IN the summer months when there was no Champions League to lure punters from the armchair to the high stool, Wednesday nights could be quiet enough at McClafferty’s.
Even soccer had to make do down the pecking order at the best of times anyway. Homeplace of the famous Dunlop clan, in Armoy the bike is king, the ‘race of legends’ drawing thousands of adrenaline junkies to this usually sleepy village for a celebration of speed every July.
On this particular night, the scent of petrol fumes had long since left the nostrils and the few patrons lining the bar hadn’t much to get the blood flowing.
“Here,” says the barman, handing over the remote, “work away”.
Soap operas. Nope. Documentaries. Not tonight. American sitcoms. Christ. Time to sup up and head for home.
But then, as one channel skipped onto the next, a familiar face appears on screen. They look at the barman, then up at the TV, then back at the barman.
“Is that you up there?” one asks.
“I don’t know, why, what are you watching?”
“Ehh,” he says, squinting up at the screen, “well, there’s a team in yella and another team in green, white and yella...”
Olcan McFetridge leans forward and laughs as he relives the exchange.
For seven odd years he manned the pumps in McClafferty’s, never a word uttered of his sporting past until it smacked him right between the eyes courtesy of All-Ireland Gold.
“The boys were just flicking through and came to TG4, then stopped when there was sport on – it probably wouldn’t have mattered what it was, but that night it was Antrim-Offaly,” recalls McFetridge.
“I’ve a few stone on since then so I don’t think the boys in the bar could believe it was me at the start.”
Tuesday past marked the 30th anniversary of that momentous All-Ireland semi-final, the date - August 6, 1989 – seared into the Saffron subconscious forever more.
The bloody-minded brilliance of Dessie and Brian Donnelly, James McNaughton’s ‘thou shalt not pass’ approach, the relentless athleticism of Ciaran Barr - you could pick out any number of men in ‘yella’ whose performance typified a day of total defiance.
Yet it was the little man with number 12 on his back who operated on an almost other-worldly level as the sun beat down on Croke Park.
Standing just 5’6 tall with a barrel-chest and a hint of a pot belly hiding beneath his Saffron jersey, the moustachioed McFetridge conjured up the kind of performance that still draws smiles and shakes of the head in equal measure three decades on.
The boys in McClafferty’s may not have had much grá for the caman code but, with every moment of brilliance that brought his beaming image back on the box, even they must have realised there was a magician in their midst.
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“GOOD luck with that,” says Terence McNaughton offering encouragement before the trip up the M2, a low chuckle fusing with the sound of smoke being exhaled on the other end of the line.
“Don’t be thinking you’re going up there to hear stories about how he spent 10,000 hours hitting the ball off the local church bell. Not a chance. Cloot just had it… and by f**k he had it in abundance.”
We’ll get to where it all began, but let’s deal with the nickname first. In that Antrim team, everybody had one; Woody, Beaver, Hippy, Sambo, Pappy, Humpy. The list goes on.
McFetridge got Cloot – derived from ciotóg, the Gaelic for left-handed. Even though he wasn’t, it stuck.
“People said I was left-handed, or cack handed, but I never was.
“Maybe sometimes I hit off that side and that’s where it came from. I had that from I was in primary school, so 50 odd years now. Even my mum and dad called me Cloot, the wife, Helen, calls me Cloot.
“It was the same for that whole Antrim team. We all had nicknames… proper nicknames too. None of this Lamps for Frank Lampard crap.”
As McNaughton predicted, there are no stories of church bells or hours spent battering gable walls. Instead, McFetridge’s feel for the game developed organically.
Growing up in a house with six brothers and five sisters, space was at a premium and, besides, he preferred the grass under his feet and the sky above as his shelter.
“There was no hurling really in the family, but where we were reared was on up beside the hurling pitch, on the Glenshesk Road between Armoy and Ballycastle, so we were never off it.
“Between first and second Mass every Sunday – first Mass was at nine, second Mass at 11 – we all went straight out to the field. We’d have brought our sticks down and thrown them in over the hurling field gate.
“I don’t see that happening in our place now, where kids just gather up. Even on a non-training night, our pitch was always black with players.
“Anybody walked in and just lifted a stick.”
Blessed with a cultured left foot, bullish strength and an almost balletic balance, McFetridge was a natural soccer player too, starring at midfield or centre-back for intermediate league outfit Armoy United.
