You’ve heard the joke about growing old. When you bend down to tie your shoe lace, you say “Is there anything else I can do while I’m down here!” Well there’s one man who jumps 1.20m and says “Is there anything else I can do while I’m up here!”
At least that what I imagine Jim O’Shea saying when he trains for the high jump out in Listry near Milltown. And I can hear him say that same thing in three weeks’ time when he will compete in the British Masters in Derby. For the first time as an eighty year old.
Jim clears the height of his well-spent life this weekend when he sails over the octogenarian bar and literally goes where few people have gone before. And in Derby he will complement his Over 80 high jump with an Over 80 long jump and for dessert will do an Over 80 sprint. And what’s more, he will enjoy all three. Reasons to be cheerful, 1-2-3.
Not many writers have written about the high jump as a theme for life. But a Turkish author called Mehmet Murat Ildan has analysed the magic of the jump in his line “You can’t make a high jump without high spirits”. He must have been thinking of Jim O’Shea when he wrote that. High jumper. High spirits. Oh yes, indeed.
Beginnings
Jim O’Shea was born on May 15th, 1942 in Battersfield in Firies. In the middle of the second world war. “I didn’t cause it, I had no hand, act or part in it!” he affirms. He does remember his early years after the war. They were dark and dreary years and he remembers the ration books in use when he was about five years old. Food was very scarce after the war and he recalls his mother with a book of coupons for flour, butter and tea to be handed in to the local shop. And used sparingly. Things were grim and grey. A lot of poverty.
Amidst this bare background, Jim started primary school in Longfield between Firies and Castlemaine. Schools were dull, featureless buildings in those days. Unpainted inside and outside. Grey walls. None of the brightness that exudes from today’s primary schools. Dry toilets. No wash hand-basins.
The history that was taught was all about the distant past…the Tuatha Dé Danann and Red Hugh but no recent history, no mention of World War 1 or 2. Irish was taught in the wrong way according to Jim. A pupil had to be word-perfect and grammar was king. Indeed the Irish language was taught through “fear and thuggery”.
He remembers 1952 when he was ten years old. Local sports were the big thing on summer Sundays. Because of the lack of car transport, local sports were big. Instead of communities going long distances to sports, sports were generated in the vernacular. The bike was available, so get on it and cycle a few miles on a Sunday. On the bar of the bike if you didn’t have one yourself. Walk if necessary. Firies, Ballyhar, Currow, Ballymac, Tralee (which had the famous “Kerry Day Out” in Austin Stack Park), Ardfert, Moyvane, Beale, Cahersiveen, Dingle, Killorglin, Sneem, Kenmare and Kilgarvan were the Meccas of those Sundays of the 1950s. “You had great competition.” These sports were not governed by the county committees. They were run by local committees who came together once a year for the big day. Wherever two or more would gather in the name of athletics. And cycling too.
One particular summer Sunday shoots back into Jim’s vivid memory. A two-mile flat race (where the athletes all started together as distinct from the handicapped race where athletes started in different places). It was in Firies under a blue sky. The race saw a young crew-cutted lad from Tubrid in Ardfert called Tom O’Riordan and a man from Limerick by the name of Jim Cregan, who later competed under the name of Jim Hogan. They graced the two -mile flat that day and little did people realise that two international stars were honing their skills. Within a few years Tom O’Riordan would be burning cinder tracks around the world and competing in the 5000m in the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 while Jim Hogan was to go on to win the European marathon championship in 1966. A live forever day in Firies.
Another gem of memory from the Firies sports in the 1950s is that on a couple of occasions there was a pole vault competition. What! Yes, a pole vault! You wouldn’t see that at every open sports. Even now, the pole vault shedette in most tartan tracks is the one that houses the mice in winter. Rarely used. In the 1950s, the pole vault was a rather dangerous event. The uprights were made of 3x2 timbers. The bar was a light timber latting. And the landing area? Well, mother earth or stones or whatever nature had dictated for that field. The best vaulter at that time was Seán O’Donnell from Tralee.
Light dawned on the educational horizon for the Firies boy when he headed off to the Killarney Technical School in 1956. Situated in New Street in Killarney, it had excellent teachers. It was a whole new world and one particular teacher stood out. Joe Tracy, a native of Rathkeale. He imparted metalwork and maths but more importantly, he would sit down with a student and chat and bestow life-skills. He explained things that were happening in the world. Jim forever thanks him for his interest and skills. One of those teachers who can show the road ahead.
