Memory Man

by Jimmy Magee

  Ever since I had watched my first World Cup, back in 1958 on an old grainy television, I had vowed that before I died I would go to the World Cup and would become a permanent World Cup-ite. Germany was the first of my twelve (so far) World Cups to cover.

  The World Cup in Germany was truly a special occasion, and the highlight for me was seeing Johan Cruyff and the Netherlands play. I was commentator for the final itself. Who will ever forget the Germany v. Netherlands final, when the Dutch got a penalty within the first minute without a German having touched the ball! And that’s no exaggeration: the first German to touch the ball was their goalkeeper, Sepp Maier, who bent over and took it out of the back of the net. The English ref, Jack Taylor, was a brave man making such a decision against the host country in the final.

  I later met Johan Cruyff when, as secretary-general of the European Commentators’ Association, I presented him with a prize as our player of the year at a match in the Anderlecht ground in Brussels. I had this beautiful trophy to present to him, which he knew he was going to get; but when I suddenly saw Pelé in the stadium I thought to myself, ‘How could I present this trophy when the king is here?’ Pelé, who I always thought was a football genius as a player and as a thinker of the game, readily agreed to make the presentation. Thankfully, I managed to get into the photograph with these two legends.

  This was in fact the second time I got to meet Pelé, having previously met him in Germany at the World Cup. He was doing promotional work for Pepsi at the time, and part of this was allocating twenty-minute interviews with the great man himself, and luckily I got on the list. Anyway, our interview ended up going to forty-five minutes, because we were both so interested in talking about football.

  I asked him how he got the nickname. ‘Was it a flower? A small animal?’

  ‘There is no meaning to it. It meant nothing. And as a child I hated the name and used to get into fights at school when other boys called me “Pelé” because I thought it was derogatory.’

  I told him I had an idea about how he may have got the name. ‘There was an Irish missionary priest in Brazil, near Santos, where you were raised. You were playing with a cloth or paper ball, because your family were poor, and you were fantastic with it, and the priest saw you. Now this was an Irish-speaking priest, and he said, “Féach an buachaill ag imirt peile,” and all the oul-ones were around and going “Ahh! Pelé! Pelé!” And when the priest was gone the name stuck.

  ‘Now isn’t that a credible story?’ And he agreed it was as credible as any of the other stories he heard. In his autobiography later he included a section on the Irish priest!

  When I met him in Brussels to make the presentation to Johan Cruyff, Pelé asked me, laughing, ‘How’s my Irish priest’s friend?’ People began to believe this story, and that’s how it began: I am the source of it.

  Over time we became sort of half mates. I interviewed him one night in the Burlington Hotel in Dublin. We were sitting in the lobby beforehand and I said, ‘There’s a name you should know.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t know any of the names of bars.’

  So I brought him back to when he won his first World Cup for Brazil as a seventeen-year-old in Stockholm in 1958. I asked him who his captain was that day. The captain was Bellini, which is the name of the bar in the Burlington. He laughed. As I said to him, ‘I’m full of useless information.’

  I have only ever asked two people for autographs: Pelé and Maradona. I’m sorry I never asked for more, because I would have a great collection by now!

  I was once on a plane flying from Mexico to Los Angeles and I was in the same compartment as Pelé. He slept most of the time but he woke up as the plane was coming into Los Angeles, and then these three Italians asked him for his autograph; they had a ticket or something from the World Cup in 1970 and they got him to sign it. He knew my face, so I went over and introduced myself.

  ‘Have you ever asked for an autograph?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but there was one I would like; but it wasn’t a footballer.’

  He went all shy and wouldn’t tell me who it was, so I didn’t press him. I told him that I was the same, that I never ask for autographs. ‘But I’m going to ask you.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and he signed a piece of paper for me. I thought this was the best thing ever, and I brought the autograph with me everywhere. When I changed suits I’d make sure to put it also into another pocket. I didn’t want to lose it.

