Out of the blue
A top swimmer in his youth, Brian Fenton is glad he got out of the pool and onto the pitch
Brian Fenton turned his back on the pool to make it with Dublin
‘IT’S THE TEAM’S RECORD, NOT MINE. I’M JUST PRIVILEGED TO BE A PART OF THAT’
BRIAN FENTON can often be spotted around St Anne’s Park in Raheny when his club is putting the next generation of Dublin hopefuls through their paces. On the next occasion he strolls down there, those youngsters will have another reason to look up to the tall midfielder as he will be there as the defining figure of this footballing year.
Raheny played its part in moulding Fenton into Footballer of the Year, but only a part. There was much more that shaped him. That competitive spirit and drive was inherited from his late mother, Marian, and was sharpened by long sessions in the pool at the Cormorant club in Donaghamede. Swimming was part of his family. Marian was a renowned swimming coach while his uncle David Cummins swam for Ireland at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
‘Yeah, swimming was huge for me when I was younger. We knew that David swam at the Olympics. And as a kid, it’s just something you are thrown into. You just kind of grew up with it in our family,’ he says.
Fenton was the youngest of four children. And the only boy so his father Brian senior, a Kerry native, was always likely to attempt to steer him towards Gaelic football. Not that the young boy needed too much encouragement. ‘Mam was understanding enough. I think she knew that once there was one boy after three girls that she wasn’t going to have the pull on all of us!’ he says with a smile. ‘She gave me up to Dad in a way, I suppose. There was never going to be a decision to be made. Swimming was just a thing I had to do whereas football was something I loved to do.’ He was talented enough in the pool to become All-Ireland under14 champion in the 100m butterfly, his preferred stroke as it was for his uncle. ‘Winning that race in Limerick was the peak of my powers. That was Under-14. I was very young and nobody knew where it was going to go. Thankfully, I have no regrets about the decision I made in sporting terms. And the swimming has stood to me in terms of endurance that is built up and the natural fitness.’ He doesn’t do the butterfly, that most technical of strokes, much anymore. Occasionally, he will be in the pool with his Dublin team-mates for a recovery session and one of them might ask for a quick demonstration. ‘It’s always seen as the hardest stroke, so I show it off the odd time when we are in recovery sessions in the pool, just do a couple strokes of butterfly and they are all very impressed,’ he chuckles. Swimming wasn’t the only thing that played a part in his becoming the best midfielder in the game. His childhood holidays were spent in his father’s old stomping ground – Kerry. Sitting in Jimmy O’Brien’s famous bar in Killarney among a group of Gaelic football legends, his dream was nurtured.
‘We were up and down to Kerry all the time as kids and we spent summers down there. I was in Jimmy O’Brien’s with my Dad. I obviously wasn’t drinking pints but you were there until 10 or 11 o’clock at night, looking at the likes of Bomber Liston and Ambrose O’Donovan and all these Kerry legends coming in. I was always well aware of the history in Kerry, we still have family down there. But I was always my mother’s son in a way. I was always into being a Dub, no doubt.’
Few success stories travel in a straight line though. There were setbacks along the way and Fenton had his fair share. He wasn’t an underage prodigy marked-out for greatness. It’s hard to believe now from the vantage point of four seasons with Dublin where he has yet to lose a Championship game, but there were times when he wondered if he would ever make it as an inter-county footballer. How he dealt with those disappointments has also moulded him into the player he has become.
‘It didn’t happen for me at underage. I was dropped off the Dublin minor team; I was 17 or 18 at the time. Then I thought I would get my chance with Jim [Gavin] with the U21s in 2012, when I was 19 or 20, and I did my knee.
‘So, I have had those downs. And they are very deep. They are severe and steep slopes which you need to climb. But I had an inner voice and an inner belief that there was nothing going to derail me from playing with Dublin. And now, looking back, maybe there was some sort of reason for it. The year off with the knee let me develop physically, let me grow into myself more. My year of minor, I was too small, my skills weren’t up to it so I had to go away and practise them. Those downs proved to be ups in a way, if that makes any sense.’
Since undergoing knee surgery with Ray Moran in Santry Sports Clinic back in 2013, Fenton has, remarkably, been injury-free. It might have something to do with his background as a physiotherapist, but the big midfielder says it is nothing more than luck.
‘I have been through my fair share of injuries. I have the scars to prove it!’ he adds. ‘I had to have knee surgery, the whole lot. So, I have been there and served my time. After the All-Ireland final in 2015, I had to have surgery on my shoulder for a dislocation. I have been under the knife but I have been blessed in that I have picked up any soft tissue stuff with my hamstrings and groin. It is nothing to do with being a physio, just luck I guess.’
When his contribution to this remarkable Dublin story is assessed, one strand is highlighted more than any other. Since making his Championship debut against Longford in May 2015, he has never been on the losing side. Fenton’s sick of hearing about the record and says it is about the team, not him as an individual.
‘I don’t think about it at all. I think it’s just a thing for when I do even- tually lose, and that will happen no doubt. It is something for other people to talk about, not me. It is nothing I’m trying to uphold, I’m a player on a team, it’s a team sport, I’m not like Michael Phelps in the Olympics or Usain Bolt. It’s not an individual thing, I’m in team sports.
‘If the team are beaten I’m beaten and it’s nothing I read into. It’s just a stat, I’ve heard about it, people say it to me but it’s nothing I think about.
‘It’s the team’s record, not mine. I’ve just been part of that. I’m so lucky and privileged to be part of that, to be given the jersey, to be backed by Jim and the players, to take to the field, and I haven’t been injured – a lot of things have fallen into place. As I’ve said, that’s the team’s record over the last four years. The team hasn’t been beaten. It’s not a Brian Fenton record.’
And it’s that sort of attitude that has transformed the former Irish swimming champion, at butterfly, into one of the best footballers in Ireland. He scaled an individual summit last weekend but there are even higher peaks in the future of this Dublin team and Brian Fenton will be key to scaling them.