BETWEEN the four Marron brothers in one house and their three paternal cousins from up the same Moneyglass lane, there was always plenty of football to be had.
Phil Marron is the middle child of five. His brothers James, Aidan and Benny would become synonymous with the St Ergnat’s GAA club just down the road.
As a teenager, Phil’s own path seemed destined to go that way too.
A talented half-back up through the grades, he was chosen for the Antrim minor football squad in 1996.
“They had me playing corner-back, and I didn’t like corner-back. You know what you’re like as a cub, especially when you’re marking somebody who could run 40mph, you earned your keep,” he laughs.
Aidan would follow in those footsteps a year later, helping the county to a rare Ulster minor final appearance in ’97.
James would go on to play a bit of senior football for Antrim, while Benny was a mainstay of the club team in goals, and has now gone down the coaching path.
The four of them and their cousins Michael, Kieran and Kevin ‘Kindo’ would spend their formative evenings and weekends shooing the cattle off a corner of one of their father’s fields to make a bit of space for football.
“There was always plenty of opportunity, plenty of boys to thran and twist with,” he smiles in the upstairs of Ground coffee shop in Magherafelt, his mild-mannered Antrimness barely audible at times over the laughter and chaos of the young children filling up the background.
In summer, they’d have their own townland soccer league.
“We were Gortgill United. Around at McCoy’s corner, that was Loughbeg United. It was 5-a-side, it used to be a gutting match, cutting shite out of each other.”
The league’s claim to fame was that after he fell from Kly Green in early January 1993, suffering a broken leg that threatened to derail his blossoming career, their neighbour Anthony of McCoy’s corner blessed it with his presence.
“AP ended up doing nets for a few games during that, standing injured with a cast on.”
McCoy has spoken before about the uniqueness of his father Peadar’s interest in horses in a small rural Irish village like Moneyglass.
The same applied to their very close friends, the Lavertys from Toome, whose interest was in motorcycles.
Fortune would place head boy Phil Marron in the same class as Emma Laverty at St Olcan’s in Randalstown.
Emma’s father, Mickey, was both farmer and biker.
He began racing in 1967 and three of his four sons, John, Eugene and Michael would all follow in his footsteps – though he outlawed them following him into road racing, insisting they stick to the track.
Phil and Emma will have been married for 15 years in October.
He was up around the Lavertys in the late ‘90s and got drawn into helping the boys’ racing pursuits.
“They’d have put electric blankets around the tyres to keep them warm, Mickey said to me ‘take that off and roll that up’. I was thinking ‘I’m only here to watch for the craic!”
In 1999, Phil was involved in a car crash near home that left him with a broken femur and a cast on his left arm for nine months. He couldn’t lift it above head height.
As those months passed, the 40mph speed of corner-forwards became further marginalised in his mind, driven out by the 180mph whirr of motorbikes.
“The crash was the nail in the coffin. I got hurt and was off [football] for a while, nearly two years. I tried to go back and wasn’t worth a shite.
“Whenever I did try to go back, racing was taking priority, I was missing training.”
As a youngster he’d worked on Carey’s farm across the road and when he’d finished an auto-sparking course at Millfield College in Belfast, he started working for local man Cathal McErlain in Loughbeg Garage.
“Working on Scanias, working on tractors, working on cement mixers, working on cars, working on everything.”
He’d always been into engines and electronics. Anything he ever got that was radio-controlled, he’d have it broken apart to see what was inside.
When the car accident happened, he was on an electronics apprenticeship with Nortel Networks. But with full-time workers being laid off, he didn’t fancy his chances and left to take a job in a bike shop in Ballymena.
By then, he was heading to England every weekend with the Lavertys. They’d get the ferry over on a Thursday night and come back on the overnight sailing on a Sunday.
“We used to drive the length and breadth of England, I did a lot of the driving. You were driving up the road on a Sunday night after the racing, getting the overnight ferry, home, overalls on, straight to work.”
While he tried the bikes out a few times himself, he laughs that he “couldn’t ride out of sight on a dark night.”
It was the joy of working at them rather than sitting on them that piqued Phil Marron’s interest.
He would prove himself to be one of the top motorbike mechanics on the circuit.
As time passed, he moved into the role of Crew Chief. He’s the liaison between the rider and his team.
Having spent ten years working with brother-in-law Eugene and another two with Michael, his career took off in a different direction again towards the end of the 2018 season.
And in November past, the former Antrim minor footballer reached the summit when he helped guide a 21-year-old Turk to the World Superbike Championship.
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IT was no easy decision to part ways with Eugene.
They’d spent ten seasons across three different spells working together, while Phil also worked two years with Michael Laverty.
Working with family can be testing but they’d always dealt with it by being straight.
“We never had anything major. I always told him ‘if you have a problem, speak up. Don’t bottle anything up, we’re adults here’. It was always quite open.
“When you get older, you get less tolerant of bullshit but you get a wee bit softer as well when you’re working with younger lads, you’re trying to put the arm around them and look out for them.
“I would have loved to have seen Eugene win a World Championship. He has three silver medals. I was with him for two of them. The work he put in was ridiculous. He’s an absolute machine, so disciplined.”
The Aprilla team decided not to renew Eugene’s contract in 2018, but they wanted to keep Phil and offered him the post of Technical Director.
He didn’t fancy the role, nor the volume of time he’d have to spend in Germany.
Eugene’s biggest rival in the early noughties had been Kenan Sofuoglu, the five-time champion who pipped the Toome rider to the title when he had his closest shave in 2010.
Sofuoglu had become a mentor to his young compatriot, Toprak Razgatlioglu, and approached Marron in 2018 to see if he was interested in joining them at Kawasaki.
