IN the days of one-size-fits-all jerseys tucked so far into the shorts they come back out the bottom, Kevin McIvor didn’t fill all that much of Ballinderry’s number two shirt.
The whole parish descended upon Ardara in the summer of 1997. While people had almost stopped going to watch the senior team, the whole place flocked behind an all-conquering underage crop.
Ballinderry had won the Derry Féile na nÓg in 1995 and were knocked out of the All-Ireland without losing a game at the group stage. They won two games and drew with Ballina, but the Mayo team had scored more in their three games and went through.
The following year, Derry title retained, they avoided the curse of their infamous host town Foxford to win a first All-Ireland Féile.
In ’97, they were back at it in Donegal.
They got there by overcoming Bellaghy in what some observers recall as one of the greatest games of underage football ever played in Derry.
There’s brief, grainy footage of the shootout in Magherafelt flying around on YouTube. The picture is 1990s quality, the light runs out towards the end, but the glorious freedom of it is unmistakable.
Ballinderry 2-21 Bellaghy 2-16 it finished. The Shamrocks looked to have it sewn up with two early second half goals but the Wolfe Tones came back, led by Pauric Scullion, who hit 1-11 of his own. Thomas Maynes got 1-8 for Ballinderry.
He was one of the rare big lads, and one of the most gifted underage players the club has produced but who got caught in the logjam at senior level.
Mostly Ballinderry’s underage teams were made up of wee men with big hearts.
Coilin Devlin delighted crowds from centre-forward. He was hardly 4’2” and he’d be marking these big strapping city lads, the quads popping on them. Devlin was unfazed. The ball would come his way and pop, the wee solo dummy sold, the big man flat on his face and the crowd in raptures.
His brother Ronan scored two penalties in the 1996 final and two more in the ’97 final.
John McGuckin captained the team from centre-back. Eunan Conway, who’s worked with teams across 20 years in the Convent school in Magherafelt, christened him the Break Ball Machine. If a ball broke anywhere on the pitch, John would appear in a puff of white smoke to pick it up.
Kevin McIvor was still two school years young. He was small in height, quiet, mannerly, but he had wee square shoulders and the old-man jaw of a corner-back.
He’d have turned those shoulders to meet a freight train if he thought it was trying to beat him to the football.
Reared on the housing estate in Derrychrin, he comes from a big, hard-working, traditional Irish family.
In a few weeks’ time, he’ll go to Turkey to undergo emergency spinal surgery. The operation will last somewhere between 11 and 16 hours.
Kevin suffers from neuromuscular scoliosis. He was first diagnosed as a teenager, but discharged at 19.
The medical help he’s received in this country has been a long way short of satisfactory.
A joiner by trade, he would go through the working day in agony.
For years he suffered until, at his wits end, he fell in with a scoliosis support group on social media. That led to a trip to Istanbul, where they took x-rays.
They revealed a double scoliosis, which is putting pressure on the spinal cord from his brain.
A few weeks back, he had to have part of his skull removed at the Royal Hospital in order to relieve the pressure.
His spine has such a severe curvature that, as he told the County Derry Post, “it is going to get to a point where it is going to pull apart, and paralysis is on the cards”.
Kevin McIvor is 36, and a father of four.
The cost of the surgery is around £50,000. As is the way of these things, the local community has rallied around him.
Kevin was a huge part of that 1997 All-Ireland Féile na nÓg winning team but by the time minor football came, his days were almost done.
But you’re never removed from the circle once you’re in it. When help was needed, Kevin was one of them. A Shamrock, always.
That’s what the GAA does, what it is.
When his friends and Ballinderry clubmates held a carwash to gather up a few pound recently, Kevin landed down to see how things were going.
Naturally drawn to work, next thing he had the sleeves rolled up, the arm into a bucket and walking about with a sponge, looking for something to wash.
On Friday night, the All-Ireland winning Féile teams of 1996 and 1997 will go up against each other in Shamrock Park. Organised by a group of Kevin’s former team-mates and friends, the game will start at 7.30pm. Unlike a good few loughshore derbies down the years, it is expected to finish.
What the players from those teams remember is the innocent craic they had.
Feeling like royalty when they got to travel on a Goldliner in ’97. Anything was better than travelling as they had in ’96, when they had to go the whole road to Mayo with vomit down the side of the bus after one unnamed player from the Moss Road got travel-sick.
They were in and out of the bars in Foxford and Ardara as young lads, filling themselves to the neck with Coke and Cidona, listening to Joey Mullan’s comedy songs.
Behind it all, the good-natured way of Dominic Rocks, their manager and mentor, a man whose influence on Ballinderry football is understated globally but quietly acknowledged in the Bridge Bar.
When they came home, the whole place was back out to see them. And for weeks on end, everybody wanted to feed them.
If feedback was the breakfast of champions, then chicken and chips were the dinner.
No peas though. Raymond Wilkinson wouldn’t even eat the chicken if there were peas near the plate. Benny Conway would just have the plate sent back if they were near it.
Everyone else kept their hand over the dilutin’ juice because if they didn’t, they’d look to find a dozen peas floating in the cup from boys throwing them.
Nobody will bring their All-Ireland Féile medals with them on Friday night, and if they talk about the winning, it will be the joy of it and the aftermath of it and the rich, life-lasting legacy of even an U14 title.
Ballinderry won the Ulster minor club title on New Year’s Day 2002, and the All-Ireland senior club title three months later in Thurles.
That was a young senior team that was going nowhere. They would dominate Derry football for most of the next 15 years.
The downside was that the backlog meant the ’96 and ’97 teams had nowhere to go. So many of them never played senior football, when in any other era, their names would have been glued to the Ballinderry teamsheet.
None of that is important now though.
If they can raise a few pound to help Kevin McIvor and remind people of how good those days were while doing it, then Friday night will have been a success.
And if Crooke eats his peas, even better.
* The Ballinderry 1996 and 1997 All-Ireland Féile na nÓg winning teams will play each other at Shamrock Park this Friday night, throw-in at 7.30pm. A raffle will take place afterwards in the Bridge Bar. All welcome to both. Donations can be made at the gate, in the bar or online at https://uk.gofundme.com/f/help-kevin-fight-scoliosis
