"Social media will be the biggest killer": Olympian Kenneth Egan tells local GAA clubs

Social media will become the biggest killer over the next few years, Olympic medallist Kenny Egan predicted at a talk in Dunsany Hall organised by members of the local football and hurling clubs.

People’s brains are going to turn to mush because they don’t talk to one another any more, spending all their time on their phones, he said.
The former boxer turned psychotherapist was giving a talk on his battles with anxiety and alcoholism and how he eventually overcame them to lead a life of sobriety for the past eight and a half years.
He recalled how he had become a “horrible, horrible, lying bastard” after his Olympic silver medal at Beijing in 2008, even to the extent of using team mate Darren Sutherland’s death to continue on a drinking binge.
But he said if his story made a difference to just one person in the hall that night, then he regarded it as a job well done.
Egan’s dream, since he was a young child growing up in Clondalkin, was to be an Olympian. He remembered as a 10 year-old, Michael Carruth coming home with his gold medal from the Olympic Games.
“But as a young lad, I was very anxious,” he explained. “I wasn’t able to speak to strangers or people I didn’t know outside of the family.”
When he joined the local boxing club though, he found an outlet where he was able to express himself.
“I loved going down training with the lads, sparring, punching the bag. I was there 24/7.”
Then, he discovered the magic of alcohol.
“About the age of 13/14, the alcohol kicked in,” he recalled. “I remember my first piss up - six can of Tennants. I found it helped me speak to people, talk to girls, break down barriers.
“So when I wasn’t boxing, I was drinking.”
Luckily for him, he had the boxing to keep him grounded to reality. But the drinking was beginning to have an affect on his boxing. He got to three finals in the National Stadium, and was beaten in all three.
“I was heartbroken. Family and friends were all there to watch me, and I had done everything I could to win those titles.”
At the age of 14, he was thinking of retiring from the game. “I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t strong enough, I wasn’t fit enough,” he thought.
But his parents could see his potential, and kept the pressure on – and he did come back and win the under-14 title the next time, the first of 10 Irish championships.
“But the drink was still there, and problems were creeping in with how I was drinking and my drinking patterns. You’d be trying to drink more cans than the next fellow – stupid drinking games like who could drink the most.”

Kenny Egan talks to Dunsany and Kilmessan players.

As a successful young Irish boxer, he was being earmarked as having Olympic potential, and while he always had that ambition, he never had the belief in himself.
“I never thought I was good enough to have the five stars on my chest. I’m an Irish champion, I’m grand. Leave me here.”
He said that his own mind was “trying to ambush me all the time” with negative thoughts. Failing to qualify for the 2004 Olympics, he was asked by Billy Walsh to accompany Andy Lee – the only Irish qualifier for Athens that year – to training camp before the Olympics for a couple of weeks.
“This was my second time to consider retiring from boxing,” he said. “I still didn’t feel I was good enough, fit enough, strong enough. The negative thoughts were still there, that it was a waste of time.”
“We were putting in the work. The High Performance Unit had been set up – there were doctors, dieticians, physios. We were stronger, fitter, healthier, but the lack of belief was still there for me.”
This young lad, Andy Lee from Limerick was only “a wet week in the high performance unit” – and he had qualified, Egan recalled. “And I hadn’t. But he had the belief in himself to do things in the ring I wasn’t willing to do.”
He went to France with Andy Lee for a couple of weeks training, and then said their farewells.
“Andy was packing his bag with the five rings on it, and all his gear - I was packing my cheap holdall and going back to Dublin. I was heartbroken. Inside I was screaming. All I wanted to do was be an Olympian. I loved the sport – but here was Andy going one way, and I going the other.”
He decided to commit four more years to the Olympic journey – in an effort to qualify for Beijing.
“I was 22, committing to 26, and still not being guaranteed,” he said. “I told Billy Walsh that I believed in the High Performance system, I believed in the coaches, but I didn’t believe in myself – what did he think? He didn’t know, just that I needed to be performing at the right time, not aiming for the Worlds or Europeans, but for the Olympic qualifiers.”
In the first qualifier in Chicago, he was beaten – Paddy Barnes qualified; in Italy, he lost too.
His last chance was in Athens. He had a chat with sports psychologist Phil Moran about his habits at competition, and he advised Egan to do something different. It was simple – instead of Egan looking at the names on the sheet that he had to beat in the later bouts, just take it one fight at a time. Don’t be getting ahead of himself. He made it to the final, against a German.
“We were 50/50,” he says. After the first round, we were on two points when I sat on the stool. Then four. Then, half way through the third round, I started having doubts. Here I was in the middle of all this, again asking was I good enough. Strong enough, fit enough. Maybe I’d be better off going home and driving a taxi. I was zoned out. Then I said I better concentrate on the punches.”
He won by seven or eight points.
“I got on my knees there after that fight. I said this was my Olympic medal. It was won in Athens. I just went to Beijing to collect it. Because for me this was what it was about – becoming an Olympian.”
He said that Beijing was not the focus of his talk in Dunsany – but getting there, getting over the line to qualify, and getting over his lack of esteem and self-belief.

 

Kenny Egan shows his Olympic medal to Aidan Mangan and Pierre Fox of Dunsany GAA.

