by John Furlong
The announcers were stunned by what they had just witnessed. Most in the stadium were in the same state of disbelief. Mills had run faster than he’d ever run in his life; his time was 50 seconds better than his personal best—an almost unthinkable accomplishment. It was also a new Olympic record.
For whatever reason, the race would have a profound influence on me. Maybe it was Mills’s underdog story, one a kid from a working-class Irish family could relate to. Maybe it was the mesmerizing finish. But from that moment on I wanted to go to the Olympics. I remember throwing on an old pair of Keds right after the race was over and taking off down the streets of my neighbourhood, imagining myself in the Olympics. I ran four kilometres to Phoenix Park, the biggest and most famous public space in Dublin. By the time I ran home I was an Olympic champion.
I watched a lot of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Many athletes made an impression on me: American sprinter Bob Hayes; Peter Snell, the great middle-distance runner from Australia; Joe Frazier, the boxer from the United States. But none left quite the same mark as Billy Mills.
At 14, life was a giant possibility, and I was probably more of a dreamer than most kids growing up in Ireland. I was born in Clonmel, in the county of Tipperary, on October 12, 1950. The town is situated on the northern bank of the River Suir and rests in a valley surrounded by the Comeragh Mountains. In Irish history, Clonmel was noted for its resistance to Cromwell’s armies, which had successfully sacked other communities nearby.
My father, John, who went by Jack, was a prison warden, or, as they were called in Ireland, a governor. Governors typically lived on the jail grounds, which meant I was raised, quite literally, in prison. We bounced around a bit. When I was six we left Clonmel for Dublin, where we stayed for three years before relocating to Portlaoise, in the Irish countryside. When I was 12 we returned to Dublin for good.
Living in a home that was attached to the walls of a prison was different. There’s no other way to put it. Depending on which prison my father was working in at the time, our house could be separated from the jail by bars. At one stop, I remember being able to look through my bedroom window into the prison yard and watching the inmates playing soccer. In Clonmel, the jail was for low-risk inmates, and some prisoners would work on the grounds of our house. I would see them all the time but be forbidden to talk to them.
As my father moved up the ranks of the penal system, the prisons we lived in housed more dangerous prisoners. Perhaps the most notorious of all was Mountjoy Jail in Dublin. Not far from our house at Mountjoy was a stone cross that marked the grave of Kevin Barry, a member of the Irish Republican Army who was hanged by the British on November 1, 1920, when they ran the prison. Barry was among a group of IRA members killed at the prison between 1920 and 1921, who collectively became known as the Forgotten Ten.
My father felt that Mountjoy was not the kind of prison that should be housing serious political criminals. It was too old, and its technology wasn’t sophisticated enough to thwart the creative minds inside and those inspired to spring them out. Not long after my father retired from Mountjoy, three Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers escaped from its walls aboard a helicopter that actually landed in the prison’s exercise yard. The escape created a worldwide sensation and a major scandal in Ireland. My father had been right.
I was the third of five boys. My brothers were Jim, Eamonn, Brian and Terry. I had a younger sister named Rosemary who would become the closest of my siblings.
Like most families in Ireland, we never had a lot of money, but my dad did have a reliable job so we were better off than many. But nothing was ever wasted in the Furlong household. When I eventually grew to share the same shoe size as my father, I inherited his hand-me-downs. They were always laughably ugly. I was teased mercilessly at school whenever I wore them. Mortified, I eventually scraped together enough money to buy a brand new pair of running shoes. I would carry the runners in a plastic bag, and out of sight halfway to school I would change out of my father’s secondhand office shoes and put on my new ones. On the way home, I would change back.
My father was a towering figure. Almost six feet tall, he was handsome, dignified, humble, extremely intelligent and fiercely disciplined. He was an avid reader and a wonderful musician. He would lead singalongs in which we were all expected to participate. Little was grey in my father’s world, certainly not when it came to what was right and wrong. Perhaps that’s not all that surprising, given his job. Growing up, there was never much ambiguity about what we should and shouldn’t do. We never helped ourselves to seconds at the dinner table without asking. We never did anything outside the home that could embarrass the family, like steal or destroy property. Our rooms were expected to be spotless. My father would inspect them on weekends. He was a Latin scholar and expected nothing less than A’s from us in Latin at school.
In his day he was a great athlete. When I began to take athletics seriously, eventually making top teams and representing Ireland in various sports, he became both my biggest fan and biggest critic. I remember returning home in the wee hours of the morning from trips I went on with my sports teams. Often, Dad would be waiting up to dissect every minute of the game, homing in on my mistakes over my triumphs. While it may not have been clear to me at the time, my father wanted me never to be too satisfied with a performance. There was always room for improvement.
My mother, Maureen, was a gentle soul. Tall, elegant and reserved, she was a wonderful cook and took pride in making the home as comfortable as possible. She was also extremely religious, as was my father. We lived in a typical Catholic home, with crucifixes and pictures of Christ and saints everywhere. There was church every Sunday, and mass before school was common during the week.
When I think of my parents, I think about how loving their relationship was. There was never any conflict in our household, at least not between them. In fact, I don’t remember a single argument between the two. I can say that I enjoyed a loving upbringing. But that doesn’t mean my childhood was without its troubles.
I was a quiet introvert, scared and often nervous. Whenever a teacher called my name in the classroom I was horrified I might have to speak. Part of that fear, I think, stemmed from the fact that we were never in one place long enough for me to establish meaningful friendships with other kids. I hadn’t been at St. Vincent’s School more than a couple of days after we moved back to Dublin when the homeroom teacher barked out my name. Oh, God, no, I thought. He walked between two rows of desks before stopping in front of mine. I felt ill.
“I presume you play Gaelic football,” the teacher said.
I hadn’t yet taken up the sport. Scared to admit it, I replied that I did.
“Good,” he shot back. “Because we’re playing tomorrow and I expect to see you suited up.”
I raced home after school and told my mother what had happened. I had to have Gaelic football boots—now, today. Although we didn’t have much money, my mother always found a way to get us what we needed. She always had a few pounds stashed away for emergencies. So we walked into town that afternoon and bought a pair of shiny new football boots.
I had watched Gaelic football on television. The game is played on a field similar to a rugby pitch but much larger. There are 15 players a side, and the object is to kick or strike the round soccer-sized ball into the other team’s net or over the crossbar. Players advance the ball up the field by passing or kicking.
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 st
reets. 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.