‘You’d get a phone call. I used collect him outside the Longford News offices in Longford town. Every day you could be heading somewhere different. The days we weren’t training we could go anywhere. He used write a column in the Sunday Press and he used go up to write his article on a Wednesday evening. You could do it on the telephone, but he preferred to go up and do it. I used go to Dublin every Wednesday afternoon. We’d put over a hundred thousand miles on the car in a year.’
Some nights the journey could pass with hardly a word between them, but Currams grew comfortable with McGee’s silence. He learned to understand the nuances of McGee’s personality and admired the way he found a route into players’ minds. McGee cared. Despite the jagged edges around the margins of his personality, that meant something.
Currams drove him to functions in Dublin. They both mixed in media circles. They travelled to Offaly games. Sometimes McGee would ask Currams about life with the hurlers, or work, but usually the immaculate silence was observed. For those who intruded on their delicate environment, it was a culture shock.
‘We were down at an Under-21 match against Carlow,’ says Currams. ‘Brian Cowen [the current Taoiseach] was playing for Offaly. Offaly had a good Under-21 team then: Gerry Carroll, Matt Connor, Johnny Mooney were all on it. Cowen was studying in UCD at the time and we were going to Dublin that particular day. We lost the game and McGee was ripping. There wasn’t a word spoken the whole way to Dublin. Cowen couldn’t get over it. It was as much as if to say, when we got to Dublin: Now, get the fuck out!’ Although McGee had his licence back after seven months, Currams stayed in Aughnacliffe for eighteen.
Meanwhile Offaly were progressing. The benefits of McGee’s unusual training regimes and practices were rooted in the players and now that results were gradually turning, they were beginning to approach the summers with a different attitude. They made the Leinster final against Dublin, and as the players gathered the night before, McGee was in exquisite form.
‘Dublin were a big barrier for everybody,’ says Johnny Mooney. ‘He broke them down into individuals. People with jobs. People who played football. He talked about their weaknesses and strengths, how they were ordinary human beings like us. He simplified everything.’
‘He was fanatical about Dublin,’ says Currams. ‘He’d smoke cigarettes and everything – even when he didn’t smoke – he’d be so uptight. He was passionate against Dublin. Any chance he had, he wanted to beat them.’
The following day Offaly met a team coming to terms with their own crumbling mortality and held them by the throat for sixty-nine minutes. Jimmy Keaveney was sent off, and Dublin struggled with fourteen men. The Leinster title was Offaly’s to take. In the middle of the field, Richie Connor took a moment to catch his breath and run some words through his mind for the speech. He had endured four years with Offaly without the solace of a Leinster medal from 1973 or the All-Irelands before that, but his honours were shaped by the respect the players had for him. He was their leader on the field. All the weeks spent training, the hours in the evenings before championship games that he spent walking the bogs at home in Walsh Island with his fists clenched, slowly winding himself up to unleash fury on the opposition, had filtered down to this. The Leinster title was theirs.
Almost.
Only a few moments left. The play has broken down and Brian Mullins bounces the football off the back of an Offaly player’s head. Offaly react, and the referee suddenly calls a hop ball.
Mullins’s instincts recognise the opportunity. As the ball hangs in the air, Mullins charges and fists the ball deep into Offaly’s defence. The ball ends up with Bernard Brogan in front of Martin Furlong. Brogan drills the ball to the net. Dublin have stolen the game. All over the field, Offaly fall asunder.
Richie Connor shook his head. He’d never rehearse a speech again.
The fall-out was poisonous. Although Offaly had gradually worked themselves from losing to Wexford in 1977 to making it to a Leinster semi-final and now a final, and competing seriously with Dublin, the county board delegates hadn’t warmed to McGee. He wasn’t one of their own. He was too distant. All these meetings and diet sheets and scraps of paper were unsettling. His autonomous regime wasn’t working. They didn’t move to sack McGee, but instead appointed four new selectors. Democracy, they said, must reign. Eventually they’d nail him.
