he would have been there.”

It cannot be over-emphasised just how genuinely devoted Bim Rafferty was to Armagh. The team’s fortunes were at such a low ebb at one stage that he was called out of the stand to play in a National League game once - he agreed and was taking his position on the field when some delayed players arrived and bailed him out.

He drove his Morris Marina pick-up van up and down the country with John’s uncle Ownie (the late Eugene Murchan) in the passenger seat of and John slotted in between them, just delighted to be there.

“I had one knee at the back of daddy’s seat and the other one across where the handbrake would have been,” John explains.

“That’s where I was perched on a cushion and we went to matches everywhere – I’ve been to county finals in Kildare, straddling the handbrake, before there was an M1!”

A natural ball of enthusiasm and energy, watching TV just wasn’t for him. Gaelic Football was his passion and his family nurtured his love for it. His sister Roisin’s husband Dennis (a PE teacher in Claremorris, Mayo) arrived one day with a special gift – an O’Neills All-Ireland football. That treasured ball rarely left John’s hands and after kickabouts with his friends he would take the O’Neills home and wash it.

“All summer we played and then daddy put up the bulkhead light up at the bottom of our yard which meant that football was an all-year-round occurrence,” he says with a laugh.

Technically there were few better but at St Colman’s College, Newry he says he was “too wee and too skinny” to get much game-time. However, as an eager squad member he absorbed every word that came out of the mouths of coaches Ray Morgan and Pete McGrath.

Meanwhile, at home he played minor football for his local club, Redmond O’Hanlon’s, aged 11 and was in the senior team at 15 and his tender age and slender frame were no protection from the ‘agricultural’ big battlers who plied their trade in Division Four.

“It was a great grounding,” says John.

“You had to learn quickly. Either you developed a side-step or a good relationship with a dentist. One or the other. I never liked going to the dentist, so I decided to work on my sidestep!”

That sidestep came in handy at home too because John had to come up with devious strategies for fooling his dad who wasn’t keen on his teenage son mixing it with burly opponents from around the county.

“I was that skinny, I think daddy was trying to protect me and he used to say: ‘Would you wash the van for me?’ on a Sunday. I would say: ‘I’m going to go to the ’Pass (Poyntzpass) match’ and he’d say: ‘Yes, you can go if you have the van washed’.

“I remember washing one half of it, the half daddy could see from the kitchen window. I said: ‘Is that ok?’ ‘That’s a great job,’ he said.

“I used to drop the bag out of the bedroom window at the front of the house and head for the backdoor and say: ’I’m away to the match here’.

“He didn’t see a kitbag so he thought then I wasn’t playing. I went round the front of the house, grabbed my bag and ran over the road.”

But John was soon a victim of his own success. Reports of a superb goal against Forkhill made the report in the local paper.

“That’s a tarra,” said Bim, with a touch of sarcasm, after reading it. “That couldn’t have been you, sure you left the house with no boots!”

He was rumbled but his dad let him play after that.

By the time he left St Colman’s and enrolled as a trainee teacher at St Mary’s, Belfast he had several seasons of senior football behind him and some meat on his bones to go along with his pace and seemingly bottomless fitness levels.

Alongside former St Colman’s team-mates Benny Tierney, Ollie Reel, Cathal Murray and Jarlath Burns, he won the Sigerson Cup with ‘the Ranch’ in 1989. He was named Player of the Tournament and Bim was there to cheer him on in the final against UCC.

With tears not far away, he explains: “One of the loveliest things I have is a photograph of me and daddy after we won the Sigerson.

“Things went well for me that day. I was marking Maurice Fitzgerald and Maurice and me had a ‘getting to know you’ session and I felt I had a good game.

“Daddy came over and gave me a big hug after the match. I was so glad that he was there because he died later that year.

“It was some day, a great day. It’s a memory I’ll take to my grave and it doesn’t get any less important to me as time creeps on by.”

Tragically, Bim Rafferty died suddenly of a heart-attack just after Christmas in 1989. The St Mary’s Sigerson team, lifelong friends to this day, formed a guard of honour outside the chapel in Poyntzpass at his funeral on New Year’s Day, 1990.

By then John was on the fringes of the Armagh side. He had been an unused substitute for the ‘Battle of Omagh’ against Tyrone in the 1989 Ulster Championship and of course Bim – his inspiration, mentor and most fervent supporter – was there, but sadly he never got to see his son wear the orange jersey in a League or Championship match. How proud he would have been if he had!

“If he’d got another couple of years he would have seen me play against Down in ’92 and I didn’t miss any Championship football until I was dropped for the All-Ireland semi-final in ’99 (more about that later),” says John.

“I would love for him to have seen me play for Armagh, but it wasn’t to be.”

John was invited back into the Armagh panel for the National League before Christmas in 1990 and the following summer the Orchardmen were drawn against Tyrone in the Championship once again. This time, on home soil and inspired by Kieran McGurk, they won but without his dad there, John felt unable to join in the celebrations. Soon after that he dropped out of the panel and it seemed the young man needed time to grieve.

“I remember sitting in the changingroom and despite the fact that Armagh had won the game, I felt this emptiness because daddy wasn’t there,” he says.

“I couldn’t cope with it. The middle had been pulled out of my football world. Here I was on the Armagh panel but without daddy there to watch it, I just didn’t enjoy it so I pulled out.