  At the 1994 World Cup in America I met Maradona and I thought to myself, ‘I have to get his autograph.’ I went up to him and took out the piece of paper with Pelé’s autograph on it and asked him if he would mind signing it. He recognised Pelé’s name, but he didn’t say anything. So I have Pelé and Maradona on the same piece of paper; but unfortunately I can’t find this precious piece of paper now! I hope one day I’ll stumble across it again when I finally get around to doing some spring-cleaning.

  But I’m not a great man for tidying up. I haven’t even been able to find the home phone for the best part of a year now because I left it somewhere and the battery eventually died, and now I can’t even ring it to find it!

  Chapter 6

  | THE JIMMY MAGEE ALL-STARS

  My idea of putting together a charity match with famous sports stars was only meant to be a one-off, but somehow it got transformed into the Jimmy Magee All-Stars and it’s still going strong. It has raised more than €6 million for various charities, which is a lot of money from a truly voluntary action.

  When the All-Stars began people said, ‘It won’t last a week.’ They were right: it has lasted forty-five years, which is a remarkable achievement for any charity. The All-Stars hasn’t really stopped, as we still do one or two concerts a year to keep us together, but the football side of it stopped about five years ago, because, sadly, time crept up and we’re all too bloody old to be running around a pitch; though I reckon that some of the older players who have retired would like to be still playing.

  It all started when, during my days working alongside Harry Thuillier on ‘Junior Sports Magazine’, the two of us used to talk about organising a charity match. Then in 1966 I was chatting to an RTE producer, Bill O’Donovan, and we began talking about the idea.

  ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got a team and have a kick-around,’ I said to Bill.

  He suggested that I should do something about it. I decided to explore the idea further. A great friend, Connie Lynch—who later went on to manage the likes of the Royal Showband, the Big 8, Brendan Bowyer, Pat Lynch and the Airchords—said to me, ‘I’ll happily organise it if you put the team together.’

  I was excited at the prospect of putting together a list of who’s who from sport, with some show-business people thrown into the mix. Nobody would refuse once I said it was for charity, so I was able to put together a dream team with the idea of giving punters an exciting exhibition match. I even had a picture in my head of the kind of jerseys we would wear: an all-white strip, like Real Madrid. In retrospect it was a ridiculous colour to choose, because all it did was show how out of shape we all were; perhaps I should have picked black instead, which can make you look slimmer!

  The plan was simple. We always did a concert on stage after the show. We would play the match first, which I called the trailer, and then later they would come back and go to the gig.

  For our first game and gig we headed off to Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan, on 6 June 1966. I didn’t think of it at the time, that our first gig was going to be on all the sixes—6/6/66—but it wasn’t a bad omen.

  I had also organised the opposition team, which was mostly made up of two showbands, the Mighty Avons and the Drifters. It’s no exaggeration to say that it was a huge success, and afterwards at the function in the parochial hall they were all coming up to me and saying, ‘It’s an awful pity that this is just a one-off, Jimmy. We’d love to do it again.’ I hadn’t dared to tell them the truth, that I already had a complete season of seventeen more games lined up, because I fir
st wanted to see if it would work out.

  ‘Actually we’re playing next week in Tullow, Co. Carlow, and the week after that we’re in Parnell Park in Dublin, and the week after that we’re in Roscommon.’

  We soon went from playing local venues to playing in Croke Park in front of a large crowd, and playing in front of a massive crowd in Gaelic Park in New York. In 1971 we did a tour of America for the Cardinal Cushing Games and went to New York, Boston and Hartford, Connecticut.

  The All-Stars was started at a time when the GAA sent official teams to America every year for the Cardinal Cushing charity. They went first to New York, then played Boston and then Hartford. One year there was a bit of a row between Croke Park and the Cardinal Cushing organisation and John Kerry O’Donnell, who ran the famous Gaelic Park in New York. The former champion hurler Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin, who had a radio show on RTE on Sunday nights called ‘Gaelic Sports Results’, said to John Kerry that if ‘real’ teams were not going out he would get the All-Stars to go over and raise money. He persuaded us we should go out. We raised the largest amount the Cardinal Cushing organisation had ever raised by playing the three matches and three functions.

