Kings of September

by Michael Foley

  Fr Sean Heaney: The most satisfying picture in my life is Sean Lowry catching the ball, hearing the whistle and up the hands go. You could never forget that.

  Mikey Sheehy: The one thing I’d say about that [Kerry] team, in important games like semi-finals and finals, we used kill teams in the last twenty minutes. That time it was Offaly who did it to us.

  PJ McGrath: A fella said to me in 2000 that he was looking at the old matches they were showing on telly. He taped them and he was looking at them. ‘I made up my mind finally,’ he said. ‘You gave the correct decision in 1982’. I said: ‘Yes. You had eighteen years to make up your mind. I had one-eighth of a second.’

  At the final whistle, there was a moment. A splendidly frozen moment. The ground went quiet, then released a guttural roar of delight. Offaly had won by a point.

  The stands burst their banks and the pitch was awash with the delirious Offaly people. The Dublin supporters on the Hill who had cheered their minors to an All-Ireland title came down and hoisted John Guinan on to their shoulders. Martin Furlong met Pádraig Horan in the middle of the pitch. With thousands of supporters pushing in around them they found the space to share a precious moment. Horan had dragged Offaly hurlers through the same bad days Furlong had endured with the footballers. He carried Offaly in his heart like Furlong. He knew what this meant.

  Sean Lowry held on to the ball as his wife Nuala got to him and hugged him tightly. All those week nights at home, promising her an All-Ireland medal. He had been right all along. All around them, Offaly footballers bobbed like corks on a sea of people, gradually being washed up on to the steps of the Hogan Stand. Kerrymen graciously performed the rituals of defeat, shaking hands and edging their way towards the dressing rooms. On the sideline, Jimmy Deenihan cradled Mick O’Dwyer’s head in his hands. O’Dwyer was broken.

  And in the middle of it all, in a potted vision of a life he was yet to live, Seamus Darby was being pulled and dragged by the crowd, his back bruised from slaps.

  20 THE LONGEST NIGHT

  Eugene McGee stood alone by the dug-out. His clothes were soaked. His light beige jacket was sodden and clinging to him like a cheap suit. As his players celebrated, he stepped back. Maybe it was the journalist in him that made him pull away from the whirl of emotion. Maybe it was the nature of the relationship he had built with the players. This was their moment of fulfilment. In getting them here, McGee had already enjoyed his.

  Up at the podium Richie Connor’s torrid journey had reached its last stop. When the whistle went he had looked around for someone to leap on. Instead, a Croke Park blazer reached him first, grabbed him and started shouting in his ear about procedure and protocol. As his teammates shipped slaps on their backs and were hoisted on to shoulders, Richie was being forced to straighten up, start thinking about his duties and obligations.

  ‘I would’ve stayed out in Croke Park for yonks. But yer man whisked me away. He made a beeline for me the minute the match was over. “Come on over here,” he says and I was up in the stand on me own. The whole crack is going on down below and I’m getting none of this madness that’s going on.’

  A million thoughts went through all their heads. Sean Lowry thought of his father and wished he could share this purest feeling of joy with the one man he knew would feel the same. With his last ounces of energy Mick Fitzgerald looked for Stephen Darby and pulled him into his chest. Darby had beaten Clonin Hill and prospered in a game filled out by big men. His wife had died months after they were married, but football had helped give his life structure and purpose. Bringing an All-Ireland medal home meant something deeper to him than anyone else could imagine. For a moment Fitzgerald let his emotions carry him away.

  As he stood on the podium waiting for the players to assemble, Richie Connor improvised a few words in his head. He lifted the cup, and the vast sea of faces in front of the Hogan Stand released a roar that shook the raindrops from the stand. As they descended the steps and set out across the pitch, the Lowry brothers carefully took the cup and shielded it from thousands of hands reaching out to touch its belly. Outside the tunnel, John Guinan met two friends from home, trying furiously to pierce the cordon and get into the dressing room. ‘Tell ye what, lads,’ said Guinan, ‘one of ye take this arm and you take the other.’ They lifted him up. As Guinan played injured, the crowd opened in front of him. They dropped him down in the middle of the dressing room and started to take it all in.

