‘He was brilliant to be around, full of life’
Kerry and Moyvane footballer Paddy Curtin was taken far too soon when, just 26 years old, he died in late December 2015 from injuries suffered in a car crash. On his retirement from inter-county football this week, Shane Enright remembers his former team
PATRICK ‘Paddy’ Curtin was such a talented footballer that he played for Kerry at all levels – minor, under-21, junior and senior. The cultured Moyvane player was recognised throughout the county and beyond as an elite prospect capable of going all the way.
Having scored 6-12 in two seasons for the minors, his development was hindered by a cruciate knee ligament injury, but he returned from that setback better than ever, to such an extent that Jack O’Connor called him into the senior fold in 2012.
Curtin wasn’t in there to make up the numbers either. He quickly showed that he was well capable of making an impact, despite the competition for places in a star-studded attack that included some of the all-time greats of Kerry football, like Colm Cooper, Declan O’Sullivan, Kieran Donaghy and Paul Galvin.
Good enough to start in the narrow Allianz League semi-final defeat to Mayo at Croke Park that year, who remembers that Curtin came off the bench, and scored, in the famous All-Ireland Qualifier victory over Tyrone in Killarney, a result that banished some of the demons of the three previous championship losses to Mickey Harte’s team?
Or that he was also introduced, at boiling point, in the two-point reversal to Donegal in the All-Ireland quarter-final shortly after? Make no mistake about it, the north Kerry man was very highly-rated and was progressing strongly up the selection ladder at that time.
On December 29, 2015, Paddy Curtin tragically died in an accident in Guatemala, while working in the Central American country. He was 26 years of age. Buried in Ahavoher cemetery in his native village, his family and friends have just been grieving the fifth anniversary of his untimely passing.
Club rivals. School mates. Holiday pals. Kerry teammates. As Shane Enright brought the curtain down on his inter-county career last week, his old buddy was in his thoughts, as he always is. Like all those who had the privilege of knowing Paddy, the retiring Tarbert defender misses him deeply.
“Yeah, of course, you’d miss him. Paddy was a very good friend of mine. I knew him from playing against him with Moyvane underage when we were starting out at under-10s, and they had one forward who was brilliant, and that was Paddy. I actually played midfield back then, so I didn’t mark him that much. You could see that he was a natural talent and a great footballer,” he said.
“Then, when we went to secondary school in Tarbert Comprehensive, I got to know him very well. We played on the same teams, we were in the same classes, we became great friends then. We had similar interests, and we were both massively into football.
“Then, in my second year playing minor, he went on and played Kerry minor with us, when we lost the All-Ireland Final to Roscommon after a replay. Our friendship kind of grew even further because we were going to all the training sessions together. We ended up doing a small bit of travelling together when we both went to New York in the summer of 2010. Paddy was only after coming back from a cruciate ligament injury, and he came over a small bit later in that summer.
“Myself and himself went down for a few days to Miami, and stuff like that, so I knew him very, very well. It was a tough time when he passed away. We all still miss him, he was such great craic to have around the place, he was full of life, it’s very sad. It’s just great to remember the times we had together.”
What sort of a character was he, and how good was he as a footballer?
“He was brilliant to be around, he was full of life, nobody would say a bad word about Paddy. As someone put it, he was a loveable rogue. He was a bit of a messer at times, but in a good way. We were mad about him, and I think someone else said that he was a genius in work and stuff, they loved him too, he was brilliant at what he did,” added Enright.
“I suppose that’s what took him away from Kerry football in the end. He was doing a bit of travelling with Liebherr, so he was out in Guatemala and different places. It was hard then to find the time, if you wanted to train and you wanted to work, he went away to progress in his career with work, that’s kind of why he got pulled away from Kerry football.
“He was a brilliant player. You saw in the couple of years that he was in with Kerry the talent that he had. He started out as a jinky corner-forward, he was only four-foot, five-foot nothing and, by the end, he was a big, strong full-forward, who would be shoving full-backs off the ball in training and knocking them to the ground. He was real strong, could kick with both feet, a real, sound footballer.”
Curtin’s eventual call-up to the Kerry seniors in 2012 was not a surprise to anybody who had been following his career up to that point.
“He was only after getting back from the cruciate for about a year, and he was showing signs again of his promise. He was a brilliant minor, his last year with them in 2007, he was probably one of the best minors in the country, and you knew that the class was there.
“Éamonn Fitzmaurice was in as a selector at the time and he knew, from watching games in North Kerry, how good Paddy was. He was probably onto Jack to bring him in,
and have a look at him. He settled in very well, he played a few league games that year in 2012.
“He did well for Kerry over the couple of years that he was there. If he had stayed a small bit longer, he probably would have become one of the mainstays of the team, one of your main forwards. He was highly thought off in the squad and I know that a lot of the lads still miss him from the place.”
Down through the years, Enright and Curtin did battle in many a north Kerry ‘derby’ between their respective parishes, and the Tarbert man still finds it hard to believe that his great friend’s fifth anniversary has already been and gone.
“The five years have just flown by. You think about him being around the place not so long ago. I remember the last time that I met him, we went for lunch when he was home, I think he had been out in Guatemala and had just come home for a few weeks and he was back in Liebherr, and I was working in Killarney at the time, so we went for a bit of food inside in Der Sullivan’s in Killarney.
“That was the last time I met him, because he was heading off again out abroad. It’s tough, because if he was at home I would have met him a bit more, but he was gone again for a while, and then the tragic accident happened. People didn’t get to say goodbye.”
In announcing his retirement after 15 years of service to the green and gold jersey, Enright stressed that, even though he was recognised with an All Star for his efforts in 2015, he enjoyed his best season for Kerry the following year. Part of that was a burning determination to honour the loss of his great friend the best way that he could.
“Yeah, definitely, that really motivated me further. I actually kind of organised with the lads, because a lot of fellas had played with Paddy, that, on the jerseys that year, we would put a little emblem on the bottom right hand side of the jersey, which read ‘PC 1989-2015’.
“That was nice, it was for the championship games that we did that, so every time that we went out to play, it was on each jersey, so you would have a look down at that, and it would drive you on that little bit more, the fact that he wasn’t with us.”
Paddy Curtin will always be in the hearts and minds of his parents John and Eileen, his sisters Linda and Evelyn, and all his extended family and friends. He will also be forever cherished by Shane Enright. Gone too soon but, most definitely, never forgotten.