Patriot Hearts (3 page)

But back then I didn’t know anything about strategy or even all the rules. The next day, before my first-ever game, the coach came to me and said, “Okay, Furlong, your job is to make sure number 13 doesn’t get his hands on the ball. Do you understand?”

I let my instincts take over. I did pretty much what the coach had asked, sticking to the other team’s left corner forward like fog on an Irish coast. After the game I was sitting in the dressing room listening to the coach talk about what we did right and wrong. Then he stopped and walked right up to me.

“And you played a great game,” he said.

I was hooked.

After getting changed, I walked by an outdoor basketball court where some kids were playing. I stopped and watched and couldn’t take my eyes off the play. “God,” I thought to myself. “Does that look like fun!” A man named Bill Casey, who was coaching the kids, came over and asked if I’d like to give it a try. “Boy, would I ever,” I said. Within minutes I was addicted to another sport.

By my early teens I was obsessed with athletics. The field of play, whatever the game, was the place I always had the most fun. I enjoyed everything about sports: the teamwork, the intensity, the way games were built around a code of honour and fairness. When you grow up as an introvert, you get pushed around and teased quite a bit, and life doesn’t seem fair. Sports levelled the playing field. No one bullied me. Sports changed my life.

There was a grass tennis court outside our home in the prison compound. Tennis was considered an English game, so people in Ireland didn’t play it. The court, I discovered, was the perfect size for a five-on-five soccer match. For some reason, our school banned the playing of soccer, so this was the only place to play it. It crossed my mind that if we took the net down from the middle of the tennis court and used it to fashion two soccer nets, we would have a pretty decent pitch. And then someone came up with the brilliant idea of marking the court somehow so we could have out-of-bounds lines. One of my friends told me that pouring gasoline on grass burned it. If we could find some gasoline we could literally burn perimeter lines onto our new soccer field.

Our family didn’t own a car, but a friend of my dad’s did. Whenever Mr. O’Donovan, the prison’s deputy governor, came to pay Dad a visit, I would take a hose and siphon gasoline from his tank. My friends played lookout so I wouldn’t get caught. We then used the gasoline to line our field. All was fine until one day I overheard Mr. O’Donovan telling my dad about how hard his car was on gas. I turned white. I imagined my father finding out about what I had been up to.

That was the last time I stole gas from Mr. O’Donovan’s car.

There were many life lessons that I would take from sports and use long after my playing days were over. In my late teens, I was named captain of a pretty good Gaelic football team. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the honour, or for that matter understand a captain’s role and responsibilities. I mostly thought I’d been given the distinction because the coaches happened to like me. In my captaincy debut, our team played what I thought was a solid game. Even better, we won. The coach, however, saw things differently and went around the dressing room after the game just ripping into people. He saved his bluest words for me.

He pretty much said I was a big fat zero who had contributed nothing to our victory. I felt humiliated and went home afterward discouraged by the dressing-down I’d received. The next day I woke up determined to bounce back from my subpar outing. I trained hard all week and barely slept. I couldn’t shake the empty feeling I was left with following my coach’s tongue-lashing.

The next game finally rolled around. I scored several times. I was in on key tackles. I left the field exhausted and covered in mud. Although we won fairly easily, I could see that our team was still struggling on several fronts. Against a stronger opponent, we’d be in big trouble. Still, I was happy with the way I’d played and figured I had saved myself from a roasting by the coach.

The dressing room went silent as the coach strode in. Within minutes he started in on different players. Eventually, his gaze settled on me. “Furlong,” he said, “is there a chance you will be making a contribution anytime soon?”

I was stunned.
A contribution?
I’d just had the game of my life. What on earth was this man talking about? I’m not sure how much later it was when the light went on, but eventually it did. My coach wasn’t talking about how many points I scored or tackles I made. He was talking about leading. As captain, I had to concern myself with more than just my own little world. “Your job is to help this team succeed,” my coach said. “Your job is to lead this team in all respects.” What he was talking about was finding a way to imbue my teammates with the belief that they could be the best in the country. I had to teach them that when someone falls down it is a teammate’s job to pick him up. When someone falters it is a teammate’s job to cover for him and not be blind to the needs of others in pursuit of one’s own success.

That is the contribution to the team that my coach wanted from me. It was one of the best lessons on leadership I ever received.

BY MY EARLY TWENTIES,
I had represented Ireland in basketball and European handball, and I had played Gaelic football for Dublin. I would discover years later that I scored the very first goal for Ireland in a European handball match. My experiences on the Gaelic football field were the most memorable, however, for the sheer magnitude of the events, if nothing else. We would often play in front of 80,000 people, and when we screwed up on the field they’d let us know it.

I’ll never forget walking toward the dressing room after a game early in my career and being met by a man and his son. The man said I was his son’s favourite player and that his boy would often wear a team sweater with my number on it. He wondered if I’d sign an autograph for his son. That was the first time that I understood the impact an athlete could have on a child. Instantly, I recognized the role model responsibility the athlete bore. But I also remember thinking what an honour it was to be in that position, to have the power to shape someone’s thinking and outlook for the good.

When it came to sports, I was fanatical. I trained hard, I played hard. I was never the most talented guy on my team. If I were to compare myself to a player on a hockey team, I was a second-liner. Not a star but a notch above the third-and fourth-line grinders. I think I was often asked to be captain of my teams because of my heart and desire. Few people were going to outwork me.

At 23, I was asked if I wanted to coach Ireland’s women’s basketball team. The women weren’t very good. In fact, they were beaten pretty badly most times they played. But I saw the offer as a challenge, something I rarely passed up.