Jim well remembers a day in 1956 when he was getting ready to go to the Tech in Killarney. Up he got and was eating his breakfast when the old battery radio was turned on in the kitchen. The news crackled through that Ronnie Delany had won the Olympic gold in the 1500m in Melbourne. “I must say, I never felt that day going” he recalls.
Ireland still holds its breath for a moment like that in Olympic athletics.
Working Life
In 1959, Jim started an apprenticeship in Liebherr in Killarney and was joined by a bunch of fellas who were interested in athletics. Among them, Mike O’Connor, Tony Falvey, Derry McCarthy (a county cross country champion), Joe Clifford and John Murphy (who later starred for the Gneeveguilla club). There was a great athletic comradeship there. Lunchtime talks meant only one thing…athletics. Who won on Sunday and who showed promise. And then they competed in inter-firm athletics which was a growing feature of the time, making their mark for the company.
In 1962, Jim joined Farranfore Athletic Club. Invited by John Crowley, affectionately known far and wide as JJ or Jack. John kept athletics alive for a generation through thick and thin in the area as his son Jerome is still doing. John was a wonderful man, a shopkeeper who owned a hackney car which broadened horizons and increased possibilities. Every Sunday he filled the car with young athletes and ferried them to sports meetings far and wide. Countywide sports meetings were now just a drive away, but Cork was now a hunting ground also: Skibereen, Nad, Banteer, Mallow and Millstreet were all reachable. With serious Corkonian competition. If you won a medal in Cork, you earned it.
In 1974, a change of career opportunity meant four years in Galway with ANCO (the industrial training body) and a return to Tralee in 1977 saw him desk there till 1989. Then to Killarney as manager and in 2005 he retired early. A good move. Life is short and eternity is a very long time.
Training in the old days
Initially Jim ran road and cross country races “which I was not good at!” he honestly admits, but they were the main activities at the time. There were no facilities for promoting field events. The Farranfore club used to meet in a field belonging to the Walsh family. Members of this family included the late Michael and also Tom (who now lives in Tralee). The breakthrough into jumps was effected when Jim and his colleagues dug a long jump pit, filled it with as much sand and mud as they could find and jumped to their dreams among the cows and cattle. The awed animals probably looked on with their dreamy eyes as they chewed the cud and wondered what the human race was coming to!
The normal running sessions were conducted on the road at night. No warm up…just tog out and belt the road from Farranfore, out by Firies and back to Farranfore again under the stars or in the lashing rain. Uphill and down dale and the devil take the hindmost. That was it. Cool down? What cool down! Shower? What shower! Sure wasn’t it drizzling out there!
Modernity in training hit Farranfore when a man called Tom McCarthy returned from the US. Tom, now resident in Ballymac, brought home a few American ideas and he infused variety into the training and put a new pep in the step of the athletes.
There were few women competing in athletics in the 1950s. After a time, sprints were introduced at some sports for women. Billy Morton, the colourful athletics promoter of the 1950s and 1960s who built Santry Stadium, was a visionary who sought to establish international women’s athletics but was uppercutted by the dictatorial Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. McQuaid considered a woman’s place to be in the home, having babies. A fierce debate raged but Billy Morton broke the glass ceiling and held his event for women. When the history of women’s sport is written, the name of Morton must be central to the story.
Masters Athletics
And then came masters athletics into Jim O’Shea’s life. Jerome Crowley describes his move to the masters’ category as “a seamless transmission” from senior athletics. He set up a home-made gym in the corner of his shed and introduced a rowing machine and other items to take up arms against the tides of the years. He was ahead of his time in this approach as athletic preparation is ideally interwoven with daily life. Training consistently and smartly, he nurtured his body carefully and largely avoided the slings and arrows of age. Injury was not a companion, as it is with many athletes.
Allied with his physical prowess, his gregarious approach to life and his indelible sense of humour ensured that masters’ athletics would be a fulfilling undertaking for Jim. His keen wit and his inevitable quips drew people to him, while his realistic and practical sense of values won him many friends on committees and in competitions. A night or day spent in the company of Jim and his brother John is an enriching experience and creates many smiles. Indeed John was asked once about the ability of an Irish dancer and former athlete doing set dancing and commented that he was fine although his tracking was off and he was pulling to the left! John O’Shea had a stroke recently but Jim assures that he is walking very well and talking very well again!
