Kings of September

by Michael Foley

  THE DAY OFFALY DENIED KERRY FIVE IN A ROW

  ‘Michael Foley has done an extraordinary job in getting inside the mindsets of the main participants in one of the most dramatic games the GAA has ever seen. This book certainly does justice to one of the greatest occasions in Irish sporting history.’

  EUGENE MCGEE

  ‘It was one of the best All-Ireland finals in recent years. The book gives a great insight into the mindset and tactics of the different people involved in this great occasion. For any GAA fan it is a very good read.’

  JACK O’SHEA

  ‘An extraordinary book recalling an extraordinary game. Impossible to come away from Michael Foley’s work without a greater understanding of Irish life. Brilliant sportswriting.’

  TOM HUMPHRIES

  DEDICATED

  To Regina for the happiest time of my life.

  To Mam and Andrew for endless years of love and support.

  To Dad for Thurles, Killarney, Cork and a love for hurling and football that will last a lifetime.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedicated

  Prologue

  PART I THE DREAM

  1 The Stranger

  2 Revolution

  3 The Nature of Magic

  4 The Special Ones

  5 Believing the Impossible

  6 The Kings of September

  7 The Party Boys

  PART II THE CLIMB

  8 The Hill

  9 Captains

  10 The Epic Story of Rocky Bleier

  11 Car Crash Stories and the Return of the Frisco Kid

  12 Siren Songs

  13 Counting Down

  PART III THE PEAK

  14 The Morning

  15 The First Half

  16 The Second Half

  17 Mikey and Martin

  18 The Calm

  19 The Goal

  20 The Longest Night

  PART IV THE DECLINE

  21 Disintegration

  22 Matt

  23 The Three-Minute Men

  24 Decline and Revival

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  18 September 1982

  Seamus Darby took a deep breath and let the cool night air plunge into his lungs, whooshing through his system like a drug. He felt light-headed. Wired. He floated home, thinking of tomorrow and the All-Ireland final, thinking of Kerry and five-in-a-row. Thinking of history.

  The night had passed like a dream. The Offaly players had sat in a small back room in the Tullamore GAA centre for two hours, listening to their manager, Eugene McGee. The silence was immaculate. He told them what they had willed themselves to believe: they were good enough. None of the pressmen who had visited Offaly’s training session the previous Tuesday night believed they could win. The bookies had laid odds of 1/5 on Kerry. On the day of the final only one Sunday newspaper would back Offaly. Three days before, the front page of the Kerryman was dominated by a picture of 1981 captain Jimmy Deenihan lifting the Sam Maguire cup, with the banner headline: ‘A Prelude to History?’ The world was treating Offaly like fall guys. But Darby knew. They all knew. Offaly weren’t afraid any more.

  ‘If someone threw a ball into the room that night,’ says Darby, ‘there’d have been someone killed.’

  Darby got home and paced the front room. The last few months had been special and promised to live with him forever. When McGee added him to the panel in mid-summer, Darby had waddled in overweight and carrying baggage. When picking championship panels to carry Offaly into the summer, McGee had ignored him for years. Darby had his All-Ireland medal from 1972 and a happy life beyond football. He had kids and a wife. He had a business to run. Did he need all this?

  In the end, something tugged at him, and he sacrificed himself for McGee. Now, he was glad. The few months of training had made him the footballer Offaly had always wished him to be. He had lost weight and knocked the edges from all the bad habits that had slowed him up. He already had a place on the team before injury scuttled him. The following day he would sit on the bench, fidgeting and crackling with excitement. If Offaly needed him, he was ready.

  He was edgy. Adrenalin was jumping through his veins, making him mad, now. His wife, Veronica, stared at him. ‘We’re going to win, Veron,’ he said. ‘We’re going to win.’

  He needed a drink, something to soften the edges and soak up the tension. He wanted to run into Paddy McCormack’s pub next door, but people had a nasty way of twisting those visits into the kind of rumour he’d find hard to shake. Instead, he rang Kevin Farrell, his brother-in-law.

  ‘Have you anything at home?’ asked Darby.

  Kevin had a bottle of brandy. ‘But I’ve nothing to put in it.’

  ‘Right,’ Darby replied. ‘I’ll be up.’

  He found a bottle of 7-Up. The bottle of brandy was demolished. Darby picked up the phone and made some calls. He rang Fr McWee, the parish priest in Edenderry and President of Offaly County Board, and an old friend who always prayed for the team and the players. ‘You’ll think of us tomorrow morning at Mass?’ said Darby.

  ‘Don’t worry, Seamus,’ the priest replied. ‘You’ll be on and you’ll score a goal or two.’

  It was near three in the morning when Darby and Veronica headed for home. That night he slept soundly, the brandy softening his nerves and lulling his senses to sleep. Morning would come soon.

  * * *

  Saturday morning in Ventry had started badly. As Páidí Ó Sé pointed his car towards Killarney for Kerry’s last training session before heading to Dublin, he saw something that chilled his blood. A red-haired lady.

  It was the worst luck. He knew old fishermen in Dingle who would leave their boats in the harbour all day if they saw a red-haired lady. For the previous few weeks all this five-in-a-row business had been nipping at him. Now this. ‘We’re fucked,’ he mumbled to himself.

  That Saturday morning in Killarney, the groundsman, Paddy O’Shea, pulled the gates shut in Fitzgerald Stadium after Kerry’s final training session. A faint aroma of olive oil wafted around the dressing room as the players got their final rubdowns and prepared to head for Dublin.

  Kerry had trained more than fifty times in Killarney all year, but this was only the visible part of an iceberg that had seen Páidí traverse the hills of west Kerry, the Tralee boys flatten out the bumps on a patch of green behind Banna Strand, and John O’Keeffe and Jimmy Deenihan pump weights in Dinny Mahony’s gym in Tralee.

  The boys headed to Mickey Doc’s at the Park Place hotel for steaks and salmon. Training tonight had been solid. John O’Keeffe sat it out, having taken the previous two weeks off to rest his injuries and prepare himself to mark Matt Connor. Jack O’Shea, Mikey Sheehy and a few lads had taken penalty kicks on Charlie Nelligan. Tim Kennelly had been slamming them into the net. The tables were quiet, save for the occasional squall of laughter from Páidí Ó Sé’s corner. His mood had lightened again. Maybe this Kerry team was beyond piseogs.

  There was something of a cause in proving that. The week in Kerry had passed quietly. The press night in Killarney a few days earlier had gone like all the rest. Jack O’Shea cheerily took questions and joked with reporters. ‘Just put me down for whatever I said last year,’ he told one. The only player who had seemed jumpy was Páidí. When reporters asked him questions about five in a row and the final, he grimaced, and ducked and dived out of answering. As Ó Sé conducted one interview, a Kerry selector pulled another player aside to arrange a trip to a local school with the Sam Maguire cup the following Friday. No one doubted. No one was worried.

 
No team had ever given them reason to. No one had beaten Kerry in the championship since 1977. When opponents scrolled through the names and considered their reputations, they were beaten before they even took the field against them. The Kerry team was charismatic, blessed with rogues and genius. In an era when Ireland was racked by unemployment and made dull and grey by emigration, Kerry offered a thrilling splash of colour.

  The public revered them. To their coach, Mick O’Dwyer, five-in-a-row felt like destiny. Their mighty rivalry with Dublin that defined the seventies had evaporated and no one in the years since had stood tall enough to stare Kerry in the eye. Five-in-a-row was their reward. Their birthright. Their destiny.

  Kerry had already been serenaded through the summer by songs of celebration. Killarney and Tralee had bickered over who should welcome the team home first. T-shirts emblazoned with five-in-a-row slogans were doing hectic business. There were mugs and commemorative plates. A special Kerry jersey was designed for the day. The public were clamouring for history. O’Dwyer had tried to block out the glare, but some shafts of light had already got through to the players. Injuries had hurt his team all summer, and occasionally O’Dwyer’s worries had got the better of him. A few nights earlier, he had run a man selling T-shirts from Fitzgerald Stadium, like a godless merchant from the temple. Now he had one day left to get through. Five-in-a-row was theirs to win.

