Now, they all had the opportunity to do something special.
* * *
As the spring progressed, a combination of results suddenly put Kerry in with a chance of making the knock-out stages of the National League. To some in Kerry, winning a league was seen as a curse. Of their ten league titles, five had been followed by defeat in the championship, including four of their previous five titles. What made this league campaign more worrying was the presence of Cork.
At the end of February 1982, they sent out a near-championship strength team to meet Cork in Killarney, and staggered out of a bloody ambush. Eoin Liston was carried off while one massive fight drew players from every corner of the ground. ‘On the evidence of this meeting,’ reported theKerryman, ‘there has to be a lot of bad blood between them as the prospect of yet another Munster final meeting between them looms on the horizon. If they do meet, a strict and authoritative referee will be a priority.’
Kerry’s 0-5 to 0-4 win was a mixed blessing, sending them into a three-way play-off with Cork and Offaly for a place in the league quarter-final. The following weekend, they met again. This time Kerry were ready. Ogie Moran traded punches with Christy Ryan, Cork’s towering centre-back. Páidí Ó Sé and Jimmy Kerrigan laced into each other early on. Once Kerry had won the fights, they cruised home by seven points.
While Cork got past Offaly, Kerry eased past Derry in the quarter-finals, and even found time to give a crippled Pat Spillane a run out. His injury remained a mystery. When Kerry travelled to America with the All Stars in May, Spillane visited a knee specialist. Spillane was given two choices. Have an operation, or build up the muscles surrounding the knee to an extreme degree, allowing them to support the damaged muscles inside. The operation couldn’t be done in Ireland, and even if he did choose to get it done, it would take him a year to recover. In Spillane’s mind, no decision needed to be made.
‘It’s going to be the sort of injury that if I get a knock on the knee it will go,’ he said after the Derry game. ‘The more games I play the greater the risk of injury. So it is in my best interests that I play the least number of games possible. The number one aim would be winning five-in-a-row.’
A little makeshift gym was set up in a garage next door to the family pub, and Spillane hit the weights. He spent nights there, flinching as the mice that terrified him scurried about the weights and benches. It was a heroic effort, but even as he forced himself through his regime, he knew it was misguided.
‘I was doing everything assways. The weight-training programme was a makey-uppy sort of thing. I was going to a gym in Killarney as well. It was all over the shop. I didn’t know where I was. I’d say eighty percent I was doing from 1981 to 1982 was counterproductive.’
When Kerry resumed training in Killarney, he rejoined them, running in straight lines when he couldn’t twist and turn, and pushing himself through countless sets of push-ups and sit-ups. After a visit to Manchester United and raising funds in Britain and America, Kerry physio Owen McCrohan had invested in an interferential therapy machine which ran electrical current through Spillane’s knee to test its strength.
Even when Spillane could barely walk, his knee could withstand the maximum voltage the machine could muster, the force of the current causing his knee to bounce violently up and down on the table. Sometimes he might try and kick a few balls, but his knee never felt right to him. No one noticed his discomfort, and as the summer began and the doctors and specialists stopped prodding and probing, Spillane said nothing.
‘I was very good at camouflaging. I was getting away with it. I could run fast in straight lines. Once I didn’t get contact I was all right. When you’d be about to kick the ball, all your weight was down on your bad knee. That’s when the pain came. There was nothing to hold it up.
‘An operation was the last thing on my mind. The five-in-a-row wasn’t a big thing with us – but I suppose it was, in that you wanted to be part of it. And I clung in and clung in.’
The Saturday before Kerry’s league semi-final against Armagh, Spillane opted to chance a county league game for Templenoe against St Mary’s, Cahirsiveen. On one occasion, he jumped for the ball, and felt his knee buckle beneath him. He lay on the ground in agony. Deep within himself, behind the bulletproof confidence, he knew that no amount of willpower could heal this injury.
O’Dwyer still held on to him like a comfort blanket. Armagh had travelled to Killorglin before Christmas for a league match, bringing with them ten coaches and two special trains along with a convoy of cars to carry their 2,500 supporters. A goal in the last minute by Ciaran McGurk won the game and Armagh celebrated like it was September.
