'I woke up the next morning and couldn't move my legs'
Former Monaghan forward Michael Slowey recounts a nomadic GAA career that saw him recover from a fractured spine to become New York’s all-time leading scorer and win championships in America, Australia and Clare.
MICHAEL SLOWEY WOKE up one morning after playing a game of football and couldn’t move his legs.
Monaghan's Michael Slowey stands over a free in the 1995 Ulster SFC. Patrick Bolger / INPHO
Patrick Bolger / INPHO / INPHO
Panic immediately set in.
An ambulance was called. He was put under oxygen and carted out on a stretcher.
As the hours passed in hospital, all he could do was stare at the ceiling. 22 years-old and wondering if he’d ever walk again, let alone kick a ball.
Eventually, the feeling game came back in his legs. Doctors told him he had broken his spine. It was a stress fracture, the accumulation of years of taking heavy knocks on the field.
The rehabilitation process was a long haul. It took him two years to make a full recovery. While his legs got stronger, his love for football slowly evaporated.
At one stage, Slowey was the coming thing in Monaghan football.
Named Monaghan minor footballer of the year in 1992, he was talked about with the same excitement as other rising stars in Ulster like Ger Cavlan in Tyrone and Armagh pair Diarmuid Marsden and Paul McGrane.
A speedy forward, full of guile and craft, Slowey knew where the posts were.
How did he develop so much wear and tear on his body at such a young age? He puts it down the amount of different teams he was playing with across football, soccer and basketball, plus his all-action style.
He was 16 when he started playing senior football with Clones.
“I was was expected to play all positions,” he tells The42. “We weren’t a particularly strong club so I’d have been battered around the place.”
He starred on Monaghan minor and U21 teams. By his early 20s, he was combining club, college and senior inter-county commitments.
In those days, Monaghan struggled to make an impact. Invariably their Ulster campaigns ended early and Slowey took up the opportunity to spend a couple of summers in Chicago.
In early 1996, he had three years put down on the Farney senior team when his world changed with those serious spinal injuries.
“I don’t want to slate anyone, but when you have an injury like that, you’re just left to your own,” he recalls. “There was no support system. A few from the club might have popped their head up now and then but nothing that you would remember.
“I was basically left to myself, there was no checking on me or anything. I was irrelevant. I just realised it was what it was. Monaghan wouldn’t have been a particularly strong outfit in those days. There wasn’t the infrastructure that’s there now.”
His recovery was far from a straightforward process.
“I went around to more specialists,” he says. “I went to loads of specialists for about a year. And just nothing. They ended up just putting me in, basically a plastic cast you’d put around your arm, they put it from my chest the whole way down covering half the cheeks of my ass. Then it continued down the right hand side to my right knee.
“Sure it was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous when I look back,” he laughs.
“I could walk but it was fairly slow. You’d be walking as if you were in a big cast. It was crazy. They eventually took the right side of the leg cast off.”
He missed two full seasons of football. It never held the same appeal for him after that.
“It was tough because football was so important to me. Football never meant that much to me after that. Music was always my first love anyway, but in the early ’90s we were starting to build a nice team with Monaghan.
“After that it was never the same. I always took football with a pinch of salt, I never cared for it that much. I still played for another 10 years but it was never the thing that it used to be. Definitely not.
“I had played a lot of football, I’d been playing since I was eight or nine. It was hard to keep going, you’d have to be winning things for the appetite to continue.”
Those two years watching from the sidelines convinced Slowey that the rest of his life would be for living.
A graphic designer by trade, those jobs were few and far between in 1990s Ireland.
So he took off. And embarked on a fascinating career as a GAA journeyman.
First up was Boston, where he spent a year.
“I played with Aidan McAnespies and we won the North American Championships that year. Peter Canavan was out playing with us. It was a brilliant summer of football.
Peter Canavan spent the summer of 1998 playing alongside Slowey in Boston. Andrew Paton / INPHO
Andrew Paton / INPHO / INPHO
“They’ve a lovely set-up in Canton now but in those days it was like a baseball field. Boys would go for the ball, there would be a pile of dust and one man would come out with it sort of thing. It wasn’t pretty.
