Sad GAA story

The Rooster

From unison.ie:

PART ONE

ALAN BAILEY is a man without a past.

His background is a rumour. He is 30-years-old, but the life he now lives began on Saturday, September 13, 2003. The rest is just conjecture. Someone else's novel that he keeps being written into.

He's lost a career and a relationship. He's had to reacquaint himself with a mother, father and sister that he did not recognise. He's had to learn to read, write and even count again. He's putting the blocks of his life together, resigned to the disappearance of its first 27 years. It is as if he was born the day he was knocked out.

His story begins in Greenford, North London. A punctured tyre meant that he was late getting to Kingdom Kerry Gael's League clash with Tír Chonaill Gaels. So he went on as a half-time substitute and, apparently, scored 1-1 with his first two touches. Then the lights went out.

The referee's report states that Bailey was "hit off the ball". He was unconscious, it is estimated, for maybe fifteen to twenty seconds. Unable to get him back on his feet and noticing that his speech was slurred, officials called for an ambulance. Within minutes, it arrived, swinging in off the North Circular Road - on its way back from a false alarm - to tend to the stricken player. That false alarm was probably the stroke of luck that saved him.

Bailey was given oxygen and immediately rushed to Northwick Park Hospital. A doctor told him subsequently that he was "a very lucky boy". Another four or five minutes without oxygen might have been catastrophic for his brain.

Yet, something was already clearly wrong. Alan Bailey could barely speak. He recognised no-one. Friends and team-mates came to visit and he became agitated by their presence. A girl purporting to be his sister, Susan, was at his bedside. Nothing made sense.

"I didn't know anybody around the bed," he recalls now. "And I was getting really panicky. Not a single face registered."

The most basic, cognitive tests were carried out. Ten questions. What age are you? What year is it? Name the Prime Minister? Lying there, still in his jersey, Bailey could provide no answers. His mind was a deleted script. The world, as he knew it, had just ended.

Within maybe four days, he was able to walk while holding a rail. But his brain was more stubborn. People came to visit and he'd find himself wondering 'Who the hell is this?' He became volatile, resentful, disbelieving.

When they settled him in a ward, the girl calling herself Susan was still there. He remembers another girl, standing outside the glass, crying. Her tears made him cry too. Something terrible was wrong.

The girl beyond the glass was his girlfriend of almost six years. She was a stranger now. When, eventually, they talked, Alan struggled to formulate speech. But what he could communicate was devastating. "I didn't recognise her," he says. "And I didn't want to see her. There were no feelings there. Everything was just gone."

Initially, the prognosis offered hope. Temporary amnesia was normal after trauma to the head. Time would pull open the curtain.

Nurses and an occupational therapist tried to hasten the process. Simple tests. Spell 'cat'. What does a dog do? Innumerable questions answered with an X in a box. The process was wearying and demeaning. His 'sister' bore the brunt of it.

"I'd just tell her to f*** off," he recalls now. "I mean I felt I'd as much association with her as I had with a stranger in the street. I was being given simple tasks and I just couldn't retain the information. I'd throw the sheets of paper on the floor in frustration.

"I mean I could barely walk and, now, I was losing stuff again. Even my short-term memory was on the blink. I was knackered, constantly worn out. And the tests were really degrading. I knew it was babyish."

Five days after the incident, he was released from hospital on condition that he went to live with his sister and her husband. It was agreed that, until his memory returned, he could not possibly live alone.

Bailey had his own flat, a nice car and a decent job. He was site manager for construction of the new, multi-storey London Hospital at Euston Square. His weekends were full of the exile's GAA life, football, coaching the London ladies. He could play the guitar.

Now, essentially, he had none of those things. He needed care. Six months earlier, he had been Best Man at Susan's wedding. "Do you live with friends?" he asked her on the journey home. "Actually, I'm married," she replied.

The Rooster

PART 2/2

The next two months were dark and deeply worrying. No memory returned. He suffered black-outs. For little pockets of time, his vision would turn black and white. He had a number of falls. He felt lifeless.

Approaching Christmas, Susan knew they had reached a cul-de-sac. "I was still a complete stranger," she remembers. "He'd still look at me blankly. Nothing was really registering."

She took him to the Clementine Hospital where a neurologist recommended some CT scans. A psychologist did more tests. Eventually, the neurologist offered a hopeful prognosis. Time would heal. The short-term memory loss was explainable. "Come back in a month," he said.

That Christmas, Susan brought him home to Kerry to see their parents, Kathleen and James. Two more strangers. He knew nothing of their story. The first port of call was Kathleen's place in Killorglin.

"I knocked on the door," he says. "This woman answers. Susan says 'This is your mother.' And I'm thinking 'Do I hug her, kiss her or shake her hand?' So I shook her hand.

"I hated that Christmas. Sitting around the table with strangers having dinner. I wanted to sit on my own. Mom was trying hard. She was showing photos of me when I was 14, playing football. But nothing she was showing meant anything. Eventually I just said 'Leave me alone. You don't know me. You may think you do, but I don't want to see this'.

"I was just taking Susan at her word. I could have sworn I'd never been in Kerry before in my life. People saying this is the house you grew up in. Pictures of me on the wall. Nothing added up. It was as if I had just landed down from outer space."

His father brought him down to the local GAA pitch in Keel, thinking it might trigger memories. It didn't. If anything, Alan became exasperated with his father's attempts at simple therapy. Visits to his old schools, faces from the past. Old team-mates. Nothing.

He returned to London, moving back into his own flat, the mortgage (£600 a month) now hanging like a millstone around his neck. Mercifully, just prior to the incident, he took a £10,000 loan to renovate the flat and, now, that money would be needed to sustain him.

