OFTEN TIMES, IT isn’t until great teams break-up and autobiographies are released before we get a small insight into the inner workings of their dressing room and what made them special.
Jackie Tyrrell’s memoir The Warrior’s Code lifted the lid on the unflinching mindset of the Kilkenny’s four-in-a-row team and Eoin Larkin’s new book Camouflage brings it on another step.
The former Hurler of the Year gives a fascinating insight into a side of Brian Cody that doesn’t often make its way into the public domain.
The outside perception of Cody may be as a ruthless and hardened individual. While Larkin admits his former manager “has a low tolerance for bullshit” he also paints the 11-time All-Ireland winning boss in an entirely different light.
A moving part of the book is Larkin’s battle against bouts of depression. He found himself on a dark, insular, lonely path during the latter stages of his inter-county career. Suicidal thoughts started becoming more prevalent in Larkin’s mind.
It reached a point where he’d daydream of taking his own life and how the insurance pay-out would set-up his family financially when he was gone.
His rock bottom arrived after a club league game in 2016, during which he told James Stephens manager Niall Tyrrell to “f*ck off” with Cody – a selector with the side – standing just yards away on the sideline.
Cody had known Larkin since teaching him as a sixth class student and recognised that something was up. Cody’s number flashed up on Larkin’s phone at 11am the following morning.
“When he asked a simple question, ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ then when you burst into floods of tears and he’s going, ‘Look, I’m here if you want to talk,’ Larkin tells The42.
“But he said, ‘Go into Tadhg (Crowley, the team doctor), if you want me to go in there with you and you want to tell me the story, that’s fine. If you don’t, that’s fine too.’ He was so open about the idea that if there was something wrong, he was there to help but make sure to get into Tadhg and just have a conversation about it.”
The great Kilkenny boss wouldn’t have lasted so long at the top of the game if he hadn’t a compassionate side to him, given how society and as a result, inter-county players have changed over the years.
“I think that was the most interesting point about it, I suppose that it was Brian Cody. He has that persona out there that he’s kind of a hard man and drops people when they need to be dropped – and he does have that (side),” Larkin continues.
“I think you need that to be a top-level manager. And obviously he is a top-level manager but he has that personal side to him as well. Not just with me, I’d know him a very long time but he has that with other people as well.
“He would have seen the night previous to that phone call at the club match that I wasn’t myself. And he had the presence of mind to just pick up the phone and make that phone call.
I’m sure, you won’t ever hear of the stories that he’s helped people down through the years. I just happened to be one of those stories and I probably don’t know of all the other stories either.
“I know for a fact that he’s always asking questions about, ‘Do you need any help with this?’ or ‘Do you need any help with that?’
“Be it hurling, personal life, private life, jobs, all that kind of stuff. And he’s done that throughout the years with me. I’m sure he’s done it with various other players as well but obviously that’s the side to Brian that you don’t see.
“I think he kind of likes it that way too that he can help you in a private way and he doesn’t need any of the hullabaloo that goes with it.”
It was striking that Larkin felt comfortable in opening up to Cody. He trusted him enough to know he wasn’t putting his place on the Kilkenny team in jeopardy by showing weakness.
“And mental strength, we all talk about mental strength and you don’t want to show any weakness when you’re a sportsperson,” he says.
“But we are humans, there is a life outside sport as well and mental strength can be big in such a way in sport, but you can have a mental weakness too in your day-to-day life but it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be mentally strong in your sport either.
“I think to separate those two is probably important as well,” he adds.
Their relationship was stronger than most given they were clubmates. As an All-Ireland winning captain, Cody was one of Larkin’s first heroes and later made him captain of the school hurling team.
Before Larkin embarked on his first tour of duty with the Irish army to Kosovo in 2007, he called Cody, worried that even after three years on the Kilkenny squad his place wasn’t safe.
“Will I be involved when I get back?”
“Do you want to be involved?” asked Cody.
“Of course I do, yeah.”
“Well then you’ll be involved.”
Eight years later, shortly after returning from a peacekeeping tour to Syria, Larkin let his emotions get the better of him in a training game.
Cody reassured him: “You’re only back from Syria and you’re probably going to be playing next week, that’s how much we think of you. There’s not many lads that would come back and go straight into the team like that.”
There were other fascinating insights.
Cody would only ever entertain bringing in someone to speak to the team if he was confident it wouldn’t make its way into the public domain.
When a national newspaper ran a piece with the headline ‘Croker Chokers’ following their 12-point league final defeat to Dublin in 2011, he revealed that Cody mentioned the journalist’s name in the dressing room “more than once before that year was out and certainly not in glowing terms.”
And at various points over the years Cody would wonder aloud: “How many of them journalists would have hurled at inter-county or even club level?”
Then there were the examples of Cody’s dry wit.
Two months after Larkin’s retirement from Kilkenny duty, he was disgusted with the manner of their 13-point defeat to Clare in the National League and vented his frustrations on Twitter.
Not good enough from Kk.still reliant on experienced lads. Younger lads need to have the attitude NEVER give up.too many standing around
— Eoin Larkin (@11larky) February 19, 2017
Kilkenny went on to lift the league title and Larkin bumped into Cody a few days later.
