The former Boro full-back suffering from locked-in syndrome is still providing a valuable service for the manager Tony Mowbray
Mid-afternoon has arrived and, training-ground duties completed for another day, Middlesbrough's first-team coach makes for the door clutching a bag of DVDs. Rather than heading home, Mark Proctor points his car south-west and embarks on the by now familiar two-hour, 110-mile trans-Pennine drive from the Championship club's weekday base near Darlington to the Priory Highbank neurological rehabilitation centre in Bury.
Along with other members of Middlesbrough's staff, most notably the manager Tony Mowbray and the goalkeeping coach Stephen Pears, Proctor has travelled this route so frequently during the past year that every passing mile feels somehow familiar. The object of the exercise is to enable a member of Mowbray's scouting analysis team to assess potential transfer targets, but Gary Parkinson is no ordinary employee.
Fourteen months ago Parkinson, a former Middlesbrough right-back and then the head of youth development at Blackpool, suffered a huge, probably stress-induced, stroke in the stem of his brain. It has left the 43-year-old a victim of locked-in syndrome, a condition in which the body shuts down but the mind remains very much alive. Completely paralysed, Parkinson's sole means of communication with his wife Deborah, his three children and the rest of the world is by blinking.
Eye movements are also enabling him to submit his assessments of players Mowbray may pursue. "Gary and Debbie have devised a way of talking using the letters of the alphabet so A is one blink and B two," explains Proctor. "It means that by Gary moving his eyelids up and down we can have a conversation. You dread to think what it must be like to sit in Gary's shoes but he's a gentleman and a really top guy, and we always have a giggle. I generally take him five or six DVDs for analysis.
"Working with either Debbie, who visits every day, or Luke, his 18-year-old son, Gary compiles the reports by blinking his opinions. Around nine times out of 10 Tony and I agree with him. Like Tony, Gary was part of Bruce Rioch's celebrated Middlesbrough team of the 1980s and it's clear that the club's football philosophy has been firmly instilled in him. From his assessments you can tell he knows exactly the sort of passing game we want to play; he can identify exactly the sort of creative and technical players Tony needs."
Parkinson's overall general rating of each player is based on a one to four blink rating; four meaning "I like him" and one: "steer clear". Neurological experts are immensely encouraged by such nuanced responses and believe Mowbray's imaginative, frustration-easing, engagement of their patient's talents is proving to be an important part of his rehabilitation.
Although complete recovery from locked-in syndrome is rare, a slow improvement, which has permitted occasional return visits to the family home in Bolton as well as a recent cinema trip, is giving rise to cautious optimism further fuelled by a visit from Kate Allatt. The 40-year-old from Sheffield recently "un-locked" and made a full recovery from a stroke-prompted syndrome she describes as "like being buried alive".
Playing alongside Mowbray 25 years ago ? and sporting a near identical peroxide-blond wedge haircut ? Parkinson was part of the Boro side who famously came back from the dead. He made his debut in a watershed draw with Port Vale played at Hartlepool in August 1986. With liquidation beckoning, the official receiver had locked the gates of Ayresome Park but once the club's survival was ensured, Rioch's swashbuckling young team rose from the third tier to the old First Division in successive seasons.
Today the class of 86 retains unusually close bonds. "There was something really special about that team; they went through a lot together and they're all still there for each other," says Proctor, whose second stint as a Boro midfielder began in 1989.
While Pears, Colin Cooper and Gary Gill are now on Mowbray's staff, virtually the entire squad ? including the US-domiciled Gary Hamilton, who flew in specially ? helped raise �35,000 for the Gary Parkinson Trust Fund by playing in a tribute match at the Riverside last May. Then, in July, the former Boro winger Stuart Ripley, now a Manchester solicitor, cycled the notorious La Marmotte, one of the most challenging Alpine sections of the Tour de France, to raise awareness of Parkinson's condition and further underwrite his old friend's rehabilitation costs.
"Parky's one of us," says Mowbray. "A Teesside lad, we played alongside each other in one of the most remarkable periods of our history. We were determined to give Gary a role where he could feel involved and have something to concentrate on. Not only that, I genuinely value his opinions."
More than a year since Deborah Parkinson said "no" when doctors asked if she wanted her husband's life support machine switched off, Mowbray's inspired initiative is offering vital hope. "You can see Gary's mood picking up when he works on the DVDs," she says.
The Gary Parkinson Trust Fund welcomes donations: www.garyparky.co.uk
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/nov/24/middlesbrough-gary-parkinson-locked-in-syndrome
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