I saw the video when no one was sure I was coming out the other side... I thought: ‘The boys have my back here’
Message from old Tyrone teammates helped Coleman through tough times
THE bond that binds a history-making team was revealed to Mickey Coleman when he needed it most. It was the spring of 2021, the world still had not emerged fully from a near global lockdown, and the 41-vyear-old from Arboe was lying on the flat of his back in the ICU unit of Montefiore Nyack Hospital in New York battling to stay alive.
Just days earlier, on March 29, his world was sent into a tailspin.
Proof that the competitor in him was still raging, he had managed to win his own personal time-trial in his looped run around his Pearl River home in Rockland County, New York that evening, shaving 15 seconds off his old best.
Life in the old man, then? As it turned out, barely.
Minutes after that run, as he sipped a cup of tea, his chest caved in, suffering the kind of heart attack so severe that its moniker, the widowmaker, needs no explanation.
But he refused to let go – the odds on surviving an attack as chronic as his when it occurs outside a hospital setting is 6% – and that is why his wife Erin, the mother of his two children Micháel and Riordan, has come to him with a gift from home.
It comes from a dressing room from the past, the one he shared with the Tyrone footballers of 2003 who crashed through the All-Ireland glass ceiling, and to a man they have togged out one more time for one of their own with a digital chorus of well wishes.
A highlight of the reel is the footballing gifted but follically challenged Peter Canavan, his old teacher as well as his former team-mate, complete with a Brian May wig lamenting that his personal grooming has gone south ever since the barber’s scissors had been decommissioned due to the pandemic.
Of all the medicine being pumped through him, none offered such relief and hope in that moment.
‘That video was a big part of me starting my recovery process,’ he explains.
‘I was in very bad shape and some of those boys I had not seen in 20 years and just to hear their voices, see their faces, hear their words of support.
‘And they were recording that video when no one was sure I would come out the other side or not. There was great positivity in it and it gave me great energy.
‘It is very, very difficult to explain but there is a bond there when you win an All-Ireland, there is a bond there that is very hard to touch and I just felt that I was back again in that moment in time when I needed it most.
‘I just felt “the boys have my back here, they are rooting for me”.
‘It is a very powerful thing to feel, especially when you are on the arse of your trousers.’
They were pretty much all back together again in Belfast last week, this time to support the launch of his recently published book ‘Pulse’, which is less an autobiography and more a testament to the power of human willpower.
Ultimately, that is why he is still here. Once he was hit by the crushing first wave of pain that night, he started to beat his chest with his fist in what may have been a vain attempt to wave off the trouble coming his way fast, but it was a declaration that it would meet resistance.
‘It was the biggest fight of my life and I came up against plenty of fights, but this was one that really tested me.
‘The will to live is a great thing when it is all you have. It is amazing what strength you have when it is all you have to work with and that is all that I had to work with that night.
‘I was determined to keep myself alive as much as I could but, you know, even though I tried to keep it going, I did drop dead. So, I didn’t exactly win but I might have eventually won the war.’
Three times he flatlined, once prior to leaving his home as the emergency services arrived and twice in the ambulance.
Indeed, his heart had stopped as he entered the hospital, but six minutes of CPR and the fight that was still inside him brought him back. It was not so much that his life passed before his eyes, but as he explains in a passage in his book, he felt himself in that moment as he occupied the buffer zone between life and death, slipping away. Inevitably, it was against the backdrop of a GAA pitch – this time his Rockland club in New York, that provided the backdrop.
‘I was overcome with an energy pulling me across the clubhouse roof and out across the playing field. It was the most beautiful feeling that I’ve ever felt in my life. Pure serenity. Peaceful. Calm. It’s difficult to put into words how good it felt. I was drawn to that energy. I wanted to go towards that energy. Nothing else mattered. I wanted to go there. Then, suddenly, another force of a very different kind of energy captured me. This time the force was pulling me back, telling me not to go there.’
As it transpired, the club members in Rockland subsequently did convene and hold a service praying for his recovery.
‘That outer body experience is obviously life changing as well. That was a big part of my recovery, I believe.
‘I do feel there was a spiritual blanket thrown over me as part of my recovery. I was not afraid to die after that,’ he explains.
But now he is busy living and he has much to live for.
A young family, a passion for music as well as football – he married both when penning a poignant tribute, Brantry Boy, to his friend and late team-mate Cormac McAllen – and a thriving construction business, it is one lived to the full.
His construction company Shoreline has gone from having two employees and an office space that was his beaten up van to approximately 140 employees and a headquarters in downtown Manhattan.
Like everything else, it was willed into being against the odds. He started out seeking to get a license to dispose of asbestos on the promise of a first time contract, but in the time he took out to do so he had to borrow money just to pay his rent. And when he got that license, he realised it would amount to nothing if he could not obtain one to construct and operate a suspended scaffold to make that contract a reality. Without having any experience, but by learning what he could from YouTube videos and learning to tie knots with dress ties, he somehow managed to pass that exam too.
That resilience was honed in the football fields of Arboe and Tyrone. He may have been a fringe player in that 2003 panel – he failed to make the panel at the start of the year but was called in for the start of the league by Mickey Harte – but everyone gives of themselves fully in a group like that.
And, as he found, you take from it too.
‘I think a lot of that stems from the resilience of growing up in good sports teams.
‘I was very fortunate to be involved in All-Ireland teams so I think a lot of it stems from that, even my recovery from illness because it’s all or nothing.
‘Some people are happy to just scoot along but I don’t think I would be that kind of person who would be happy to do that.
‘I have to give it everything, it’s all or nothing. If it fails, you just get yourself up, dust yourself down and go again.’
In many ways, that was also a world view informed by playing ball during the Troubles.
There is a potency to your sense of
identity when it is something that has to be fought for.
‘Going to Gaelic football matches for us was not an easy task. We had all the obstacles of the British Army, getting pulled out of cars and having our kit bags thrown out on the road. It wasn’t simple but all we had to hang onto was our culture and our heritage.
‘We were very proud of the fact that we were Irish men, we were proud of the fact that we could play Gaelic football so it was an absolute honour to do so. I guess some might have looked at us and said we had a chip on our shoulder.
‘I don’t think we did have a chip on our shoulder but I always felt we had to prove our point more than anyone else.
‘I always felt that northern teams had to do that, but we were happy enough to play the hand that we were dealt.’
And he still is. He has adapted to his new reality, he watches his diet which now has a strong plant-based foundation, but more importantly, he looks after his mind.
Prior to his illness, he never switched off, particularly not from work. But he has found ways to address that, not least through mediation.
‘I think you can eliminate a lot of stress issues. I do believe it had a big part to play in my illness. Do I clinically know that? I don’t. But I just know myself it had a massive part to play in it.
‘It would be something subconsciously that would chip away at you. When you are constantly on the move, burning the candle at both ends, there is only one outcome, really. You are going to get sick at some point.
‘There was a whole new world I dived into after I got sick and I started to recover. It was just to quieten
down the head and the body. It really does help, it is a game changer, it certainly was for me.
‘I started doing yoga. It took a little bit of time just to get into that zone just to understand, and it took me a good three or four months just to get into mediation but when I did, it was just amazing, absolutely amazing.’
‘You still have all those challenges every day, the work is still ongoing but I guess it is just trying to find a way to manage it better so that it is not affecting you as much as it could be. I am just very thankful that I got a second chance and when you get a second chance, you should make the most of it. There is a great quote that I have in the book which is “every man has two lives, but they only start to live their second when they realise they only have one”.
If it fails you get yourself up, dust yourself down and just go again...