Born To Run

 

THE turf fire flickers in Willie Keane’s front room. Outside, the bracing March wind cuts through Kilkee as the evening light slowly gives away to the night sky.
While embracing the warmth wafting around the sitting room, Willie is probably more at ease mixing it with the slings and arrows of Irish weather. His 56 NACA Irish senior titles and 16 Clare championships attest to that. At the height of his career, Willie was beaten just once, in a 10-year spell, while running in the national championships. Yet he recounts a time when running on the roads near his parents’ home in Lisdeen, was a source of embarrassment to himself.

“When you’d meet a car, you’d go inside the ditch. You’d be ashamed to be seen on the road. There was a kind of a stigma,” he remembers.
Football was Willie Keane’s first sporting love. His father, Willie, had played football with Blackweir and Willie Junior passed most of his summer evenings playing football in O’Donnell’s Field.

“It was probably by accident I got into athletics. We were up on the main road one evening in the autumn time when this car pulled up. It turned out it was a chap behind from Cross, Denis Liddane. He was trying to recruit a few young fellas to go running. He had an athletic club in Cross,” Willie detailed.

He ran his first race around 1965, in an U-16 event. He immediately developed an infinite taste for running. It’s a solitary past-time but Willie was used to his own company.
“I used do a lot of the work at home on my own, things like milking cows and feeding cattle. Even going to the bog, you’d have the crowd of people there when you’d be cutting turf but when you’d be saving it then, you’d probably be on your own. I suppose it built up a mental strength. I never used a gym or never had to. I was blessed with physical power. For the first year or two, I wasn’t overly successful but I didn’t know anything about training. Although I always knew that I’d a good engine. I’d rakes of stamina,” he said.

A nine-month stint in Birmingham in 1969 turned out to be an educational experience. Willie learned how to train properly and when he moved back to Kilkee, he became a familiar figure, pounding the roads.
Running seems a simple pursuit but off road, it was complicated. The BLE was a 26-county athletic organisation, whose athletes represented Ireland at the Olympics and the world cross country championships. Willie Keane was a NACA man to the bone though, even if it meant that representing Ireland, at the major championships, was not an option. The NACA was a 32-county organisation.

“The NACA were actually founded by the GAA. They competed at the Olympics in 1924, 1928 and 1932. Tisdall and Pat O’Callaghan won gold medals as NACA athletes. In 1935, Britain claimed the six counties and they got the NACA suspended from competing internationally,” Willie noted.

“When I got the history of that, I never agreed with it. I decided I was staying with the NACA even though I knew we’d have to forfeit going to the Olympics and that. I never regretted it. It’s a matter of ‘stick with your beliefs’. If I was starting off today again, I’d do the very same thing. You stick by what you believe in,” he reiterated.

Willie was involved in a very controversial incident in Ghent, Belgium in 1973 when he was part of an NACA team, which tried to compete at the world cross country championships.
“We went as an unofficial Irish team. There was also an official Irish team. We couldn’t get near the starting line, it was so well stewarded. We had to make a decision. We broke into the front of the race. We were pulled out by the stewards one by one. We were blamed for interfering with the race. But it was the stewards that actually interfered with the race. The Irish cyclists had done something similar prior to that and it resolved the whole thing. By doing that, we were hoping the same thing would happen. We got widespread publicity in the national papers, which we normally wouldn’t get. All the journalists were getting trips with the official party. When they’d print something, a lot of the time, it would be something controversial,” he revealed.

In his younger days, Willie had to rely upon his thumb for transport. There weren’t many buses leaving Kilkee, which corresponded with the NACA event timetable. 
“There was a lot of thumbing. In the early days, you had very few cars. You had no problem going to the county, Munster or national events. There would be always somebody going but if you were going to support open races, you’d have to make your own way,” he reminisced.
A co-operative lorry driver was a good man to keep in with.
“We’d be watching the creamery lorry on the Saturday. John Joe Honan, a man from the west, was driving it. Michael Shannon was always with me. John Joe would pick us up and would drop us below at the station in Limerick,” he recalls. Willie and Michael would get the train to Dublin and make the return journey the following night.

“Many a time we ran over O’Connell Bridge to catch the train. Remember I was here at home with two small lads that time, William and Ger. It wasn’t easy for Marie. There was no phones or no contact. We’d be back in Limerick at 9.30pm on a Sunday night and no way of coming home. Only Shank’s mare. We walked miles and miles at times,” he remembers vividly. 
Willie’s GAA career was stymied somewhat in the mid 1960s when Kilkee reached a county U-21 final. Along with his brother, Michael, Willie was on the team that beat Kilmurry-Ibrickane in the semi-final but was dropped for the final.

Marty Marrinan fielded a hurling team at the time and the Keane brothers hurled for it, when asked by the Kilkee publican.
“Between the semi-final of the U-21 and the final, Marty fielded a hurling team. He being a publican and we having a pub at home in Lisdeen, he came out and asked us would we play the hurling with them. We did but when the U-21 football final was played, Kilkee wouldn’t play any of the two of us. Michael [Keane] never went to a game, I’d say, since,” Willie said.
The following year, Willie and Paddy Hurst formed a club in Blackweir, which lasted a year before Willie transferred to O’Curry’s. In 1971, he returned to play for Kilkee and lined out at midfield with his brother-in-law, JT Larkin, in a championship game against Kilmihil.

Training-wise, Willie soon realised that over training was futile. Although he often had to work on the farm before a race, he made sure that he kept himself fresh.
“Before a big race, I’d very rarely train after a Wednesday. I’d walk and get a massage. I felt I came out fresher of a Sunday. You learn and you find what suits you best. I was a great believer in walking,” he said, adding that he still walks 20 miles per week.

He remembers a time when, along with Michael, he forked two blocks of hay into a barn on a Saturday, travelled to Dundalk on Sunday and won a championship.
“They’d be talking today about sleeping and relaxing. I got the fastest spin to Dundalk I ever got,” he smiled.

A Clare County Council employee for 36 years, along with being a part-time fireman in Kilkee and a barman in Halpin’s Hotel, Willie has just one athletic regret – he’d love to have put time into marathon running.
“I always regretted I didn’t run a marathon. I was well capable of breaking 50 minutes for 10 miles, which would equate to good marathon running. The myth that time was that you wouldn’t run a marathon until you’d be around 30 years of age,” he revealed.

While his days lightly running the Cliff Walk or out the Dunlickey Road in Kilkee are in the past, Willie retains a deep love of running. 
“I’d watch athletics all day if I’d the time,” the legendary Lisdeen man reflected.

A tribute night to Willie Keane, entitled Born to Run, will be held in the Stella Maris Hotel, Kilkee at 8pm on Sunday March 31. Tickets are available from 065 9056455 and all proceeds will be donated to the West Clare Mini Marathon cancer fund.