  Players were in the shower area around the Sam Maguire cup singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. Johnny Mooney spotted a priest squeezing his way through the throng. Fr Moriarty had officiated at his wedding in San Francisco a few weeks before and promised Mooney he’d be picking up an All-Ireland medal in a few weeks’ time. Evelyn Currams, mother of Liam, appeared in the dressing room wearing a chain with her son’s All-Ireland hurling medal attached and kissed McGee. ‘Next year,’ she said, ‘I’ll have two.’

  Seamus Darby slugged on a bottle of milk. In the middle of chaos, Eugene McGee gave an interview to RTÉ’s Mick Dunne. As reporters squeezed into the dressing room, McGee asked about the game. ‘Was it good?’ he wondered, so absorbed had he been in the details.

  Martin Furlong sat on the bench and took a long draw from a cigarette and considered their achievement. ‘We beat one of the best teams of all time,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t be too bad ourselves, so.’

  When Richie Connor returned to the dressing room, he opened his gearbag to find everything had been robbed. A new tracksuit, socks, wristbands and other gear had all been pilfered. All he had left was enough to dress himself with.

  ‘I don’t know what eejit took them. We got very little stuff at the time. It was something you’d use in winter training. Often I thought I’d love to see somebody wearing the tracksuit with my name.’

  All the while, Matt Connor took the congratulations with a quiet, dazed smile. ‘The dressing room was very good, but fellas are so drained. You just want to get on to the next part. [You tell yourself] the next part will be great. What you’d love is to get the lads in a small place on your own and just have a chat. That’d be my ideal. Even for a couple of hours, just to get away from it. But that never happened.’

  As the reporters filed out and the players tightened the knots on their ties, McGee emptied the dressing room, leaving only the players and his selectors. Those who travelled to Ballycommon for training and pulled themselves up Clonin Hill only to see themselves dropped off the panel in mid-summer were there. Even after their demotion, many of them had pledged their assistance if required for practice games in training. Anything. This was their day too.

  In the middle of the room, sitting on a battered old table, was the cup. The silence was impeccable. It was the quietest moment they had known since losing in 1981. There was no one hounding them, no thoughts about Kerry rattling around their heads. Every debt had been settled. Every task had been accomplished. This was their greatest moment. Suddenly, there was nothing left to do.

  Seconds passed and the silence remained unblemished. Like Matt Connor, Pat Fitzgerald suddenly felt this strange sense of emptiness. Was this it? Was this what they had given six years of their lives for? The cause that had held them all together was gone. When the dressing-room door opened again, all the players would step into another life. They had foiled history. Kerry’s ordained place was now theirs. On the other side of the dressing-room door, the whole world was waiting for them. Everything they once knew was gone.

  Then, from somewhere in the room, a great roar exploded the silence. The moment had been broken, and everyone smiled and cheered. The party could begin.

  * * *

  Outside on the pitch, downtrodden Kerrymen strolled towards their dressing room. As Eoin Liston neared the tunnel, an Offaly man landed nearby, having clambered over the wire at the Canal End. Liston brushed him aside, and patted Jack O’Shea on the back. Charlie Nelligan walked to the dressing room, dazed and devastated. As he went across the pitch, a Kerry supporter came up behind him
and punched him in the jaw. Charlie didn’t feel a thing.

  ‘I didn’t see who it was, but I was told after that whoever it was got a bigger dusting himself. It was about three weeks later a man came into the shop and said: “Jesus, what happened was desperate.” And I said: “What happened?” The minute he told me, I remembered. At the time it never registered at all.’

  He remembers other moments. Seconds after the punch, Donie Houlihan, an old friend from Tralee, slung his arm around Nelligan’s shoulders. Tears were welling in his eyes. ‘He was bawling his eyes out. He said to me: “Never mind. Ye gave us fabulous years of football. We’ll never forget ye.” That meant more to me than the clatter I got before.’

