‘It wouldn’t have helped; you wouldn’t have been on the ball every morning, but it wouldn’t have been the reason the business fell asunder. I wasn’t the only one in Edenderry. Bigger people than me went down.’
Life was hitting him hard. The 1982 final was seven years gone, but it still hadn’t left his system. He drank a bit. His marriage had broken down. There were women. Business was suffering and the debts were rising. He took on a pub in Borrisokane but it did none of the business he was promised. He was in deep trouble. At thirty-nine years of age, Darby was forced to leave for England.
‘It wouldn’t have been something I ever planned to do, but I didn’t have any choice. At that stage I owed a lot of money. Businesses had fallen down around my ears. Times were bad in Ireland. The banks wouldn’t give you a light. I couldn’t get a job. I applied for an awful lot of repping jobs. I had been on the road for years. The odd person would reply to you with a big circle around your age. There was nothing left. I had to go.’
One weekend he saw an advert in a newspaper looking for a bar manager in London. He rang the telephone number. The voice on the other end was Irish. They chatted for a while. The conversation turned to football. He asked where Darby was from.
‘Offaly.’
‘You’re not the footballer, are you?’
‘That’s right,’ replied Darby.
The atmosphere softened immediately. There wasn’t, in fact, a managerial post available, ‘and I wouldn’t insult you with a barman’s job,’ the man said.
‘I’ll take it,’ said Darby.
He moved to London and started work in the Fiddler’s Elbow in Chalk Farm. Soon after, he got a managerial job in Kentish Town. Things started to take off. He lived in a one-bedroom flat and took a job on the railways to supplement his income. He worked as a look-out, watching for oncoming trains while labourers worked on the lines. ‘It was a monotonous job, but you had to be on the ball,’ he says. ‘One mistake and you could kill ten lads.’
His new life started taking shape. He had met a new girl at home, and she followed him to London. He took on a pub in the Elephant and Castle, and business took off. GAA clubs visiting London became a crucial source of trade, and his stories kept them coming back. Sometimes the burden was hard to carry. The nature of his fame sometimes troubled him.
‘I can walk into a bar and sit down, and people will come to the table and call you by your name. That’s something I always found hard to deal with. I’d enjoy company and chatting and the crack. That’d be my scene. But going to a strange place where someone already knows you can be strange.’
There were other stories too. After hearing about the goal, people wanted to hear the story of the aftermath. His life in England. The drinking. The irony of being the central protagonist in an epic moment of history, then fading into the background like an old prize fighter, where the greatest fascination lies not in the ring but in the darkened corners of the life that follows.
‘I’ve had nights when I didn’t want to be out. I’ve had nights like that where I’ve said: Fuck’s sake, I don’t need this shit. But you can always stay home as well. I would’ve been one of the lads who would’ve been at a lot of dinner dances and presentations. With that would come a few jars. I probably did more than a lot of lads, but I wouldn’t have any regrets about that.
‘Drink is not a problem with me. Like anyone who takes a drink, I can get in with the wrong company. In the right company, I can sit down, have a few jars and there’ll be no more about it.’
A few years back, he decided to come home. He bought the Greyhound Bar and developed a solid little business. He helps Richie Connor sell some houses on the side, and lives comfortably with his old stories. The walls are dotted with newspaper articles and pictures. There is one of George Best with Darby from 1983 at a charity soccer game in Newry. There are pictures of the goal, and framed articles telling the story of 1982. There is one of a reunion with the 1972 team. Darby sits down front, his legs crossed, with a beaming smile. Still a boy among men.
‘The only game they think I played in was ’82. People often say to me: “I heard you’d prefer you’d never scored it.” That’s not true either. There’s an awful lot better players than me and they won’t be remembered at all. I was lucky enough to get the goal and I’ll probably be remembered for that as long as I live. It’s always been a good memory. Never a regret.’