  Sadly, he’s dead now, so I can probably name Seán Purcell, who for my money was one of the greatest footballers in GAA history, in the following anecdote. On the first night of the tour he had one too many drinks after the flights. He wasn’t the only one, but he was fairly well gone.

  ‘Now, remember we have training in the morning,’ I said, joking. These guys were jetlagged after our long journey and there’s me telling them they had training in the park at nine o’clock the next morning.

  Anyway Seán, who could hardly tell you his name at that stage, was the first man down the next morning in the lobby of the hotel. I said to myself, ‘Now that shows discipline!’ It was the discipline of top-level sportspeople who took me at my word and said, ‘I must show by example.’ This was about fifteen years after Seán was at his peak in 1956, but he still thought it worth his while, and that has always impressed me.

  We’ve been fortunate with the calibre of people who got involved in the All-Stars at one time or another down through the years. I won’t be able to mention them all, but the names that immediately jump to mind include Brendan Bowyer, Tom Dunphy, Dickie Rock, Larry Cunningham, Gene Stuart, the Indians, Doc Carroll, Dermot O’Brien, Jimmy Keaveney, Paddy Cullen, Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin and Seán Doherty.

  There was also Jack O’Shea, who was probably one of the four greatest Kerry midfield players in my opinion (the others being Paddy Kennedy, Mick O’Connell and Darragh Ó Sé). Paddy Kennedy played with me in the All-Stars and then refereed some games for us. Mick O’Connell was an honorary captain on a few occasions.

  But one name that always jumps to my mind is that of the legendary Cork hurler Christy Ring. We were in Hartford one day and we were playing in a field outside the city, rather than a stadium. We were playing against a New York and Hartford selection. Before our game there was a softball game on, and the lads decided that Christy would be good at it and wanted him to have a go. Christy wasn’t to be found, because he was away off at the far side of the field, hiding behind a tree but watching the game. One of the lads said, ‘Sure he’ll come over for you, Jimmy.’

  I toddled over to Christy. ‘The lads want you to have a go at this softball, Christy.’

  ‘Do you want me to have a go at it?’

  ‘Yes, Christy.’

  ‘All right so.’

  And we went back over.

  ‘Give me that there what-do-you-call-it,’ he said, knowing damn well what it’s called. ‘Is that a bat or a stick, or what do you call it?’

  ‘A bat.’

  ‘All right. Thank you. Now do you hold it like this or do you hold it like this?’

  They were all questions he knew the answers to, because he had been watching the game.

  Then he said, ‘Now, who’s your best pitcher?’

  ‘Billy Kyle Junior.’

  So, Christy asked them to bring Billy Kyle out. This young fellow of about nineteen came out and pitched for an underhand softball. Christy hit it and it went over the wall and down the motorway and kept going until it was out of sight.

  ‘That’s a home run now, isn’t it?’ Christy said. Then he dropped the bat and nonchalantly walked away.

  That’s the kind of man he was: he was only interested in perfection. Late in life he took up squash and became Munster champion though he had never played the game before. Very often he would ask you leading questions, such as, ‘You were good on Saturday.’

  ‘Thanks, Christy.’

  ‘Who was the best player on the field?’

  There’s no definitive answer to that, is there, unless it’s Ronaldo or Pelé! ‘Well, I suppose, taking everything into account, Lindsay in defence.’

  ‘You’re a man who knows something about it,’ he would reply, which meant that he agreed with me. Then he would go through the whole rigmarole of why that man was the best.

  Christy was a winner all the way. He loved winning, and he knew how to win. He would say to you—we used a roll-on, roll-off system and I was playing on the field—‘Did you find it yet, Jimmy?’

  ‘What’s that, Christy?’

  ‘The thing you’re looking for. You’re running around the same spot, Jimmy. You haven’t moved out of it.’

  That was his way of getting at me because I was standing in the same spot.

  ‘Did you lose your contact lenses?’

  ‘No, Christy.’

  ‘Well, let me out there and I’ll have a look for you.’