Fr Heaney was weary from fighting. Much of his time was spent keeping McGee sweet with Dowling, and cajoling the rest of a bucking county board along with him. Offaly hurlers were showing significant signs of life, and the workload was getting heavy. Now, he had to deal with McGee and four new selectors who didn’t like him.
‘They were anti-me,’ says McGee. ‘These fellas would’ve had a slight resentment to me getting that job. They would’ve expected one of them to get it. If they picked teams I didn’t agree with, I had to grin and bear it. There was no point in arguing.’
During one game in Cork, McGee stood on the line while the selectors sat in the stands. When he wished to make a change, McGee had to run up the steps for consultation and a vote. His power had diminished, and something of his dignity, too.
‘I was basically a messenger boy. I decided to take drastic action. We had a big tournament match coming up in May in Ferbane against Galway. So I picked the team and didn’t tell them [selectors] anything. I told them: “That’s the team we’re playing.” They got thick and stood on one side of the field. I stood on the other. Luckily we won the match.’
That night, all four selectors wrote a letter to Fr Heaney telling him they couldn’t work with McGee. The following morning they found a short note in each of their letterboxes thanking them for their services. Heaney quietly appointed himself, John Dowling and assistant county secretary Brother Sylvester as replacement selectors. McGee had regained the freedom he wished for, at a price. ‘If Offaly didn’t win the Leinster title now,’ says Fr Heaney, ‘then we were all gone.’
The hurt drove McGee all through 1980. Offaly roared into another Leinster final, and by now Dublin were spent. A cloud seemed to shadow everything about them. Over 150 supporters had been locked out of the Hill. Those inside spent much of the game fighting. That June, Brian Mullins’s car had smashed into a lamppost, and he had spent eight months recovering.
The heart was ripped out of the team. Heffernan’s greatest creation had expended its last energies in losing to Kerry in the 1979 All-Ireland final, but early on they mustered enough fight to suggest Offaly would be repelled again. Minutes into the game, Martin Furlong raced out from goal to intercept a through ball and dived at Ciaran Duff’s feet. Duff powered on, cutting Furlong open over his eye and knocking him senseless. Bobby Doyle finished the loose ball to the net, and, as Furlong resumed with a bandage swaddling his bloodied head, Offaly were lagging behind. They were six points down at half-time, but they weren’t beaten.
Johnny Mooney came to centrefield and towered over everyone. Matt Connor was switched to centre-forward, hit two quick points and played the game of his life. With minutes left, he escaped for long enough to win the game. He stood in front of the goal, without an angle to jink away from the cluster of defenders around him or the space to generate some momentum before releasing a shot. ‘He hit the ball so hard,’ says Fr Heaney, ‘John O’Leary didn’t even see it. It went past O’Leary about three inches from his side. Eugene McGee didn’t even see it.’
Matt finished the game with 1-7, and Offaly had won, 1-10 to 1-8. The team was convulsed with joy. As the stands burst their banks and Offaly supporters streamed on to the field, Richie Connor took a moment. Five years of playing for Offaly had brought ignominy and humiliation. It had brought him to boardrooms defending a manager he barely knew. It had consumed his life.
‘I was playing football and getting nowhere,’ says Connor. ‘I got more relief from that win than any other. I definitely had doubts about us. The final whistle had to be blown and blown and blown. It was such a feeling of achievement. Anything was possible then in m
y mind.’
The dressing room was the scene of unbridled joy. As the players cradled the cup, Eugene Mulligan reflected on a decade spent labouring to finally beat Dublin again. ‘We didn’t just beat a team,’ he said. ‘We beat a legend.’
‘That was the end of Dublin,’ says Currams, ‘and a turning point for Offaly.’
They brought the cup home to Tullamore and toasted it for the bones of a month. With one Goliath slain, they now turned to face another.
Kerry.
4 THE SPECIAL ONES
Spring, 1980
The boys are lined up. Tim Kennelly. John Egan. Ger O’Keeffe. Leaning against the wire and breathing deeply. Facing them is the wide expanse of the pitch in Fitzgerald Stadium. This is wire-to-wire, a training drill invented by Mick O’Dwyer and road-tested in hell.
