Original subtitles

INTERVIEWER: Looking back on your life Jim Malone, have you any regrets?

I would say no, I have no regrets.

The only thing is I would love to have been a great footballer.

And when I say a great footballer, I mean a player of the calibre of the late Jimmy Hasty.

Jimmy to me was the be-all and end-all, both on and off the field.

His memory will live in Dundalk and in Oriel Park for many, many years.

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In Dundalk, Jimmy Hasty is a god.

Jimmy Hasty is their Maradona.

He made people sit up and take notice of Dundalk football club.

We all had our doubts what he could do.

Extra, extra people arrived at Oriel Park to see this phenomenon.

The gates went up... It was the making of the club.

Jimmy loved football and he wasn't going to let any disability get in his way.

His story is extraordinary on so many levels.

And I have hairs on the back of my neck standing up even thinking about it.

In the 1960s, Belfast was one of the biggest port cities in the world.

There would've been maybe 30,000 men working there every single day.

And Sailortown was a really thriving part of the city at that time.

2015, I was a Radio Ulster producer.

A student called Ryan Mallon approached us with a really lovely story about Sailortown.

As part of that, he mentioned this footballer called Jimmy Hasty.

But there was no audio and absolutely nothing in terms of television pictures.

Once we started looking into this story, it just took on a life of its own.

My father just left school on the Friday and then on the Monday he went to work in Jennymount Mill.

He was only in the job a couple of hours,

when the sleeve of his shirt got caught in a machine,

and his arm was pulled in it.

He spent many weeks in hospital and they had to amputate him,

just leave a stump on his left arm.

That was his first day at work, aged 14.

I met him in Sailortown, where he lived.

I wouldn’t have known him, never heard a tale of him until I met him.

He just seemed to take life as it came.

Losing his arm didn't seem to take over his life.

I remember the stories from old folks saying about my dad.

Somebody said something before about George Best.

My dad was with a tennis ball, and George best is meant to have turned round and says,

“what he could do with a tennis ball, I couldn't do with a football.”

Going to Dundalk was a big thing.

We never even went down to Dundalk.

He didn’t have it in his head that he was going to be a big star footballer or anything like that.

He went and enjoyed, I think, the football more.

My father's name was Jim Malone.

He was an accountant in Dundalk like myself.

I'm still in the same rooms that he was in in 1950.

He was involved in the club from a very early age.

You name it, he did it.

He went onto the board in June 1955.

The club hadn't won anything apart from three cups in the previous thirty years.

Dad heard about Hasty and went down to Newry to have a look.

And just couldn't get over the fact that this one-armed player dominated the whole match.

Dominated everything.

We had a board meeting in Market Street.

The reason for calling the meeting was that this player in Newry was available,

approach him.

Of course, once I mentioned that he had only the one arm,

a lot of people pooh-poohed it and said, “oh, no, no, no, no, no.

We can't have anything...”

So eventually I said, “look, if I pay the transfer fee,

"will you agree to sign the player?”

The news went around the town like wildfire.

“Jesus, Dundalk signed a guy with one arm.”

I genuinely think the fans thought Mr. Malone was a nutjob.

Completely, you know?

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I became a Dundalk fan in 1958.

At first, most of the club was run from the Great Northern Railway which wasn't far away.

The steps on the stands were made from railway sleepers,

dressing rooms were railway carriages.

Nothing fancy, no showers or anything like that.

Jerry McCourt, whom I knew very well, was manager, physio, everything.

Jimmy used to travel up from Belfast on he train on a Sunday morning.

Jerry would pick him up, bring him down for his breakfast.

On a Sunday morning, I would be sent off for the Sunday papers.

And this particular Sunday morning, I headed off, got the papers,

and Jerry McCourt pulled up on his car,

“good morning, Kevin,” he said.

“I'd like to introduce you to our latest signing, our new centre forward, Jimmy Hasty.

"You’re the very first supporter to meet Jimmy.” I was chuffed with that.

When he came, it was like somebody put the switch on.

The first match was against Cork in Oriel Park.

There was a lot of curiosity to see what was to some a freak show.

They came up more to have a laugh than to see anything else.

But they came up.

And within a couple of minutes Jimmy had scored, made a second,

and that was the beginning of the Hasty legend.