When they met again in Croke Park with the ground hardening and Kerry starting to motor towards the summer, Armagh didn’t have the gas to stay with them. Croke Park was stripped of its prestige that day, with no public address announcer, no band and no electronic scoreboard. Barely 11,000 turned up, and even with Spillane missing, John Egan absent, Páidí Ó Sé injured and among the subs and Mikey Sheehy’s ankle just out of plaster, Kerry had enough in their locker to win by fifteen points.
At a South Kerry Board meeting the following week, nearly six months of arguing over the captaincy came to an end. With neither Sneem nor St Mary’s yielding, the board decided to leave the decision to chance. Fifteen pieces of paper were placed in a hat. Thirteen were blank, the other two bore John Egan’s and Jack O’Shea’s names. Paddy Reidy was St Mary’s delegate at the meeting, but, as the local garda sergeant, he was deemed sufficiently above reproach to pull out the name. When he unfolded the piece of paper, it contained Egan’s name.
‘It was such a joke in the end,’ said Egan. ‘I was really disappointed over the captaincy. I know Jack O’Shea was riding high. I don’t know why it happened. I’m still disappointed over it.’
When he turned to face the public, Egan put his anger at the process aside. ‘It’s every player’s ambition to be captain of the Kerry team and the honour is very much greater when you’re going for the kind of record we’re chasing. It would be a marvellous way to finish up if we could pull off the five-in-a-row. If we put in as much effort as in other years, and there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t, I would be quite confident.’
Meanwhile Jack O’Shea let the moment quietly pass by without a care or a thought. The episode was half-forgotten, but the scars would stay with Egan.
With Cork in the league final, Kerry’s run into the championship was getting needlessly hectic. A good winter had renewed Cork’s courage. Kerry’s injuries were piling up, and they were forced to field a team without Sheehy, Spillane, Páidí Ó Sé, Ogie Moran, Paudie Lynch and with Tim Kennelly hobbling around on a heavily bandaged knee. Suddenly a simple league final had taken on real meaning.
The game was hard and unpleasant. Cork got in Kerry’s faces and never backed away, but with fifteen minutes left Kerry still led 0-10 to 0-6. It appeared that Cork had been quelled. Instead, they pushed forward and pinned Kerry back. No one could remember anything like this happening before. Kerry appeared to be sitting on their lead.
Pat Spillane was introduced for his brother Mick late-on, but the tide had turned and no amount of thrashing against the waves by Spillane could change that. In the end, Kerry hung on for a draw, 0-11 each.
A strange silence pervaded at the final whistle. People wondered at the events that had just unfolded. Where Kerry had always made a virtue of burying their opponents, this time they had inexplicably stopped. In the Kerry dressing room players shook their heads and smiled. ‘Even when we were four points ahead, they refused to give in,’ said Sean Walsh afterwards. ‘They were even cocky as the second half wore on.’
The following Friday, Kerry headed on the All-Star trip to America with the lessons of the previous Sunday barely digested. Up in Aughnacliffe, Eugene McGee was thinking. Had Cork just exposed a chink?
10 THE EPIC STORY OF ROCKY BLEIER
Cork seem to have brought the late tackle to a fine art
. In boxing parlance, Ger O’Keeffe was put down and only saved by the bell. Jack O’Shea was grounded by solid rights and hooks to the head but refused to take a count. Ger Lynch was put down four times. Ger Power and John Egan had the headlock used on them with effect and John L McElligott was sent to the ground …
Extract from a May 1982 letter to the Kerryman
a week after the National Footbal League final
Kerry returned from America to a county fermenting with concern about Cork. O’Dwyer was used to these occasional outbreaks of panic. He had always told his boys that they weren’t playing against 31 counties, but 31½. Always watch for snipers in the ditches. He knew his team, and its engine was starting to make the right noises.
Training in America had been almost flawless. The players were looking lean. A few injuries were still wafting about and Spillane was a loss, but Kerry were showing they could cope. The Sunday before the league final replay against Cork, they travelled to Claremorris for a challenge game against Mayo, fielded a scratch team and slammed in five goals. The following evening, O’Dwyer ran them all into the ground in Killarney for ninety minutes. They were looking lean, sharp. Mikey Sheehy was still troubled by injury, but the rest looked ready. Five-in-a-row hadn’t been mentioned by O’Dwyer, but it was always there. The league final replay was a day to make a statement.
