OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Southern comfort

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Pulling his jacket tightly around him, he complains about the way the winter cold in these parts seems to cut right through your clothes. In the sanctuary of a coffee shop, he orders a hot chocolate and begins talking exactly like he used to play. A simple inquiry about his last days with Ireland yields a response that is passionate, involved and yet betrays no hint of bitterness.
“I was sat on a beach in Miami in 2000 when I got a phone call off Mick [McCarthy] asking me would I come to the U.S. Cup,” Phelan recalled. “I jumped at the chance, left the missus and the kids there, flew over to England, on to Ireland and back to America. I played in every game of the tournament and Mick called me up that August to say I was out. I look back now and say, why did I travel half way around the world for that?
“I suppose I did it because I thought to myself I might have a chance of getting back in here. And because I wanted to play for my country any chance I got. It meant something to me. Even now I think back on the stuff that went on with the FAI, supporters getting drunk on our plane on the way to matches, the crap training pitches and stuff, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t give a damn about that stuff at the time. I really didn’t care if I was on a cattle plane as long as I was going over to play for Ireland. I wasn’t bothered.”
The accent still reeks of his native Salford, the conversation even peppered with a few unmistakably Mancunian “Did I heck as likes?” The passion for the cause, though, can be traced all the way back to Tubbercurry, the Sligo town from which his mother, Brigid-Ann, emigrated in the early 1960s. For Phelan, Ireland was always much more than a jersey of convenience. He remembers going up to Scotland with the Irish youths as a raw teenager, and being abused for both the color of his skin and the country he was representing. It was a crash course in history, politics and bigotry not available in any classroom.
Phelan was in Quakertown, a rural outpost east of Philadelphia, to which he had come one morning to conduct business. An hour earlier, he was at a board-room table negotiating a sponsorship deal with the sports-equipment manufacturer Kwik-Goal. Four months after playing his last competitive game for the Charleston Battery, based in the South Carolina city, he is a director and partner in OneonOnesoccer, a coaching school based 60 miles down the road in Lancaster. The new role will take him all over America, and the portrait is of a man in the first excited flush of a new chapter in his life.
“Todd [Hoffard, his partner in the venture] played with me at Charleston and he invited me up to have a look at his set-up last August,” Phelan said. “I enjoyed working the training camps, so I jumped at the chance to get involved. I’m going to be 37 in March, and it’ll be 20 years since I made my debut for Leeds, and that’s a good-size career. Do I really want to be bouncing about the game at my age? I’ve had me thrills, I’ve won a few medals and sometimes you’ve just got to turn the page and try something different.
“I’m doing my apprenticeship now in a job that lets me put a smile on kids’ faces every single day. Nothing beats that and I still get to run around every day. Todd is the expert, with the experience of the business; I’m coming in with my name and the experience of playing at international level. I’m watching him now and learning. I’m getting as big a buzz out of this as I used to do from playing.”

Early apprenticeship
His previous apprenticeship began at the age of 13 when a Leeds United scout knocked on Phelan’s door. These days, it seems an obscenely young age to take a boy away from his family, but that was a different time. The club allowed him to swap the unforgiving streets of Manchester’s inner city for a quaint Yorkshire village called Barwick in Elmet. A charming, sleepy place with a Maypole in the center of the town square, where Leeds felt their youngsters were out of harm’s way. During Phelan’s time there, John and Darren Sheridan, Denis Irwin, Tommy Wright, and Scott Sellars were among his fellow residents.
“Me mother could only do so much for me in Salford, so she sent me up there with a clip around the ear and told me it was better for me than hanging around the streets at home,” Phelan said. “I moved in with a family called the Parkinsons and they were like me mother and father, really. They kept me on the straight and narrow. Coming from the streets of Salford, where it was hard living, I found it hard to adjust at first. I got on with it though because what else was I going to do? Go back to Salford? End up in the pubs? End up in jail? I would have ended up like most of the other lads I grew up with, scraping and scrounging for a few quid.”
He bought his mother a house in Tubbercurry a few years ago, but she preferred to stay living in Salford. Back visiting her there at Christmas, it was in a Moss Side barbershop that somebody gave him chapter and verse on Paul McGrath’s recent travails. He watches Sky Sports News on satellite most nights, but the distance means he’s still out of the loop in many ways, and footballers don’t really stay in touch once they move out of each other’s immediate orbit. The same day the current Leeds players refused to defer their astronomical wages, the full-back formerly known as the most expensive defender in the world (Manchester City paid Wimbledon

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese