THE sound of wind whistling around is all you can hear for a couple of seconds before an urgent, animated voice takes over.
“Houl on a wee second – I’ll phone you back in the length of time it takes me to get from here back down to the ground…”
Jerome Johnston sr is in the middle of tiling a roof in Newcastle when the call comes. It’s threatening rain, while the breeze blowing in off the Irish Sea is seldom forgiving in February.
In this week of all weeks, though, nothing can dampen his mood.
Tomorrow his three sons, Jerome jr, Ryan and Shealan and six nephews – Ceilum Doherty and the Branagan contingent, Aidan, Aaron, Darryl, Eugene and Niall – will all be involved as Kilcoo get a second crack at All-Ireland glory against Kilmacud Croke’s.
“Do you know what it reminds me of?” he says, “it reminds me of a child looking forward to Santy Claus coming. You just hope you get the present you want.”
Family connections might contribute to restless nights along the way, but the excitement, the anxiety, it’s all wrapped up in so much more than the here and now. For Jerome Johnston sr and so many others, this is the culmination of a journey no-one could ever have imagined.
Standing here now, on club football’s grandest stage, pride seeps from every pore. That wasn’t always the case.
A full-forward in his playing pomp, the Magpies yo-yoed between the second and third tiers of Down football for much of that time. Burren had been the kings of the ’80s but it was closer to home, in the schoolyard at St Malachy’s High School in Castlewellan, where seeds were first sown.
“The thing that really drove me on was going to school with the Castlewellan boys and Bryansford boys, they had identity, club gear, kits bags, shorts and socks – we had nothing in Kilcoo. I mean nothing.
“It used to annoy me. I’d go with my da to championship finals and watch the Burrens, the Bryansfords, thinking wouldn’t it be great if one day this was us… coming up the road in the car you’d say that and daddy would say ‘child dear, Kilcoo will never be there’.”
That beleaguered mentality ate at him, to the point that he was ready to try something different.
“The older brigade at the club thought I was in cuckoo land,” says Johnston sr, “but sure if he wants to waste his time, let him tear away...”
In 1989, the ball started to roll – slowly.
“I got involved with U10s, boys like Anthony Devlin, Noel Devlin, Sean O’Hanlon, Mark Branagan, the eldest of the Branagan brothers. Me and the man who drove the bus, Paddy Morgan, took the team.
“Paddy Morgan was my idol… not a football idol but what he did for our club. Paddy managed every underage team in Kilcoo when I was growing up, he refereed the match, he was secretary, he drove the bus, he’s now the club president.
“You mightn’t have agreed with everything Paddy did but he was a great man. And he had some of the best phrases as a manager, you could’ve read him like a book.
“One of his favourites, every match you went to play he said the same thing to every team, and the famous speak was ‘spread out and don’t be running after the ball like sheep after a bucket of meal’.
“Only for him, we didn’t have football.”
The young Kilcoo team that reached the East Down final in 1992 was the first to compete in a championship final in over 50 years. They were beaten by Bryansford – “well beaten” - but Johnston sr was in no doubt that brighter days lay ahead.
“I can still see all the wee faces with tears in their eyes - my own eyes had tears in them because I believed we were going to win. They’re listening, clued into every word you’re saying, and I told them ‘boys, they might’ve been bigger and stronger than us today, but I can assure you now, the day will come when we will beat them. We will be winners’.
“Paddy grabbed me by the shoulder and says ‘don’t be telling children that because we’ll never beat them, we don’t have the numbers’. Well in 1996 that same group won our first all-county championship.
“There was men standing along the line with rosary beads and prayer books, and Paddy Morgan came to me with tears running down his face - ‘you’ve done it, I didn’t think you could do it, but you’ve done it today’.
“That was the start. The conveyor belt was starting to go.”
Kilcoo were minor champions in 1998, won back-to-back U21 crowns in 2000 and 2001 and, before he knew it, they were playing alongside the man who had mentored them along the way.
After beating Castlewellan at Newcastle’s St Patrick’s Park in the league final, there could be no looking back. Johnston sr and other elder statesmen were getting ready to pass on the baton, and they did so knowing it was in safe hands.
“I was 35 or 36 then. That was my goal, to have those lads coming through. I played with too many boys who didn’t care. When I say didn’t care, it didn’t hurt them enough to get beat. In those early days, I was going home and I couldn’t be lived with because of what I saw going before me with Bryansford and Castlewellan.
“But then when we won in 2003, oh boy… and when you look at the photo from that day, there’s our Jerome and Ryan, Cillian Laverty, Darragh O’Hanlon, all them wee boys were all in that photo like the wee children are today.
“We lived in Newcastle after we got married, and for the first few years our Jerome and Ryan went to primary school there. Because I lived beside the Bryansford pitch, I’d have gone over to watch if Kilcoo weren’t playing.
“Jerome and Ryan came over and they’d be kicking about football with the wee boys they went to school with and big Oliver Burns, God to be good to him, I’ll never forget, he says: ‘I must get Bryansford jerseys for them two wee boys’. And I says ‘naw, you know what Oliver, we’re alright for dishcloths and cloths for washing the car’.
“He grabbed me, like a big bear grabbing a wee bear. But, for Kilcoo, the whole thing had changed.”
In those young faces, the next generation was already on the way. Although fresh to the senior team, the likes of Conor Laverty, Donal Kane and Aidan Branagan got involved with the new crew, alongside Johnston jr and Mickey McClean.
Travelling to the All-Ireland Feile in 2006, little was expected of a small but skilful Kilcoo U14 side. Few clubs have ever enjoyed beating the odds as much.