  So I would go off and he would come on. Jaysus, he went mad and scored a goal and a couple of points and then went back off again. You couldn’t tire him out. At this time he was in his fifties.

  Christy was a very, very special person. He died only eight years after this trip. He was a genius of a man.

  After participating in the event for the Cardinal Cushing charity we decided to treat ourselves and we went to Las Vegas to do a show in the Gold Coast Hotel, which is just off the ‘Strip’. We were to fly from New York to Las Vegas. As the plane ascended, Jody Sheridan, from Granard, Co. Longford, began to sing. He knew a lot of songs, so we asked him for ‘The Gallant John Joe’. He finished just as we got into Las Vegas, having sung for six straight hours. I feel that really sums up the sort of thing the All-Stars was about.

  On another flight the great trad fiddle-player Seán Maguire, and musicians such as Nita Norry and Dermot O’Brien, started a jam session when they discovered there was a piano bar on the plane. It ended up with the whole plane doing a conga up and down the aisle, with O’Brien and Maguire up front with the accordion and fiddle. This went on until we were flying into San Francisco and the pilot was telling us, ‘I know it’s terrific, I can hear it from here, but you’ll have to take your seats, as we’re coming in to land.’

  We said, ‘All right, we’ll sit down,’ but then suddenly they decided to belt out one more tune, and the pilot had to wait for us.

  The stewards couldn’t get over it all: they enjoyed watching all us Irish men dancing up and down the aisles. When we were getting off the plane they asked, ‘When are you guys travelling home? Will you be travelling with American Airlines again?’ It was obvious that they were hoping for a repeat performance. On the way back they had the red carpet rolled out for us and we were upgraded and given the full treatment. But we didn’t dance in the aisles on the way back.

  We always had a priest with us, and he would say Mass every morning. One morning Jimmy Keaveney, who played for St Vincent’s and Dublin, was missing from the morning Mass in Father Brian D’Arcy’s room, so they sent me off to look for him. I went around the hotel and when I found him I told him I’d been sent down to get him. He didn’t really want to go back to the Mass but I persuaded him, and up he came back, huffing and blowing. During the Mass, Father D’Arcy would always ask if anyone had anything they would like to pray for or to say.
Jimmy pipes up: ‘I have something to say, father. I’ve never been to so many bleedin’ Masses in me life. If I die this minute I’ll go straight through the fuckin’ roof, with clothes and all on!’

  Everyone just laughed—including Father D’Arcy.

  Before we got to Las Vegas we had arranged with the hotel that we could use the house band’s musical equipment, because we hadn’t brought ours with us, as nobody wanted to be lugging this stuff all over America. But what we didn’t know was that the house band had another show that night; and when we were up on stage I noticed that, bit by bit, the equipment was disappearing. Then they came out and took the piano away. We looked at them and said, ‘You can’t do that!’ Of course they replied that it was theirs, and they had to go to another gig.

  We still had Mickey O’Neill—the Lord have mercy on him—on the drums; and then they took away the high hat, then they took the snare drum, and he was eventually left with nothing, just sitting on the stage with the two sticks. Then the fellow came up and took the two sticks out of his hand and left.

  They continued to wheel stuff away in mid-performance, and then they began taking the guitars, and then the amps, and we were left with fellows on the stage with no instruments. ‘Bloody hell! What do we do now?’

  ‘Keep going—keep singing,’ I urged them, because I could sense that the audience were on our side. But it has to be the first and only time I have seen a band disappear on stage.

  ——

  I was coming back from an All-Stars match one night in the early hours of the morning, probably about three o’clock, in the car with Gerry O’Byrne, a former Kerry footballer, and Paddy Harrington, a Cork all-Ireland footballer who was also the father of one of Ireland’s best golfers ever, Pádraig. The talk in the car turned to who was the fastest runner among us. They asked me, ‘Are you fast?’

  ‘Sure I would have been fast when I was young.’

  ‘Would you be fast now?’

  ‘I reckon I’d be faster than either of you two,’ I said, cheekily.