Kings of September

by Michael Foley

  ‘So you’re going away,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Mooney. ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘Go on,’ said McGee. ‘We’ll win the Leinster next year. But keep training away and I’ll bring you home for the All-Ireland semi-final.’

  Mooney was thrilled, and confused. The scope of McGee’s ambition was stunning. Walking through the Leinster championship was never a privilege allowed to Offaly. Stumping up the cash to bring Mooney home at a time when the country was falling asunder was another day’s work again, but Mooney agreed to keep fit. McGee’s words stayed with him all winter, filling him with excitement for the summer to come.

  The previous year had left a deep imprint on him. Before the 1981 final, his footballing life had flirted with full-blown celebrity status. Drink flowed through the weekends. Ladies were never a problem. He possessed a rare talent as a footballer, and every year had brought a share of glamorous days in Croke Park. At twenty-three, life was an unending carnival.

  Then, he fell off the trailer on Croghan Hill, smashed his shoulder and lost the All-Ireland final. The county had bemoaned his absence, and defeat had hurt him deeply. The day after the final, his shoulder screamed with pain. The operation left pins in his shoulder. The time spent recuperating made him think.

  ‘You’d head out on a Saturday night and let fly. Offaly is a small county and word would always get back. But when I got over that part of my life, I realised you couldn’t do that and hope to win.

  ‘The realisation about how lucky I was to be playing a sport I loved, playing Leinster and All-Ireland finals – that made me realise: Jesus, a change of attitude could do something. My attitude changed. Whereas before you might’ve taken things for granted, or taken things a little easier, now you wanted to win. There was a total focus on winning. There was nothing going to stop me. Nothing.’

  He settled in San Francisco with his girlfriend and played football with Shannon Rangers. He trained the team twice a week and played a game on Sundays. With hundreds of Irish immigrants in the area, football was strong and training was intense. Every Sunday morning, the radio gave Mooney a link to home. Micheál O’Hehir’s voice was his Sunday-morning alarm call, wafting across the bedroom, painting pictures from Croke Park, offering a symbol of what awaited: big days in Croke Park, the sun dappling on his back and Offaly charging at Kerry.

  When the All-Star tour came through town McGee called on Mooney, and was impressed with what he saw. The plan was still in place, he said. Mooney would be home in August. One day, the Kerry footballers visited the university where Mooney was on a construction job. When he walked into the cafeteria for lunch, he spotted Pat Spillane, Ogie Moran, Ger O’Keeffe and Tommy Doyle. Soon, the slagging started. Mooney hopped the first ball.

  ‘So, I presume you boys are all set for the five-in-a-row?’

  ‘Well, you can play your part and stay here,’ said Ogie.

  Mooney laughed. ‘It wouldn’t be worth your while coming home,’ said Pat Spillane. ‘You might get an oul’ Leinster medal, I suppose.’

  They chuckled and munched on their sandwiches. That evening in Balboa Park, Mooney watched Kerry train. For two hours Mick O’Dwyer sent them on lap after lap around the running track that encircled the field. They endured an interminable series of sprints before the footballs were produced. Then, they hit top gear. Mooney never saw as many footballs at a training session, nor had he ever experienced the same intensity of effort.

  It was a simple training session miles away from the cynical eyes of the sages that dotted Fitzgerald Stadum every evening, but to every Kerry player every session was a statement of their standing against the man beside them. None of them wanted to be seen as inferior to the other. That was the level Mooney needed to reach. He knew he was getting close. As the All Stars left for home, Eugene McGee reported back to the Tullamore Tribune that Johnny Mooney ‘has no plans to return to Ireland.’

  As the evenings lengthened into the summer back home, Offaly’s work went quietly on.

  9 CAPTAINS

  A week after the 1981 All-Ireland final, Jack O’Shea and John Egan guided South Kerry to the county title. Twenty-three years had passed since South Kerry had last won the championship, and the celebrations fitted the occasion, but all that was quickly overtaken with the business of 1982. In Kerry the county champions were traditionally conferred with the honour of providing the Kerry captain. People wondered. Who would lead the five-in-a-row team?

