Kings of September

by Michael Foley

  Nothing would be left to chance. Before Offaly travelled, McGee went to the county board insisting the players be transported to Ennis on Saturday and booked into the best hotel in town. When the Offaly footballers arrived anywhere, they needed to make a statement. Their visit deserved the trappings of an occasion. He wanted people to turn their heads, and the players to notice them looking. Their confidence needed building up. A little attention was a good start.

  The following morning, McGee put another idea into motion: a pre-match meal. As the players came down for breakfast, McGee told them they wouldn’t be eating until midday. Stomachs grumbled and players followed suit. The pre-match meals finally arrived: twenty plates of steak, nothing else. The players turned militant. Chips were demanded. At the risk of prompting a revolt, McGee agreed. A carefully proportioned dietary plan had now turned into a slap-up feed. With a hefty dinner threatening to burst the buttons on their trousers, the players piled into the team bus and headed for west Clare. As Clare battered Offaly into the mud, the steak sat in their guts like a cannonball. In the end, Offaly survived their stitches and scraped home. McGee had more lessons put away.

  His first Leinster championship drew Offaly against Wexford, but McGee was already looking through the draw for Dublin. Wexford, he reckoned, was a game to cruise through. Instead, Offaly were sunk before they even left port. McGee had begun the season without goalkeeper Martin Furlong and would suffer for his absence. He had kept goal for Offaly for three All-Ireland titles – their first minor title in 1964 and their two senior titles in 1971 and 1972 – but he was out of form. Offaly paid a heavy price for his decline. Wexford hit three goals inside the first fifteen minutes and by the time Offaly recovered their bearings the game was gone from them. It finished 4-4 to 1-12. The result prompted uproar. Dropping some All-Ireland medal winners had been difficult politically, and without good results McGee was playing with fire.

  PJ Mahon was secretary of Walsh Island, and one evening at the cattle mart in Tullamore told him all he needed to know about McGee’s future. The place seethed with talk of a coup. But Mahon knew the players had other ideas. They knew McGee was different. Each club sent two delegates to the monthly county board meeting and Mahon invited Richie Connor to fill one of Walsh Island’s berths. At the meeting, Connor looked around a room filled with strange faces. Some he had never seen at a game. When they spoke he could hardly believe what he was hearing. Eugene McGee, they said, hadn’t won anything serious in footballing terms. He had no background in football. And, worst of all, he was from Longford.

  ‘Are there not great men in Offaly that could do the job?’ asked one delegate.

  ‘I agree with the previous speaker,’ said another. ‘We’re expecting a man from Longford to do the business for us. Sure, Longford have never won anything.’

  Connor quietly waited his turn. When it came, he needed to be strong. ‘It wasn’t Eugene McGee that lost the match,’ he said. ‘It was the players. As a player I couldn’t fault the preparation. It wasn’t a case of Eugene McGee letting us down, as us letting him down. As a team, we’d be anxious to put things right.’

  The matter was put to the floor for a vote. McGee survived, but he needed something to happen the following summer. Offaly needed to beat Dublin.

  * * *

  In his years with UCD, McGee had fought battles in the Dublin club championship that left him scarred and battered, but ultimately they never broke him. Few clubs cared for UCD and fewer still chose to disguise their hatred. In the fifties, Kevin Heffernan had led a generation of St Vincent’s players to form the core of a great Dublin team and re-energise football in the city. Now Heffernan was busy revolutionising Dublin again as coach, but he always had time for Vincent’s. In McGee and UCD, he saw a pernicious influence that must be stopped. McGee was bad for Dublin football.

  ‘Vincent’s hated McGee with a vengeance,’ says John O’Keeffe, centrefield for UCD. ‘It was deep, deep, deep.’ For successive county finals, McGee stalked Heffernan along the line and his star-laden team frequently outshone Vincent’s. It drove Heffernan crazy. Sometimes his team followed suit.

  In 1972, Vincent’s met UCD in the county final for the first time. That was the spark. The game was a war. Two players were sent off, but the battle knew no limits. One Dublin official claimed he had to leave Parnell Park after fifteen minutes, so appalling was the violence on show.