“After Boston I went to San Francisco and I was going to play for a club over there, they were great. But there was just something about New York…”
During his summers in Chicago, the North American board had allowed GAA players “head off down to New York any weekend you weren’t playing.
“When I went into Manhattan that’s when it whetted my appetite. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m going to end up in New York at some stage.’”
So the offer of graphic design job tempted Slowey away from San Francisco to the Tyrone club in New York.
“After that I was away,” he smiles.
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And so began his love-affair with New York GAA.
He pitched up there in 1999 at the very time when the county team were beginning to take things seriously.
The New York county board had successfully lobbied to be part of the All-Ireland race, beginning that year.
An agreement was reached to allow New York compete in the Connacht SFC on the stipulation they had to travel to Ireland to play the games.
“They were quite closed about people joining, to be honest. They had been training for a couple of months and they weren’t keen on taking anybody in.
“I just happened to be playing the best football of my life at that stage,” he says. “I was averaging about 10 points a game for the club so then I got drafted in.
“I think my first year I got fifty-something points with Tyrone in the club championship. That was probably my best year.
“I wasn’t interested in playing with New York at the start because I’d started with an advertising agency down in Manhattan and I didn’t want to be missing work. But one of the owners was Irish American and he was sound.
“Those were my most enjoyable years, ’99 and 2000. I loved the football there. It just clicked for me that year. I was taking frees, my brother (Martin) was on the team too and there was a nice bunch of lads involved. There were some physical dudes on our side and that’s always a good thing.”
New York in the parade before playing Mayo in 1999. Andrew Paton / INPHO
Andrew Paton / INPHO / INPHO
New York’s first championship game on Irish soil took place in MacHale Park, when they shipped a 3-13 to 0-10 beating to Mayo.
“We stayed in Westport. They put us up in some hotel. It was really well done but I think they were overfeeding the lads.
“They were up getting big breakfasts and then going training and coming home for lunch and dinner in the evenings. I hadn’t been home in a few years so it was nice to get back. My sister got married that same time I was home.”
The following year they went down by 10 points to Galway in Tuam Stadium.
“I was still with that advertising agency so I came home on the Friday and played the game on the Sunday. It was a dreadful day. I went back to New York on the Monday so I don’t have much memories from that trip.
“I just remember scoring a real flukey goal that day.”
He travelled to Australia in 2001 and missed the game against Roscommon, which was New York’s last fixture on Irish soil. The events of 9/11 later that year made travel to the US more difficult and since then New York have hosted the fixture.
Slowey was back in harness for the 2002 visit of Sligo to Gaelic Park.
“That was the strongest New York team I’d played with,” he says. “I arrived back from Australia and they were training hard, it was full-on training. We just couldn’t get teams to play us.
“That team could have done really well if they had National League games but they had no league games. We played Boston and the Fire Brigade but there weren’t enough games.
“We had Kevin Lilly, an Irish American guy, and Bingo (Gene O’Driscoll), he was a great footballer. Very intelligent player. A lovely guy, I got on very well with him.”
New York were within three points after an hour, before Sligo pulled away and won by eight. Slowey’s 1-5 tally that afternoon brought him to 2-11 over three championship games for New York.
It’s a scoring record that remains unrivalled.
He’s surprised to hear he is the county team’s all-time leading scorer.
“That’s nice to hear. I got something out of my career! I mightn’t have won much.”
But he won plenty.
Slowey must be the only man to have played in the Connacht SFC, Ulster SFC, won North American and Australasian Games medals, and lifted a Clare senior county title.
“Jeez, I played with an awful lot of teams when I look back,” he laughs.
His Australian adventure began with a desire to visit Japan. He spent a month there and headed to Australia. He started out in Sydney but ended up travelling to Melbourne to play football after a friend from Monaghan persuaded him to join them.
“Our club played against a team in the final and there was a bit of fisty cuffs during the game…the usual macho stuff.
“Then we ended up playing with them for Victoria in the Australasian Games. It was quite nice to put things in perspective again.
“We won that out and it’s probably my favourite memory from Australia.
“Who was handing out the medals only Sean McCaigue (GAA President at the time). That was a bit of a strange one. Ireland were over playing Aussie Rules at the time. He was the first manager I had for Monaghan back in the early ’90s.”