  The coves and inlets around the Iveragh peninsula echoed with rumours. Egan had been on the Kerry team much longer than O’Shea, but Jacko was a special player. Sneem were intent on promoting Egan as their candidate; St Mary’s of Cahirsiveen were equally driven to secure the captaincy for Jacko. The winners of the South Kerry divisional championship would normally provide South Kerry’s candidate for the Kerry captaincy, but Valentia had already carried the title away to the island. Ger Lynch was Valentia’s only representative on the Kerry panel, and his place on the team was uncertain. It was between Jacko and Egan. History was at stake, and everyone wanted their piece.

  It wasn’t long before the trouble started. St Mary’s nominated Jacko. Sneem nominated Egan. While Cahirsiveen had always been richly blessed with footballers, emigration and dwindling numbers had damaged football in Sneem for years. Coming from Sneem often made John Egan’s footballing life a battle for recognition.

  It had been that way since he was a child. When the Sacred Heart secondary school in Carrignavar in Cork went fishing for new pupils, they often cast their nets deep into south Kerry. In 1965, the Egan twins, John and Gerry, left the tiny townland of Tahilla for Cork, and their footballing education began.

  John hurled as well as he could play football. Volleyball and basketball came easily to him during PE. When the boys played table-tennis leagues, he usually won at that too. Fr MacCárthaigh looked after the footballers. He was a man of intellect and ideas. Catch and kick was fine, but he preferred to apply some science to his work.

  He studied circuit training, and designed training drills for his teams that the Egan boys brought home to Sneem every summer. In 1969, while St Brendan’s College in Killarney was the dominant force in colleges’ football, Carrignavar chipped out their own mark at B level. Everything flowed through Egan, and Fr MacCárthaigh reckoned he would benefit from a trip to the Kerry minor trials.

  Others weren’t so sure. Different people told Egan 1969 was a bad time to be trying out for the Kerry minor team. His first trial game would pit him against John O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe was already considered a star, but Egan kicked a few scores and ensured he wouldn’t be ignored. That summer the Kerry minor team was filled out by ten players from Brendan’s – and Egan.

  In time, Kerry would learn to appreciate him, but years before the incomparable glamour of the seventies and the quest for history in 1982, Egan had seen the darker side. In 1970, he lost an All-Ireland minor medal. In 1971, he lost an All-Ireland Under-21 medal. Finally, in 1973, he collected an All-Ireland Under-21 medal in Ennis against Mayo, but as he began his senior career, Kerry were in a state.

  At half-time in the 1973 Munster final, Egan stood on the straw-strewn floor of the Kerry dressing room. With the old Cork Athletics Ground being prepared for reconstruction, the team was shunted into the stables in nearby Cork Showgrounds and the shambling surroundings fitted the mood of the day. Kerry were miles behind Cork and facing ignominy. Some of the older players had lit cigarettes, and the younger ones worried about the whole barn going up in smoke. Egan looked around. These were his heroes, yet he was on a different wavelength to everyone around him. Kerry lost another Munster final to Cork in 1974 and an ageing team began to fracture, leaving Egan and a handful of others to make something from the wreckage.

  ‘You can imagine growing up idolising these men and now you’re in a dressing room where they’re all crestfallen. It builds your character. Losing was never a fear to me after that. When you saw they could lose, you’d never be afra
id to lose.’

  When Mick O’Dwyer retired and took over as coach in 1975, Egan expected little would change. Egan remembered all the good passes he had laid off to O’Dwyer over the previous two years before making a good run, but receiving no return pass. The revolutionary training he experienced at Carrignavar remained the measure of Egan’s expectations. O’Dwyer, with his old rituals and ways, couldn’t be expected to match that.

  Instead, the reverse happened. Egan would become O’Dwyer’s template for his new team. Kerry would thrive on swift transfer of the ball and rapid movement. Their fitness would ascend to a level beyond anything any team in the country could match. They would thrive on self-confidence and play with a swagger. When Kerry re-emerged in the mid-seventies reshaped and reborn, Egan was at its core.

