Kings of September

by Michael Foley

  ‘Mick,’ he said, ‘I want you to carry on as the trainer of the team.’

  They went downstairs together, and for a few hours the guests gathered around the players and insulated them from disappointment. As the night drew on, the guests started getting loose and the cordon around the players started to unravel. Some guests went looking for Mikey Sheehy. When they found him, they had words.

  ‘[They were saying] You bottled it,’ says Sheehy. ‘You cost us five-in-a-row. That sort of thing. It comes with the territory. They’re not supporters. You knew the genuine guy who’d come over and throw the arm around you. He might be saying something else privately, but at least he came over and said something to you anyway.’

  With the hotel bulging with people, the security gates outside the Gresham had been locked. Out on O’Connell Street some Kerry players who had left earlier had returned but found their way barred by bouncers. One player made a burst forward but was kicked back on to the street. There he sat, looking at the stars, with nowhere to go.

  All across town there were parties and wakes. Declan Lynch wandered back to the Ormond hotel and headed for the bar. Galleon’s dreams had been shattered too, but Lynch didn’t care so much about that. They all had jobs waiting for them at home. They weren’t broke. Winning five-in-a-row was bigger than any earthly concerns.

  The Kerryman beside him was more agitated. The telephone in the bar rang for him once. Fifteen minutes later it rang again. And again. He explained it was his wife. His fondness for porter worried her, and the trauma of the day could send him hurtling off the rails. But there was more. Out in his car, he had thousands of T-shirts. Five-in-a-row shirts. What good were they now? He drank his pint.

  ‘But I’ll tell you the truth, Declan, there’s always a way out. I’m after getting a right good deal on ten thousand plastic macs. If the Lord is any way fair at all, it’ll pour rain for the week at the Listowel Races.’

  They drank their pints, forgot their sorrows and waited for morning to come.

  * * *

  The party went on the following morning in Mulligan’s pub, where Con Houlihan held court. When he spotted the Kerry contingent, Houlihan sent over a bottle of champagne. Up at the bar, Pat Spillane settled in beside Houlihan and saw a chance to fluff up his feathers.

  ‘Con,’ he asked, ‘who were the best team you saw in1982?’

  Con paused, and thought. ‘Italy,’ he replied.

  The champagne disappeared quickly and Eoin Liston was into his set list, including his own altered version of ‘Five in a Row’. People laughed, and as lunchtime came they headed back to the Gresham for the annual post-All-Ireland lunch with Offaly.

  Liston was the personality Kerry wished the world to remember as theirs, gracious and good humoured. As Sean Lowry ordered a drink at the bar, Liston walked up behind him, pulling himself up to his maximum height. ‘Lowry,’ he said, remembering the sweet hook that had caught him on the jaw the previous day, ‘I owe you one.’

  Lowry looked him up and down. ‘Bomber, I don’t care if you owed me ten belts right now,’ he said, and the tension dissolved in laughter.

  As Johnny Mooney stood at the bar, he felt someone tap him on the back. He turned to hear a familiar voice that took him back to alarm-clock calls and early Sunday mornings in San Francisco. Micheál O’Hehir. For a minute, Mooney’s throat went dry.

  There were more songs from The Bomber and from a contingent of Dublin minors who were celebrating their own All-Ireland. John Egan sat beside PJ McGrath and chatted. Before long it was time to catch trains and head home.

  That night Killarney and Tralee both teemed with people and sadness. The players stood on the trailer in Killarney in front of the Park Place hotel, looking shattered. O’Dwyer was broken. ‘I know we let ye down,’ he said, but the rest of his speech was carried off in a hail of cheers. The crowd chanted: ‘1983. 1983.’ As he put the microphone down, O’Dwyer pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped his eye.

  ‘Fate dealt us a lethal blow,’ said John Egan, still smiling, still keeping his feelings in check. Páidí sang ‘An Poc Ar Buille’. The Bomber led the crowd in ‘The Rose of Tralee’. The rest of the week dissolved into nothing. Ger O’Keeffe got wind that Jimmy Keaveney and a few old Dubs were down and disappeared with them to Ballybunion. The rain spilled down all week on Listowel and the hawker’s plastic macs sold like hotcakes.

