Davy Fitz’s greatest victory – beating his childhood bullies

There are few Irish sportspeople who can polarise opinion like the Clare hurling manager Davy Fitzgerald – he’s loved by his own and often appears hell bent on ensuring the rest of the country can’t stand him.

But that pendulum swung in the opposite direction this week when he again spoke of the bullying he was on the receiving end of as a young student.

On one hand, it may have shown that – at one stage at least – his popularity in Clare wasn’t universal. But more importantly, it saw him soar in the estimation of so many others up and down the land.

It wasn’t the first time that he has spoken about bullying but it was the graphic way he described it that really captured the terror that victims of this most cowardly practice have to endure on a daily basis.

For those who missed it – and there cannot have been many – he was talking to students at the Limerick Institute of Technology and he spoke of those times on the school bus when he lived in daily fear of his oppressors.

It might be hard to reconcile the opinionated, animated, doggedly determined hurling man of today with the small boy who was a soft target for his attackers.

But what was really shocking about his experience was the relentlessness of the attacks – the smashing of an egg into his head, the throwing of his shoes out the school window, the gross invasion of his person by boys who probably through that this was, for the most part, just a bit of craic.

Even now, 30 years on, Fitzy’s own words capture the terror in a way that illustrates just how lasting a mark this behaviour left on him.

“I used to dread getting up in the mornings and going out on the bus, absolutely dread it. I used to sit on the second seat from the front nearly all the time. There was seven or eight guys who used to be laughing at me.

“They’d hit me on the back of the head. They would pull my hair. They put egg on my head. They would pull me back to the back seat – the bus driver wouldn’t know anything about it – they’d open my shirt and start painting on my body. I got my shoes thrown out the bus window. I felt absolutely so low and I tried to figure out what this was all about.

“I went home with a black eye and bruised ribs. I never told my mam or dad anything. To this day, I don’t understand bullying. I cannot understand how people are so insensitive. I cannot understand how you would single someone out and do that,” he told the students.

The difference between Davy Fitzgerald and others, of course, is that deep down he had the determination and will to win that was to epitomise his playing career and now his management style as well.

He had a dream and despite the best efforts of bullies he was not going to be deflected from achieving it. To that end, he was lucky – it is the boys and girls who don’t have that inner strength who fold to a point that their futures are forever tarnished because a few hard men wanted to have the craic.

The caricature of Davy Fitzgerald is that of a squealing lunatic, besieging his charges to go that extra yard; it’s easy for impressionists to send him up – and we all laugh when they do.

I’ve never met him, but there’s a great friend of mine who has known him from the time he first pulled on that Clare jersey – and he describes him both as one of the best friends and one of the nicest men in sport.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.