Kings of September

by Michael Foley

  O’Dwyer’s attitude and ambition bucked against everything around him. He played his first game for Waterville in Croke Park, against St Sylvester’s of Malahide, after the club made arrangements to stage the game there with GAA general secretary Paddy O’Keeffe during his holidays in Waterville. The bar was set.

  He became the first player from Waterville to play with Kerry. When Waterville won their first South Kerry title in 1956 he was twenty years old and kicking the frees. Around the same time, Mick O’Connell was growing into his greatness on Valentia Island, and in time O’Dwyer coaxed him to play for Waterville when they were reaching county finals in the late sixties.

  By then, O’Dwyer was coach too. When Waterville won their first South Kerry title, their captain, Finbarr McAuliffe, had organised training for the team. It was a rare innovation, but this team had come like a comet. If they could help the tail streak across the sky for a little longer, they would. McAuliffe designed a brutal running course on the Lake Road out of town. It tested the players’ resilience but it hardened their legs and their minds. When they played the final, Cahirsiveen were run off the pitch. O’Dwyer had taken note.

  As the years went on, his store of information began to bulge. He listened to athletes who came to Waterville on holidays. He watched Australian Rules football. In the seventies he travelled to Manchester United’s training grounds for a look. He had his own running route around the outskirts of Waterville, out near his mother’s homeplace and back into town, that gave him time to work on his fitness and think. In the late sixties he would travel into Con Keating Park in Cahirsiveen to train with Mick O’Connell. They stood a few yards from each other and fired the ball with venom, always catching it in front of their bodies. For two hours their regime was ceaseless, relentless.

  By the end of 1974 O’Dwyer had retired and football was changing. But he was slow to follow. The classrooms of Strawberry Hill teacher training college in London were dotted with footballers who came home with their notebooks filled with new ideas. One of them, Kerryman Mickey Ned O’Sullivan, was the most radical evangelist. One day in 1975 O’Sullivan convinced O’Dwyer to accompany him to a GAA coaching course in Gormanston, County Meath. On the way home, O’Sullivan started on to O’Dwyer. O’Sullivan was Kerry captain that year. If he was to fulfil his ambition, Kerry needed a good trainer. Eventually he wore O’Dwyer down, and O’Sullivan sketched out a rough training schedule before O’Dwyer’s first session. It was the last time O’Dwyer turned to anyone.

  His regime was brutal. Laps accompanied sprints. Players looked after their own stretching requirements. O’Dwyer wanted them to run. To prove themselves. They played 11-a-side games with O’Dwyer as referee. He routinely swallowed the whistle, and the players battered each other, but O’Dwyer maintained control. It kept the players sharp, edgy.

  By the beginning of 1975 Ger O’Keeffe was in his early twenties with All-Ireland medals, National league titles and county championship medals already jangling in his pocket. He had played with O’Dwyer like the others. When he became manager, they were devoted to him.

  ‘I remember playing a game against Longford with Mick O’Dwyer and Mick O’Connell,’ says O’Keeffe. ‘Mick O’Connell was midfield and I was wing-back. The words from O’Connell were: “I’ll tell you when to jump.” These were our heroes. O’Connell. Dwyer.’

  ‘Dwyer wouldn’t bring us in till February,’ says Mikey Sheehy. ‘Maybe the odd couple of nights every so often. Then you’d meet a couple of fellas and they’d say, “Jesus, I’m dreading going in.” Every fella would say the same thing to the other guy: “Fuck it, I’m doing nothing.” And every fella would actually be out on Banna Strand. You went training to go training with Dwyer. You’d be tailed off if you didn’t. And no fella wanted that.’

  No team trained as hard or as often, but O’Dwyer knew when to slow down too. In Sheehy, Kerry possessed the most gifted forward in the country, but he often returned to training needing to shed a few pounds. When he did, O’Dwyer would work on his mind.

  ‘He’d tell you you’re going great. You’d be there after doing two hard nights and he’d say on the second night, “Lads, we’re getting there. We’ll do one hard, good session” and you’re dreading it. All of a sudden Dwyer comes in and says, “Okay, two laps of the field.” Then you did your own stretching. Next thing he’d organise a game of football.