  On Wednesday night, the team followed Egan back to Sneem. A mighty bonfire illuminated South Square in the village, but the posters that had been prepared acclaiming Egan’s return with the Sam Maguire were put away. Hundreds turned out, unsure what to say or do.

  ‘It was like attending your own wake,’ says Pat Spillane, ‘only the corpses were having a drink with you. It was horrible. It’s not that we didn’t know about losing, but when you’re standing there saying we’ll be back next year …’

  Local people queued up to pay John Egan a tribute. PJ Burns, the club chairman, recalled how Egan had raised more than IR£1000 when the club fundraised for their new pitch. People spoke of the debt Sneem owed to the Egans that could never be repayed. Frank King told Egan’s friends and neighbours the team regretted nothing as much as failing to see Egan return home with the cup. ‘We all know he deserved that honour.’

  When Egan spoke, he simply said the right things. ‘I can’t believe just how genuine and sincere everybody is in welcoming us home. It’s unbelievable.’

  Sneem had shown Egan what he meant to them, but he didn’t have what he wanted to give back. He was heartbroken. They all were.

  PART IV

  THE DECLINE

  21 DISINTEGRATION

  Declan Lynch woke up on Monday morning with talk of plastic macs swirling around his head and porter churning up his guts. He felt rough, but a day off rolled out ahead of him. He left Dublin and stopped in a pub in Portlaoise to decide his next destination.

  Cork or Killarney.

  In Cork, sympathy might be hard for a Kerryman to find, but Killarney? Losing homecomings didn’t promise much either, especially this one. Then he started thinking outside the box. How far was Tullamore?

  That night, Tullamore was thronged. As the train carrying the Offaly team pulled in, a mighty bonfire burned in the car park with a banner in front proclaiming, ‘Veni, Vidi, Vici.’ The team bus slowly edged through the main street. Nuns, perched on the roof of their convent, waved tricolours. Waitresses emerged from the Bridge House hotel with trays laden down by glasses and bottles of champagne for the players. When the players reached the GAA centre and stood on the stage, they looked out across a sea of faces and remembered 1981. This time there were no tears, just smiles.

  John Guinan saw his father hoist his youngest brother on to his shoulders for a better view, just as he had with John when Offaly came home with the cup a decade before. Tomás O’Connor gazed off into the distance and spotted his father at the back of the crowd, away from the mayhem. Their eyes fixed on each other for a moment, and Tomás saw him nod. Praise enough.

  When Eugene McGee spoke, he took himself back to 1976. He recalled the old days travelling to Askeaton to play Limerick and Lahinch on a freezing winter’s afternoon.

  ‘Those that weren’t there don’t know what they missed,’ he said. ‘Lahinch in December takes some beating.’

  The week that followed was manic. On Tuesday morning, John Guinan woke up feeling bleary and struggled into the kitchen for his breakfast. The house was empty except for his mother. Everyone was at work. The All-Ireland had been won. Time that normal life resumed.

  He took a walk into Clonygowan, the local village, for the newspaper. Having paid one of the two village pubs the courtesy of calling in the previous night, he decided to drop into the other. ‘It was about noon,’ he says. ‘What was along the top of the bar? A whole load of lunchboxes and my father and my two brothers in the middle of them. Padraic Dunne’s father was there and a few more. Everybody thought they’d gone to work!’

  That nig
ht, Richie Connor brought the cup back to Walsh Island. On Wednesday they hit Ferbane, where green, white and gold Fianna Fáil election posters had been doctored to read: ‘Welcome to Lowry Country’. Back in Offaly, Edenderry came after Ferbane. That night, Richie Connor called Sean Lowry aside. ‘I’ve something to show you,’ he said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a crumpled envelope. The address read: ‘Richie Connor, Offaly captain, Offaly’. The handwriting looked feeble. Lowry took out the letter. It was from an old woman in Fermanagh, thanking Richie and Offaly for the joy they had brought her on Sunday. She was the old woman down the country lane. She was everyone.

  By then the team were moving through the county like a travelling circus. One night they hit Gracefield, where a player met a local car dealer and swapped his old Fiesta for a brand new car. On Thursday, Johnny Mooney, Matt Connor and a crew headed for Listowel races, fell in with a few of the Kerry boys and were fêted all weekend. Free passes for the races were produced, while their money was no good anywhere they tried to spend it. This was their week. They showered in people’s houses and bought clothes as they needed them.