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Off we go.

It's been a long time since we ran out here, hey Francie?

It sure is.

Do you remember the game we played here was against Cork Celtic?

Big John Coughlan came over to me after the game and he says, "hey Murphy,

where did you get that one-armed bandit?

Will you give him a message?

Tell him the next time I play him, against him,

I'll pull the other arm out out of him,

because he gave me the hardest game of football I got for a long, long time."

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Jimmy joined in the season ‘60/’61.

And in that time Dundalk wasn't a prominent team.

We were more down the bottom than we were towards the top.

If you ever see any photographs of the team,

you’ll always see him by Christy Barron

where he always sort of hid the left side in photographs.

But he certainly didn’t hide out on the football field, sure he didn’t?

The impact was tremendous.

Oriel park was full every home game to see what this one-armed man was like.

People soon forgot about the one arm because he was doing his business on the pitch,

and he didn’t look for sympathy.

Jimmy obviously was the star player on the team.

I was amazed at some of the things he could do.

I have to admit that I was guilty of being sceptical,

of all the things I was told about Jimmy Hasty.

The Dublin papers were writing it up as well as the local papers here.

You know, “we just can’t believe what’s happening here.”

The sub editor of the Evening Press gave a one-arm Jimmy Hasty, a second arm because the

photograph had to be wrong.

And he just painted in an arm.

And everybody in Dundalk looked at it saying, “well, that's not Jimmy.”

The '62/'63 season, we started to reap the benefit of Jimmy Hasty.

The last time Dundalk won the league was 1933.

And it was exactly 30 years later that we won it, 1963.

Jimmy was just the right piece at the right time, and they just took off.

Since then they won 12 league titles.

Jimmy was the missing piece that lit the touch paper and then off they went.

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This was the first time Dundalk ever was in the Europe.

We were drawn against Zurich FC.

To say we were green, we were really green, we didn't know what we were doing.

No one had a clue.

We were beaten 3-0, and we went and looked like a hopeless case for the second game.

We just wanted to try and make up a bit for the poor performance in the first round.

I think that would've been the first time he had been on an aeroplane.

So that in itself would've been a big thing for Jimmy.

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Plane landed and of course you're met by the Zurich officials.

Two of our players got injured.

And Davy McArdle limped down with a walking stick, believe it or not!

Timmy Lyons came down with plaster on his leg.

Jerry McCourt, he was our trainer, he had a limp!

And the next thing was Jimmy Hasty was one arm.

And the officials, you could hear them!

"Is this the right plane or are they going to Lourdes?"

We spoke to so many people and they were giving us chapter and verse on,

these amazing exploits, especially the guys down at Dundalk FC.

But it still felt like we were lacking something.

And then one evening something pinged in from a Swiss email account.

And I could hear audio of Dundalk versus FC Zurich.

So I emailed back and went, "is there a video of this?"

And the guy went, "oh yeah, sure, but I didn't think you wanted a video."

I went, "mate, please send that to me."

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(Video plays game audio)

We'd never seen any footage in our lives of my daddy playing football.

We couldn’t believe it.

From a wee lad in Sailortown, playing football, losing his arm,

and then he gets to live his dream playing in the European cup.

I feel great that he got to do that, I really do.

Everything was true, everything.

I saw Jimmy playing.

I saw how incredible a footballer he was.

I burst into tears.

Taking part in the first goal over in Zurich, and then to score the second...

...not bad for a wee Belfast boy with one arm. (He laughs)

He hit this blockbuster of a shot and the goalkeeper was nowhere near it.

And he was so unlucky to hit the bar.

If it had a gone in, that was three nothing we were winning,

and we were in a replay.

But in the end, Zurich scored a late goal.

2-1 we eventually won.

It was the first win in a European match away from home by an Irish team.

And it still is!

Oh, whenever he'd come home, oh god, he was all talk about that.

That was good.

Disability is only a disability if you see it as such.

We just considered as kids that Hasty walked on water.

There were kids running around the place with their sleeve dangling,

and the arm inside their jumper or inside their jersey,

because they all wanted to be Jimmy Hasty .

You could have seen how well he was respected and liked down in Dundalk.

I think Jimmy enjoyed life.

