When Tom Donoghue was twenty, he was playing and coaching the Galway Under-21 hurlers to their first All-Ireland title in 1972. A spell in Strawberry Hill teacher-training college had immersed him in different coaching cultures. By 1980, he was teaching in Tullamore and hurling with Offaly. McGee knew what O’Dwyer was doing in Killarney and was also intimately acquainted with Kevin Heffernan’s boot-camp regime in Parnell Park. Would Offaly take to the same stuff? They had to try.
McGee needed a hill. He drove around Offaly looking over gates into fields, trying to gauge the right gradient and underfoot conditions. One evening he pulled into the GAA club in Rhode and took in the sight of Clonin Hill. The field stretched uphill for four hundred yards before suddenly steepening halfway up into an almost vertical climb. This would be their Calvary.
A softer approach would be needed to ease the players through the hardship McGee had planned for them. Where his manner was tough, Donoghue was gentle. He had an easy sense of humour, and as an Offaly hurler he was instantly recognisable to them all. After five years under McGee, Donoghue could help freshen the players’ bodies, and their minds.
Once summer came, Offaly were playing with a new confidence and finding new players to fill some troubling gaps. The week before the Leinster football final against Laois, Padraic Dunne came home late to Portarlington from training one night, and quietly let himself into the house. All week Offaly had raged with rumour. The last spot at left-half-forward was between Tom Fitzpatrick and Vincent Henry. John Guinan, another new player, was in the mix, but everyone reckoned Fitzpatrick was a shoo-in. A few weeks before, McGee had arranged a trial game and invited Dunne to play, but Dunne had a problem. He was working in a factory in Portarlington, and they needed him for an inter-firms soccer game. To the boys in the factory, there was no contest. Playing for Offaly wasn’t going to happen. This was real. Winning the soccer game meant something. Pointless trials didn’t.
But Dunne wanted to try. He agreed to play the first half of the soccer game and then head to the trial. By half-time the match was balanced on the edge. His father sat in the car with the motor running, ready to go. The boys from the factory pleaded with him to stay and not be fooling about. Instead, Dunne went. Now he had a shot at making the Leinster final.
For the previous few weeks he had travelled to training with Fitzpatrick. That evening as they went to Edenderry, Tom was nervous, but Dunne re-assured him. ‘Jesus, Tommy,’ he said, ‘it’s your position. Don’t worry about it.’
At six foot two inches and fourteen stones, Dunne promised to have the height and strength Offaly needed alongside Tomás O’Connor in the years to come. Dunne was cocky. He liked to hop balls and tug at people’s tails. After years of the same voices, Dunne’s humour swept through the dressing room like an air freshener. He was also obsessed with football and making it with Offaly. He hung out with the Connors. That was a good sign. At worst, McGee could make some kind of footballer out of him. At best, he could become one of the best Offaly ever had.
That night, Dunne crept into bed and turned the lights out. His father opened the door.
‘Well?’
‘Ah Jesus,’ said Dunne, ‘you won’t believe it. Terrible decision.’
‘Oh no. Who are they after picking now?’
‘It’s just unbelievable. I don’t know what they’re doing.’
And his father began dolefully listing players, like the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary.
‘No,’ replied his son. ‘They’re only after picking me.’
‘He got a bigger shock than I did,’ says Dunne. ‘I never minded. Sure, I was nineteen.’
Like Dunne, Offaly feared nothing now. Their squad was easily their strongest under McGee, which gave him room to start expanding their style. Brendan Lowry had been added to the panel at the start of the year having been reluctant to commit to the heavy training and relentless dedication required. He preferred playing soccer with Ferbane Town, but with his brother Sean in his ear and his third brother Michael on the team, he gradually yielded. Now, he helped form a spectacularly potent full-forward line with Matt Connor and Sean Lowry and after a year already stood on the brink of an All Star.
He enjoyed an almost telepathic relationship with Gerry Carroll from the beginning. Off the pitch they lived at opposite ends of the county and rarely met. On the field, their minds moved almost as one. When Lowry ran, Carroll knew where he needed to put the ball. As McGee preached the need for accurate passing, Lowry gave the players something other than Matt Connor to aim at. When delivering a ball into their forwards, Offaly now had a choice of players to aim for.