After Australia he spent time in New Zealand before returning for a stint in Japan.
A bronzed Slowey arrived home to Monaghan in 2003. Initially, a move to play club football in Dublin was in the pipeline.
“I was meant to go back and play for Ballyboden (St Enda’s). I was in the process of doing it. The management were meant to get me a design job. Then there was no job. The manager at the time…it was all a load of crap. So I just didn’t bother.”
He returned to his native Clones and not long afterwards a call-up to the Monaghan panel arrived for the 29-year-old.
“Colm Coyle called me in. It was my first time in eight years to play Monaghan.”
The inter-county game was almost unrecognisable since his last experience in 1996.
Slowey takes on Laois great Hughie Emerson during the National Football League quarter-final in 1995.
Armagh and Tyrone were driving it towards professionalism. For a free spirit like Slowey, who thrived on an expansive, kicking game, he didn’t like what it had become.
“It was completely different, with the video analysis. Although I was pretty decent with the physical stuff, the running and playing ball. But it had gone to the stage where they almost didn’t want you to kick the ball.
“It wasn’t for me. I know it’s a team sport but the art of kicking had gone out of it. It’s making a bit of a comeback but what I found most enjoyable was giving a sweet kick pass and obviously scoring.
“You were playing more defensively, tracking back the whole time.
“I played against Armagh in the first round of Ulster. That was nice to do but I probably had my fill of football at that stage.”
He played for two seasons with Monaghan before packing it in.
“In 2004, I got another injury, Gilmore’s groin. I came back that year and played a couple of league games and one more game in the championship and that was it. I gave it up, I said that’s enough.”
Slowey started studying teaching in UL and spent another couple of summers in New York.
He found playing abroad a purer form of the game.
“There was a certain freedom to it. It was more enjoyable, it wasn’t this ‘for your club and your county’ die-hard approach. Now some of the managers would be the old-type of kicking tables and chairs nonsense.
“But the players themselves…it was good because you’d be playing with lads from loads of different counties, and from what are considered weaker counties as well.
“You’re playing with lads with similar interests. It’s hard to beat that.
“Even more so the characters you’d meet. They’d come over and introduced themselves after every game in New York. They could have been from Monaghan originally, or even from somewhere like Kerry, and you’d have the banter with them.
“Then you’d meet them every time you’d be over. You mightn’t be around be around for while and you’d come back a couple of years later and you’d meet them old characters again. Just pure gentlemen. Loved the sport.”
One of the final stops on his journey brought him to Lissycasey in Clare.
Former New York manager Pat Scanlon originally hailed from the village and encouraged Slowey to join them while he was studying in Limerick.
“That was my final year of college in 2007 so I went out to play with them. They were a lovely club, it was a really enjoyable six months of football with Lissycasey. They were a professional outfit. A very well ran, lovely bunch, complete and utter die-hards.
“They had never won the championship before and were beaten in the final the year before that. You could just sense it was going to happen that year. We won the Clare senior championship.
“Everything sort of worked out.”
For the summer of 2008, Slowey needed to scratch an itch one last time.
“I went back out to New York for one last hurrah. I played with my brother, we got to the semi-final out there. Then I hung them up for good.”
New York travel to Tullamore to face Offaly in the Tailteann Cup. Andy Marlin / INPHO
Andy Marlin / INPHO / INPHO
Teaching in Sligo these days, Slowey watches out for Monaghan and New York’s results but doesn’t have a huge interest in the game anymore.
“I barely watch it, I’ll be honest,” he admits.
“I’d keep an eye on the scores, especially if Monaghan or New York were playing. Apart from that not a whole pile.
“I get the whole club and county bravado but I don’t know. When you’re playing it’s different. But nowadays there’s so many team meetings and video analysis.
“I think you have to trust in your players. They’re there for a reason. Obviously you have to have a plan and instructions. But it’s like a tennis coach when he’s breaking down a serve, you’re too busy concentrating on your feet than the player in front of you.
“A lot of the creativity is gone. I put on Derry and Donegal (last weekend), it’s just shocking. It’s just terrible.”