  ‘With about five minutes left I looked over and I saw a free-for-all between the two benches,’ says O’Keeffe. ‘The two sets of subs had a go off each other. But the referee was very sensible, he just let the game run out. It was an effort by Vincent’s to get the game abandoned; they were so sore over it.’

  The teams met in seven consecutive championships from 1970, including five finals. In 1974 UCD were forced to give a walkover when the club championship was suspiciously scheduled while the students were sitting exams. Now, with Heffernan and Dublin in their pomp, McGee returned to plague him with Offaly, looking for a way to take them down.

  ‘I knew Dublin inside out,’ he says. ‘I was the worst person in Ireland, as far as Dublin were concerned, to get the Offaly job. I had walked around Parnell Park behind Heffernan for so many county finals. There was nothing about Dublin football I didn’t know.’

  Before he could figure a way to take down Dublin, he had to figure out his own team. He needed to find a way into the players’ heads like he did with UCD. If McGee wished to talk to the players in UCD, they were easy to find on campus or around town. But the only time McGee saw the Offaly players was at training. McGee would have to go to them.

  He hit the road, and visited players at home. He looked around and took the atmosphere in. Did his players have the right kind of background to make it? Did they have a stable home? Were there problems he needed to know about? Was there the required element of steel in their bloodlines to survive championship football? Did they need loving or pushing?

  One night he landed in Ferbane looking for Sean Lowry, stayed up chatting all night and slept in Lowry’s spare room. The following morning when Lowry got up, McGee was gone. ‘You could have a great old chat with McGee,’ says Sean Lowry, ‘but you’d never feel you’d got inside him. There was a bit of mystery about him that way too.’

  The players were all learning about his quirks and his talents. Although he could go months without speaking directly to some of them, they never felt left out. McGee loved meetings. All the analysis and thought he applied to each opposition were distilled into meetings that could stretch deep into the night. The night before a championship game was McGee’s greatest stage. The atmosphere was almost always perfectly pitched, balanced between raw passion and the cold steel of logic.

  He could talk for two hours and lose no one. He weaved his dry humour through his analysis of the opposition and his own team. Just as with UCD, Offaly were furnished with exhaustive breakdowns of the opposition. And each player received a small slip of paper with a short, typed paragraph detailing their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.

  ‘With the best will in the world,’ says McGee, ‘players take in about ten percent of what is said to them. This they could look at ten times and concentrate on it. If there was anything they disagreed with, they could check it with me. It meant if their nerves were really at them, they could look at it and it’d bring them back to basics.’

  He was drawn to players like Lowry. And Richie. He knew Kevin Kilmurray from UCD and when Martin Furlong returned from his absence, McGee used him, too. He asked them about players in Offaly, and about clubs. Who were the people who ran Offaly GAA? What clubs were strong politically? Offaly was an alien county to him, but he was learning.

  McGee’s visits and the detail of his training methods confirmed his commitment to the players, but they still found it hard to find a way through to him. Making him laugh was almost impossible. An entire season could go by for some players without a word from McGee, then the phone call might come, or a visit in the night. Some p
layers were harder than others to figure out.

  ‘At the time,’ says Richie Connor, ‘league matches meant pints. You played your league match, then you went in and drank the evening away. It was nothing to go in and drink eight or ten pints. You’d go in and get your meal, have a few drinks and often a few pints would lead to a few more. McGee would be there drinking his bottle of Carlsberg. He wasn’t a drinker, but it was part of the culture.

  ‘Fellas like Gerry Carroll or Johnny Mooney – the only time he’d have talked to them on a serious level was over a few drinks. And they could talk to him. There would’ve been general respect for him in the team, but that drinking thing in the early years was very important to bond with the players and get their confidence.’

  To have any hope of catching Dublin, he needed that, but it wasn’t always easy. He had thrown the reins around the team, but some of the players were wild, untameable. Keeping the loosest horses in line would become his greatest challenge.

