The coach who lit up Rhasidat’s Olympic dream
He inspired Adeleke to go for gold and just weeks after his death, the sprinter pays tribute to Johnny Fox, who endured many tragedies in his own life but went on to be a co-founder of Darkness Into Light to help others
IN the early hours of this morning, just as the sun began to rise over the Phoenix Park in Dublin, thousands of people started to cross the finish line of the annual Darkness Into Light walk. This 5km fundraiser for suicide prevention charity Pieta House is always something of an emotional affair. But this morning, as groups of families and friends who set off at 4.15am came to the end, there was an added poignancy — a familiar and much-loved face was missing.
Just three weeks ago, Johnny Fox, who came up with the concept and was one of the main founders of this now hugely charity event, died in Tallaght Hospital at the age of 83. Although poorly for a few weeks, his death was unexpected and his family had hoped he’d make it to the Phoenix Park again.
Since the walk was first launched, back in 2009, when 479 people took part, Tallaght man Johnny always stood at the finish line, clapping and cheering as each participant crossed over. It didn’t matter how long it took, he stayed until the very end, until each one was done.
‘I want every person walking to know how important they are,’ he once explained.
It was a cause that was extremely important to him after he lost his second youngest son Fergal to suicide in February 2008. It came out of the blue and to this day his family are still clueless as to why the fun-loving, football-mad 24-year-old took his own life.
This ferocious blow came less than two years after another son, Robert, died of cancer at the age of 43. As you can imagine, both Johnny and his wife Gertie struggled with their grief.
But an introduction to Joan Freeman, the founder of Pieta House, hugely helped Gertie to start coming to terms with her loss. When Joan mentioned they were exploring ways to raise funds for the suicide charity, Gertie insisted she talk to Johnny, who knew a thing or two about sponsored runs and walks.
Back in 1979, when such things weren’t all that common, he was the first person to run solo from Malin Head in Donegal to Mizen Head in Cork and raised money for spina bifida and leukemia research.
He also knew a lot about organising and getting people involved in their community.
In Irish athletic circles, Johnny is something of a legend. A onetime international marathon runner, after an injury ended his career he turned his hand to coaching in his 40s and helped found the Tallaght Athletic club in south Dublin.
Over the next five decades he coached countless numbers of children, many of whom won athletic scholarships to colleges both here and abroad. Others have enjoyed some major success, like rising running star and Olympic hopeful Rhasidat Adeleke, who last week helped power Ireland to a bronze medal in the World Athletics relays in the Bahamas.
Johnny was her first ever coach when she joined Tallaght AC at the age of 12. From her training base this week, in the University of Texas in Austin, Adeleke tells how Johnny’s death has given her added impetus to come home with an Olympic medal this summer.
‘Part of me is running for Johnny now,’ she says. ‘It’s given me even more purpose and motivation. He always said when I was growing up, “she’s going to be an Olympic champion”. He had so much faith in me.
‘I was young and thought he said that to everyone but he really did believe in me, that’s what I appreciate him for. I would love for him to be there and see me run, but he’ll be there in spirit.’
Johnny was her coach for five years during her early teenage years, and they were still in constant contact. Every time she came home from the US, one of the first people she would visit was Johnny. She describes him as a gifted mentor, who always ‘went above and beyond’.
‘My mum was working, and it was just her, so it was hard to balance everything,’ she explains. ‘Whenever she couldn’t take me to training or competitions, Johnny would take me and then drop me home again, he was a really important figure in my life.
‘He gave me advice on everything and helped me make hard decisions. He lived through so many experiences and he wanted me to learn through what he’d been through and not make the same mistakes.
‘He’d tell me not to dwell on things, like losing a single race. As a kid it’s so important because you can get really down about the small things. He helped me see that if you don’t achieve something right now, just keep going. Life goes on.
‘He was so passionate about wanting me to succeed and did everything he could for me. He made sure I was OK, that I had every
JOHNNY WAS A REALLY IMPORTANT FIGURE IN MY LIFE
thing I needed, and put me in contact with people who he thought might be able to help me in the future. I know my mum is so thankful for everything he
did. ‘He was ultimately a good man, with a really good, pure heart. He gave time to everyone he met, and he treated everyone with respect, it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from. He was really genuine, that was just his character.’ Indeed, as his family found over the days of his removal and funeral, there were a lot of people who wanted to share just exactly how special he had been.
‘Lots of athletes in their 50s and 60s turned up,’ explains his son Sean. ‘They maybe only ran with him for a couple of years, but he made such an impact on their lives that they wanted to come and show their respect. We were pretty blown away by it all.’
Johnny, originally from near the Long Mile Road in west Dublin, and his wife Gertie, raised their 12 children in Tallaght. The couple first met as schoolchildren when Johnny was cycling to a cousin’s house.
‘He actually knocked her down that day while cycling his bike,’ smiles Sean. ‘She literally fell for him.’
Johnny loved boxing for a while, but he adored the freedom of running.
‘He knew from the beginning how good it was to clear the head,’ says Sean. ‘What it could do for your mental health. He did marathons and ran internationally for a long time. He represented Ireland in Jerusalem, Hungary, all over the place back in the 1970s and 1980s. Eamon Coughlan was a very good friend of his.’
Long before the deaths of his two sons, Johnny had experienced another double family tragedy. When he was 26 years old, his beloved father died of a brain haemorrhage and then six months later, his only sibling, his sister Charlotte, died in a car crash in Co Wicklow.