The drill sends the players sprinting from one side of the field to the other for as long as O’Dwyer sees fit, and serves a variety of purposes. It runs the arrogance out of them. If word filters back through O’Dwyer’s network of contacts that a few players have been out the night before, he can run the beer out of them. After their winter’s break, some players always come back a little chubby. Even the thought of wire-to-wire leaves the players with sunken cheeks. Wire-to-wire gets them fit, and gets them focused. To some players, it’s a creation of such intolerable cruelty that they can already feel their dinners swelling in their guts before they even begin.
O’Dwyer stands a few yards away, whistle in hand. He brings it to his lips. A little smile. He loves this.
The boys are eyeing O’Keeffe. They call him Gadocha. It’s a nickname partly rooted in affection, partly rooted in gut-wrenching annoyance. All through the seventies Robert Gadocha had left flaming trails behind him along the flanks when playing football for Poland, incinerating full-backs all over Europe with his speed. O’Keeffe was his incarnation in Killarney, without an ounce of fat on his bones and able to run forever. He was a blessing in the team, but sometimes he was a curse too.
O’Dwyer blows the whistle. Gadocha establishes an early lead, but the boys are holding him. As they pass beneath the goalposts, Gadocha flicks through the gears, and pulls back his shoulders. Gone. The shouts are behind him and starting to get distant.
‘Gadocha! Get back here!’
He touches the wire on the other side. And back across. And back again. And back across. And back again. The boys are out on their feet. Gadocha has a sweat broken, no more. This is what O’Dwyer loves. The boys never give up. It’s springtime now. A few months of this, and Gadocha will drag them all up to his level.
The stand in Killarney is largely empty, save for a few pockets of onlookers and tourists. Out in the centre of the field is Mick O’Dwyer, his whistle hanging around his neck, the central hub around which a great team revolves. Years before his team would ultimately become the embodiment of invincibility, O’Dwyer was an icon for them all. They had grown up with him among their heroes. Now he was their taskmaster. He shaped their ambitions and their expectations. In a career filled with success, his greatest achievement was finding a method into every man’s soul, to make them believe in him, and then drive them savagely on like a drayhorse.
Long before he began to gather All-Ireland titles with Kerry like shells on the strand, O’Dwyer’s legacy as a player had written a rich legend. He played his first game for Kerry on 11 July 1954 in the Munster minor championship against Waterford and his last against Sligo in Killarney in May 1974. Waterville held on to him for another decade, where he played his last game aged forty-eight.
In between, he smashed records and propelled himself to greatness. He was a fearless player, blessed with unparalleled courage and an unquenchable thirst for success. He won four All-Ireland senior medals and twelve Munster senior medals with Kerry. His eight National League medals remains a record that looks unbreakable.
He played in ten All-Ireland senior finals. He was wrecked by injury, but refused to yield to pain. He almost lost his eye during a football game. He once kicked frees with a broken toe. In a county championship game in 1957 against Kerins O’Rahilly’s from Tralee, he took a punch that knocked four of his front teeth out, but he never retaliated. In the mid-sixties two bad ankle injuries forced him to retire, but when Kerry asked him to return in 1968 he won another All-Ireland medal in 1969 and was named Footballer of the Year.
Resilience was bred into his bones. Years later he told the story of the birth of his mother on Scariff Island off the coast of south Kerry. That night his grandmother was alone on the island save for her husband. As the birth progressed, complications began to arise. She needed a doctor, but there was no boat to row ashore. Her husband, Batt, headed for the strand and plunged into the ocean. He swam till he reached the mainland and returned with help. They rowed back to Scariff, where O’Dwyer’s mother was born safely.
His father, John, was a quiet, gentle man with little interest in football but a passion for hunting and a life filled with adventure. He volunteered for the IRA when the War of Independence reached Kerry, and remained on the Republican side at the beginning of the Civil War. One evening a convoy of Free State troops came across O’Dwyer and his comrades near Waterville. While O’Dwyer managed to escape to the caves above Waterville, the rest were taken to a mine nearby and blown up. At the end of the war, he jumped on a cattle boat in Cobh, and headed for Canada. Years later, when old wounds had begun to heal at home, he returned to Waterville and started a family.