“Armagh went to the Ulster final that year but I don’t have one regret, my heart wasn’t it. He was the reason I was sitting in that changingroom but he wasn’t there.”

So he took the time out he needed and returned to the fold the following season. He had to bide his time and sitting on the bench became routine but the breakthrough came against Roscommon at Lurgan’s Davitt Park.

“Joe Kernan told me to warm-up and after a few minutes he said: ‘Get that tracksuit off you, you’re coming on’.

“I was that used to sitting freezing in the dugout that, underneath the Armagh tracksuit, I had my own tracksuit on. I got the first one off and started pulling at the second one and some wit from Lurgan shouted over the wire: ‘This game will be over by the time you get all them clothes off!’

“Anyway, I came on and I had a right good game. I remember going for a ball against this big mountain of a man. I didn’t pull out, I don’t think he expected me to keep coming but I came out with the ball.”

From then on he was a certain-starter and winning that ball against Roscommon summed up John Rafferty’s footballing attitude. He is iron painted as wood, with a genuine smile and a word for everyone but an unshakeable will. At his peak he was around 11 and-a-half stone and just shy of 5’10” but his absolute fearless commitment meant he wasn’t found wanting in the physical stakes. With the ball in his hands he was quick and technically excellent and as a defender he was (to say the least) dogged - he was given a man-marking job against Down’s James McCartan and spent half-time waiting outside the Down dressingroom for McCartan before walking back onto the field with him!

“I was no wrecking machine,” he says.

“But I never hit the brakes going for a ball. I knew that I had to go for it as hard as I could or not go for it at all. When you’re wired to go for it, that’s what you do and it’s as simple as that and if I was asked to mark you, I marked you.

“If you wanted to play football I could do that and if you wanted to give bad manners and the other carry-on, I could accommodate that too.”

By the start of the 1992/93 season, Jim McCorry and John Morrison had taken over the Armagh reins and they appointed John county captain: “Leading Armagh out at Irvinestown in 1993 was a high, it was lovely,” he says.

Armagh played six Ulster Championship matches that summer and never got beyond the semi-final (Derry won the All-Ireland that year playing five matches) but they reached the National League final the following year and gradually began to build. By 1999, with Brian Canavan and Brian McAlinden now in the dugout, the Orchardmen ended a 17-year wait for the Ulster title by beating Down in a one-sided final.

The county was Armagh-mad as the squad prepared for an All-Ireland semi-final against Meath and the scene seemed set for John to star in a real-life Croke Park repeat of the backyard games of his youth. Only, it didn’t happen…

The management decided to go another way for the final and John was left out of what would have been the biggest game of his career. Sport can be cruel and perhaps the Armagh management said more than: “You’re not big enough, or strong enough” when they told him he’d been dropped on the Thursday night before the game. But that’s all John remembers from the conversation.

“It was disappointing to hear that given that I’d played in the National League semi-final and semi-final replay against Dublin in the spring and I’d done alright,” he says.

“So to be left out and told I wasn’t big enough, my immediate reaction was: ‘Well there’s no point in going on Sunday’.”

His wife Catherine convinced him to pack his gear and board the bus for Dublin but it was a soulless experience for a man who had spent close to a decade in the team but knew he wouldn’t feature in the game.

“I disagreed with the decision at the time and I still do because I was taken off the team and replaced by people who hadn’t been there at the start of the National League because Armagh wasn’t important enough for them at that time,” he says.

“Is it a sour note? No, because it wasn’t my mistake. It didn’t kill me, so it made me stronger and I didn’t fall-out with either Brian over it.”

Armagh lost the game and John never played for his county again. It was a drab way to close the chapter but it wasn’t the end, not by a long shot. By that 1999 season he was back playing with his native club in Poyntzpass but before then he’d spent 10 fruitful seasons with Antrim’s St Gall’s where he won Antrim titles in 1990 and 1993 is still regarded as a club legend as player and manager (more about that on Monday).

“I was so lucky to go there,” he says.

“The first fella I met from St Gall’s was Sean McGourty – he was my head of department when I started teaching in La Salle in Belfast. As human beings go, they don’t get any better than him.

“The fellas I played with were such good men – Seamus McGoran, Peter Stewart, Lenny Harbinson… all great fellas. I had 10 years playing there but it got to the stage where I had children and I couldn’t be tramping up the road to Belfast all the time but I was a very lucky man to get to play for St Gall’s and win two championships (1990 and 1993).”

As transfers tend to do, his switch from O’Hanlon’s to St Gall’s had caused consternation but he was welcomed back to the Poyntzpass club with open arms and played until he was 45. By the time he’d finally hung up his boots his son Joseph was a team-mate in the O’Hanlon’s jersey.

“I really enjoyed playing for the ’Pass when I went back,” he says.

“I would have loved to have played in a final for the club (he did get to a semi-final) but I did win two Division Four medals and they mean as much to me as the two championship medals I won with St Gall’s and the Ulster Championship medal I got with Armagh.”

His last match was for O’Hanlon’s Masters versus Ballyvarley Masters late in 2018 to mark 120 years’ of GAA in Poyntzpass and the joy he has for the game shone through that night like it always had. He’ll always be that boy, playing under Bim’s bulkhead light…