“We went to the Feile and if we knew what we found out in the semi-final, I don’t think we’d have even went. I was talking to Conor Deegan who was with Kilmacud Croke’s, we shook hands, long time no see, I says ‘Jesus, look at the size of them lads’ and he says ‘we have nine U14 teams in Kilmacud, we have our own wee league then pick the best 30 out of them’.
“I remember thinking ‘my God… what are we even doing here?’ But I’ll never forget Sean Kelly, the president of the GAA, coming over the day we won it. He had been at all our matches, and he says ‘I have never seen as small a children in my life can play football the way they can play’.”
Next off the production line came the likes of Ceilum Doherty, Dylan Ward, Eugene Branagan, Miceal Rooney – men just hitting their peak now and driving Kilcoo back to another All-Ireland final.
Yet their path wasn’t so straightforward.
“They were in a bad place at minor level. One evening I was up at the shed and I heard this commotion going on at the field, I went over and Kilcoo had 12 men left. Discipline was terrible, they couldn’t get the numbers out, half of them didn’t want to play.
“Like everything else, I overstepped the mark, fell out with the managers, so I got involved. As the wife says, ‘that’s you again, sticking your nose in’. But by this time we were starting to win senior championships, and I never wanted to lose what we had.
“Now you see how many of them boys have come on and are now part of our senior team. Look, there’s a lot of luck involved in it, they’re talented wee boys, I didn’t make them the footballer they are today, neither did anybody else.
“They just maybe needed a wee bit of guidance.”
As well as rivalries with the rest of the county, family fall-outs became a running theme on the way through the ranks. Johnston sr and his sister Bridie, mother of the Branagan boys, would often laugh together when their boys’ backs were turned.
But the bad blood between cousins would ultimately sharpen all for the battles ahead.
“See when family get-togethers come, and they’d all go out into the garden when they were wee boys, oh my God there was some rows. You couldn’t have spoke to one another for weeks.
“There was nights they’d have come home after a game, maybe even a training game, and I’d have gone mad at them, saying ‘I’m telling you now, see the next night? Don’t you be soft’. This is a Branagan they’re talking about! ‘See the next chance you get? You lift him, because he done you dirty there’.
“Then I’d go round to the Branagans’ to see their side of the story - ‘well boys… how’d the training go?’ Nothing. You knew when you got the silent treatment, there was revenge in the works.
“I used to hear phone calls in the house ‘don’t you worry, we’ll get them’, then two nights later they’d be playing against Bryansford or Burren, maybe a row broke out and the whole lot of them’s in together, beating for each other.
“That’s the thing about playing for Kilcoo - you need to be thick skinned. The minute everybody comes through the gate at the field, no matter what family disagreements or arguments, that is put to the side and the black and white jersey is the only thing that matters.
“They love their farming, and they love their football. That’s Kilcoo in a nutshell. [Donegal All-Ireland winners] Martin McHugh and Noel Hegarty, they’re all sheep men, them boys would come to the Branagans to do with sheep and wouldn’t leave for three or four hours.
“Roll Conor Laverty into that with the sheep and all, and they just think this is the best thing since the sliced pan loaf.”
The whole trip has been an education for Johnston sr too. Away from the club, he was involved with Down during James McCartan’s first stint at the helm, and is currently part of the management team at Ballybay in Monaghan.
However, having a close quarters view of the way Mickey Moran works has been an eye-opener, and he believes the Kilcoo players are every bit as determined to lift the Andy Merrigan Cup for their manager as much as themselves.
“I’ve had the good fortune to have been involved with great men like PJ McGee, who was my PE teacher. The respect everybody has for PJ is something else.
“Then the great man Brian McIver during the Down days. We were the big brothers, but Brian was the daddy figure to the players.
“And then there’s Mickey Moran. What Mickey Moran has done for my children and boys in Kilcoo is unreal. Let’s call a spade a spade, Mickey’s not going to be there forever, and the one thing that has eluded Mickey Moran in his managerial career is an All-Ireland.
“I know how much them Kilcoo boys love Mickey and respect Mickey. It would be great for him to have an All-Ireland, the man can nearly rest easy then.
“For him to win that coveted All-Ireland with Kilcoo would just be something else.”
The days have flown by since St Finbarr’s were vanquished in a bruising All-Ireland semi-final, and now the big one has landed on their doorstep - the ups and down of the past 30 years delivering Kilcoo to this point.
Every member of the panel will have handled the past fortnight in their own way. Johnston sr knows his boys better than anybody and knows that, despite their different personalities, all three are ready for whatever tomorrow throws their way.
“Jerome’s a laughy, jokey sort, always the life and soul of the party. Ryan will have a bit of fun and a bit of craic… he’ll pass himself at the party, but he’ll not be the boy the party’s revolving round.
“Shealan’s a different kettle of fish altogether. He’d be there taking everything in – he’s his mummy’s side of the house. You’d be a good’un to get anything out of our Shealan. He’s a deep wee thinker.
“To me, it was no coincidence Conor Laverty made him the captain of the county U20s last year. Conor used to say to me ‘I would have conversations about football with your Shealan that I wouldn’t have with another man – and he’s never far wrong’. He never says much, but he’s normally on the money.
“Back in September me and him were sat in Croke Park the day Mayo and Tyrone played in the All-Ireland final. It was half-time, and our Shealan turns round to me and says ‘we need to get back here… I’m telling you now, we’ll be back here’.
“I never really answered him because you’re sort of thinking ‘Jesus son, you should be glad to have been here when you were here, but the chances of getting back could be few and far between’.
“Now, as it turns out, he was on the money again. It just shows, success breeds success - all it takes is one spark to start a fire. Back in those wee boys in 1992, that was the spark for everything that followed since.”