Kerry pounded Cork from the beginning. With the sorry business of the captaincy settled for now, John Egan was buzzing and nailed a sweet goal that finished the game as a contest. Kerry strolled away by seven points, 1-9 to 0-5, and the watching football nation held their heads in their hands. Jimmy Deenihan lifted the trophy in his final act as captain, before handing over to Egan. ‘There could hardly have been a worse advertisement for this year’s Munster final,’ wrote JJ Brosnan in the Kerryman, but the worries and fears of a county slowly becoming consumed by five-in-a-row had been assuaged.
The following Saturday, the Kerry team trundled into Sneem GAA club to officially open the club’s new facilities. The development was a triumph of local enterprise and generosity. The new grounds encompassed basketball and tennis courts, a playground and saunas and dressing rooms. They had John Egan as Kerry captain and plans already being drawn up for a joyous homecoming in September. This promised to be Sneem’s year.
Cork had been booked to play Kerry at the pitch opening, but Kerry had already shown Cork enough over the previous few months. Pat Spillane stood in goals and only three players survived from the League final team. Mick O’Connell refereed the game and Jack O’Shea embroidered the occasion with a fifty-yard solo run that ended with a goal. The crowd gasped. Kerry won by three points. Cork shook their heads again, and headed quietly for home.
Three nights later, Kerry re-gathered in Killarney for training. The first round of the Munster championship against Clare was less than a week away. It was a warm June evening and a summer shower had covered the grass with a light coating of drizzle. O’Dwyer split the panel into two teams. These were the matches that proved the players’ collective mettle. For an hour they were dipped into a furnace. The heat either made them, or finished them off.
The individual duels were brutal. John O’Keeffe picked up The Bomber. Páidí Ó Sé scampered after Pat Spillane. Tim Kennelly tried to snag Ogie Moran. Every summer since they were kids, John Egan and Jimmy Deenihan seemed to end up alongside each other. They had accompanied each other to the peak of their careers. From where they now stood, they could see for miles.
Egan loved marking Deenihan, and Deenihan loved marking Egan. While Deenihan could deal with any physical challenge, Egan was different. He made Deenihan think. When Egan might begin to run in one direction, Deenihan needed to accommodate the possibility that Egan was planning to turn him inside out.
For Egan, Deenihan was a challenge like no other. He never said a word during games, but he stood so close Egan could almost feel his breath on his neck. When the ball dropped between them, the prospect of the sheer physical force Deenihan could tackle with sometimes made forwards duck out of the prospect, but not Egan.
Captaining Kerry had been a proud experience for Deenihan, and the Kerry defence leaned on him like a scrum on a tighthead prop. He was their rock. ‘I was really at my peak in 1982,’ says Deenihan, ‘mentally and physically. You just think about the game. You don’t lose any energy through tension or not sleeping, or worrying about a game. I was mature as a footballer.’
North Kerry was good ground for harvesting backs, and Deenihan and Tim Kennelly were the pick of the most recent crop. Growing up in north Kerry, with its fearsome local championship and the locals’ appreciation of hard, flinty football, gave Deenihan his grounding, but his football career also passed through an age of enlightenment.
He went to Strawberry Hill College in London in the early seventies to study physical education, played rugby with Mickey Ned O’Sullivan and absorbed modern theories on strength and conditioning. He played for the National College of Physical Education in Limerick under Dave Weldrick, who gave students tuition on modern training methods. While inter-county teams were beating out lap after lap around the country, the students were playing scaled-down football games on small pitches to maintain the intensity and improve their skill levels under pressure. They recalibrated soccer drills for Gaelic football. Weldrick made the boys think about the game and their roles. Every game was planned out. A few years before Eugene McGee was watching his tapes of Offaly get mangled in his video recorder, Weldrick was recording his team’s games and showing them to his players, triggering debate and a level of analysis players hadn’t been exposed to before.