  * * *

  Everybody loved Johnny Mooney. Johnny was classy. He wore snappy suits. He never got nervous before games and wafted around the dressing room, scenting of calm and confidence. When he played at centrefield, he had the power to reach for any ball he deigned to leap for. He could kick off both feet. He was powerful, yet his footwork was nimble enough to allow him glide past opponents without any apparent increase in speed. At his peak, he was untouchable. But there was a devil in him, too.

  Training could be a problem. Winter training was an almost insurmountable barrier. Some evenings when a player would call to his house to collect him for training, his mother would stand at the front door explaining how she hadn’t seen him all evening, while Mooney headed out the back. When McGee arrived as trainer, his attention to detail and his innovative thinking appealed to Mooney, but his dry personality sometimes irritated him. Months could pass without a word between them. Then, Mooney could disappear.

  ‘We had a stormy relationship,’ says Mooney. ‘I was a wild young lad. Not in a bad way, but I would’ve been a wild one. But I always loved playing with Offaly and I don’t believe I ever let Offaly down in a competitive game. But we had our differences. We had a lot of differences.

  ‘I went missing at times. I was having a good life, but we always got it sorted out. We always had a relationship, in that he knew what he wanted and I knew what I wanted, and both included the common good of Offaly.’

  The National League was an annual battleground. After a game, most of the players would head out for the night. Sundays could drift into Mondays, sometimes Tuesday. If they missed training that evening, McGee was on their trail. Over the years Mooney’s time on the League panels was short and fleetingly sweet.

  ‘I didn’t particularly mind because I didn’t like playing in the muck and gutter. It suited everybody. You’d be training with the club, you’d play well, then you’d get the recall. It’s easy to look back and say it was all planned, but it wasn’t. I was only nineteen. Looking back in hindsight you’d say: Jesus look at this fella. But that’s not how it was.’

  One evening McGee called him over during a training session and asked where he had been the previous night. Mooney protested his innocence, insisted there was a perfectly simple explanation for his absence.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said McGee. ‘Well look me in the eye and tell me.’

  ‘How can I?’ replied Mooney, ‘when you’re always looking at the ground?’

  Being dropped gave Mooney the anger to force his way back.

  ‘Johnny Mooney,’ says McGee, ‘was impossible to manage.’ But McGee also knew he couldn’t be without him. He knew the same about Gerry Carroll.

  People in Edenderry had waited for Gerry Carroll to grow into a great footballer since he was a kid, but plenty doubted him too. They remembered his father, Christy, as a beautiful footballer. The older followers always said Christy was ahead of his time. He was small, but in an era of mountainously proportioned men, Christy had survived and prospered.

  Christy lived life his way, and applied the same values to football. He liked to shoot pheasants. Offaly might be training on a particular evening, but if the mood took him, Carroll might head into the country with his shotgun instead. He carried Offaly to Leinster finals when they tended to lose them, but when they finally started winning, Christy was losing interest.

  He was there when Offaly finally won a Leinster title in 1961, but he let football go soon afterwards. Christy cast a long shadow that Gerry always found hard to escape, but people were missing the precious detail that made Christy’s son special. Sometimes he might be standing thirty yards from goal and miss, but he could nail a moving target from forty yards. Full-forwards loved him. His passing was immaculate and clean. Years later, opticians would tell him his eyesight was exceptional for a man in his fifties. The secret, he reckoned, was twenty years spent focusing on the horizon, looking for a spare man.

  At the beginning, he and McGee were close. He liked McGee’s modernist approach. The meetings and the slips of paper appealed to him, and every note filled him with confidence. ‘It made me think: This guy [his opponent] can’t play me. If he likes to run upfield all the time, the first ball I’m going to get I’ll hit it over the bar and the pressure will be on him.’

  Carroll was young and precocious. When the boys went out on a Sunday night after league games, Carroll and Mooney were the ones they watched. From their adventures would pour a fountain of stories to keep the banter crackling along the following week. With Matt Connor in tow, Sunday nights were their break from the constraints imposed by football. They needed those nights, but sometimes it got them in trouble.