  Opposing corner-backs dreaded his speed. His movement pulled defences out of shape and made space. Sometimes the detail of his work was lost on the wider public, but Kerry couldn’t function properly without him.

  In the dressing room he was always quiet and laid back, the epitome of the gentle grin Kerry liked to show the world. There was never a care in the world about Egan, but as the years went on, football made him think about football’s place in his world. He thought about his grandmother. She had suffered a stroke when she was seventy-five and was cared for by Egan’s mother for twenty years. She lived much of her life in the same room, gazing out the same window, watching the months and seasons drift by. She had never attended a game of football in her life, yet football was still her lifeline to the outside world.

  She listened to the matches on radio. When Egan called on her, they talked about football for hours. He described Croke Park to her and the matches he had played. The Dubs. Offaly. The raging clashes with Cork. As he got older, he thought about their chats and realised how the game’s importance to him had grown beyond his own ambitions. By 1982, he knew he wasn’t just playing for himself any more. The captaincy was more than a simple gesture. It was a deeply cherished badge of honour. Sneem could never have imagined such a privilege as to claim the captain of the greatest team of all time in their greatest hour. Egan could deliver it.

  All the politicking that engulfed the captaincy hurt him. Nobody thought about the decade of travelling and training he had given to South Kerry and Sneem. For years he had worked as a Garda in Kildorrery, north Cork, and endured the long, difficult drives to training and matches. People would never know what he had been through to maintain his link to home. Clubs in Cork had come to him over the years and tried to persuade him to transfer to them, but he always refused. When Sneem revamped their playing facilities in 1981, Egan raised pots of money for them. If South Kerry were going to honour him with the captaincy, he shouldn’t have to fight for it.

  ‘I never put influence on anybody to nominate me as a captain. I assumed the South Kerry Board would nominate a captain, but it became the biggest disappointment for me in relation to the value they had for players. It became a political football.’

  When Jack O’Shea looked around the dressing room in 1982, he still felt like a boy among men. He wasn’t going to fight anyone to become captain either.

  ‘It never entered my head,’ says O’Shea. ‘If I was going to be captain, I’d be captain, but I never expected it. John Egan was older than me. He’d given a lot more service to Kerry. It didn’t knock me. All I was interested in was playing.’

  A local spat quickly inflated into a full-blown dispute. The county board were besieged with requests from the South Kerry Board to intervene, but they declined. One evening after a Railway Cup game involving Munster, Egan and O’Shea were invited to a hotel room in the town. Egan thought he was about to get expenses from the Kerry County Board. But when they arrived, a group of officials was waiting for them.

  ‘I was told to sit down,’ says Egan, ‘and that we’re here to discuss the captaincy of the Kerry team. What are ye’re views on it?’

  In the end Jimmy Deenihan retained the captaincy until the end of the National League, giving South Kerry four months to find a solution. Meanwhile Kerry footballers across the country stirred from their short winter’s nap. While collective training could wait until the clocks went forward, the players couldn’t. Egan was pounding the roads around Kildorrery. The Tralee crowd could be spotted jogging on Banna Strand and playing soccer on a patch of ground overlooking the beach. Páidí Ó Sé returned to his annual rituals on Slea Head, scaling Mount Eagle, sweating the toxins of Hawaii out of himself and feeling the muscles across his guts tighten up again.

  John O’Keeffe and Jimmy Deenihan were in Jimmy Mahony’s gym in Tralee pumping iron, trying to top each other with every lift. Jack O’Shea and the other Dublin boys were getting their work done with Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh. Charlie Nelligan was conducting his own goalkeeping exercises in Castleisland. O’Dwyer would call on them soon. Even God couldn’t help them if they weren’t ready.

  Like Egan, the magnitude of the record they were chasing and the careers they were enjoying was beginning to dawn on them all. As their stock grew, opportunities followed them everywhere. In Tralee, Mikey Sheehy was making his way in the insurance business, and five All-Ireland medals never caused hindrance.

  ‘It opened up doors for you,’ he says. ‘People did business with you because of it. It was always good for your profile to be prominent. If you look at all the prominent players of that era, they did well.’