  The 1982 final promised to shape lives forever. It would make heroes of some, and shatter others. Some would be jolted from their sleep in the middle of the night, still reliving the moments the game slipped away from them. Others would find themselves destitute and alone. Some marriages and livelihoods would strengthen and prosper after 1982. Others would fall apart. Some friendships would improve. Others would end. Even when their lives would threaten to melt down, the All-Ireland medal would withstand the heat, an indelible image of the remarkable story it represented. It would be the backdrop for triumphs and tragedies, happy times and sad ones.

  Like all epic stories, it began simply, with a young man sitting at a typewriter.

  PART I

  THE DREAM

  1 THE STRANGER

  ‘The uncertainty now is over for Offaly. For the past few years they were being constantly mentioned as threats to the leading teams but that day is finished. The great Offaly team of the first half of this decade is well and truly finished and, barring a miracle, they will not be serious championship contenders for some time.’

  Eugene McGee, Sunday Press, 14 March 1976

  Eugene McGee replaced the receiver on the old wind-up phone, and allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction. That piece was good. He rolled the sentences around in his head again. It felt like the best piece he’d ever written. It was sharp and edgy, but was softened by sympathy. It conveyed a sense of drama and loss, but, most importantly, it was bang on the money. He didn’t pull a punch, and every blow he threw reached its target. Offaly were buried, and there was no point in dancing around it.

  Their last game had felt like a wake. Offaly had travelled to Roscommon for a league game against Mayo, mired at the bottom of Division One. The loser would fall into Division Two. The steepness of the drop promised to wreak damage on either team.

  Both counties were burdened by history. Mayo hadn’t won an All-Ireland since 1951. Their last Connacht title had come in 1969. Offaly still retained a team dotted with players who had won their first All-Ireland titles in 1971 and 1972, but the team was creaking with age. As McGee took his seat in the ground, the grim awfulness of the day wrapped itself around everything and everybody. A bitter easterly wind whistled through the stand. The scoreboard in Dr Hyde Park wasn’t in operation, leaving the few hundred people huddled together for warmth to do their own sums.

  McGee looked around the crowd and saw Tony McTague take his seat. When Offaly won in 1971 and 1972, McTague was a warrior hero. He kicked crucial frees and led the attack with verve, but he was retired now, and no amount of cajoling could get him back. McGee thought about McTague’s best days and how Offaly had thrived when he was there. Now here he was, sitting in a stand in Roscommon, witnessing Offaly’s slow, agonising decline. McGee was transfixed by the depression of it all.

  At half-time, Offaly were clinging on, but gradually they faded away. Near the end, they won a penalty. Full-forward Sean Lowry prepared to take it, but minutes passed before the referee could properly clear the players away from the ball. Lowry struck it well, but Mayo goalkeeper Ivan Heffernan beat the ball away. The referee’s whistle blew. A reprieve. Something was amiss, and the penalty would have to be retaken.

  Lowry placed the ball again. Heffernan saved again and the ball deflected away off the bar. The crowd groaned. When the referee blew the final whistle, Offaly had failed to score for the entire second half and had lost by nine points.

  As he thought of Offaly, now withered by age, McGee was moved to recall some poetry.

  Even now my limbs tell an answer

  To the Croke Park cheer

  As borne on the murmurous air above

  It fills Ireland from Malin to Clear

  And now I raise my head

  Not in grief nor in sadness grey

  But rather, in pride to whisper,

  – I had my day.

  For years McGee had scrapped for work as a journalist, but pieces like this one for the Sunday Press convinced him he was finally beginning to make progress. He had written articles for the Gaelic Weekly magazine, worked on trade magazines and taken subbing shifts and writing jobs with the Irish Press. His columns were written under pseudonyms, leaving his mother to wonder whether this Daniel O’Connor truly was her son.