  ‘To see the change in fellas! He was a psychologist. Now fellas start jumping. They’re on their toes all of a sudden. No fella’s stiff. No fella’s sore. All mad for ball.’

  The wire-to-wires went on. O’Dwyer raced his entire full-back line against each other. Tim Kennelly chased Páidí Ó Sé across the field. None of them wanted to be left behind. None of them wanted to be beaten. In an atmosphere of ferocious competition O’Dwyer moulded his team, kept them sharp, constantly hungry. When Kerry came home with the Sam Maguire cup in 1975, twenty-three fireworks exploded along the railtracks as their train rolled into Killarney, one firework for every All-Ireland title Kerry had won. On the platform in front of the Park Place hotel, Mick O’Dwyer proclaimed his team capable of winning ten All-Irelands. Five years later they had four already won – and years left in them if they could keep going.

  As 1980 began, it seemed there was nothing to stop them.

  * * *

  Sometimes, when Offaly were still labouring to pull themselves out of the muck against Clare or finally drive a wooden stake through Dublin in the Leinster championship, Eugene McGee would wonder what life was like beyond the brow of the hill. What would playing Kerry be like? League matches and challenge games against them had always ended with Martin Furlong complaining of an aching back from the amount of times he was forced to bend down and pick the ball from the net, but that was only shadow-boxing. How would they handle Offaly in Croke Park?

  The All-Ireland semi-final was McGee’s chance. Their brief shared history with Kerry had always been kind to Offaly. In 1972 they drew the All-Ireland final before Offaly inflicted the biggest defeat on Kerry in a final in the replay. They hadn’t met since, and they were both in a different place now. They trotted out that Sunday on to Croke Park with the sun beating down on a rock-hard pitch. In their royal blue jerseys, Kerry gleamed a Cadillac. Offaly looked gawky. They knew nothing of days like this. They were in for a world of learning.

  The game began at a blinding pace, and Kerry tried to blister Offaly early on, but Offaly held steady. Johnny Mooney had been moved from the middle to corner-forward and won plenty of ball close to goal. Matt Connor was dancing. He began the game having scored 3-22 out of Offaly’s total of 3-36 for the championship and although Kerry’s defence was mean, he jinked and dodged and twisted his marker, Mick Spillane, into a corkscrew. The ball landed in his hands twelve times during the game, and Matt ended the match with 2-9. Gerry Carroll rushed forward from centrefield to hit 2-1. Carroll and Connor shared all Offaly’s scores between them, and even without the assistance of anyone else, Offaly had accumulated 4-10. Problem was, Kerry hit 4-15.

  When Offaly hit a goal to pull themselves back into the game, Kerry smashed them with a wave of attacks. At half-time, Kerry led by 1-9 to 1-3. Minutes after half-time, Gerry Carroll hit a goal, but it only roused Kerry again. They hit three points in a few minutes, then Mikey Sheehy slotted home another goal. With fifteen minutes left they had stretched away by 3-14 to 2-6, but Connor and Carroll hit back again, and for a few minutes Kerry wobbled.

  Then Offaly ran out of steam. The following month Kerry won their third successive All-Ireland title against Roscommon in a poisonous game, but they never forgot Matt Connor and the sensation of Offaly briefly breathing fire on their necks. Offaly got close, but Kerry had swatted them away like a fly.

  ‘It was a completely ridiculous scoreline,’ says McGee. ‘They should have won by twelve points. We closed the gap at times, but it was completely false. Six of the goals were handpasses. Only two forwards scored for us. But I was able to manipulate that result. First
of all, we had scored more against them than anybody before in an All-Ireland semi-final. It was a great boost to say we could score 4-10 against Kerry. It was great entertainment, it looked fantastic. We were happy.’

  Offaly had their Leinster title, and the defeat to Kerry didn’t stain their year, but it still left a mark on McGee. His question had been ruthlessly answered.

  5 BELIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

  The evenings had lengthened and the cuckoo had returned to squat in the nests around Killarney as Mick O’Dwyer brought his players down to a quiet corner of Fitzgerald Stadium in early 1981. They stood in the shade of the stand and caught their breath. O’Dwyer had a question for them. ‘Lads. Where are we going this year?’