  Nelligan entered a dressing room smothered by silence. Boots clattered on the concrete floor. The only sounds came from the pitch outside, the dressing room next door and the spatter of water on the showers on the tiled floor.

  John O’Keeffe came in and sat down. His hip ached. He had cradled history in his hands. Now, it was gone. After years of focusing on the next ball, the next game, the next training session, he had allowed his mind to drift to the podium. He looked down at the ground, as the tears dropped. ‘The dressing room then was the worst I ever knew,’ he says. ‘Lads were saying, more or less, that’s the end of it.’

  The press quietly filed in and began the doleful business of gathering the thoughts of a shattered team. O’Dwyer pulled himself together as best he could. ‘They played very well,’ he said. ‘We didn’t get far enough away from them at any stage. Retirement? This isn’t time to talk about things like that, but naturally the thought is in a few minds. We’ll have to wait for that.’

  That evening, Mick O’Dwyer sneaked out of the dressing room, into the back of Eric Murphy’s car, and lay down across the back seat. As Murphy drove through town, O’Dwyer didn’t utter a word. When they reached the Gresham hotel, O’Dwyer relocated to his room, and stayed there.

  ‘Reporters were coming in, trying their best,’ says Charlie Nelligan. ‘But what do you say? It was unique. We had it and the next thing it was gone. The fabulous five-in-a-row. Next thing you had four-in-a-row.

  ‘It would’ve been nice to have won it all right but I don’t know was it meant to be. We had everything. We’d won everything. We’d all the joys that had gone before. The winning of the four-in-a-row. If you could bottle all the losses of the teams we’d beaten, it would equate with the loss we had in 1982. We had the four years’ losses all in one year. It was desperate.’ The following morning Nelligan disappeared to Castleisland where he didn’t speak for three days. Jerseys were left dripping on the benches for whoever wanted them.

  But as Mikey Sheehy stood in the Croke Park shower, replaying the day over in his head, he remembered something. The girl from Armagh. She might be outside looking for autographs, he thought, but she won’t want this jersey now. As he headed for the team bus, he heard a familiar voice call his name. It was the girl. Kerry had been beaten, but as for Mikey’s jersey, it still had value for her.

  Outside in the corridor beneath the stand, Richie Connor was stepping out of the Raidio na Gaeltachta broadcast van having given an interview, when he saw John Egan, fully clothed, heading for the exit.

  ‘We stole it on you, Johnny,’ he said.

  After everything: the name pulled from a hat, the embarrassing evening in Ennis, the hundreds of miles between Kildorrery and Killarney, after all the silly questions from pressmen and officials, enduring the referee and listening to the guff about five-in-a-row, here was where it ended, in a dull tunnel, shrouded in darkness. It could have been his day. Egan smiled and walked away.

  Ger O’Keeffe’s chin was cut and bloodied after his collision with John Guinan’s hip, and having showered and changed, he set off for the Mater Hospital to get the wound stitched, on foot and alone. The others headed for the Cat and Cage pub, their refuge on the best nights and the worst. As O’Keeffe waited in the accident and emergency unit, a man sat down beside him.

  ‘Were you in a fight?’ he asked.

  ‘Yerrah, I was in a bit of a fight, all right,’ replied O’Keeffe.

  ‘Were you at the match?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘What did you think of it?’

  ‘Sure, I suppose it was unfortunate Kerry lost.’

  O’Keeffe’s companion smiled. ‘Ah, I was delighted. It’s great to see a new team winning.’

  O’Keeffe started to bristle. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m one of the Kerry fellas who lost.’

  ‘He suddenly changed his tune and was disappointed in what he’d said,’ says O’Keeffe. ‘Then he talked to me about it and actually made me feel good. He actually sat me in the car later and brought me back up to the Cat and Cage.’

  John O’Keeffe sought out his wife, Liz, for support. Tom Spillane walked to the pub alone, spattered by passing cars and taunted by the beeping horns of those who recognised him. The Spillanes had gathered in one corner with the Templenoe crew. Other players mingled around the bar, supping pints and trying to forget. In one corner a group of players had gathered round Tommy Doyle. He took defeat hard. He could still feel Darby behind him, a phantom hand leaning against his back. If he had been behind the man, he could have stopped him. In his mind, his mistake had lost Kerry everything.