It was a thrilling combination. Leinster was Offaly’s to rule and with an All-Ireland semi-final against the Ulster champions to deal with, they could start seriously thinking about the All-Ireland final. With Dublin in pieces, Laois met Offaly in the Leinster final and were neatly despatched, while Down were smartly dealt with in the All-Ireland semi-final. Offaly were back in the final, but, with Kerry busy making history, their timing didn’t seem great.
On the other side of the draw Kerry’s dominance was total. In the All-Ireland semi-final, Mayo came to Croke Park with their first Connacht title for twelve years and fell in a heap at Kerry’s feet, losing by sixteen points. After the game Mick O’Dwyer stood in the middle of the dressing room and put context on the scale of the challenge Mayo had faced. ‘This is the greatest team of all time,’ he said, ‘and possibly the best we will see in our lifetime.’ The money for Australia was rolling in. September was Kerry’s to shape.
* * *
While Kerry’s season was tinged by the quest for four-in-a-row, Offaly was bordering on near delirium. A few weeks before the football final, Offaly hurlers beat Galway to claim the county’s first All-Ireland hurling title. The celebrations lasted all week and gently blended into the build-up to the football final.
The Tuesday night after the hurling final, the two hurlers, Liam Currams and Tom Donoghue, arrived late for football training and were greeted by applause. Currams had always felt more comfortable with the footballers. While the hurlers were largely reared in the country, most of the footballers were urban. They liked different music. The footballers were sharp dressers. While the hurlers enjoyed their few pints, a night out with the footballers always seemed more freewheeling to Currams. He could be himself more among them, and the footballers loved him.
Now they could provide him with a refuge from the madness outside. No player had ever won two senior All-Ireland medals in the same year. At twenty years of age, Currams was playing for a place in history.
McGee was worried about him. Currams was shy. He was more sensitive than the older players. He never needed minding on the team, and during McGee’s meetings Currams was frequently the butt of his most caustic remarks, but talking to papers and publicity wasn’t his natural thing. He simply wanted to play his matches and leave the rest after him. For the next few weeks, he’d need watching and protecting.
‘I really couldn’t handle it,’ he says. ‘But McGee screened all that for me. He’d only allow me to take so many phone calls. He’d tell me to watch out for certain individuals. He’d always read the articles I was interviewed for and if he saw something I was saying wrong, he’d always teach me not to do it that way.
‘He kept your two feet solid on the ground. Without him I wouldn’t have survived it. I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on the games. He allowed you to focus on the game and forget the hype.’
Aside from Currams, McGee had a headful of problems to worry about. In the All-Ireland semi-final against Down, Tomás O’Connor had dominated the skies against Liam Austin. As the days drained down to the final, O’Connor felt a surge of confidence running through him he never knew before. After years of pushing himself and fighting his doubts, he had arrived as a player. The All Star lay between himself and his marker Sean Walsh, but O’Connor was backing himself all the way.
Two weeks before the final, Offaly played a challe
nge game against Galway. As O’Connor took one ball and prepared to launch a long kick towards goal, his right knee suddenly gave way. In 1980 his knee had suffered some cartilage damage, but an operation had tidied that up. Now, it had returned with horrendous vengeance. It swelled up immediately, and O’Connor was carried off. A few days later, he went to meet Meath footballer Gerry McEntee, a specialist at the Mater Hospital. The x-rays were damning. His ligaments were damaged and a piece of bone was chipped off the top of his leg. The area around the knee was bulging with fluid.
The prognosis was bad. First a bandage would be applied from his foot to his knee. After five weeks, he could begin to use light weights to strengthen his knee. Two weeks later, light jogging. O’Connor looked at McEntee.
‘Gerry,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I want to hear.’
He had the fluid drained from the knee, and went home crippled. Then, another pillar of McGee’s team came crashing down.
On a hot summer’s afternoon, Johnny Mooney was on the bog near the old dormant volcano of Croghan Hill, loading turf on to a trailer. As he climbed on top of the pile to lay the final sods, the drawbar of the trailer that was connected to the tractor broke. Mooney stumbled and fell from the trailer, hitting the ground with a sickening thud. His knees were cut open. Blood was seeping from his head, but the greatest pain came from his shoulder. It was broken.