Deenihan applied the science to what he knew best: marking, hounding, leading. He shaped his teaching career around football: teaching allowed him to devote his summers to football, and when he wasn’t teaching PE clases in Tarbert Vocational School, he trained. He roomed with John O’Keeffe before every game in Dublin and lived his entire career alongside him at corner-back. ‘I used say I was Johnno’s domestique,’ he says. ‘Johnno could always go up for the high one because he always knew there was someone there to clean it up if he missed one.’
They fitted together and the full-back line prospered. In six All-Ireland finals, Deenihan conceded just one point, to Brendan Lowry in 1981. The relationship among the defence was almost telepathic. Deenihan always knew where Páidí Ó Sé was at right-half-back. He could sense when Johnno would come for a ball and where he needed to be. Kennelly was like a brother. These were the foundation stones on which O’Dwyer had built his empire. They would shoulder the greatest burden during the summer to come.
As the evening drew in, the pace of the practice game increased. The entire team was moving sweetly. Even as the light grew dim, it all felt too good to call a halt. ‘We’ll have one more attack,’ shouted O’Dwyer.
The ball was played towards Deenihan and Egan. Deenihan trailed him out. As Egan bent down to gather the ball, Deenihan dashed it from his hands. He stretched out his leg to kick the ball away, but both players’ legs got entangled. They skidded on the greasy surface and the sound of Deenihan’s right leg snapping echoed around the stadium, as far away as the players at the other end of the pitch and into the stand where pockets of locals gathered nightly to watch the team. Deenihan lay on the ground, writhing in agony. He looked down and saw his foot twisted around, facing in the opposite direction.
An ambulance was called, and the players gathered round Deenihan. ‘It’s God’s will,’ he whispered, as he was lifted into the back for the trip to the Regional Hospital in Cork. The impact on the rest of the summer would be seismic. Suddenly, nothing about Kerry’s future seemed certain.
‘It was a fracture,’ says Deenihan. ‘My leg was broken in three places. I did a lot of damage to my ligaments as well. It was fairly traumatic. It was there I saw my career with Kerry ending.’
For a moment, he yielded to nature, but his ambition and the environment he had grown up in compelled him to reconsider. ‘I was convinced I co
uld get back for the All-Ireland. That’s how motivated we were. We all wanted to be part of it. Everybody wanted to be part of winning five in a row. I convinced the surgeon when he was putting the plaster on that I wasn’t sore, but it was killing me.’
He persuaded the surgeon to take the cast off early. Deenihan walked Ballybunion strand in the salt water every morning at dawn. A chunk of every day was spent in Jimmy Mahony’s gym, pounding weights. He walked as soon as he could, regardless of the pain. He began running long before he should have.
He read books to rehabilitate his mind, and found a soulmate within the pages. People always reckoned that Rocky Bleier of the Pittsburgh Steelers was too small to make a professional player in the NFL. At 5ft 9in and 210lbs, Rocky was small for a running back. He was toast if the opposition got a hand on him, but Rocky played smart and found a way to survive.
The Steelers picked him through the 1969 season but at the end of his first season, the US Army drafted him for service in Vietnam. That August, his platoon was on patrol when they walked into an ambush. Rocky took rifle wounds in his right leg. A grenade exploded nearby, embedding shrapnel in his left leg. They shipped Rocky home with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, but he could barely walk. He had lost almost forty pounds and struggled to walk without a limp when he began, but at least, Rocky told himself, he hadn’t lost a leg or a foot.
Painstakingly he started to rebuild his career as a football player. By 1980 he had regained his place on the Steelers’ starting line-up and collected four Super Bowl rings as part of the greatest team that ever played the game. He also wrote a book charting every excruciating step of an extraordinary journey. Deenihan soaked up the sentiment in every line as if it were written about himself. He could not yield or give in. He could be Rocky Bleier. He could make it back.
Meanwhile, other injuries were mounting around Mick O’Dwyer. After Kerry’s challenge game against Cork in Sneem, Jack O’Shea had played with St Mary’s against Waterville. O’Dwyer was in the crowd. When O’Shea came down badly on his ankle and lay in a heap, O’Dwyer was over the wire and on to the pitch.
Kings of September Page 11