Football was part of the background hum at home, but always rang clearly in young O’Dwyer’s ears. He listened to the radio and worshipped Kerry’s Tadhgie Lyne and Joe Keohane. Dublin’s Ollie Freaney was an exotic hero from another world. The Galvins from Derrynane were his relations, a tough, hard-living group of brothers who liked their football with a glint of steel. With their cut, and his father’s gentle personality, O’Dwyer had an attractive set of genes as a footballer, and a man.
He received his first football aged eight and spent his first evening attempting to kick the ball over the telegraph wires that crossed the road above him. He spent hours in Dr Mellerick’s garden in Waterville and the GAA pitch kicking football. When the ball burst he and his friend Jimmy Eric Murphy took it to Eric’s father, the local cobbler, to get it restitched.
The boys grew up together. Waterville was its own world, isolated by mountains on one side and the Atlantic Ocean lapping up behind it on the other, but the village still teemed with life. There were fishermen and island people from Valentia. People employed by the local cable station tapping messages out to the world. Old commandants from the British Army often retired to Waterville and promenaded through the town on warm summer evenings, some hobbling on cork legs, all bedecked in their finest pressed suits.
The boys learned to handle every shade and colour of character. The island people were quieter, darker. The tourists came from all over and brought the locals out of themselves. Then some people west of Waterville had never even travelled the ten miles into Cahirsiveen. They were another breed entirely.
O’Dwyer hung out with Jimmy Eric and Brud Sullivan, Brendan O’Sullivan and Joe Griffin. The local orchards were a source of adventure and nourishment. One evening a chap chased them as they escaped with their haul of apples and lost him when he landed waist high in a pool of pig dung. They bought a ferret, put it in league with a greyhound and went hunting rabbits, selling them to those working in the local cable station. O’Dwyer kept lobster pots and went sea fishing with the Galvins.
Cars fascinated him. ‘This man would be going to dinner below with a baby Ford,’ says Jimmy Eric Murphy. ‘Every Saturday morning we’d spot him and be down. The key would be in the ignition. Out the road with it. I’d be looking through the steering wheel and the car hopping all over the road.
‘Dwyer’d be saying, you’re up to forty now. You’re up to fifty-five. Sixty-four was the most we could get out of it with the fall of ground, and you’d have to be thinking of stopping about forty yards before
you wanted to. It was a howl altogether.’
Even when surrounded by devilment, every element of his life was shaped to fit around football. His father ran a hackney cab around Waterville and when Mick took it on, Eric picked up his customers from the dances around south Kerry so Mick could sleep if he had been training. One evening in 1956 the lads were caddying at Waterville Golf Club when they saw a man running along the beach, occasionally breaking off to scale the sand dunes but never pausing for a break or a breath.
‘Lads,’ said Murphy. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could get that man for Waterville.’ A few months later they read of Ronnie Delany’s gold medal at the Melbourne Olympics, and the stranger had a name.
They could do with footballers back then. Before Mick O’Dwyer ever won All-Ireland medals, played with Kerry or moulded the finest team the game would ever see, he had to deal with prejudice and politics. Between 1926 and 1952, no player from South Kerry had been chosen to play for Kerry. Teams were harvested from the rich soil around Tralee, Killarney and north Kerry and left no reason for selectors to go poking around the barren coves and peninsulas at the edge of the country.
South Kerry football was in mild disarray. Drinking before games was part of the pre-match routine, designed to bolster the local players ahead of the match and scare the life out of the opposition. ‘Only a few of us in Valentia trained,’ said Paddy Reidy, who played with Valentia before joining O’Dwyer in Waterville in 1952. ‘When they’d come into town to play the Mary’s [Cahirsiveen] they’d go into Katie’s pub across the road from the football field and they’d drink four or five pints before every game. They’d come out then and they’d frighten the life out of the Cahirsiveen crowd. They’d kick and belt and hit. But after the first twenty minutes they were gone. It was left to three or four of us to keep the thing going. They were all conked. But they were tough men.’
Kings of September Page 5