  The trip. While O’Dwyer’s torturous training was the stick, the winter trip was always the carrot dangling at the end. All-Star tours and trips to parade the Sam Maguire cup among emigrants had taken them to America. The previous year the cup had got lost on one trip, and Kerry had probably seen enough of the place for now. England had been well conquered over the years. The players needed something different. They were chasing four in a row. Only one Kerry team had ever reached that milestone and almost fifty years had passed since then. This was history. It needed marking with something special.

  Spain and other parts of Europe were mentioned. America again. Then Páidí Ó Sé grabbed the discussion by the throat. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said, ‘the only place to go is Australia!’

  The players laughed and shook their heads at Páidí. Always thinking big. Australia was a whole world away at a time when the price of filling a tank of petrol was enough to worry about. O’Dwyer left it with them, and the residue of Páidí’s wild notions drifted through their heads as they headed for home.

  Later that month, the team gathered in the Imperial hotel in Tralee to discuss their choice. Páidí’s idea was still rattling around, and beginning to gain some currency. The team were as famous as they were going to get. People loved them. O’Dwyer’s business brain told him their personalities and achievements made them an effortlessly marketable asset. If they needed money, surely people would donate.

  Australia was stuck in Páidí’s head. This time, he had come prepared.

  Tom McCarthy was born in Annascaul and had built his financial empire on hotels. He knew money and he loved football. Now he could mix both.

  ‘How much do ye need for Australia?’ he asked.

  The players reckoned IR£20,000.

  ‘Chicken feed,’ said McCarthy. ‘We’ll raise a lot more than that.’

  The committee set a target of IR£60,000 and sketched out an itinerary – a world tour. The team would travel to New York, San Francisco, all over Australia and back to Hawaii in a month. They started coming up with ideas. Aside from corporate and personal contributions, they would organise a competition to find a Kerry GAA Personality of the Year. An artist would be hired to paint a tribute to the team that had won four in a row.

  ‘In fairness, the lady did it from passport photos,’ says Pat Spillane. ‘But the trouble with passport photos is you don’t know whether the person is 6 foot 9 inches or 2 foot 1 inch! If you look at the picture, Ogie is the biggest in the painting and John O’Keeffe is one of the smallest. I remember my mother looking at it and she didn’t recognise Mick, her own son. Dwyer used say to take it in you had to hold it at a distance of a hundred yards.’

  Three weekends were organised in Ulster where Kerry played six games against northern opposition and left with the gate receipts. Everywhere they went the locals hailed them as gods. The lads stayed in their houses and lived among them. When Kerry took to the field they smashed the locals to pieces, just as their hosts would have wished. A show was the smallest courtesy Kerry could grant them.

  They played Down in the Burren. They travelled to Donegal. One weekend they travelled to Castleblayney to play Monaghan. Mick O’Dwyer knew Declan Loughman from his days booking acts for his dancehall in Waterville, and the entire Kerry team squeezed into Loughman’s house before popping across the road to annihilate Monaghan. After the matches, the polite rounds of tea and sandwiches were replaced by some raucous nights that left the locals bewildered.

  ‘The image they had of us was we’re fabulous athletes,’ says Spillane. ‘Suddenly we went up and we were drinking for Ireland. They couldn’t get over that, and still go out the following day and beat the living daylights out of whoever.’

  One night they played Tyrone in Carrickmore under lights. With no RUC barracks in the town, the pubs stayed open all night and the Kerry contingent made it worth their while. The following morning they headed for Dundalk to play Louth.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ says Spillane, ‘but if there was a breathalyser test on the way into the field seventy or eight percent of the Kerry team would have blown it sky-high. The only thing was, everybody went away happy. Louth went away from the match thinking they weren’t too far away.’

  The money rolled in. As McCarthy and his fundraising committee threw the nets out for more that summer, Kerry worked their way painlessly through the championship. The evening before the 1981 Munster final, Con Houlihan took his Evening Press readers back to another time and place. It was the 1945 Munster final between Kerry and Cork, when Con set off from home on his bicycle to Killarney to witness Kerry perform their annual ritual of removing Cork from the championship. It was a deadening state of affairs. Cork had won only one Munster title from the previous seventeen finals. They travelled to Killarney facing the All-Ireland champions as condemned men, and Con sensed nothing in the wind to change his mind.