Marron was pairing up with the sport’s brightest young talent, someone with the capability to wow but who was still raw and hindered by a desperate language barrier.
“We were getting by on broken English, but the year before he’d been working only with Italian [team-mates], so the language barrier was even bigger.
“Me and Toprak spent a lot of time together the first few weeks, trying to build him up. He’s very intelligent and picks things up very quickly, but he just wouldn’t have the confidence when he’s speaking, especially if he has to repeat something.
“With his accent, people were asking him to repeat things nine times out of ten, and he’s a shy lad, so he ended up he just wouldn’t try to say it.
“Now he’s coming out of his shell. You can actually hear an Irish twang in some of the English he’s speaking.
“In Argentina in 2019, Eugene was coming out of one of the cubicles in the toilet block, he opened the door, Toprak was standing and goes ‘what’s the craic?’
“He’s a lovely lad, there’s a real nice, kindly thing in him.”
A real nice, kindly thing and the instinct and ruthlessness of a killer.
The defining image of his world-title winning year was when he passed leader Scott Redding on the second-last corner in the Czech Republic to win.
The race had looked gone when Razgatlioglu ran wide on a maneouvre four turns earlier, but he came back for another bite at the death.
As the pair crossed the line 0.04 seconds apart, the Turk was in front and the Englishman was furiously waving his fists, later saying: "I don’t think that’s very fair racing, but if he wants to race like that, so be it."
But the fearlessness is bred into Marron’s rider. His father was a famous stunt rider known ‘Wheelie Arif’.
On YouTube, there is 2009 footage of an eight-year-old Toprak performing his own stunts. He was born to be on a bike.
Phil Marron’s role was to guide him. First, they broke down the language barrier. Next, the young rider had to be shown the right path physically.
“In 2019, he wasn’t fit. We did a race in Buriram in Thailand - humidity from hell. Everyone was sweating just standing about.
“He came in after one exit and he was as red as that wee Clio,” he says, pointing out the upstairs window to a motor parked on the far side of Market Street.
“Sweating, the focus was wandering. I remember asking if he ever went to the gym.
‘I go when it’s raining, but I don’t like it’.
‘How often does it rain in your country?’
‘Twice a year’.
“He knows he’s being funny, he gives you the deadpan face and then a wee smirk.”
The final piece of the puzzle was moving from giants Kawasaki, where he’d been groomed to ride alongside six-in-a-row world champion Jonathan Rea and dominate, to the more humble Yamaha, who hadn’t had a winner since 2009.
“Fair play to Kenan, he said ‘no disrespect to Kawasaki but if Toprak wins there, he’s just another Kawasaki winner, whereas if he wins on Yamaha…’”
Marron went with them.
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THERE were times when 2021 seemed like it might be another chapter of disappointment for Phil’s catalogue.
Razgatlioglu criticised his team-mate Garrett Gerloff after being taken out by what the Turk called “a big mistake, a stupid mistake” in Holland.
He’d re-entered the garage kicking some inanimate object out of his path before declaring angrily to his team: ‘That’s the championship’.
Marron moves quickly to calm him. As crew chief, he’s half mechanical support, half emotional healer.
With the lead regained in the title race and one more victory needed to take the crown from Rea, Razgatlioglu crashed out in Portimao, 24 hours after the Larne man had lost his bike at the same corner.
That’s why Marron likes the environment around him to retain whatever cool it can in the heat of competitive beasts racing at life-changing speed.
“You have to react to whatever happens. I try to keep my crew as calm as possible.
“Toprak is watching the guys working on the bike, if he sees them panicking, it gets him heightened and he can make a mistake.
“I heard it years ago and it stuck with me: ‘The guy in a hurry is either coming from a mistake or going to a mistake’. So don’t be in a hurry if Toprak’s in the garage. Stay calm.”
A normal, Covid-free year could involve flying 150,000 miles around the world across 10-and-a-half months. He might get a day at the start of the trip and a day at the end to enjoy whatever city he finds himself in.
Emma tends to keep her travels towards the more domestic end, but they’ll go to Portugal together in October.
Eugene lives 30 minutes from the track in Portimao, and they’ll get to visit for the first time in three years.
His twin brother, Eamonn, took the footballing route rather than chasing the bikes and was a handy operator for Cargin.
The other Laverty boys have written their own legacy on the track.
Yet their brother-in-law has achieved more in the background than he could ever have dreamt of when Mickey Laverty told him to roll up those tyre warmers.
A footballer was lost to Moneyglass and Antrim. He was gone by the time the club won an intermediate championship in 2004.
There was a year in Edinburgh, a couple in Lincolnshire, but home now sits in Cargin with a foot on the border into Creggan.
Bikes of a different variety are his other big passion.
“I love my mountain bike. Davagh, Rostrevor, Bigwood this side of Warrenpoint, Garvagh when it’s a shitty oul day because you’re always in the shelter of the trees. I love that. Absolutely love it.
“I’ve friends from the two-wheeled world who are right and handy, but I can hold my own and get through it.
“The Monday after a race is the worst hangover in the world. That’s the best thing for resetting for me. Two hours on the mountain bike, then go home and be in the office four or five days.”
He tuned into the MacRory Cup final a few weeks back, mostly to keep a watch on the natives involved in St Mary’s Magherafelt’s victory over Holy Trinity, Cookstown.
But it’s a long time now since corner-forwards and clearing cattle to play football were usurped by the lure of the chassis and the master cylinder.
“I’d keep an eye. Used to be mad for it, but the bug on bikes takes a different hold altogether.
“I was surprised. I’ve known a few friends have done the same from other sports, got into the racing and felt it was a different world.
“There’s an addiction there.”
An addiction that’s served him well.