When the big boys came calling from across the water, however, he was nowhere to be seen.
“We’d a game one night against Cushendall up at the Glenravel tournament, and Armoy also had a semi-final in the soccer,” he recalls.
“I went and played the hurling match, and the next day some of the boys from the soccer club were telling me there had been a scout there from Wolves, apparently wanting to look at me. But sure I hadn’t a clue.”
Their loss was Armoy and Antrim’s gain and, as McFetridge advanced through the age groups, it wasn’t long until notice was served of his precocious talent with hurl in hand.
“He was a talented wee bastard,” recalls Cushendall legend McNaughton in typically robust terms.
“I marked him at U12, U14, right up through. He could just do things with a ball – control wise, touch, striking, catching over big men. In terms of physique, he would have been like a Maradona.
“Going to bed on a Saturday night, he’s the one player you’d be worrying about the next day. He could make a **** out of you very quick and very easy.
“No matter how hard you hit him, you couldn’t put him down – and I did try. He was like a rubber ball. Being aggressive with him was a waste of time because you couldn’t intimidate him.”
McFetridge smiles and nods, immediately drawing upon a minor encounter with future county team-mate Ger Rogan to prove the point.
“We were playing a minor match against Rossa, I was going through for a goal and big Rogie just emptied me out. Bang! Right across the bake.
“I lost a couple of teeth, had 14 or 15 stitches in my lip... but even that didn’t annoy me. I just thought ‘sure that’s what defenders are supposed to do’. If they get away with it, they get away with it.
“About eight years later, my first training session with Antrim was in Cushendall and when I went into the changing room there was Niall Patterson and Gerard Rogan. You know what he says to me? ‘How’s the mouth?’
“I says ‘I think that’s him sitting beside Niall Patterson’. That was it, the ice was broken, and I always got on great with Rogie.
“If somebody wants to hold a grudge, go ahead, but why would ye like? I never got fazed in hurling.”
Fazed in hurling, or fazed by hurling. They were two sides of the same coin to McFetridge. And where even the biggest shithouses in the county couldn’t ruffle his feathers on the field, nor would any result make or break his day off it.
“If we won by 18 points or lost by 18 points, not one bit of difference. He doesn’t get excited about anything,” says McNaughton.
“If we lost I wouldn’t have come out of the house for a week, whereas if Cloot had phoned you up the day before an All-Ireland final and said ‘I’m not going because I couldn’t be bothered’, you wouldn’t have died of shock.
“He’s just that sort of character; a completely different animal from the majority of that ’89 team.”
His sense of perspective deepened further when brother Joe (29) died in a car accident in Dunloy on November 4, 1989 – just a couple of months after proudly watching his younger sibling line out in an All-Ireland final.
If such a tragedy striking so close to home doesn’t alter your perception of what’s important and what’s not, then nothing will.
“My attitude to sport was to play it, and to play to the best you could.
“If I lost, I never looked for excuses for losing… I wouldn’t have dwelled on it. It’s not to say it didn’t annoy me, but I left it on the pitch. It never came home with me.
“You look at a boy like Sambo, and the things he had to come through with his stammer; the impact that had on him.
“Sport’s sport and it’s great, but there’s more important things in life.”
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THE limp is fairly pronounced now, the legacy of misdiagnosed injuries that befell Olcan McFetridge in his mid-20s, just as his inter-county career was about to take flight.
“My girls [Erin and Emer] look at me, they see me limping about, and you know what they say to me? ‘How were you ever able to play hurling?’” laughs the 56-year-old.
“And I’m saying ‘well I wasn’t always like this’. They can’t envisage me back 30 years.”
He reckons he might have played minor for Antrim once, nothing at U21, and was only involved at senior level for five years before back problems and two bad ankle injuries – the first hurling for Armoy in June 1988, the second in an Irish Cup clash with Glentoran seven months later - took their toll.
“From then until now, it has been a disaster,” he says with a heavy sigh
“I played my first game for Antrim against Laois in Portlaoise before Christmas, hurt my ankle again at the Oval and got back out in April or May ’89.
“Both times it was x-rayed it was just diagnosed as a bruised foot, but when I got it operated on they said there was two breaks in it. They weren’t sure if I’d broken it twice at one time or two different times.