  Weeks of celebrating turned into months and they quickly became enslaved by their obligations With requests for the Sam Maguire cup rolling in, Mick Fitzgerald was given custody of the trophy and provided with a diary to keep a schedule of appearances. The players tried to share the workload, but public demand didn’t allow that. People wanted to see Darby – Matt – Richie – The Lowrys – Furlong. Players were out for nights on end. Their days were clogged with appointments at schools. There was no escape.

  ‘I did thirty-two schools that winter,’ says Sean Lowry. ‘And there was no point in going at three in the evening, they wanted you there in the morning so they could give the kids a half-day and no homework.

  ‘I went to Leitrim with it. Longford. I went to the strangest places. The biggest problem was people had jobs. I was working with the ESB but I had a very good supervisor. I was going to him at eight in the morning with the Sam Maguire in the boot outside, saying: “I’ve promised to go to three schools this morning. I’ll be back at lunchtime.” It was the only way it could be done. I’d have the cup booked for three days.’

  The cup went everywhere in the evening, and everywhere there was drink. One weekend, Offaly played a league game against Down in Newry and were afforded a civic reception by Newry and Mourne District Council the night before. A long table was covered with bottles of beer. A local official approached one player: ‘There’s tea being served over there,’ he said. ‘We can get tea at home,’ the player replied. The following day, Down ate Offaly alive.

  One evening, deep into the winter of 1982, Liam Currams headed down from Longford to a function in Tullamore. As the night drew on, Currams didn’t leave till half-four in the morning and braced himself for a treacherous drive home. As he neared home, Currams approached the brow of a hill when the car swerved out of control. It lurched to the left and went flying through a ditch, landing in a field. Currams shook himself. He felt okay. Then, he fell asleep.

  As dawn broke, he was woken by a thudding sound. He opened his eyes to find a calf rubbing its face against the window. He turned the key in the ignition. The car was turning over and the wheels were moving, but the car stayed in the same spot. When he got out to check, he found the car balanced on a tree stump, suspended in mid-air. This life was becoming too much. The wheels were still spinning, but Offaly were starting to slow down.

  That winter, Richie Connor got a phone call from Jack O’Shea to see if he could borrow the cup. All those years and he had never got a picture taken with it. It had suddenly struck Jacko he might never see it again.

  * * *

  Winter passed slowly in Waterville. As the tourists emptied out, the cold weather set in and the Atlantic began to churn with temper. Mick O’Dwyer was left alone with his thoughts.

  He brooded for months. Some nights he watched the video, pausing the tape at vital moments, forensically deconstructing every frame with sadistic precision. One wild winter’s evening his old friend Owen McCrohan called to one of O’Dwyer’s hotels in Waterville to see him. When O’Dwyer descended the stairs, McCrohan met a broken man. The twinkle was gone. The spark of enthusiasm for football was extinguished. When the talk turned to the final, O’Dwyer could reel off moments where the game had turned from Kerry. As they chatted, the wind rattled the window frames and howled through the empty hotel. In this ghostly place, O’Dwyer pondered his future. Rumours rumbled around Kerry that he would leave, and as Christmas approached he was beginning to agree with them. ‘I’ll never start from the bottom again,’ he said.

  Eoin Liston had been in Waterville since 1979, where O’Dwyer had taken him on as a personal winter project and turned him into a serious player. They were tight. When the local council asked O’Dwyer to organise keep fit classes during the winter, he brought Liston along to work through his aerobics. They ran circuits around Waterville together, with only O’Dwyer’s guttural breathing breaking the night silence.

  They played rounds of golf on the links course. They played handball and badminton. When the squash court in Cahirsiveen was free they travelled in for a game. O’Dwyer was always the referee, and Liston rarely questioned his decisions. They played cards on a Saturday night, always stopping to watch ‘Dallas’ at O’Dwyer’s insistence. ‘Maybe he saw himself as some kind of JR,’ Liston teased.

  O’Dwyer always pushed Liston hard, but Liston loved him for it. Now, O’Dwyer needed people like Liston around him. There were days when he and Liston would be striding down the fairway at the links course when O’Dwyer would return to an incident in the game, recalling the minutiae of the moment with chilling clarity. The clamour had been too much. The jerseys, the hype. Páidí’s piseoga. Mikey Sheehy’s loose kick-out of defence. The nudge on Tommy Doyle. The crazy frees called by the referee. Spillane’s injury. It was harrowing.