  At least he had amassed a few triumphs, even if he was the only person who knew about them. In 1972 he had watched Kilkenny hurler Eddie Keher training alone in Terenure College, preparing for their All-Ireland final against Cork, and built up a friendship with him. Although the bulk of the country was happy to back Cork, McGee was consumed by Keher’s dedication and optimism before the game, and backed Kilkenny to win. That Sunday, as Keher delivered a stunning performance and Kilkenny claimed a classic All-Ireland, McGee wallowed in the satisfaction.

  For years his colleague in the Gaelic Weekly, Brendan MacLua, had written a column for the Sunday Press. Now he had a new idea, a newspaper for the sprawling Irish community in London, to be called the Irish Post. He asked McGee to join him.

  McGee thought about it. He spent a month in 1976 visiting the Irish centres and GAA clubs around London, establishing a network of contacts for the new newspaper, but in the end couldn’t leave home. In return for his help, MacLua cut him a break. With his job at the Sunday Press vacant, MacLua recommended McGee as his replacement. A public profile – and a byline his mother could believe in – were priceless fringe benefits.

  Offaly. Immigrants. Keher. His nature and heritage always drew McGee to the underdog. Donlon’s shop in Longford town was the GAA’s unofficial headquarters in his home county and from its counter McGee’s brother, Fr Phil, held court for years, gleefully chatting to all who would listen and rarely leaving them go without an array of stories and ideas to chew over about football.

  Hours could pass with Fr Phil. In years to come, Liam Mulvihill, the GAA’s director general, would remember evenings spent in the Longford Arms hotel after county board meetings listening to Fr Phil’s theories on local football – and anything else passing through his mind. As Longford’s delegate to the GAA’s Central Council, its primary decision-making body, Fr Phil proposed the concept of an inter-county Under-21 championship. In 1965, it came into being.

  People always looked to Fr Phil. When their elderly relations took ill, people sent for him. When cows were calving and the local farmers wished to enact the old tradition of blessing the animals to ensure a safe delivery, they called Fr Phil. He worked ceaselessly for the local Latin school in Moyne, a two-hundred-year-old institution that had grown out of an old hedge school. The McGees had grown up in the gentle countryside of Augh
nacliffe, near the Cavan border, ringed by lakes and ancient dolmens. While Longford struggled to make any imprint, successive Cavan teams were regarded as gods. Parts of Longford provided willing converts.

  Football seasons in Longford came and went untroubled by victories or any ambitions, but Fr Phil never felt comfortable with that. In the late sixties, he turned his full attention to the Longford senior footballers, and the dust began to rise. When it came to seeking a new trainer, Fr Phil sought the best. Mick Higgins was among Cavan’s greatest footballers and now coached the Cavan county team, but Fr Phil reckoned he could double-job. He called one evening to talk, and stayed until Higgins caved in. Higgins trained Longford, Fr Phil picked the team, and Longford won their first Leinster title in 1968, along with a National League title in 1966. In a place where the footballers’ failure had hardened from an annual occurrence into a state of mind, the county had never known such boundless prosperity. Fr Phil had made it happen.

  All the while, his younger brother went to training sessions and learned. In 1969 Eugene headed for University College Dublin (UCD) to begin a BA in English and History, but football provided the greatest outlet for his intellect.

  UCD football was in a ragged state. The captain of the football team organised everything. He picked the team. He arranged pitches and starting times for matches, and spent the rest of his time corralling the players to the venue. When McGee took over as secretary of the football club, he assumed some of the workload. He took on the freshers’ team alongside the captain and won an All-Ireland freshers’ title in his first year.

  He followed the team through and as captains changed, McGee emerged as a constant. He never played the game well, but he thought deeply about it. At a time when enlightened thought on training for Gaelic football was confined to a handful of minds scattered around the country, McGee was borrowing ideas from everywhere. He used training concepts from soccer and American sports to devise new drills. McGee wanted to get inside players’ minds, figure out how they ticked and see if there was a way to improve them. When GAA coaching courses were organised in Gormanston College in Meath during the mid-seventies and packed by coaches who would apply the lessons learned in the decades to come, McGee shared the same lecture halls as Mick O’Dwyer and Kevin Heffernan. When Gaelic football coaches began exploring new territories, McGee was among the pioneers.