Jonny McCambridge: The day Joey Dunlop kick-started my career

I was very much in the football camp. Despite being reared in the 1970s just a couple of miles outside of Armoy where the Armada ruled the roads, I was immune to the appeal of road racing. In truth I was (and still am) rather cowed by the roaring sound of motorbikes.

My recollection is that the North West 200 always occurred around the same time as the FA Cup Final, and it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone could prefer watching the blurry spectacle of passing racers to the Wembley showpiece. I just didn’t get it.

Having said this I do remember being struck by the almost religious devotion that those who followed the bikers had to their sport. That, and the fact that its tentacles seemed to stretch everywhere. At one point in my education one of my best friends was a distant relative of Joey Dunlop. Later I was good mates with the son of Mervyn Robinson, another member of the Armoy Armada. Paul, known as ‘Robo’ like his father before him, would also go on to become an accomplished road racer.

I was, of course, aware of Joey Dunlop, but only in the sense that his aura was ubiquitous when you were from north Antrim. He was the one truly famous person who came from the same little patch of land as I did.

And that remained the case as I developed into a young adult. The year (I think) was 1998 and I was a journalism student living in Belfast when I was offered some unpaid work experience at the Ballymoney Times, which had been my local paper as a youth.

The logistics were difficult. I had to get an early morning train from Belfast to Ballymoney, and then reverse the commute at night. However, I was desperate to work in a newspaper so I undertook the gruelling trek without complaint.

On one of the days I was detained late in the office and missed my train home. I remember scanning the timetable to discover that I would have a wait of a couple of hours for the next train.

So I did what any self-respecting student would be expected to - I went for a pint to pass the time.

Happily there was a bar at the railway station. At the time I think it was called a different name than it is today (possibly the Railway Tavern or Railway Arms), but to everyone from the area it was always just Joey’s Bar, because of its famous landlord.

Eventually, in recognition of this, the sign outside the premises was changed to one that simply read ‘Joey’s Bar’.

On this evening I entered, took a stool at the bar and ordered a pint of stout. Soon I became aware that Joey Dunlop was sitting a few places to the left of me. It was the only time in my life that I was ever in his presence. Perhaps if I had had more confidence I might have said hello but Joey was notoriously quiet and certainly didn’t do small-talk.

Behind the bar was his wife Linda, who was much more talkative, and was telling another patron about a recent trip Joey had made to Australia.

I overheard her explain how Joey had been out on his bike one day on the sprawling Australian roads when he decided to see what the machine could do. A few minutes later he was pulled over by the traffic police.

The officer approached Joey, who was still wearing his distinctive yellow crash helmet, and asked him: ‘Who do you think you are? Joey Dunlop?’

The story delighted everyone in the pub and, the next day, I reported what I had heard to the then Ballymoney Times editor Lyle McMullan.

He asked me to write up the story and then he phoned Joey to get some supporting quotes (and presumably to be sure that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing as some sort of drunken misadventure).

A couple of days later the paper was printed with the exclusive story on the front page under the headline ‘G’day Joey’ and featuring my byline. It was my first ever splash. It was then picked up by several Sunday newspapers before eventually making it onto TV as a lighthearted feature on the local news.

It was a few weeks after when I went for an interview for a paid job. During the interrogation I was asked to name one decent story that I had sourced myself. I mentioned the Joey Dunlop yarn. The interviewer smiled and replied ‘Oh, we all know about that story’.

I got the job. I’m not saying that the Joey scoop made the difference but it certainly helped me along the way. In the two decades that have followed I’m not sure any other story I have published has given me so much satisfaction. It also remains, against journalistic tradition, the only exclusive in my career that I have ever picked up in a pub.

I started this column by mentioning the childhood choice between football or bikes, how it seemed then that it had to be one or the other.

Twenty years ago on a Sunday night I sat down to watch the final of the Euro 2000 football championships between France and Italy. I was with a friend who, like me, is from north Antrim and who, like me, loves football and has no interest in road racing.

Shortly before the game started we read on teletext the news that Joey Dunlop had been killed in a racing accident in Estonia. We both sat down, stared at each other and mumbled a few stunned words. Neither of us had ever seen Joey race, neither of us had ever spoken a word to him. But he was Joey Dunlop, and in the world that we understood, his presence was surely a thing of permanence. We didn’t seem to be able to register that it was possible that he was no longer alive. I will always remember exactly the haunted look on my friend’s face.

Then we turned the telly on and watched a football match. I don’t remember a single bit of it. Not a single bit.