SKY’S THE LIMIT FOR DAVID
ALL you can do is tip your cap to young David Shanahan and wish him the very best.
At 15 years of age he had a fanciful boyhood dream: to play American football.
At 16 he ordered some footballs and took himself out to a nearby field and started kicking them.
At 17 he did a bit of research, found a training academy in Melbourne, Ausrtralia, and made a short video of his kicking technique, which he sent to them.
At 18 he met one of the Melbourne academy coaches in Dublin, where he was told he had some ability, but would have to attend the Prokick academy in Australia if he wanted to further his dream. He went.
And now, at just 19 years of age, Shanahan has accepted an offer from Georgia Tech in Atlanta to take up a four-year scholarship where he will be the college football team’s one and only punter.
Chapeau, young man.
It’s probably true that all the best sports people - or the movers and shakers in any environment - are born with that je ne sais quoi factor that first sets them on their path, and then keeps them up there being the best at whatever it is they do. We’ve certainly seen it with Michael Jordan over the course of The Last Dance documentary, and you can apply it to many of our top sports people closer to home.
David Shanahan wasn’t the first kid to watch American sport on television from his rural Irish home and dream of slam dunking in The Garden or hitting home runs over Fenway’s Green Monster or throwing or catching that Hail Mary pass at a Super Bowl, but the young Castleisland man was one of the very few to at least try to convert a dream into some sort of reality.
Even to buy the American football online and head to the local field to practice was a step further than most teenagers would make. Usually the singlet or the sneakers is enough to be buying.
Further kudos to the Castleisland kid for jumping on the internet to scratch his itch a little more, not to mind putting a YouTube video together and sending it to the other side of the world to be analysed by the expert kicking coaches. So far so little to lose.
But then the bombshell. ‘Mom, Dad, ah, you know the way you were hoping I would be going to college in September, maybe into the IT in Tralee or up the road to UL. Well, slight change of plan...I’m thinking of going to Australia. To Melbourne. To a sports academy. To learn how to kick a football. Just to kick a football, nothing else. An American football. The idea being that after six or eight months there that I will get picked up by a college in America and get a scholarship over there...’
Imagine being that kid, having the vision and the desire and the courage to even proposition your parents with that. And imagine being those two parents to send their young son off to Australia - to learn how to kick a football - with their blessing and goodwill in his rucksack.
Next January David Shanahan will head to Atlanta, Georgia and start out on the road to what could - hopefully - lead to a callup to the big time, to the NFL, to the professional ranks, to the - whisper it - Super Bowl.
Shanahan’s story this week makes it easy for us in Kerry to think of Tadhg Kennelly heading to Australia over 20 years ago, at almost the same age as David Shanahan is now, to take a punt, as it were, at a career in the AFL. Turns out young Kennelly didn’t fare too badly at his chosen sport. Remember that Grand Final win and the jig he danced on the medal rostrum?
Then there was Tommy Walsh. No less a real prospect than Kennelly at breaking into the ‘footie’ game Down Under, and he was well on his way to succeeding until a horrible injury wrecked his chances.
Now we have Mark O’Connor and Stefan Okunbor forging the same path with the Geelong club.
A question: is there anyone in Kerry who isn’t amazed at what David Shanahan has achieved so far, and proud of there being a Kerry man heading to a big US college to play American football, or who doesn’t wish him the very best in his endeavour?
Another question: Is there anyone who doesn’t wish the same for O’Connor and Okunbor on their Aussie adventure?
We’ll assume the answer to both is No.
So why then the constant hand-wringing and moaning when a few young men go to Australia - like David Shanahan did - and stay there to make a career in sport for themselves.
Yes, Mark O’Connor and Stefan Okunbor are a big loss to Kerry football, but are we not proud that two of Kerry’s sons are good enough athletes and mature enough young men to do what they are doing on the other side of the world?
Is the lack of outcry this week that Shanahan has been ‘lost’ to a foreign version of football because (a) he wasn’t tapped up by some nefarious AFL scout or (b) because he wasn’t being considered a good enough talent to make the Kerry senior team?
Yes, Shanahan hatched his own plans to make it to Australian and try his hand - or foot - at American football punting. There was no scout prying at him playing with Castleisland Desmonds or the Kerry under-17s when he was part of that squad.
And, yes, David Shanahan, good and all a Gaelic footballer as he is, doesn’t seem to have been on the radar of the Kerry senior team management, and therefore - in the eyes of many, we’d suggest - is fair game to do what he wanted in sport and wherever that took him.
And all that is fair enough, to a point. But no more than Dingle ‘invested’ years of coaching in Mark O’Connor and Na Gaeil ‘invested’ the same in Okunbor, so too did Castleisland Desmonds invest in a young David
Shanahan and give him the early kicking tools that now sees him head to Georgia Tech with that ‘booming leg’ as Prokick coach Nathan Chapman called it.
In the greater scheme of things, no more young talented Gaelic footballers are lost - really lost - to Aussie Rules than choose soccer or basketball or golf. Now, American football is just another draw for our most ambitious young men.
Still, is there anything more refreshing, more uplifting than seeing a young person take a really brave punt with their life?