24 DECLINE AND REVIVAL
In September 2005, Charlie Nelligan and Mikey Sheehy were chatting outside Nelligan’s bakery in Tralee when they spotted Darragh Ó Sé coming down the street. A few days had passed since Tyrone had beaten Kerry in the All-Ireland final. Ó Sé was still raw, still hurting. He wondered what two men with fifteen All-Ireland senior medals between them could tell him of defeat.
‘Jesus, lads,’ he said. ‘This feeling is sick. How long does it take to get out of this thing?’
Sheehy smiled. ‘We were beaten by Offaly in ’82, and we still haven’t got out of it!’
A few weeks after he met Ó Sé, Sheehy was sitting in a pub in Tralee, watching a Premiership game. There was a good crowd in when a telephone call came through to the bar for him. He picked up the receiver. The voice on the other line snarled: ‘You fucker, you bottled it in ’82!’
Sheehy thought someone was joking with him, but no one ever came to him claiming the punchline. ‘You get over it,’ he says, ‘and you don’t. A lot of other people obviously don’t get over it either. People would bring it up. You know when they bring it up what they’re thinking, but they’re not saying it.’
From his bakeries in Castleisland and Tralee, Nelligan sees it all the time. People come in looking to talk football, and he’s happy to oblige, but the conversations always flow the same way. ‘They’ll say: Jesus ye were a fabulous team,’ he says. ‘Then they’d say: How many [All-Ireland medals] do you have? Is it seven or eight?’ And they always finish up: Wasn’t it an awful pity about the five-in-a-row? I’d see it coming, and when I do I always say it first. And they always say: Jesus, I was just about to say that.’
In Kerry, too, 1982 changed lives. As Jimmy Deenihan’s recuperation continued through the summer, people came to him with different projects. During the world tour, Deenihan had spoken strongly in Australia about the merits of Gaelic football and the links it could forge with Australian Rules. In Croke Park, crudely formed notions about some kind of compromise game were being floated and Deenihan was added to a committee to examine the idea. Eventually he and referee John Moloney were sent away to hammer out a set of rules. Down in Tarbert Vocational School he stuck up two extra posts and used his pupils as guinea pigs during PE class. He would meet Moloney in Limerick to exchange notes. Eventually a set of rules emerged that are still in use.
Other, more profound, changes were happening too. In 1982, the country was plunged into political turmoil. Two elections came and went, and with the economy leaking jobs, money and people, no political reputation was safe.
Adversity also bred opportunity. Fine Gael were struggling to preserve their support base in north Kerry and sought a rallying force. The Deenihans had always carried the party colours. Jimmy’s father had nurtured a devotion to Michael Collins, and his support for the party had never been in doubt. They had relations who been Fine Gael TDs. The bloodlines suggested Jimmy might run. When they came looking for him Deenihan bargained for time, and headed for John B Keane.
He always looked to John B. When an evening’s socialising brought him to Finuge, John B would always seek out Deenihan’s father. Deenihan was eleven when he won his first football medal in Listowel primary school. John B was at the match with his sons, Billy and Conor. He called Deenihan over to show off his medal. ‘From then on,’ says Deenihan, ‘I was his buddy.’
John B travelled to Deenihan’s games and put Deenihan’s name on the guest list for all his opening nights. Deenihan, John B and Billy travelled to Thomond Park together in 1978 to see Munster defeat the All Blacks. Deenihan dr
ank his first glass of stout in John B’s bar. The town was steeped in literary talent and wisdom, and Deenihan was drawn to them. Writer Bryan McMahon became a friend, so did actor Eamon Kelly.
To Kerry’s greatest writers and poets, their footballers were divine creators on a par with the greatest artists the world had seen. When Ger Power came to work in the Listowel social welfare exchange, they were inextricably drawn to him. ‘John B wrote some article called “The Boss”,’ says Power, ‘so the boys used all call me The Boss because they were all unemployed. It was gas fun.’