“It was deteriorating all the time I was playing. Dan Turley was physio for the county at that time and he kept me going really.
“I just sort of got it half fixed about 10 years ago, had an operation where there was bits cut off it, planed up, screwed in... it’s more or less just a club foot now but sure I’m not playing any more anyway.
“It’s just for stopping on.”
A builder’s labourer at the time, those injuries forced him off the site and into alternative lines of work. He did a bit of taxiing for a time, pulling pints in McClafferty’s suited him well because he was always walking on an even surface.
Nowadays he’s back behind the wheel as a volunteer driver with Causeway Coast Community Transport.
Although he played on for Armoy until 2000, the end of his county days came after the All-Ireland semi-final hammering at the hands of Kilkenny in 1993.
Four summers previous, though, McFetridge had written his name into one of the most famous chapters in the Saffron story, his masterclass against Offaly helping Jim Nelson’s Antrim into a first All-Ireland final since 1943 and earning him a coveted Allstar award.
McFetridge scored 2-3 while the Faithful departed, as well as winning the decisive first half penalty – converted by Aidan McCarry – with a majestic leap and catch over the head of Offaly corner-back Aidan Fogarty before being felled by Jim Troy.
Yet when the subject of that famous August day inevitably arises, you soon get a sense of what it must have been like to try and pin this man down on the hurling field.
Thirty years on, the mobility may no longer be there but that instinctive evasiveness remains as McFetridge instantly deflects any invitation to bask in his own reflective glory.
“I haven’t got a DVD player, or social media, WhatsApp or anything like that,” he says when asked whether he had ever watched the match back.
“It’s totally foreign to me. The only thing I have is a mobile phone that I detest. That’s it there…” he says, thrusting a blue brick onto the table.
“Somebody told me it was a 3310; I don’t even know what a 3310 is.”
We’ll take that as a no.
What about his first goal then - the brilliant bit of anticipation to read the break before burying beyond Troy?
“Brian Donnelly did a lot of the work because they [the Offaly backs] were following him. I stopped – there was no point me being in with them big boys. They’d have half killed you anyway.
“That’s where the luck come into it. The ball was kept in play and it came out to me...”
Okay, so if that one owed mostly to luck, surely there is no way of talking himself out of the wonderfully impudent piece of skill that was Antrim’s third goal, putting them into an unassailable 3-14 to 1-14 lead with six minutes remaining.
Loitering on the edge of the square, McFetridge clasped a ball driven his direction by Brian Donnelly and, despite bouncing off his knees and springing into mid-air, still managed to swivel, take aim and sweep the sliothar into the net in one sublime sequence.
“The second goal. Right. I don’t believe… the thing is…”
Here we go again.
“There was no other option there; it happened that quick. I wasn’t going anywhere with that ball like. All I could do is what I did do. It was tight, there was no pass on. It just… happened.
“You see if I’d done that and it’d hit the side of the net, there’d have been somebody saying ‘why the f**k did you do that?’”
Battle-worn and wearied by now, the beautiful catch that led to McCarry’s penalty is a final attempt at indulging in some sepia-tinged nostalgia.
“My timing in sport was good,” he admits with a bashful smile. Hallelujah!
But then…
“It’s very strange actually because I’m the worst dancer. Helen will tell you. Even when I had two good legs I wasn’t fit to dance.”
“That’s the thing about Cloot,” says McNaughton, “he was our Georgie Best, but he didn’t have any ego.
“Cloot never realised how good he was, he still doesn’t realise it, and it’s a damn shame that modern day coaching doesn’t allow players like that to exist any more.
“You would never have heard Cloot’s name if he was born in this generation; he wouldn’t feel comfortable in an environment where everybody’s buying their T-shirts from Mothercare to show off their muscles.
“Here’s a story,” continues McNaughton, clearing his throat, “I remember there was a homecoming parade through Glenavy in ’89. This’ll stick in my head ’til the day I die.
“It was about two o’clock in the morning when we got back and Cloot led us up the street playing the accordion. There was about a thousand people there cheering us into the local hall, marching up the street under Union Jack flags.
“Cloot went up onto the stage and played away… just took centre stage without realising he was taking centre stage. That moment, everything about it, just summed him up.
"I’m glad I hurled with him, and I’m glad he’s a friend of mine.”
