Big Jack was a friend to all, including unsuspecting fishermen in Limerick

OF all the stories and yarns about Jack Charlton that have been told and retold since his death last Friday, the one recounted by Liam Mackey (which I hadn’t heard before) in Saturday’s Irish Examiner was a personal favourite.

Mackey recalled a car trip from Cork to Limerick in 1994 during which he was doing an in-depth interview with the by then world famous Republic of Ireland manager.

Charlton – a keen fisherman – spotted a sliver of the Maigue river outside Croom and wanted a closer look. As Big Jack waded his way along the riverbank he came across, as Mackey writes, ‘a lone angler on the river bank [who] suddenly found his solitude interrupted by what must have been the mind-bending sight of one of the most famous people in the country approaching him at a good clip and enquiring, in that unmistakable Geordie brogue, if he’d caught anything yet’ to which the, presumably local man, said he hadn’t. The barely believable scene ended with Jack taking the rod and casting out a few lines into the Limerick river before treking back to the car and continuing the journey and the interview with the then Sunday Press journalist.

Quite how the man on the river convinced his friends that night as to the veracity of his story gave Mackey his pay off line: “This big, lads, I swear to god, he was this big.”

Mick McCarthy – as cranky as Charlton could be – seems an eminently nice bloke, while new Ireland team boss Stephen Kenny also comes across as a decent skin, to use the soccer vernacular. Still, it’s hard to picture either man – or any present day international team manager – sharing a twohour car journey with a journalist for a one-on-one interview.

Even less chance of one dashing across the countryside to startle an unsuspecting fisherman. But then the really did break the mould when they cast Big Jack Charlton, the fisherman friend to all.