“Did you see the match the other day?”
“Oh I did, yeah, great win.”
“I hope you put up a tweet about that,” Cody smiled.
*****
In many ways, it’s a book about Larkin railing against Irish male stereotypes.
The temptation for supporters is to put inter-county players on a pedestal due to their superior skill and athletic ability, so their psychological capacities are expected to be superhuman as well.
“We’re all human and these things affect humans,” says Larkin. “I know what you’re saying, you go out in Croke Park and you’re seen as these macho things but behind it all you’re still a person.
“Definitely as a society we are moving with the times. Probably not at the rate we should be moving. You still have certain lads that will say, ‘Here, cop yourself on there just get on with it.’
“I don’t think you can just get on with things and there’s only so far you can go with getting on with things. You reach a point as I realised and noticed over the past number of years. I was getting on with things for so long and then it just reaches a point that you can’t get on with it anymore you have to realise.
My father would have never known (about the depression). Even the night after I went to Tadhg, he came out and he was your typical male again, ‘You need to cop yourself on, grab a hold of yourself here.’
“I think if you believe in something you just need to be strong about it and believe in the process and things like that. I think we need to get away from that stereotypical male macho thing.
“It’s not like that, you need to just put yourself out there and the more you put yourself out there in positive ways the more positive feedback you get and I think that’s the way you need to go forward.”
The decision to go public with his depression in the book, written in collaboration with Irish Daily Mirror journalist Pat Nolan, invariably meant Larkin would have to speak about the issue in public for the first time during the media tour.
Accepting he had depression and dealing with it was one thing, but he opened himself up to the world and showed a vulnerability not generally associated with elite sportsmen.
“Once I had decided I was going to do the book, I had to be all in. I was never going to do it and just do it by half, tell some part of the story.
The first day I met Pat Nolan, who wrote the book, he asked me a simple question of, ‘What’s going to be in it?’ I told him I suffered with depression and that I wanted to put it in it.
“But look, once I decided I’d made up my mind I was totally comfortable with that. I was comfortable with the way I was feeling about it and the way that everybody else would know about it and I think that’s the most important thing.
“Once you’re comfortable with it and you want to let it out there, that’s the most important part. I was comfortable at that stage so obviously that had to go in.”
He put himself out there in several other scenarios, like sitting his Leaving Cert for the first time when he was 28 or connecting with the half-sister Kim he’d never met at 34.
It was only five or six years ago when his father told him about the daughter he had from a brief relationship in the 1970s, before he met Larkin’s mother.
Kim was adopted and while his father later made contact with her through Facebook, they had never met. Larkin eventually took control of the situation.
“Look, it was tough to make the connection but we were texting over and back and it was, ‘Will I ask her to meet, do I she want to meet?’ That kind of stuff.
“Then when I actually asked her did she want to meet, she was delighted because she didn’t really want to ask and have me say no either. So she was delighted that one of us took the bull by the horns and asked. I suppose it’s tough at the start.”
He continues: “I think you just need to be out there in those kind of conversations. My father, obviously he didn’t want to ask did she want to meet either because he was afraid that she’d say no and that he was interfering with her life.
“But again you need to just ask the question and not be afraid of rejection. As males, that’s what we’re afraid of as well. We’re afraid of rejection. But if you put yourself out there more often than not you get other people to buy in and that was another episode that if you put yourself out there you get the rewards.”
He’s become close with Kim since then and she was in Nowlan Park last Sunday with her family when Larkin’s James Stephens went down to Ballyhale Shamrocks in the county final.
“She got down, she was down for the quarter-final as well. So she got down for Sunday’s game as well. It was nice to have them on the field afterwards.
“Obviously it would have been nicer if we had of won and had them on the field but look, she was delighted to get down as well with her husband and the kids.
“We had a drink after it and she stayed around for a little while and went home Monday so it was great to have them down there for the game.”
Since the book was released last week, several people have reached out to Larkin informing him of their own mental health struggles or talking about family members going through depression.
“I’ve had a couple of messages come through that various lads are going through this or that. I’ve had a couple of lads with their family members going through it as well.
“It’s reassuring to hear that there are other people going through it,” he admits.
“You just hope that they can come out the right side of it the way I have. It’s not easy, it’s not easy to be open and honest about it.
Brian’s phone call was probably the catalyst, I’d still probably be suffering only when you’re in floods of tears talking to Brian Cody you know there’s something wrong.”
“I think that’s the biggest thing, that you can actually admit that you have a problem. I was in denial for so long that this doesn’t happen to me, it happens to the lad down the road, it happens to other people.
“Since that I heard people with cancer that when they get the diagnosis they can’t believe it because they’re telling themselves, ‘I don’t get cancer, other people get it.’ And that’s really the way I was dealing with depression, ‘I don’t get that, other people get it. The lad down the road gets it.’
“But once you admit to yourself that you have a problem you can go get help them. But if you don’t admit it it’s harder to get it. I had been at a doctor previous to that, my wife was constantly telling me I was depressed.
“But I went for her sake rather than admitting that I had a problem. I think once you admit it then the road to recovery becomes easier and you can actually go and get help.”
- Eoin Larkin’s autobiography Camouflage with Pat Nolan is available in all bookstores now
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