When John B was once asked what he’d like to be remembered for, his answer was simple: ‘As the individual who scored the winning point against Duagh in the 1951 North Kerry intermediate final.’ They lived their footballing fantasies through Deenihan, but now that chapter seemed over. O’Dwyer had been on, but Deenihan sensed he didn’t truly need him. O’Dwyer had played into his late thirties, but Deenihan always thought he was suspicious of any player over thirty. For years he had heard O’Dwyer goading them: ‘Ye’re getting old, lads.’ He trained for 1983 but a bad hamstring injury slowed him down. John B reckoned Fine Gael needed him. In the fifteen previous elections, the party had managed to get just two TDs elected. On a Thursday, Deenihan was approached to run for Fine Gael. The following Saturday, he had been endorsed as a candidate in Kerry North.
The following few weeks tested him. In the end, he was pipped by 140 votes, but people had warmed to him. New Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald nominated him for the Senate, and Deenihan had been catapulted into a new life.
‘If I had a week to think about it and gone to a few political meetings,’ says Deenihan, ‘I doubt I’d have run. It’s a very, very tough game. I was still a PE teacher in Tarbert. I’d have been training every hour of the day. Then I was a senator and under pressure. To some degree I was public property, but I was still a very private individual. I just couldn’t do both things. I was just thirty years of age, and that was it.’
Politics reluctantly took over his life and it took time to let football go. The days of matching Johnno’s weights in Dinny Mahony’s gym were gone. He still had Finuge and the fanatical quest for a North Kerry championship to sustain him, but he missed Killarney and the warmth of the summer.
‘Breaking my leg was a turning point in my life. Psychologically, it was. I suffered from that trauma for a while afterwards. I used to dream about it. Football was our lives for so long. It was my life since I was seven years of age, right up to 1982. That’s all I did. The only reason I did physical education was because I wanted to be fit for football. Everything I did was geared for football. Next thing, you break your leg, and it was all over.
‘I was fairly traumatised. Not being part of the five-in-a-row team when you were part of it for so long, just being there on the periphery took a lot of re-adjustment. I wanted to be part of it.’
Before the next general election in 1987, Tim Kennelly canvassed for him. When he was elected in 1987, Deenihan’s supporters struggled to hold him on their shoulders until Kennelly butted in and took him on his own. He looked up.
‘Deenihan, I’ve carried you all my life.’
‘Sure, isn’t that what horses are for,’ he replied.
When Deenihan went, the old Kerry defence started to fall away. Ger O’Keeffe relocated to Kenya after 1983, contracted malaria and never fully returned to football again. As Paudie Lynch left the field after defeat to Cork in 1983 Munster final, he pulled his old sidekick Páidí Ó Sé by the jersey: ‘The next time you see me on a field, Sé, will be with the Jimmy Magee All Stars.’
Kennelly went in 1984 and behind him John O’Keeffe had already yielded to his creaking body. Having returned for 1983, a ruptured hamstring ended his Munster final, and a glittering career petered out in the rain. His hip continued to ache every day. Soon after the final, he finally made the trip to the orthopaedic surgeon he had been dodging for years. The doctor told him what he had always feared, but what he had also known.
‘He told me to hang up the boots straight away. He said you’ll jeopardise your career as a PE teacher. So I took his advice. Eventually I had to have it replaced. The surgeon said to hold on, and I didn’t get it done till the late nineties. I suffered too much pain with it. But I’ve never regretted it. I’d love to go through it again. They really were the good years. Great years.’
For years Pat Spillane repeated the same mantra, but recently he has started to question his beliefs. By the beginning of 1984, Spillane’s knee had healed. He collected three more All-Ireland medals between 1984 and 1986, playing the best football of his life, but the journey to greatness left him crippled.
It hurts the most in school. His greatest fear is the ball that rolls toward him during PE followed by two hurtling teenagers. His battered knees won’t allow him move out of the way in time, so he braces himself for the hit.