  ‘Tommy took it very personally,’ says John O’Keeffe. ‘That was all wrong really. I won’t forget it. Tommy took it very badly. We won as a team, and we lost as a team, but he took the whole thing on himself, which was wrong. I remember trying to get him to come round. It wasn’t nice.’

  When Ger O’Keeffe arrived from the Mater, he headed straight for Doyle’s group. ‘When I arrived up, Tommy Doyle was crying. The motto for the night when fellas had a few drinks was: Five-in-a-row, five-in-a-row, by Christ we were close to five-in-a-row.’

  * * *

  The Offaly players filed out from the Hogan Stand through a human corridor of backslapping and whooping. From there, the team bus headed straight for RTÉ for the post-match television show, a pre-recorded show with the winning team to be screened that night. Already players were restless. As the hours drew on in the television studio, the players were getting hungrier and thirstier.

  ‘We were starving,’ says Richie Connor. ‘Fellas wouldn’t have ate much that morning and all you want is a couple of pints and a bite to eat with your friends. We were put on a bus out to Montrose. Michael Lyster was doing his thing in twenty-minute slots. We were in the studio for about two hours. No drink, nothing.

  ‘There was a meal in the Montrose next door afterwards and by then it was time to go out to the Ambassador [hotel, Kill, County Dublin]. Fellas might’ve had two pints drank. Not that all you wanted was to fill yourself with beer. But you’re after winning this thing. You just wanted to chat to your friends. We had no control. Kerry wouldn’t have gone to Montrose. RTÉ were delighted we won.’

  The Ambassador in Kill, on the route home, had become a magnet for every stray Offaly car and supporter since the end of the game. By the time the players arrived, the hotel was bursting at the seams. The crowds streamed out into the car park. Water dripped down from the ceilings caused by the condensation steaming up from the thousands that had packed themselves into the function room. By the time the players arrived at the hotel, it was near eleven at night.

  ‘Nothing could have prepared me for the scene there,’ says Connor. ‘Everybody was pissed. They were after running out of Guinness and Smithwicks in the hotel. Fellas were buying crates of large bottles. It was mad. There was broken glass on the floor. We thought we were going to walk in and everybody would be the same as ourselves. We weren’t thinking. While we were caught up in Montrose, fellas were giving it a lash.’

  The players were swamped. The greater the compliments that were delivered the harder came the backslaps. The post-match analysis was also suffering under the conditions.

  Connor found himself cornered for the night.

  ‘Well done, Tom! That was a
great ball you kicked into Darby!’

  ‘I’m Richie and it was Liam that kicked in the ball.’

  ‘Next thing,’ says Richie, ‘fellas are being hoisted over our heads by drunken slobs. There was beer spilt and there’s glass on the floor. It was crazy. It was a cattle mart. A fucking disaster.’

  Sometime around one in the morning, Johnny Mooney headed for his room, but found the door already open when he arrived. ‘There were about twenty people in there. I didn’t even know them. It was like Woodstock. The whole night was like the Fleadh Ceoil in Ennis or something. We’d nowhere to stay, so we stayed up all night.’

  * * *

  At some stage during Kerry’s banquet in the Gresham hotel, someone asked Páidí Ó Sé where he was headed afterwards. ‘Oblivion, perhaps,’ he replied. ‘And if I don’t get there, perhaps limbo.’

  The room was draped in sorrow. As the bell rang for the banquet to begin, Kerry county chairman, Frank King, was still looking for O’Dwyer. He went to his room and knocked on the door, and found him inside, lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. The mask had slipped. O’Dwyer was shattered. He had invested everything in his team. He had protected them all year, and had carried the pressure himself. Now the roof had come crashing in. Throughout his time as county chairman, King had supported O’Dwyer. Now, O’Dwyer needed him again.