‘I knew when I fell,’ he says, ‘that I was in big trouble.’
It was later that evening when selector Paddy Fenlon rang McGee in Aughnacliffe with news of Mooney.
‘Well, that’s fucking that,’ replied McGee.
The guts had been ripped from McGee’s team. He needed to find a new centrefield pairing, but resources were thin. At best, he reckoned he might squeeze a half each from Mooney and O’Connor.
On the morning of the game, Tomás O’Connor went for a fitness test in Belfield. McGee threw a few balls into the air and O’Connor deliberately leapt off his left foot to camouflage the state of his right knee.
‘I convinced myself I was right,’ says O’Connor, ‘but I couldn’t even straighten my leg. Even running around before the game, my knee used lock a bit, then the fluid would clear out and the leg would straighten. I was thinking: once the ball is thrown in here, I’ll be fine.’
That morning as Padraic Dunne stepped out from the cheering supporters on the platform and on to the train in Portarlington, he took everything in: the fresh seats, the faint smell of diesel from the engine, the puffs of steam from the vents as the train pulled out for Dublin. He had never ridden a train before.
Pat Fitzgerald pulled up in the station having driven from Newbridge with a hollow grumble in his guts. Having calculated the dietary requirements of the day against the nerves gnawing through the lining of his stomach, he hadn’t eaten all morning and didn’t think he would all day.
Mooney was on the train with his shoulder strapped up and Tomás O’Connor making himself believe his knee would last the day against Sean Walsh. The team was quivering with nerves. McGee’s plans were teetering on the brink of collapse.
He tried to make do. Tomás O’Connor would start against Sean Walsh, with Johnny Mooney replacing him at half-time. Wing-forward Aidan O’Halloran would revert to defence to try and disrupt Kerry’s flowing movement.
‘They were such an awesome team you couldn’t go in with the blasé notion that we won’t worry about the other crowd,’ says McGee. ‘It’d be absolutely ludicrous.’ It was a gameplan based on containment. Offaly weren’t set up to take Kerry on, but to stop them.
6 THE KINGS OF SEPTEMBER
Kerry’s Saturday night in Malahide appeared to pass off quietly and peacefully, but Mick O’Dwyer’s mind was tormented.
It was Spillane.
O’Dwyer never publicly listed his players in order of importance, but the others always sensed he valued Pat Spillane most of all. Football was Spillane’s life. He was utterly certain about his own ability and a sense of destiny had already attached itself to him as a child. The night Offaly crushed Kerry in the 1972 All-Ireland final he had cavorted with Páidí Ó Sé around Croke Park when they were two pupils from St Brendan’s, Killarney. His bloodlines were impeccable, flowing back to the great Lyne dynasty on his mother’s side that provided Ted, Denny Jackie and Michael to Kerry teams over three decades from the thirties to the fifties and won All-Ireland medals as minors, juniors and seniors. By the end of their own careers with Kerry, Pat and his brothers, Mike and Tom, would bring home nineteen All-Ireland senior medals, and Pat would join the small handful with a record eight.
His father, Tom, had won an All-Ireland junior medal with Kerry and died as a young man, leaving his wife with a pub in Templenoe and a young family to rear. Life had hardened them at a young age, but their mother always allowed them time for football. That was their escape.
‘One Whit weekend, which is the busiest weekend of the year in Kenmare,’ says Tom Spillane, ‘we left with people hanging off the rafters to play some challenge against Laois in a place in west Limerick called Ballyhahill. We drove up a height until we were almost overlooking the Shannon. With the mist on the pitch I didn’t think there’d be a game. They sent down a second team. And I thought of it afterwards: we busting our guts to go up there and our poor mother and sister behind at home and the place lifting with people, to go up and play an oul’ tournament game against a shadow Laois team. It wasn’t important.’
