“Laughter is the sun which drives winter from the human face.”
- Victor Hugo
WHENEVER I think of Oul Duck, I’ll think of laughing.
The way he was always in your company after the match in the bar, even when he wasn’t. His energy radiated through The Dolphin Bar. You wouldn’t hear every insult he’d drop but you’d feel the reverberation of the laughter that followed.
Donal Brolly was his right name. The family nickname was The Tams but all anyone ever called him was Duck. When he and Lena had their own collection of six wee Ducks, it became Oul Duck.
It didn’t matter which social group he would pass by, Oul Duck had that rare human ability to connect with the people in it, whether it was one of his 13 grandchildren, a senior footballer or his own peers.
No matter what age you were, he was always the same age as you inside.
Flicking through the phone yesterday, I came upon a photo of him at a wedding a few years back. The youngest brother had invested in a new jacket. You could tell by the head of him he liked it more than he should have.
The evening runs on and the jacket is flung to the chair as he heads to the bar.
“Gimme that thing!” says Duck, the opportunity not to be missed.
He’s barely fit to get it around his shoulders as he poses proudly, the hands on the lapels, the smile bursting across his face as Seamus comes back to see the head on him standing in his good jacket.
In later years, the van would often pull up behind the goal we trained at. He’d sit and take an eye over the session, shouting in every so often.
Probably the best conversation I ever had with him was at training two years ago. I could feel the glares as I stood over the wire talking to him while the rest of the team finished off with sprints at the far end. Sure what odds? I was a done goalkeeper that couldn’t run when I was 20. He was talking about his treatment and football and different things. You could have just talked to him, all the time.
By day, he was a shuttering joiner whose work would have stood up against that of man in the country.
He had an unbending love of football and slagging.
His sharp wit could be too much for some boys who were more sensitive of the soul.
Nobody was spared. Praise was not easily extracted but offered just often enough that it really meant something for Duck to think you’d played well (not that I’d know!).
He appreciated a good footballer but far more than that, he appreciated the lads that cared enough about the orange jersey to get hurt. He knew and we all knew that was in his own sons. And you could see the soft spot for Meatball, Hen, Alex Moore especially. They got more abuse than anyone, which was a compliment in its own way.
In the late teenage years and early 20s in our house, it was like a badge of dishonour if you weren’t up out of bed on a Sunday morning before Duck arrived to catch you for the club lotto.
If you were still in the cot and you heard him shouting his goodbyes to the Foxs next door, you were up pulling the clothes on and through the kitchen door with a handful of the change from the night before.
He never knocked. Just come roaring in through the back door. “Are ye up, Annie?!” if there was nobody in the kitchen.
On one particular visit, he cursed all around him as my mother, for badness, paid him in 5p and 10p coins. He went out the street hardly fit to walk with the weight in his pockets.
Sunday mornings were for lotto and the afternoons were for Drum games.
He stood on the same spot every week, just up past the halfway line in front of the trees, often at the bonnet of my parents’ car where the smoke and carry-on would keep the midges at bay.
Hail, rain or shine, home or away, he was there. He travelled the country watching Derry as well. Football was his oxygen.
First he was a player and then when he couldn’t do that any more, he took teams right up to senior, and then he became chairman. Eventually it was like having a Grandmaster about the place. His was the voice that was listened to.
More than most, Oul Duck had earned the right to land into the football debate with his tuppence.
They say he was a great footballer. The unearthing of the 1983 intermediate final on YouTube allowed us a window.
Duck was close to the end of his playing days by then. He was player-manager but chose not to start himself. Within 14 minutes, he Drum were 1-4 to 0-1 down and he threw himself on. Local scribe Seamus Mullan pondered in his match report whether the result might have been different if he hadn’t been as selfless.
First ball, he wins a free. Then he kicks a point. For the rest of the day, he’s at the heart of most of the good. And when he can’t get the ball, he gets a bit of the man.
Drum leave a host of goal chances behind them in the last 20 minutes. They could easily have won. He won three junior medals and lost two intermediate finals.
Christmas fell on a Sunday this year.
As Gabriel Bell went around to open the back door, The Dolphin settled into a hush.
All the regulars knew of the plans. Bell had sent a few texts, word had spread. The place was packed. The Christmas drinks that were once a staple part of the diet of rural Ireland returned for the day.
Not even the arrival of his siblings to the house could stop him. They were on the way in and he was on the way out. ‘I’ve somewhere to be!’ he laughed.
As Oul Duck came through the door, the congregation in the bar burst into spontaneous applause. The kind that rural Ireland doesn’t bestow upon anyone living, really.
He came in on a mobility scooter that had been gifted to him by the Blight family [McCloskeys]. Their own father, Mickey, passed away at the end of November.
A place where Mickey had always enjoyed some solace, the Blights own the Dolphin now. One community pillar lost and missed, but even in his absence they helped another to get through what would turn out to be his final days.
It seemed a short while ago that Duck might not make it to Christmas but he pulled through again, as he did so many times over eight-and-a-half years battling cancer.
Even cancer found that in order to knock the spirit from him and the craic from him, it would have to literally knock the life from him.
Nobody in the bar on Christmas Day would have believed that within a few days, he would have taken severely ill again. He passed away at home surrounded by his family last Tuesday.
At his funeral on Friday, Donal ended a heartfelt poem he’d written about his father with the words of Val Doonican:
“Be a proud man and hold your head high.
Walk tall, walk straight and look the world right in the eye.”
He was the proudest Drum man. For all the slagging, he was one of the few that made you feel like it was a corner of the world worth fighting for. That you weren’t to be looked down or laughed at by the big clubs.
It would make him thick to think of Drum being disrespected, and it made him thick when the team didn’t always embody that spirit.
Oul Duck would be the first to tell them, too. And then he’d laugh.
We feel the winter on our faces this week.