The years that he had, he enjoyed them.

Explaining the politics of the Troubles here is not a simplistic matter.

‘74 was a particularly bad year.

You had grown accustomed to hearing about shootings or bombings and people dying.

(Dog barks) (Gunshots)

We lived in Ardoyne for a while and that was really bad.

So people were moving to different places.

So that's how we ended up down in Hillman Street.

Where Hillman Street was, the neighbouring district would have been Tigers Bay,

which would have been a Loyalist area.

Whereas the New Lodge would have been a Republican area.

So Hillman Street would have been the first street over.

I would drive to work each morning, dropping my wife off.

As my wife got out to go to her work, she and I heard what we considered to be a shot.

And I drove on down Brougham Street because I could actually see that there was

someone lying on the pavement.

I jumped out, got down on the pavement beside him.

He was still breathing. His eyes were closed.

I told him my name was George, and I said that he'd be okay.

He did open his eyes and look at me, so he knew I was there.

Then I realised that there was a policeman beside me and his first words were,

were, “oh my god, it's Jimmy Hasty.”

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I knew that there was something wrong,

that the army might have been raiding or something.

Nobody seemed to be telling me what had happened.

Jimmy had an aunt who lived next door, and it was her husband that had come in.

And he thought I knew.

And he had said something about it.

And it was then that I knew that he had been shot.

And...

...I couldn't tell you much after that.

REPORTER: The victim was walking to work along this street in north Belfast when he was shot dead.

A gunman got out of a parked car and shot Catholic, James Hasty, once in the back at close range.

The shot man, who had only one arm, then staggered across the street,

and later died on the pavement in the arms of a policeman.

He was a married man, with two children.

This morning’s murder came less than 12 hours after another killing,

in the Belfast suburb of Newtownabbey.

An organisation called the Ulster Protestant Action Group has claimed responsibility for both killings.

They say they were in retaliation for shooting incidents in Belfast yesterday.

Our Paul was about two-and-a-half, and I'd just turned seven on the 8th,

and father my was murdered on the 11th.

I loved my dad, so I did.

When he was murdered, it just hit me when I hit teenage years,

that's when I started getting all the hate.

And I just hated everybody.

And it just grew and grew and grew, until...

...they couldn't handle me anymore.

I just wish things had’ve been different.

But you can't turn the clock back.

That was hard.

He didn't go out the door that morning...

...thinking he wasn't gonna come back again,

because he had no reason to.

You were just left to pick up the pieces, get on with your life.

But then that didn't only happen to me, there were hundreds of people that happened to.

And the hardest part of it was...

...that you didn't do anything to deserve it.

Match programmes!

(Indistinct chatter) (Tannoy announcement)

In goal, number 1, Nathan Shepperd.

Number 2, Lewis Macari.

Number 4, Andy Boyle.

(Cheering and applause)

It was Jimmy that changed our appetite for winning leagues.

That league win in ‘63 changed the dynamic of the whole club.

Up on it, up on it!

Dundalk are one of the, if not the, most successful Irish team.

I wonder sometimes, is the story so seemingly far-fetched that people

don't actually believe that it could be true?

This story is one of our biggest sporting stories,

and we all know about George best,

we know about all the sporting greats that come from Belfast and come from Northern Ireland.

But Jimmy Hasty should rank among them.

There should be statues of the man.

(Commentates)

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Inside the Lilywhite Lounge Jimmy's jersey’s on the wall.

Every time a supporter walks in, it's there in front of them.

Everybody knows Jimmy.

He’s still an icon.

And long may he continue to be, you know?

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(Cheering)

Somebody asked me once, “what did you make of Jimmy's disability?”

And my answer was, “what disability?”

Jimmy was just the most incredible centre forward I ever saw.

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Did he really do that, did he go...did a one armed man,

at 14 years of age, learn how to play football again,

and score a goal in the Champion's League?

Yes he did, and it was the winning goal.

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I feel proud at how much he's still highly thought of.

He loved Dundalk, and Dundalk loved him.

After all these years, for Jimmy still to be talked about,

it's a long, long time,

for people still to be thinking about Jimmy,

and it's nice for Martin and Paul,

to have...although they didn't see him playing,

now they can hear plenty about their daddy.

(Cheering)