  As the game began, Cork set about Kerry with abandon and never gave them a moment’s peace. By the end, Kerry were beaten ‘and Kerry people left Fitzgerald Stadium feeling as though they had seen a river flow uphill,’ wrote Houlihan.

  Along the way home, a fellow cyclist was grappling with what he had just witnessed. ‘Kerry will have to play better than that if they want to win the All-Ireland,’ he said. As far back as he could remember, entry into an All-Ireland semi-final for Kerry had always been a matter of course. Their dominance had been so unfettered, so utterly unrivalled, that losing a Munster title was a state of affairs that had never impinged on his wellbeing before.

  So it was in 1981. Seven years had passed since Cork’s last Munster title. Nothing suggested Cork had any trumps to play this time. The Tuesday night before the Munster final, Eugene McGee arrived in Killarney and witnessed the final nights in the torture chamber. The players sprinted across the field. Jimmy Deenihan led them out in his Adidas tracksuit top. Tom Spillane’s Derry jersey was tucked in behind him. John Egan was at his shoulder. Ger Power and Mikey Sheehy led the others home. The team was winding down, but the mood was dark with intensity. Cork in Killarney. That was enough. Along the sideline, McGee sidled up to Mick O’Dwyer.

  ‘I’m a strong believer in the group principle,’ O’Dwyer told McGee, ‘where a group of players come together and agree to work completely as a unit in all aspects of the game, but particularly training and preparation. Any player who shows himself unable to comply with that is a renegade as far as I’m concerned, and he’s finished. Discipline is the number one thing in football today. Without discipline the man in charge loses control and he is left with nothing. As you saw in training tonight, no player ever questions any of my decisions or comments.’

  McGee had spent his evening in the stand, listening. ‘The winners of this game on Sunday will have the All-Ireland wrapped up,’ said one observer. McGee sensed the same from the players. As O’Dwyer left the training field, a child from Armagh sought out his autograph. ‘We could be meeting you in the All-Ireland final,’ said O’Dwyer.

  After years of subjugation, Cork were growing weary of fighting back. In 1977 Kerry’s winning margin in the Munster final was 15 points. In 1978 it was 7. In 1979 and 1980 it was 10. A generation of Cork players had grown used to hearing Mick O’Dwyer proclaim them the second-best team in Ireland after each gam
e, and slowly it drained them of morale and hope.

  By 1981 Cork had given up on defeating Kerry by conventional means. As the game began, they switched their centrefield pairing, while in attack only their two wing-forwards remained in their original positions. They frantically shuffled their team around, trying to shift Kerrymen into positions of discomfort, but word of their plans had leaked into Kerry during the week, and suitable action had already been effected. With Cork’s plans for anarchy foiled, the final became a shambles.

  When Cork goalkeeper Billy Morgan was stretchered off seven minutes into the second half after colliding with Eoin ‘The Bomber’ Liston, Cork lost their spiritual leader. Once they got the scent, Kerry ate Cork alive. The crowd had begun to drift away midway through the second half, and by the end Kerry had skated home by 1-11 to 0-3. It was Cork’s lowest score in a Munster final since 1962. ‘Cork did not do justice to themselves,’ said O’Dwyer. ‘They tried to bamboozle us, but instead they bamboozled themselves. In a Munster final, you must go out with a practical plan, which they didn’t.’

  It was that simple, and that brutal. Even the most complex trickery hadn’t even caused Kerry to blink. In Munster and beyond, Kerry were untouchable. As he gathered his notes and left the press box, Micheál O’Hehir fell into conversation with a local journalist. ‘Thank God for hurling,’ said O’Hehir.

  * * *

  Back in the winter of 1980, Eugene McGee got to thinking about his old trips to Highbury and the notion of pre-season training. In 1980 most teams, including Kerry, shut down for the winter. To catch up with Kerry, McGee knew Offaly couldn’t afford to stop moving. When they met Kerry in 1980, no one had truly believed they could win. There was no precedent to sustain them. By the end of the game the players were exhausted. Whatever about their skill levels and their belief in themselves, fitness was something he could improve immediately. But he needed help.