  Carroll’s straight talking often chafed with McGee and they had their scrapes. ‘There was good times and bad times,’ says Carroll. ‘I think I had a good relationship with him. The thing about it was I wouldn’t hide my feelings. If I was pissed off, he’d know.’

  One spring evening Carroll had his fill of McGee’s manner and his training. He took his grievances to McGee, and a row broke out. The following weekend the team was travelling to Tralee to play Kerry, but when the bus arrived Carroll wasn’t there. Offaly travelled, and were narrowly beaten.

  ‘At the time I did it because I thought I was right,’ Carroll says, ‘but I think a lot of players were pissed off with me. I remember Richie Connor saying years later: “If that fucker hadn’t decided to go home, we’d probably have won that game.” When I thought of it that way, it was probably wrong – then I regret doing it. But I don’t regret doing it for the reason I did it.’

  He clung to Sean Lowry from the beginning. Where Carroll reckoned McGee was merciless with his criticism and impatient with his demands, Lowry knew when to clap him on the back. When McGee and Carroll began to flirt with all-out war, Lowry was the peace-broker.

  ‘He respected my game and made me feel good about my game. Seanie would take me aside and tell me how vital I was to the team and stuff like that. It was nice to hear those things. That would make me feel good.’

  A shared aim kept them all together. Mooney and Carroll wanted to be winners. For Offaly to be successful, McGee needed them around. They learned to endure one another.

  * * *

  As 1978 began, McGee continued ripping out the wiring and renovating his team, but it badly needed some load-bearing elements. In 1976 Tomás O’Connor was a scraggly young teenager with a tousled mop of blond hair that had caught McGee’s eye with Offaly minors. That year Walsh Island reached the county senior final against Ferbane. These games were no place for quiet men, but Walsh Island were ready to take a chance with O’Connor.

  They landed him in at centrefield. It would be his first senior game for Walsh Island, and after years in defence, his first as a centrefielder. Before the game began, O’Connor made a promise: leave nothing behind; empty every drop of effort onto the field. He flung himself into the game against Ferbane’s Sean Lowry, survived the fights that raged throughout and dominated the middle. Walsh Island won the county
title, and would lose just one championship match over the following seven years.

  In the years after 1976, O’Connor became a solid, marking centrefielder, obsessed by the business of stopping his opponent. He had played under-14 football for Offaly with Johnny Mooney and Gerry Carroll, but they were the names that commanded attention even then. Tomás was in the supporting cast, and never felt he could exceed that role.

  Football was always a trial for him. He tortured himself when his marker got the ball. All the good things he would do in a game were clouded by his innate pessimism. If his marker escaped with the ball, O’Connor fretted about staying on the field. He terrorised himself into becoming a better footballer, but, in McGee’s mind, O’Connor was precisely what he needed.

  His bloodlines confirmed McGee’s faith in him. In the thirties his father, Tommy, had joined their neighbour Bill Mulhall as the first Offaly players selected for Leinster. They were tough footballers, hardened by their life outside the game. When Tommy O’Connor first married, he settled in Sallins, Co Kildare, twenty-six miles from Walsh Island. Every morning he cycled the distance to the site of his new house back in Walsh Island, and cycled home again every evening after a day’s building. He footed turf for Bord na Móna and filled the break times with football matches.

  Tommy’s brother, Jim, played football for Offaly too and the boys grew up close. When they took wives, they married two Bryan sisters from nearby, and settled their families within a half mile of each other in Walsh Island. They were rooted in football, and Walsh Island. Years later, when Jim died, the locals warmly reckoned that the night Jim spent in Walsh Island church after being waked was the first he had spent away from home.

  Tommy and Jim travelled together to watch Offaly play. The Sunday mornings would begin with a seven-mile cycle to Mass in Portarlington. Having returned home for breakfast, they would set out for Croke Park. The same routine was observed religiously for years, and their stories of the epics they had witnessed kept the faith stout at home for generations.