In a team of stars, Pat was among the brightest in a glittering sky. His fitness levels were phenomenally high. His leg muscles were savagely strong, yet he could sprint like a hare. Before every game, Spillane would find a quiet moment, close his eyes, and watch a reel of plays and moments from the game to come. He visualised himself catching, kicking, tackling, scoring. Winning.
Maybe O’Dwyer saw something of himself in Spillane. He couldn’t handle him the same way as everyone else, and Spillane’s teammates knew that too. He needed to be indulged. He was allowed roam and gather ball. It made space for Egan, Sheehy and Liston in attack, and satisfied Spillane’s restless nature. The joke among the boys was there was never such a thing as a one–two with Spillane, but a one–one. Yet, he was an example too. When the Kerry boys arrived in Killarney for training, Spillane was usually there, kicking points, with a patient from nearby St Finan’s hospital booting the ball back to him.
He honed his own style constantly. When he received the ball, he often waited for his opponent to come right up against him, before digging his left heel into the ground and pivoting to the right, pushing off his left leg but twisting his knee into an awkward angle while applying immense force to the joint. His ability to twist and turn away from opponents in a tight spot abused his leg joints to a dangerous degree. That August he finally pushed too far.
A week after Kerry had annihilated Mayo in the 1981 All-Ireland semi-final, Spillane lined out for Templenoe in a club game against Waterville. At one point he sprinted for a ball, turned sharply and felt something in his knee snap. The pain shot through his leg. He was carried off the field, but eventually the pain subsided. That night he numbed the remaining pangs with beer and went to the Fleadh Ceoil in Kilgarvan where he danced the Siege of Ennis, unaware that only some tenuous strands of muscle were holding his knee together. The following day, Spillane could barely put his leg under him.
‘The pain was worse than anything I’d ever experienced. Savage, savage pain. I’d broken fingers, but it was the first serious injury I’d ever had. No one could really understand it. My muscles were very strong. Any test done by the physio didn’t show anything up.’
By the weekend of the All-Ireland final, injuries were worrying Kerry. For a brief few days four-in-a-row seemed in jeopardy. Mikey Sheehy’s instep had been aching him for a while and the team for the final was released with two vacancies. The reporters reckoned Spillane was 50-50, but as O’Dwyer gathered his players on the beach in Malahide he was determined they would sleep soundly.
‘The team talk that ni
ght was as if I was playing,’ says Spillane. ‘I knew I was codding them. The temptation was certainly great. Sportspeople by their nature are selfish, but the team ethos was very much there. I knew I’d pulled a fast one on Dwyer and the doctor. But I did another little session on my own on the Sunday morning and I knew goddamn well. I was honest enough and said no. I wouldn’t play.’
The following day Sheehy’s foot was numbed with painkilling injections, and Spillane was withdrawn with Tommy Doyle coming in at left-half-forward. But as Kerry lined out for the team photograph, the players beckoned Spillane from the dug-out to join them. In years to come some of the bridges that linked Spillane to his teammates would be incinerated by the flames of his criticisms as a pundit, and even in 1981 you needed to know how to take him – but every family has one; they still loved him then.
‘You’ll go through all the little things in life that cling to you from football,’ says Spillane. ‘That running across the field for that picture was humbling. It really was. Coming on in the last five minutes. It’s only really in subsequent years it hit me, because there’s only a few of us that played in all eight All-Ireland finals. It was really nice.’
By then, Kerry had the game locked up and secured. McGee’s decision to withdraw Aidan O’Halloran to screen in front of the defence only allowed Páidí Ó Sé transplant himself into Kerry’s attack and decorate his finest performance in an All-Ireland final with three points. When Offaly did get on the ball, their kicking and passing was imprecise. To beat Kerry, Offaly needed to exceed every level they had reached in the previous three years. They never stood a chance.
Brendan Lowry didn’t leave a mark on Jimmy Deenihan. Tim Kennelly dominated Gerry Carroll at centre-back and delivered a towering performance. McGee’s plan to start Tomás O’Connor and bring Johnny Mooney in at half-time failed, and Sean Walsh lorded the game at centrefield. At one point during the game O’Connor chased a ball towards the sideline, and sensed Walsh charging towards him. All the worries about his knee, Walsh and the match crossed paths in one jarring moment.
Kings of September Page 7