Tommy Dillon tells SEÁN KENNYhow his Southill powerlifting club has become an enclave of positive energy

TOMMY DILLON opens the creaking door to his world. A naked bulb flickers and cuts through the winter gloom. The day’s chill seeps through the walls.

This is it. Nothing to look at: a single room, long and narrow. Powerlifting paraphernalia – weights, bars, a bench – much of it rusting from the relentless damp of the years.

Look closer. This is Southill Powerlifting Club and those scrolls lining every wall say “world record”.

“It’s basically rough and ready but all we need is there. Other clubs would have better equipment but you wouldn’t need it. I was at the World Championships in Canada once. I was lifting against this Canadian guy. He said to come down to see his gym. It was about half a mile long. Now, he didn’t know where I train. He was trying to intimidate me. I beat him anyway.”

He’s been at this weights game for half a century now. Fifty years fighting gravity hand-to-hand. Five decades toiling under bars freighted with unmerciful loads of iron. His focus now is coaching but in the club he still falls in with lifters a third of his age. He has always been hands-on. He has had to be. He and some lifting friends built what became Southill Powerlifting Club in 1985. “All I saw was a load of young lads in the area hanging about doing nothing. I tried to start a club but I couldn’t get a place. So we built our own in my garden.

“It took a long time because it was built on Saturdays and Sundays. You’d have a fella who might be working on a building site. Then a hundred bricks would appear out of nowhere. I didn’t ask. After a week or two, word went around that there was a club. And there were a few hundred young fellas at the door wanting to get in.”

The level of interest in joining the club in Donough O’Malley Park, where it is based, remains high. Why? He replies with hard, flat certainty. “Nothing else to do. They put 600 houses in here and not one sports facility. They just built the houses after the baby boom in the 60s and threw us up here. Then they’d be wondering why there’s crime.”

Much of O’Malley Park is a great filthy sweep of ruin, of houses abandoned, burnt out and boarded up. Desolation row. There are other houses, islands of resolve amid the surrounding squalor. And there is the club. It became a small enclave of positive energy in the soul-sapping mire.

“We’ve had all kinds in the club, men and women, criminals, Travellers, everyone is welcome, once they behave themselves inside the club. What they do outside the club . . . I’m not their minder. If a fella came to me and told me he’d done a bit of (weight) training in jail, I wouldn’t say he’s not welcome. I’d say, ‘Train away. Behave yourself’.”

Thousands, he says, have passed through the club. Some stop fleetingly. Many have graduated to the sinew-straining elect of World or European champion. How many? The club has been successful beyond the realm of easy numerical recall. Well over 20, he thinks. World records? Ah, here. Past 100 anyway, over the three events of squat, bench press and deadlift. Dillon alone set 40-odd over the years. Powerlifting came to consume him. Still does, at 66.

“To get to a world-class level, you’ve to be powerlifting from the time you get up in the morning ’til you go to bed. It isn’t necessary you’re lifting all that time but you have to be clued in to everything. To me, it’d be a thing where if a fella died on the wrong day, I couldn’t go to his funeral. You’d say, ‘F**k it, that’s a training day’.”

He sees the same fierceness of purpose in his young lifters. It might be a product of life at the margins of society, in Southill. It might be sheer bloody-mindedness. He has seen others with more comfortable lives baulk at the prospect of lifts the Southill boys embrace.

“I’ve done strength training with rugby players. They’ll get to a certain target area and they’d be inclined to think, ‘the next lift could be an injury lift’. In the club that’d never come into their heads. There’s two ways of looking at it: one is that they’ve nothing to lose, two is that they’re not intelligent enough to know. Half of it is in the mind. They’ve no fear. But in the club there isn’t one lifter has got injured in a competition. And that’s the only time I drive them.”

The Southill Academy of Lifters was formed in 2005. It has already produced two new world champion lifters from scratch.

“I could ring around today and get every World and European champion around to come back and train with me. But I’m not interested in that. I want to bring the young fellas through. I’ve brought two of them as far as winning World and Euro championships. They didn’t even know a bar when they saw it. I spent two to three months working with an empty bar showing them how to do it properly.”

Barry Keehan (23), is one of these new champions. “Tommy really knows his stuff. That’s why there have been so many champions. Everyone here has huge respect for him for what he’s done with the club. The club keeps lads occupied, not to be going down the bad road. It’s easy to go down the bad road here if you’ve nothing to keep your mind occupied.”

Burdens are borne together in the club’s clanking, sweaty confines. They talk weights and they talk women. No one leaves their life at the door. It’s a unity of which Tommy Dillon is proud.

“I like to develop a club spirit, that we’re all in for one another. If I see a fella getting selfish, I put manners on him. It’s noticed by other people when we go away, the spirit among them. They mightn’t have the best of gear – they might have one belt between four of them. They’d be taking it off and giving it to another fella.”

One more thing – there is a perception steroids are used in powerlifting. He’s been asked about this a hundred times.

“They’re not allowed use steroids. The thing is, even if they were available they probably wouldn’t be able to afford them. The steroid dealers make a fortune. It’s € 300 a month for growth hormone.”

He has to leave soon, to have his photograph taken for a local paper as Limerick Person of the Month. Another picture demands explanation first. It shows Tommy, orange as an African sunset, clad in the merest wisp of fabric and flexing his Charles Atlas torso. It transpires, back in the ’70s, when powerlifting as an organised sport was still in its scrawny youth, bodybuilding was his thing. In 1975 and 1976, he was Mr Ireland. But this picture was taken in 2006, when he was 63.

“I have that picture up to blackguard the young fellas. They all think it’s my head stuck on another body!”

He rasps out one of his mad, infectious cackles. And another as we leave the club and he jibes, “I hope your car’s still there!”

A hefty slap on the back and Tommy Dillon, Mr Ireland 1975 and 1976, Limerick Person of the Month November 2009, and the kinetic force driving one of the country’s least heralded, most successful sports clubs, is off.

Difference between powerlifting and weightlifting

POWERLIFTING AND weightlifting are two distinct disciplines. The former differs from the latter in that powerlifters do not raise the weighted bar over their heads.

Powerlifting is regarded as a greater test of limit strength than the Olympic discipline of weightlifting.

Powerlifting involves shorter, simpler movements, and greater weights are often involved. Weightlifting is done relatively quickly, whilst powerlifting involves slower movements.

Powerlifting consists of three events. In the squat, lifters squat and then stand under the weight. The bench press involves lowering and raising the bar whilst supine.

In the deadlift, competitors lift the bar to waist-height from the ground. Competitors are allowed three lifting attempts in each event.

Their best score in each is added to give a total.