I became possessed with the idea of turning this disparate group of women into something resembling a real team. I decided I was going to make them better no matter what. I remember realizing that when I stood in the middle of the gym floor, looking them in the eyes, making demands of them that they initially thought were impossible to meet, every one of the players looked directly back at me. They were paying attention. That may not sound significant, but for someone who was 23 and a little intimidated by the job I’d taken on, it was. It told me I’d made a connection with these women, giving me confidence that I could make them believe in things they hadn’t believed in before. It also gave me some assurance that I could hold a room. I became conscious of the importance of words and the influence they could have on people. Thanks to these women, I also came to understand that if you lead the right way, people will follow.

By the time our first game came along, the women were ready to run through walls for me. I coached them for only two games before events changed the direction of my life, but I would always be proud that we won both of them.

LIVING IN IRELAND
, we were somewhat immune to the problems going on in Ulster. Most nights when you turned on the television, there would be some story about “the Troubles” that plagued Northern Ireland, but for a teenager it was a story on television, nothing more. The violence was so commonplace that there would be stories about milk prices, bus fares and telephone strikes before those about someone dying in Belfast because of the Catholic– Protestant war. That would change on the afternoon of May 14, 1974—the day that my family’s world changed forever.

At 5:30
PM
, as most people were heading home from work, three car bombs exploded in Dublin’s city centre. I remember feeling the blasts through my feet as I walked along a street far from where the explosions occurred. Within minutes I could hear the sound of ambulances making their way to the locations of the bombings, which happened on three different streets. In all, 26 people would die.

In the immediate hours after the explosions, everyone in Dublin was frantic to hear from family members and loved ones. I was quick to assure my parents that I was okay. But as afternoon turned into night, my mom’s sister, Josephine, and her husband, Ned, hadn’t heard from their daughter, Siobhan, who would have been leaving her job downtown about the time of the explosions.

Siobhan was among the dead.

Those who were missing family members were urged to go downtown to a temporary mortuary to identify the bodies. For my aunt and uncle, that task was too much. Besides, they lived 130 kilometres away. My father volunteered for the assignment. He later described a scene at the provisional morgue that was nightmarish beyond belief. The bombs had ripped people into pieces. Body parts were stuffed in bags. It was a ring on a finger that helped identify Siobhan.

Many of the dead had been young women who were employed in the civil service and were leaving their offices just as the blasts occurred. There were also 300 injured, many of whom would be permanently disfigured. The Ulster Volunteer Force would claim responsibility for the bombings almost 20 years later.

It would be said that there was no family in Ireland that wasn’t affected in some way by what happened that day. I feel the country lost something that it never fully recovered. Bad history biting us again.

My cousin’s funeral was difficult to sit through. I remember looking around the church at tear-streamed faces. My aunt and uncle were broken and almost unrecognizable in their grief. So was my father.

I wouldn’t realize until later the extent to which the whole appalling chapter in the country’s history had emotionally ravaged my poor father. In the weeks that followed, he could barely talk about what had happened. He was haunted by the gruesome images he encountered at the morgue. He was never able to shake the feelings he was left with after having to see his niece’s body torn asunder. It was as if he was in a perpetual state of shock.

Less than a month later, on June 4, my father was felled by a heart attack.

He lapsed in and out of a coma. I remember sitting at his bedside by myself and praying that I could have one more conversation with him. He stirred and looked at me.

“What are you doing here?” he said in a whisper. “Don’t you have things you should be doing?”

It was so typical of my dad.
Don’t you have things you should be
doing?
Which meant something better than sitting in a hospital waiting to talk to him, preferably something that would help me get ahead in life and make me a success. During an earlier talk my father had said to me, “We sent you to good schools. We taught you the difference between right and wrong. You know that when something isn’t yours you shouldn’t take it and if you break something you should fix it. But all these values together aren’t going to make you a success. What’s going to separate you from the others is how hard you are prepared to work.”

I will never forget that.

My father died the next day, June 5, 1974. He was buried beside my cousin, Siobhan. And there would be few days in the following years when I wouldn’t see something, or hear someone talking, that didn’t make me think of him. I missed him terribly. He was just 63 years old when he died. It would take me a long time to stop feeling angry that my father’s life had been cut so short, that he’d been robbed of an opportunity to enjoy life after working so hard for so many years.

Not long after my father’s death I was enticed by an unexpected offer. A recruiter from a high school in Prince George, British Columbia, had come to Dublin in search of someone to set up an athletic program. I was a young teacher with just two years’ experience. The job intrigued me. My cousin’s death, followed so closely by my father’s, had left me feeling a little empty, and open to new adventures. I was definitely receptive to the idea of leaving Ireland after what had happened a couple of months earlier.

I decided to take the position, thinking I would return to Ireland in a few years.

IT WAS A FALL DAY
in 1974 when my wife and I bundled up our son and daughter and boarded a plane to Canada.

I don’t recall much about the long haul over the Atlantic other than looking out the window occasionally at the great white expanse below and pondering just how cold it was going to be when we landed. I spent part of the flight second-guessing my decision. At one point, I pretty much convinced myself that I had made a colossal error—and I had dragged three other people along with me on this misadventure.

But it was too late to obsess about that. Our plane touched down in Edmonton, and we approached a customs agent with our passports and a letter of introduction from the school I would be working at. I will never forget the parting words of the man who interviewed us. “Welcome to Canada,” he said as he handed me back our documents. “Make us better.”

Soon I was in Prince George starting a new life. My job offered plenty of challenges, but I dove into it with everything I had and made some real headway in getting an athletic program up and running. I had only been at the school a couple of years when I received a call about a position with the city as director of parks and recreation. Compared with what I had been doing, this was a big leap. The city owned arenas and tennis courts among its many recreational properties. I would be in charge of them all. And I would have to deal with unions almost daily. I was 26. I got the job.