Jim competed for the first time as a master in 1983 at the age of forty one. He high-jumped to a medal in the national championships in the O40 category. Got a medal in the 400m for good measure. The next year, he got ambitious and headed off to the European championships in Brighton in England. Accompanied by his wife Anne, John Crowley, Tom Walsh (a noted jumper in his day) and his wife Mary.
The Europeans in Brighton were a whole new experience, the like of which was never sampled before. Tom Walsh competed in the O45 long jump and finished fourth. Jim competed in the O40 high jump and was ninth of seventeen. Next came the British Indoor Championships in 1988 and success in the pentathlon, a bronze in the gruelling five events, all in one day. The shot was the most challenging: “with my build I barely threw it beyond my toe caps!” Jim admits. Delighted to get a medal, he was to continue his international competitions through each age-group, ticking off the years with medal after medal, against the best athletes on the circuit. Unlike J Alfred Prufrock in Dylan Thomas’s famous poem who counted his hours in coffee spoons, Jim counted his medals. And the magic of competing and training.
In 2018, Jim boarded a plane for the European masters championships in Madrid with Jerome Foley and Mike O’Connor. Gold in the O75 long jump. Nice. A year later, he got “super ambitious” and off he went with Seánie O’Shea and Jerome Foley to Torun, south of Gdansk in Poland to the world masters’ championships and got a bronze medal in the O75 high jump. Jumped 1.25m. Try jumping that height at home and you realise the extent of the achievement. In championship competition too. His name in Athletics Weekly. He had arrived. Eddie Mulcahy was another athlete who travelled with Jim’s entourage on occasions abroad.
You have to see Jim in action in the high jump! He uses the straddle technique which was the dominant style in the high jump before the development of the Fosbury Flop after the 1968 Olympics. Basically, Jim jumps off the foot nearest the uprights from the left side with face down towards the bar as he sails over it. Fosbury Floppers jump over on their backs with faces up to the sky. He is one of the few exponents of the style now and that will be his style for life.
In recent years, Jerry Horgan of Killorglin has been a key man in Jim’s training. Jerry carries out a physical training session a few nights a week in his gymshed and it is most enjoyable. Thursday means a trip to the An RÃocht track in Castleisland, accompanied by Annette O’Brien, an efficient high jumper and a long jumper also. Marks and heights are shared. Two coaches who happen to be athletes also. Two visionaries envisioning.
Jim has fought the good fight of athletics through the decades of change. When he joined the running world of Farranfore in the 1950s, there were two athletic organisations. The NACA (who were promoting all Ireland athletics) and the AAU who were based in Dublin and were the internationally recognised body. It affected the status of some athletes who wished to compete internationally and Kerry’s Tom O’Riordan had to change from the NACA to the AAU to be eligible to compete internationally. He was castigated wrongly in his home county for doing this and would have sacrificed his place on the plane to Tokyo ’64 if he hadn’t made that decision.
In 1967, when Jim was competing in a number of events, BLE was formed as a unity body but a section of NACA broke away and two opposing organisations were still active in Kerry until the year 2000 when Kerry Athletics finally unified the whole county. Jim was delighted to compete for the unified county at the start of the new millennium and to win some of the new Athletics Ireland historic medals.
The best Irish woman athlete of all time in Jim’s opinion is Sonia O’Sullivan. Capable of running track and cross country in equal measure on the world stage, she is his icon. John Treacy is his male icon with his two world cross country golds and a silver in the Olympic marathon. Locally, the late Jerry Kiernan has to be tops. Wonderful ability, a sub-four minute miler who finished ninth in the same Olympic marathon in LA where Treacy got that silver. Kiernan never got full credit for that ninth position.
The Feckless Four
Four members of the Farranfore club met in the 1960s and are till bosom buddies. Jerome Crowley was in the club already when Jim joined in 1962, Joe Clifford joined in 1965 – it was indeed Jim who introduced him to athletics that year in Pender’s Field where Ballyhar sports were being held. Joe testifies that Jim has made a huge contribution to athletics both as athlete and official. He has had an enormous influence on young people in his own FFMV club and beyond.