  ‘We all had agendas,’ says Ger O’Keeffe. ‘As a consulting engineer, I probably had at the back of my mind that this would be good for business. I’d get an article in the paper and a bit of publicity. We all had something in the back of our minds. We all went a bit individualistic trying to get some recognition, which was to the detriment of the team performance.’

  In 1980, Charlie Nelligan had landed in Los Angeles on an All-Star trip with two All-Ireland medals in his pocket. A local Kerry businessman came to him with a proposition. A baker, he told him, could make good money in America. The businessman offered him a location for a bakery and the cash to start the business. Ireland was dying. He had his two All-Ireland medals. Any more, as Pat Spillane sometimes said, was only accumulation.

  Nelligan thought of his father. In 1947, when Dan Nelligan had finished his baking apprenticeship in Cahir, he returned home to Castleisland looking to start a business. He found a property in town, but couldn’t muster the money to make a bid. He had an offer to go to Australia and it appeared he had no choice. Instead, Charlie’s grandfather stepped in. The Nelligans had an old site that matched the value of the property. They swapped the land for the shop, and Dan Nelligan started his bakery.

  Now, his son faced the same dilemma. He and his wife were expecting their second child in the winter and home had a hold on him. When he arrived home from America, his father took him for a drive and stopped outside a building near the church in Castleisland. This, his father said, could be Charlie’s new bakery. If Charlie wanted, they could buy it. His son smiled, and agreed. Just as well, said Dan. The deposit had already been paid.

  For years, Nelligan’s battle with Paudie O’Mahoney for the goalkeeper’s jersey had kept the public intrigued and gave O’Dwyer an annual platform for devilment. In 1975 when O’Mahoney was in goals for the All-Ireland final, Nelligan was with the minor team and sat on the bench for the senior game. Soon after, he moved to Dublin and began studying at catering college. He played football with Home Farm and began applying soccer training drills to Gaelic football. During an accountancy course in Cork, he hooked up with former Cork footballer and soccer player Billy Field for training, and advanced his education. Back in Dublin he trained with Jack O’Shea and a constantly changing cast. The evenings began in UCD with Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, and ended with meals in Daly’s on the quays. ‘The biggest job,’ says Nelligan, ‘was to avoid the second dessert.’

  The competition between him and O’Mahoney was intense. One evening, Castleisland played Spa in the county championship that swung on two penalties:
one for Castleisland and one for Spa. Both goalkeepers were sent up to take the shots. O’Mahoney scored for Spa, and Nelligan missed. A few nights later in Killarney, O’Dwyer commiserated with Nelligan. Then he started hopping balls.

  ‘But didn’t Paudie get a nice penalty?’ he said, and walked away, leaving Nelligan’s mind turning cartwheels. Suddenly every match report looked different, every comment on the street had a different tenor. Nelligan was driven on. After Kerry’s defeat to Dublin in the 1977 All-Ireland semi-final, O’Mahoney was dropped and Nelligan was given his chance. He had won the battle. Like Egan, he was now starting to look beyond himself.

  One year, Nelligan took the Sam Maguire cup to a small national school in the village of Lyreacrompane, nestled in the Stacks Mountains a few miles from Castleisland. The school contained just one teacher and, despite its many visits to Kerry, the Sam Maguire cup had never ventured into Lyreacrompane before. As Nelligan waited outside the schoolhouse, he peered in the window.

  ‘Now the All-Ireland final will be repeated on the television tonight,’ the headmaster was saying, ‘and I’ll give you all lessons off if you watch it.’ A cheer went up. Nelligan knocked and when the door opened, a little boy was standing in front of him. He was gazing at the cup, his mouth wide open.

  ‘At that,’ says Nelligan, ‘the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It just hit me what it all meant.’

  Boys were becoming men. Some were married. Others had young families. In Tralee, Mikey was now the most blessed of a canon of great forwards. Castleisland had never seen a footballer like Charlie. In Tahilla and Sneem, Egan was an icon. When he thought about that, he felt humbled.