Courage, warmth and f illed with compassion – he’s the measure of how I judge myself
AUSTRALIAN Rules Football is a macho world, so Jim Stynes was always going to be something of an oddity. On the pitch, the Dublin man was as tough as any other, but in the dressing room, his ‘sharing and caring’ was, for many years, treated with suspicion. But there is no doubt that the 6ft7in father of two won over his critics – his death has prompted a remarkable outpouring of grief in his adopted home. And the men who would rarely betray their feelings have not hesitated in sharing their thoughts.
Perhaps none more so than Jim’s former captain and the face of Aussie Rules, Garry Lyon, who – in front of a TV audience of almost one million last Thursday – gave an extraordinarily moving eulogy.
‘I now see the irony that I was to become the leader of the football club and helped set the standard for others to follow, and all the while it was Jim who was doing the real leading and setting the real standard,’ Lyon told viewers. ‘I see that with such clarity now. I didn’t back then and it led to doubts about Jimmy.
‘Why was he not fanatical and obsessed like I was? Why did it appear that football was just a game to him when it was much more to me? Why could he smile an hour after losing a game, whereas it took me a weekend to get over it?’ he asked.
‘Why did he not embrace the manly aspects of our game as enthusiastically as the next bloke, where drinking beer and attracting women was a badge of honour – worn as proudly as anything achieved on the playing field?
‘Why could he be as compassionate about the welfare of others, outside the club, whereas I was predominantly obsessed with what happened within?
‘Why was he so prepared to buck the system and explore an alternative path when the rest of us were so aligned to the one that had been trod so rigidly for decades?
‘Why did he not shy away from displaying his emotions when I saw it as a weakness to do so? Why was he so fervently proud of his Irish heritage when I had barely given mine a second thought? Why was he so sensitive to issues of racist and religious tolerance, ahead of his time, when I was part of the problem? I thought he had it all wrong.
‘What I know now was my doubts were less about Jim and more about myself and I say that, not self-consciously, but with some degree of pri de. For it means that I have come to t ruly appreciate the kind of man that Jim Stynes was – and if it puts me in a lesser light, then I am fine with that because there are few, if any, that can compare with him.’ Once Stynes’s playing days came to an end, it was his ‘compassion for the welfare of others’ that took over the footballer’s life, according to Lyons.
His unearthing and unrelenting support of Liam Jurrah — the first indigenous person from a remote tribe to play in the AFL — provided a watershed moment.
Stynes also championed the involvement of women in the running of Aussie Rules – something that was almost taboo. But Stynes, with wife Sam a kindred spirit, believed that the AFL had to do more to embrace women. Which made another poignant moment last week, when Melbourne club chiefs signalled their intent to bring Sam on to the club’s board.
Sam Ludbey, a primary school teacher who met and married Stynes in the mid-nineties, was a rock during his illness. ‘They were very alike in so many ways,’ one sports source who met the couple told the Irish Daily Mail. ‘She never shied away from the publicity – not that they were courting it, but they obviously had made a decision to go public with his illness and they did it together. A perfect match.’
THERE was little surprise that he was given a state funeral — only the third sportsman in the history of Australia to receive one. ‘ They want a wards n a med after him and a statue of him outside the Melbourne Cricket Ground,’ one local source explained.
At a s pecial, undisclosed location chosen by Jim, his ashes will be scattered by wife Sam and their two children, Matisse, ten, and seven-yearold Tiernan. Although he never ‘banged on about being Irish’, and was settled in the seaside suburb of St Kilda, it was clearly important to him.
Raised in Rathfarnham, south Dublin, Jim was not popular in his school, De la Salle College in Churchtown, where he played rugby. ‘I really didn’t fit in,’ he once said.
Instead, it was at the Gaeltacht that he found his place. He recalled how the headmaster, Domhnall Ó Lubhlaí, told him: ‘You’ve got to understand where you come from, your heritage, that it’s deeply rooted in you. If you don’t understand that you’ll just drift.’
Like the rest of his family – brothers Brian and David and sisters Sharon, Dearbhla and Terri-anne – he joined local GAA club, Ballyboden St Enda’s. As a nine-year-old, he played for the under-11 football team.
‘Even then he was bigger than most of the other boys his age,’ former St Enda’s chairman Gerry O’sullivan said. ‘His parents, Brian and Tess [Teresa] were in the club all the time. Brian was a coach and mentor and Tess played camogie in her youth. One of my most vivid memories is when Dublin won the All-ireland