The fourth hardy boy, Mike O’Connor came along in 1966. Mike has been burning up miles with smiles since he was asked to say hallo to running by Jim at an open sports in Kilcummin in that year. Holder of a host of walking and running medals from many levels, Mike notes that Jim is meticulous in everything he does and has the old and respected skill of impeccable handwriting. That handwriting has been used for many posters, athletics notes, minutes, observations, compiling quiz questions and crafting letters over the years. An almost forgotten skill now, although Community Games and some local magazines are efforting to keep the skill alive. Michael signs off on his evaluation of Jim as “a great clubman” and he can mark out a track better than most. The club is always the first item on the agenda when the two dynamos meet over a weekly coffee.
These feckless four are still hale and hearty today, the senior citizens of Farranfore Maine Valley AC and Kerry Athletics. Milage on the clocks, buzzing with wisdom, and a joy to listen to. Full of roguery too, it must be added. Oh, the tales they tell.
The hidden Jim, the other Jim is revealed to have a keen interest in classic cars and is the owner of an NSU Prinz 4 and two immaculately restored NSU Quicklys. Veratility indeed. And there’s the local charity work that Jim does quietly behind the scenes, not to mention gardening skills beyond the ordinary. Fear iol-dánach, a multi-talented man indeed.
Children under Pressure
As well as competing himself at all levels from county upwards, Jim still likes to go to see local athletics events, county championships and Community Games. He loves to see children involved in sports. He doesn’t wish to be a prophet of doom, but he feels that young people are under pressure from a number of sports. Too many organisations pushing sport on them. People are dropping out of football and other sports very young. Intense training and travelling to training and burn-out is inevitable. There are parents running to the Gaelic pitch with children this evening, up the road for rugby tomorrow evening, to the athletics for training another evening and to the local hall for basketball on Saturday. Compulsion to be on time is widespread, meaning a young person rushes from one training session to another in a number of sports even on the same evening. It’s like a tug-o-war between sports and the children are in the middle. National championships for the very young is not advisable. Young people should be allowed to sample a variety of sports at local level and be allowed to choose. He is a long-standing Spurs fan himself.
Too much sport is as bad as too little, Jim thinks but life would be very dull without sport.
“Life went pretty slowly till I was about twenty seven, but then the birthdays started coming fairly quickly” Jim mourns. Years pick up speed. Some days you see photos of deceased neighbours and friends in the memoriam notices and you realise they have been gone for much longer than you thought. He is determined to be involved in sport as much as possible before the end of days.
Looking back, Jim says he is very lucky to be married to Anne. A native of Ballyvary near Castlebar in Co Mayo, she has always supported his athletics escapades over the years. They actually met after an athletics meet in Dublin in 1967. When he mentions a possible athletics trip, all Anne says is “Why not!” She has encouraged his trips out and was intending to go to Finland to the world masters championships this summer. “But I sized it up and decided it was too far away”. He who lives long must be prepared for changes, Goethe said.
Maybe it’s that kind of decision-making that endears Jim to Anne. And I suspect that there’s a perfect team partnership in operation in the O’Shea household and family of three sons too.
The hurricane that is Jim O’Shea will compete in the O80 category for the first time in the British Masters track and field championships on June 11th in Derby. The plane is booked and he is locked and loaded for the occasion. He will thrive and prevail in the competitive atmosphere and then immerse himself in chat and humour after the competition. He will inhabit the life of the stadium. His balanced and passionate nature will animate the day and make it into an occasion. Afterwards he will tell us stories about it which will reach into the secrets and the spirit of athletics.
When asked about who inspires him, Jim mentioned one hidden hero. He is a man called Tony Bowman living in England and he is somewhere north of eighty five years of age. A former RAF pilot. To look at him, he is just like a young man of sixty, Jim says! Tony has had two heart attacks and a number of operations. His ambition is to be able to run the 100m at one hundred years of age and to live till he is one hundred and twenty. He just oozes life.
Like Jim O’Shea oozes life. He is a ball of life. He has a sparkle about him. Enfolded by sport. He is also a gentleman of life and athletics and he clears the height of his life this weekend. Being eighty will only add to his equilibrium.
Happy 80th Jim.