In mid-March of '04, he took an after-school job that amounted to making sandwiches and, generally, looking after the needs of five to nine-year-olds for the princely sum of £236 a month. The cost of the private consultations was eating into his money. He tried to release equity on his flat but, without a proper income, his application was rejected.

A race-night in the club had raised £3,500 for him and Susan was still grappling with the strange nuances and complexities of the GAA insurance scheme. London County Board expressed concern for his predicament but revealed little appetite for pursuing the player responsible for his injuries.

Tir Chonaill Gaels held firm on a bewildering party line that Bailey had been injured in a "fifty-fifty" collision.

Approaching the summer of '04, bankruptcy had come calling. Bailey had £34 in his account with a mortgage repayment due in six days. Family and friends offered help, but his pride just would not countenance it.

Moral support was in full flood, mind. The girls he once coached, began offering practical assistance. Corina Harrington worked on his pronunciation and tried, in vain, to retrieve his skill on a guitar (he had previously played in Scór na nÓg).

Angie Fogarty was an almost daily caller to his flat, insisting on getting him out in the evenings, keeping depression at arms' length. But he needed work. He needed a wage.

A kind of salvation came in Mick Langan's phone-call. Originally from Tarbert, Langan - a club-mate - got Bailey on as a general labourer in his aunt and uncle's company, Buildstone Ltd. Painstakingly, he taught him how to paint and decorate. They gave him a wage even when the work he was doing might not have entirely merited it.

"It was like spoon-feeding a baby," recalls Alan. "But Mick stayed with me. He understood. He's a pure gentleman. Only for Mick, I'd have lost my flat."

To this day, he works for Buildstone, "labouring, that's all I know now".

Moving back into his own place was, to begin with, an intoxicating experience. Everything seemed new. The big TV. The cd player. The clothes. The freedom. But the little trickle of memories had dried up now. And slowly, depression took a hold.

In August of last year, Bailey hit rock bottom. One minute he was on a site, painting. The next he was sitting in a pub in convulsions. "I just wanted it all to end," he remembers. Too many seemed inclined to turn their backs. London GAA. Tir Chonaill Gaels. He could feel the pressure building inside his head.

A visit to the neurologist alerted him to the possibility that his memory might, after all, be gone forever. The news devastated him.

One night, irrationally, he sat into his car and decided to just disappear. Swung onto the M4 with the aim of driving to some place, any place, he wouldn't be known. Build a new identity. One hour down the motorway, he realised he had just half a tank of petrol and his wallet was at home. The plan was aborted.

After a depressingly long and difficult process, Susan managed to secure the maximum insurance pay-out for her brother. It amounted to £200 a week for 26 weeks. Little more than £5,000. He looks and sounds healthy now but memory is still a black hole. "I have the capabilities of maybe a 15-year-old," he reckons.

Susan says their relationship is based on the last three years only. "He still has no great memory of growing up together," she confirms.

Just before Christmas, a two-hour meeting with Dessie Farrell in Dublin brought the Gaelic Players' Association into play on his behalf. Farrell admits that Bailey's case is one of the "most heart-rending" he has come across. GAA president, Sean Kelly, has also expressed concern.

Susan does all his paperwork. He calls her his "computer", his "brain". Together, they thieve humour from the trauma. Last week, to mark his 30th birthday, she sent him a card to celebrate his third. "If I don't see the funny side, I'm going to go into an awful depression," he reasons.

But some days are darker than others. "Emotionally, it's probably getting worse," he says. "To know that nothing's coming back. What is my future? I'm 30-years-old. I don't remember the first 27 of those years. What can I work at? Am I to go with a shovel for the rest of my life? How do I start to rebuild my life?

"I still love the GAA. I still love football. But, if nothing else, maybe what happened should alert other players that the insurance structures just aren't adequate. My injuries just didn't seem to be covered in any category.

"I mean I've lost my life because of this. My whole past is gone. Am I to spend the rest of my time just digging holes, sweeping up? I'm just ticking over, trying to re-learn the most basic of things. It's soul-destroying.

"Sometimes I think I'd have been better off if I broke both my legs and arms. In a certain amount of time, I'd be fine. Life could go on. But the way I am now is more or less completely disabled. I'm just this person going around at 30-years-old who knows nothing and nobody. "My life was football all the way. Now there's nothing. All I've got back is hassle, forms, letters, a sense of getting nowhere."

Imposter

I was just about to post this. I hope it changes the opinions of people who think that off the ball incidents are "just part of the game". I'm also shocked that the GAA insurance scheme doesn't cover him.

cournioni

That is one of the saddest things I've read in quite some time. If it was an off the ball incident and the player struck Alan Bailey he should definately be reported by Tir Chonaill regardless. If he had been killed what would have happened? This kind of thing has to stop in the GAA.

Kojak

Imposter wrote:

I'm also shocked that the GAA insurance scheme doesn't cover him.

If you had any experience of what the GAA call 'insurance' then you wouldn't really be surprised. It is laughable at best - I know, I have had personal experince of it. Not as bad as Alan Bailey, thank God - terrible story.

Very sad story about Alan Bailey . It does go to show that 'off-the-ball- incidents can have serious consequences, regardless of what people say. Tir Chonaill should have reported their player - the whole thing is a discrace, IMO. :mad:

Big Ears

A very sad story , and the thought that the culprit of it all recieved no punishment makes it even worse . Not to mention the rediculous amount of insurance he got .

Rodney Trotter

Typical GAA attitude, unfortunately.