He’ll keep tabs from afar of events in O’Connor Park this afternoon. New York play Offaly in the Tailteann Cup in what is their first game on these shores in over two decades.
Slowey still keeps in touch with old friends in New York. He tends to head back during his school holidays but hasn’t made the trip since Covid.
He was chatting to a former team-mate recently around the time the Exiles faced Sligo in the Connacht championship.
“His father is originally from Down but he’s American.
“He was showing me videos of his daughter playing football in upstate New York. She looks very good. She was dribbling around all these boys. She’s very fast and her father was the same. She’s 12 years-old, I couldn’t believe he has a daughter that age.
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'I woke up the next morning and couldn't move my legs'
MICHAEL SLOWEY WOKE up one morning after playing a game of football and couldn’t move his legs.
Panic immediately set in.
An ambulance was called. He was put under oxygen and carted out on a stretcher.
As the hours passed in hospital, all he could do was stare at the ceiling. 22 years-old and wondering if he’d ever walk again, let alone kick a ball.
Eventually, the feeling game came back in his legs. Doctors told him he had broken his spine. It was a stress fracture, the accumulation of years of taking heavy knocks on the field.
The rehabilitation process was a long haul. It took him two years to make a full recovery. While his legs got stronger, his love for football slowly evaporated.
At one stage, Slowey was the coming thing in Monaghan football.
Named Monaghan minor footballer of the year in 1992, he was talked about with the same excitement as other rising stars in Ulster like Ger Cavlan in Tyrone and Armagh pair Diarmuid Marsden and Paul McGrane.
A speedy forward, full of guile and craft, Slowey knew where the posts were.
How did he develop so much wear and tear on his body at such a young age? He puts it down the amount of different teams he was playing with across football, soccer and basketball, plus his all-action style.
He was 16 when he started playing senior football with Clones.
“I was was expected to play all positions,” he tells The42. “We weren’t a particularly strong club so I’d have been battered around the place.”
He starred on Monaghan minor and U21 teams. By his early 20s, he was combining club, college and senior inter-county commitments.
In those days, Monaghan struggled to make an impact. Invariably their Ulster campaigns ended early and Slowey took up the opportunity to spend a couple of summers in Chicago.
In early 1996, he had three years put down on the Farney senior team when his world changed with those serious spinal injuries.
“I don’t want to slate anyone, but when you have an injury like that, you’re just left to your own,” he recalls. “There was no support system. A few from the club might have popped their head up now and then but nothing that you would remember.
His recovery was far from a straightforward process.
“I went around to more specialists,” he says. “I went to loads of specialists for about a year. And just nothing. They ended up just putting me in, basically a plastic cast you’d put around your arm, they put it from my chest the whole way down covering half the cheeks of my ass. Then it continued down the right hand side to my right knee.
“Sure it was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous when I look back,” he laughs.
“I could walk but it was fairly slow. You’d be walking as if you were in a big cast. It was crazy. They eventually took the right side of the leg cast off.”
He missed two full seasons of football. It never held the same appeal for him after that.
“It was tough because football was so important to me. Football never meant that much to me after that. Music was always my first love anyway, but in the early ’90s we were starting to build a nice team with Monaghan.
“I had played a lot of football, I’d been playing since I was eight or nine. It was hard to keep going, you’d have to be winning things for the appetite to continue.”
Those two years watching from the sidelines convinced Slowey that the rest of his life would be for living.
A graphic designer by trade, those jobs were few and far between in 1990s Ireland.
So he took off. And embarked on a fascinating career as a GAA journeyman.
First up was Boston, where he spent a year.
“I played with Aidan McAnespies and we won the North American Championships that year. Peter Canavan was out playing with us. It was a brilliant summer of football.
“They’ve a lovely set-up in Canton now but in those days it was like a baseball field. Boys would go for the ball, there would be a pile of dust and one man would come out with it sort of thing. It wasn’t pretty.
“After Boston I went to San Francisco and I was going to play for a club over there, they were great. But there was just something about New York…”
During his summers in Chicago, the North American board had allowed GAA players “head off down to New York any weekend you weren’t playing.
“When I went into Manhattan that’s when it whetted my appetite. I was like, ‘Ah, I’m going to end up in New York at some stage.’”