Naturally, it had a massive effect on his life, but thankfully he had Gertie, who he married at the age of 21. The couple had six boys and six girls — Carmel, Robert, Sean, Margaret, David, Cíaran, Charlotte, Susan, Michelle, Audrey, Fergal and Anthony.
For most of his life he worked as a driver at different factories across Dublin but running and coaching were his passions. In the early 1970s he helped set up
an athletics club in his new home village of Tallaght.
‘It’s not too far from where we’re sitting here now,’ says Sean. ‘Just down the road from the Square Shopping centre. We moved here around 1968, when I was four. It was a lot smaller back then and before long everyone knew who dad was.’
After getting a redundancy at the age of 50, Johnny decided to study to become a social worker and got a job with the South Inner City Community Development Association, which helped kids with issues around education. He worked there right up to retirement.
Throughout it all, he ran and he coached.
‘His own career ended when he was in his 40s,’ explains Sean. ‘He’d just got into ultra long marathons and was running in a local park and there was a hole that grass had grown over, his leg snapped in two places.
‘But like everything that happened to him, he always looked for something bright to come out of it. So he threw himself into coaching others even more, he overcame things constantly.’
Johnny rarely took a day off from anything.
‘He’d come home from work at 5.30pm, eat his dinner and was then back out to train the kids from 6pm to 7pm. Then he’d train himself and the senior athletics, before making it home at about 8.30pm, that was five days a week and then all of Sundays were gone on races.’
Sean says their mother was always supportive of Johnny’s commitment to the club, that she understood how important it was to him, and the other people who went there.
‘With dad it didn’t matter where you came from or what you did, it was irrelevant,’ he says. ‘Everybody had a story.’
Sean got to experience some of the magic his father was able to spread. A talented long-distance runner himself, he won an athletics scholarship to a university in Idaho in the US. Unfortunately, injuries in his early 20s saw his career cut short. ‘I used to go running with dad a lot, just the two of us going for miles, it’s a very special memory to have,’ he says. ‘Dad was responsible for a lot of kids who went to the States, including a guy who was at his funeral who graduated from Harvard.’
His passion for running, Sean believes, helped Johnny through the most difficult parts of his life.
‘When my brothers passed away, he really understood that idea of needing space to clear your head, to be able to cope,’ he explains. ‘Robert died of cancer and then less than two years later, Fergal.
‘My dad struggled — Robert he understood, it was cancer and there was still a lot of pain. But with Fergal, my dad really struggled with that. For someone who’d spent his life dealing with kids, many of them troubled, and not being able to see something in his own son...
‘His suicide came completely out of the blue. There was no sign of anything the day before, he spent the day watching a match with dad, he’d just bought some football gear because he planned to start playing again, everything was good.
‘The evening he took his own life, he sent a message to my younger brother telling him to take care of my mam and dad. It was very difficult for dad to comprehend, and my mum was still struggling after having to bury their first son.’
It was suggested to Gertie that she go to Joan Freeman, who had set up Pieta House two years previously, for counselling. After getting so much from the charity, the Fox family wanted to give something back.
‘Dad was quite modest,’ says
Sean. ‘But I would think the Darkness Into Light walk was his idea, he’d done sponsored runs and things like that before. He was great at that stuff.
‘Joan was really close with my parents, I’d say she was instrumental in their healing process, they both spoke very highly of her and Pieta House. They never got anything from it, it was always purely voluntary work they did, dad wanted it that way.’
A couple of years ago a bench was put up at Malin Head, to honour both Gertie and Johnny’s work they did for mental health and Pieta House.
‘It’s called the Bench of Hope,’ says Sean. ‘There’s also a poem written on a plinth, dedicated to mam and dad. It looks out over the sea.’
It sounds like the sort of place Johnny would have spent time talking to anyone who needed an ear.
‘He didn’t always have the answers, but he would sit with you,’ says Sean. ‘Even after talking to him, if things still went pear-shaped, you could always go back to him, again and again.
‘That was his great gift, with everyone. He treated all the athletes with the eyes of a father, not just a coach. If you weren’t good
FERGAL’S SUICIDE CAME COMPLETELY OUT OF THE BLUE
HE TREATED ALL ATHLETES WITH THE EYES OF A FATHER
enough, you weren’t sent off, that wasn’t his way.
‘He’d wait at the finish line for everyone, no matter how long it took them. If you were second last today, maybe next time we’d get you to third last, that was his mentality, to get the best out of people.’ Every runner mattered to him. ‘A few people at the funeral were talking about Rhasidat and how wonderful he was with her, coaxing her out to training sessions when sometimes she didn’t want to go — the usual teenager stuff,’ he says. ‘Now she’s a bright shining star, which is beautiful.
‘But my dad cared as much about the guy who couldn’t kick snow off a rope. He didn’t differentiate.
‘That’s why he was always at that finishing line in the Phoenix Park. He wanted to encourage people, for them to understand they’re not alone, that they’d done their best to get to that point.’
For a man who gave so much, he still managed to hold something back for his family.
‘From the very beginning of our lives, we never had our dad to ourselves, we always shared him,’ explains Sean. ‘Right through to the very end.
‘But there was enough of him. We never felt hard done by, none of us. Because as good a coach as he was, and he was exceptional, he was a way better father.’