“And when the last bell rang in the last round in Beijing, and I had a medal, I fell to my kness and my first thought was ‘what the fuck do I do now?
“Imagine that, here, in front of 80,000 people, that that’s what was going through my mind. I had sacrificed so much for 18 years. This was my Mount Everest. It had taken me 18 years to reach my Everest – it only took me two years to hit rock bottom. I had no Plan B.
“They say 90 per cent of the people who died on Mount Everest die on the descent.”
The association didn’t help, he says, although that has all changed since, due to his mistakes.
“They let us off the leash.”
Three Irish medal winners out of an Olympic team of 51 – Paddy Barnes and Darren Sutherland won bronze - and the whole country “just went bananas”.
“It changed me,” Egan says. “It changed people I knew. People I lived with. People I drank with. They were pulling out of my top. Wanted photos NOW. Touched my hair. Fame is very dangerous. It was surreal. I couldn’t handle that. It freaked me out.”
But he decided to pat himself on the back and reap the rewards. “The drinking sessions were getting longer, and the training periods shorter,” he says.
“We’d be supposed to bring the medals to a school and the kids would have ‘Welcome Kenny’ posters drawn up, and I’d be on a bar stool in town at 11am, on the piss. I turned into a horrible, horrible person, a horrible, horrible, lying bastard, a compulsive liar.”
That was his life for two years, he said. Drinking, Wearing the same jeans for a week till they smelt. Plenty of hangers-on to keep him company.

Former boxer Davey Parnell from Kilmessan/Dunsany meets Kenny Egan.

“Here I was outside me local, the wall holding me up, getting sick in the same car park thousands of youngsters had welcomed me home to a few weeks earlier.”
His mother brought him up to the graveyard in Tallaght where two of his infant brothers were buried, and told him he would be going in there if he didn’t stop.
After a two-week drinking binge, he found himself playing pool with a stranger in Naas, a pool cue in one hand, a half pint of Guinness in the other.
“The door opened, and my mother walked in. She said, come on son, we’re going home. I put down the glass, got into the back of the car, little was said, but I haven’t touched a drop since. That was 12th August 2010.”
Kenny Egan went back to education. He holds a BA in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy and a higher diploma in addiction studies, and runs a counselling and psychotherapy clinic in Clondalkin. 
It is through his work he sees the threat of social media. Lack of dialogue with children locked away in bedrooms for 18 hours a day, on Playstation, with the dinner almost shoved under the door to them.
“Parents don’t want to be parents anymore,” he says. “They find it hard to be parents – because of all the technology that makes it easier to be a parent. It’s going to be a minefield.”
“We need to lose the phones, get away from the Snapchats and Instragrams. You could spend eight hours a day looking at your phone without even knowing it. That’s what I’m afraid of. It’s escapism. But escape from what?”
He says the opposite to addiction is not sobriety – it’s connection and conversation. Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue is the only way to deal with issues, and encourages anyone with negative, bad thoughts, to talk about, find someone to chat to, family, a friend, club mate.
His downfall was that all his mates were drinking buddies – he felt lonely with no one to turn to when things did get out of hand after Beijing.
“That Olympic medal was my greatest sporting achievement,” he says. “But my greatest achievement in life is to be sober for the last eight and a half years,” he says.

Kenny Egan was on the beer in Temple Bar in Dublin when he got the phone call that his team mate and fellow medal winner at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Darren Sutherland, had killed himself in London.

Darren Sutherland with his Olympic bronze medal.

Sutherland, whose family lived in Navan, had turned professional and was living in the UK capital.
“It hit me like a tonne of bricks,” Egan says. “This guy had been the ultimate athlete – a perfectionist. I got the call, I couldn’t understand it. How could someone like that … someone who shows no signs of any issues in his life, only positivity and professionalism, and wanting to be world champion ... how could this have happened?”
He and Darren had travelled the world together.
“I was disciplined to a degree, but this fella was the ultimate professional athlete. Talk about high performance. I didn’t deserve to wear a high performance vest – he did. Everything about him was just immaculate – I looked up to him all the time, how he trained, how he presented himself.
Egan said that if anyone was going to commit suicide in those years after the Olympics, it was himself “with the way I was drinking and the crazy things going through me head in the hangovers – like jumping off the West Link bridge. I never had the bottle to do it, but the thoughts were there.
“And the shameful thing about it was, when we got word of his passing, even though it hit me like a tonne of bricks, my thought process was that we won’t be back in training as quick, there’ll be a funeral, so there’ll be more time for drinking. What type of thinking was that?”

 

Kenny Egan at Darren Sutherland's funeral in Navan. Photo: Seamus Farrelly

 

David Coleman, clinical psychologist, author and broadcaster will be in Boardsmill on 7th March next, presenting a talk for parents, titled 'Your Child, Technoloy and the Internet", open to all parents in all areas.

 Coleman is a clinical psychologist and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Psychology in UCD. He specialises in working with children, teenagers and their families. He is best known for the range of television programmes he has presented dealing with childhood struggles, teenage angst and other aspects of family life.
David is also a bestselling author of 'Parenting is Child’s Play' a guide to raising young children. His second book is a guide for parents of teenagers called 'Parenting is Child’s Play: The Teenage Years'. David’s third book is titled 'The Thriving Family'.
​Earlier this month, the Guardian nwespaper reported that the number of young people who say they do not believe life is worth living has doubled in the last decaxade, amid a sense of overwhelming pressure from social media, new research suggests.

In 2009, only nine per cent of 16 to 25 year-olds disagreed with the statement that “life is realy worth living”, but that has risen to 18 per cent.

Just under half of young people who use social media now feel more anxious about their future when they compare themselves to others on sites and apps such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. A similar amount agree that social media makes them feel “inadequate” according to the research by The Prince's Trust. More than half – 57 per cent- think social media creates “overwhelming pressure” to succeed.

Tickets for David Coleman's Boardsmill talk are €10, available in the school office or in The Matchbox and The Stile shops in Trim.