So the offer of graphic design job tempted Slowey away from San Francisco to the Tyrone club in New York.
“After that I was away,” he smiles.
And so began his love-affair with New York GAA.
He pitched up there in 1999 at the very time when the county team were beginning to take things seriously.
The New York county board had successfully lobbied to be part of the All-Ireland race, beginning that year.
An agreement was reached to allow New York compete in the Connacht SFC on the stipulation they had to travel to Ireland to play the games.
“They were quite closed about people joining, to be honest. They had been training for a couple of months and they weren’t keen on taking anybody in.
“I just happened to be playing the best football of my life at that stage,” he says. “I was averaging about 10 points a game for the club so then I got drafted in.
“I think my first year I got fifty-something points with Tyrone in the club championship. That was probably my best year.
“I wasn’t interested in playing with New York at the start because I’d started with an advertising agency down in Manhattan and I didn’t want to be missing work. But one of the owners was Irish American and he was sound.
“Those were my most enjoyable years, ’99 and 2000. I loved the football there. It just clicked for me that year. I was taking frees, my brother (Martin) was on the team too and there was a nice bunch of lads involved. There were some physical dudes on our side and that’s always a good thing.”
New York’s first championship game on Irish soil took place in MacHale Park, when they shipped a 3-13 to 0-10 beating to Mayo.
“We stayed in Westport. They put us up in some hotel. It was really well done but I think they were overfeeding the lads.
“They were up getting big breakfasts and then going training and coming home for lunch and dinner in the evenings. I hadn’t been home in a few years so it was nice to get back. My sister got married that same time I was home.”
The following year they went down by 10 points to Galway in Tuam Stadium.
“I was still with that advertising agency so I came home on the Friday and played the game on the Sunday. It was a dreadful day. I went back to New York on the Monday so I don’t have much memories from that trip.
“I just remember scoring a real flukey goal that day.”
He travelled to Australia in 2001 and missed the game against Roscommon, which was New York’s last fixture on Irish soil. The events of 9/11 later that year made travel to the US more difficult and since then New York have hosted the fixture.
Slowey was back in harness for the 2002 visit of Sligo to Gaelic Park.
“That was the strongest New York team I’d played with,” he says. “I arrived back from Australia and they were training hard, it was full-on training. We just couldn’t get teams to play us.
“That team could have done really well if they had National League games but they had no league games. We played Boston and the Fire Brigade but there weren’t enough games.
“We had Kevin Lilly, an Irish American guy, and Bingo (Gene O’Driscoll), he was a great footballer. Very intelligent player. A lovely guy, I got on very well with him.”
New York were within three points after an hour, before Sligo pulled away and won by eight. Slowey’s 1-5 tally that afternoon brought him to 2-11 over three championship games for New York.
It’s a scoring record that remains unrivalled.
He’s surprised to hear he is the county team’s all-time leading scorer.
“That’s nice to hear. I got something out of my career! I mightn’t have won much.”
But he won plenty.
Slowey must be the only man to have played in the Connacht SFC, Ulster SFC, won North American and Australasian Games medals, and lifted a Clare senior county title.
“Jeez, I played with an awful lot of teams when I look back,” he laughs.
His Australian adventure began with a desire to visit Japan. He spent a month there and headed to Australia. He started out in Sydney but ended up travelling to Melbourne to play football after a friend from Monaghan persuaded him to join them.
“Our club played against a team in the final and there was a bit of fisty cuffs during the game…the usual macho stuff.
“Then we ended up playing with them for Victoria in the Australasian Games. It was quite nice to put things in perspective again.
“We won that out and it’s probably my favourite memory from Australia.
“Who was handing out the medals only Sean McCaigue (GAA President at the time). That was a bit of a strange one. Ireland were over playing Aussie Rules at the time. He was the first manager I had for Monaghan back in the early ’90s.”
After Australia he spent time in New Zealand before returning for a stint in Japan.
A bronzed Slowey arrived home to Monaghan in 2003. Initially, a move to play club football in Dublin was in the pipeline.
“I was meant to go back and play for Ballyboden (St Enda’s). I was in the process of doing it. The management were meant to get me a design job. Then there was no job. The manager at the time…it was all a load of crap. So I just didn’t bother.”