  Liston had sensed O’Dwyer’s hunger for five-in-a-row all summer. Throughout his life, O’Dwyer had raged against the conventions of Kerry football. He had proved himself a footballer of rare worth despite almost being discarded as a Kerry minor. He had taken a willowy senior team in 1975, when Kerry was sinking to its lowest ebb, and won an All-Ireland. He had torn up the old manual of catch-and-kick, re-invented Kerry’s style and increased the levels of training and devotion required to succeed. He had survived the abuse and derision thrown at him. Five-in-a-row would have shown them all. Five-in-a-row would have carried him and his team to a peak where they could have seen for miles, safe in the knowledge that no team in the history of football would ever possess the talent or the perseverance to join them. Now, he was left with nothing. The 31½ counties were sharpening their claws again.

  ‘The biggest psychological problem Kerry ever came across was the five-in-a-row,’ says Ger O’Keeffe. ‘Psychologically, we were in trouble going into that game. We had been built up into something superhuman. We allowed ourselves to become embroiled in a lot of fantasy. We would’ve walked ourselves into a false sense of security. Mentally, most of the players forgot to play, or couldn’t play, because psychologically they were battered.’

  Meanwhile, Eugene McGee was gleefully thinking about history. Tom Donoghue had run the team up Clonin Hill during the spring of 1983 and noticed no change in their fitness or their mood. John Guinan was starting to show real pedigree. All the Connors were in good fettle. Surfing on the wave of the previous year, Johnny Mooney had decided to stay at home and bought a pub in Geashill. Offaly strolled through the league and were toasted wherever they went. As All-Ireland champions they could pick their challenge matches from the dozens of offers. One evening they travelled to Castleisland to play Kerry. With a few minutes left, Offaly sprang Seamus Darby. As the game wound down, he burst through with only Charlie Nelligan left to beat. On his home pitch, after everything that had gone before, Charlie couldn’t allow himself get beaten. He sprinted out and smothered the shot. The crowd cheered, and Darby smi
led. ‘I remember saying: “Why the f*** didn’t you kick that one and I’d have saved the other one?” said Nelligan. “You could have this one!”’

  Offaly collected six All Stars that winter – Martin Furlong, Mick Fitzgerald, Liam O’Connor, Sean Lowry, Liam Currams, Padraic Dunne, and Matt Connor – and they prepared for the trip to America. This was living. Freedom.

  On their way from Los Angeles to San Francisco, John Guinan, Liam O’Connor, Padraic Dunne, Richie Connor and Galway’s Seamus McHugh escaped the main party, rented a car and headed for the desert. They ventured into Indian country. Death Valley. Vegas. For three days they drove from town to town, cramming themselves into double rooms at the local motels. They partied hard, yet made San Francisco in time for their battery of functions and matches. On the flight home, Padraic Dunne celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Guinan was twenty. They had All-Ireland medals in their pockets and sore backs from the slaps of two weeks’ adulation on the west coast. They felt invincible. But problems were brewing.

  Gerry Carroll and Eugene McGee were bugging each other again. Winning an All-Ireland hadn’t softened the edges on their relationship, and the night before Offaly played their first Leinster championship game against Kildare, they got snagged again.

  That night, McGee called Carroll. He was dropping him from the team for disciplinary reasons. He wasn’t putting in the effort at training, said McGee. On the other end of the line, Carroll was seething with rage. ‘It was the closest I came to quitting,’ he says. ‘People talked me out of it. I’d had enough then. That’s when I lost a lot of respect for our manager, and things started to turn sour.’

  That night, Carroll drank a few pints and forgot about football. The following day McGee put him on at half-time. Offaly smashed Kildare in the end, but by then further cracks had started to appear. Late in the game, Sean Lowry ran out to contest a ball, caught his foot in a hole and tore ligaments in his ankle. Liam Currams was struggling too. During a club game one evening in April, he leapt to catch a ball and came down heavily on his ankle, snapping the ligaments. They started him in the Leinster final on Barney Rock, but two months without training or a game knocked the sharpness out of him.