He returned to his native Clones and not long afterwards a call-up to the Monaghan panel arrived for the 29-year-old.
“Colm Coyle called me in. It was my first time in eight years to play Monaghan.”
The inter-county game was almost unrecognisable since his last experience in 1996.
Armagh and Tyrone were driving it towards professionalism. For a free spirit like Slowey, who thrived on an expansive, kicking game, he didn’t like what it had become.
“It was completely different, with the video analysis. Although I was pretty decent with the physical stuff, the running and playing ball. But it had gone to the stage where they almost didn’t want you to kick the ball.
“It wasn’t for me. I know it’s a team sport but the art of kicking had gone out of it. It’s making a bit of a comeback but what I found most enjoyable was giving a sweet kick pass and obviously scoring.
“You were playing more defensively, tracking back the whole time.
“I played against Armagh in the first round of Ulster. That was nice to do but I probably had my fill of football at that stage.”
He played for two seasons with Monaghan before packing it in.
“In 2004, I got another injury, Gilmore’s groin. I came back that year and played a couple of league games and one more game in the championship and that was it. I gave it up, I said that’s enough.”
Slowey started studying teaching in UL and spent another couple of summers in New York.
He found playing abroad a purer form of the game.
“There was a certain freedom to it. It was more enjoyable, it wasn’t this ‘for your club and your county’ die-hard approach. Now some of the managers would be the old-type of kicking tables and chairs nonsense.
“But the players themselves…it was good because you’d be playing with lads from loads of different counties, and from what are considered weaker counties as well.
“You’re playing with lads with similar interests. It’s hard to beat that.
“Even more so the characters you’d meet. They’d come over and introduced themselves after every game in New York. They could have been from Monaghan originally, or even from somewhere like Kerry, and you’d have the banter with them.
“Then you’d meet them every time you’d be over. You mightn’t be around be around for while and you’d come back a couple of years later and you’d meet them old characters again. Just pure gentlemen. Loved the sport.”
One of the final stops on his journey brought him to Lissycasey in Clare.
Former New York manager Pat Scanlon originally hailed from the village and encouraged Slowey to join them while he was studying in Limerick.
“That was my final year of college in 2007 so I went out to play with them. They were a lovely club, it was a really enjoyable six months of football with Lissycasey. They were a professional outfit. A very well ran, lovely bunch, complete and utter die-hards.
“They had never won the championship before and were beaten in the final the year before that. You could just sense it was going to happen that year. We won the Clare senior championship.
“Everything sort of worked out.”
For the summer of 2008, Slowey needed to scratch an itch one last time.
“I went back out to New York for one last hurrah. I played with my brother, we got to the semi-final out there. Then I hung them up for good.”
Teaching in Sligo these days, Slowey watches out for Monaghan and New York’s results but doesn’t have a huge interest in the game anymore.
“I barely watch it, I’ll be honest,” he admits.
“I’d keep an eye on the scores, especially if Monaghan or New York were playing. Apart from that not a whole pile.
“I get the whole club and county bravado but I don’t know. When you’re playing it’s different. But nowadays there’s so many team meetings and video analysis.
“I think you have to trust in your players. They’re there for a reason. Obviously you have to have a plan and instructions. But it’s like a tennis coach when he’s breaking down a serve, you’re too busy concentrating on your feet than the player in front of you.
“A lot of the creativity is gone. I put on Derry and Donegal (last weekend), it’s just shocking. It’s just terrible.”
He’ll keep tabs from afar of events in O’Connor Park this afternoon. New York play Offaly in the Tailteann Cup in what is their first game on these shores in over two decades.
Slowey still keeps in touch with old friends in New York. He tends to head back during his school holidays but hasn’t made the trip since Covid.
He was chatting to a former team-mate recently around the time the Exiles faced Sligo in the Connacht championship.
“His father is originally from Down but he’s American.
“He was showing me videos of his daughter playing football in upstate New York. She looks very good. She was dribbling around all these boys. She’s very fast and her father was the same. She’s 12 years-old, I couldn’t believe he has a daughter that age.
“I just thought, ‘The party times are over!’”
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