It’s also the mornings when he’s walking across the school yard as a shower of rain begins to fall and he knows he won’t be able to scurry for shelter. Over the years his other knee suffered from overuse. He can’t go for walks anymore. Jogging is long gone. Even kicking a ball, the simplest expression of the game he joyously mastered, is now impossible.
‘At fifty years of age, when you can’t do the normal things, it suddenly dawns on you. You’re an invalid. You’re not an able-bodied man any more. Since the last problem with my knee, the “I’d do it all again” attitude comes with a “maybe” now. You’d do it all over again, but you wouldn’t be as gung-ho about it.’
When players think back to the dressing room after 1982, some of their most vivid memories contain John Egan. Of them all, they reckoned he had the most to lose, yet, in his darkest hour, Egan was fighting the gloom. He moved through the dressing room that day, smiling, trying to drag them all back from the depths. ‘Sure, lads, it’s only a game,’ he kept saying. It’s only a game.
They had grown used to Egan’s demeanour before games. He was always cool, unnervingly calm. They remembered him like that before the 1982 final, and never remembered him the same way again.
‘It only hit me later on,’ says Egan. ‘I felt sorry for the club who really expected it. It was disappointing, but I’ve had lots of disappointments. I was anointed that I didn’t leave the side down. I led from the front. Anybody who thought I might have been a bad captain – I certainly wasn’t.’
As winter drew in that year, his life got mercilessly harder. That autumn, his twin brother Jerry was at a party hosted by the Caseys of Sneem, famed as international wrestlers, and the set of brothers who almost rowed for Britain at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Some time during the night, Jerry left the party to head to the shop for supplies. The following morning they found him in Casey’s pool. In the next three years Egan would also lose his father and his brother-in-law. When people thought of Egan, they imagined the depth of despair losing the final must have created, but 1982 was only part of it.
‘What happened in the next three years was tragic. It’s only that sport is such a transparent thing. There’s so many people involved and it’s a massively emotional thing to be involved in, especially when you’re carrying the can. We were the men who had to do it.’
He had always thought about football’s place in his life. Now it was changing. He remembered the reporters in the lead-up to the All-Ireland final. Some asked him about the number of All-Ireland medals he had won. When he had first joined the panel? What club he played for? After thirteen years playing with Kerry at different levels, he was still a stranger to them. They knew nothing of his life, nothing of the sacrifices, and they didn’t care. That hurt.
‘What is really disappointing is that you get no thanks for it. There’s no sentiment, only people waiting to take the legs from under you. It’s an awful cruel place to be.’
Egan’s form in 1982 was recognised with an All Star, but football was getting hard to focus on. He drank harder. He was slowing down and other players were catching him up. One evening in 1984, he
travelled to Mayo for a challenge game and was pulled aside by a selector before the game. He hadn’t been playing well, the selector told him. If he had serious notions about this year, he should take the frees this evening, so he could notch a few points beside his name.
‘I nearly took the jersey off and threw it at him. It’s those things that hit you. I should’ve retired after ’82. It was effectively the end of my career. It was disappointing to go out in that respect, because when you lose at that stage, everything is negative, irrespective of being gallant losers. When you’re a winner, it’s easy to talk about being a gallant loser. But it hurts when you’re a loser.’
He battled all summer for his place, won his sixth All-Ireland medal and retired that winter. Kerry moved on without him. For years people described Egan as the most underrated component of the Kerry forward line, but time has changed that. His place among the greats is enshrined.
‘I was lucky to be where I was and achieve what I did. If I owned the world I could never meet the people I did when I was young. Travelling to all those cities. Being heroes. Being appreciated. We were treated like kings. But we had to work hard at it. We had to be the best.’
Some players carried 1982 in their hearts. Others recycled it into motivation and used it as the fuel to drive future teams to greatness. With John O’Keeffe gone, Mick O’Dwyer again compelled Sean Walsh to move. This time, it was to full-back. He never settled fully in the neighbourhood, but having Páidí Ó Sé beside him at corner-back made it feel more homely.
Mick Spillane returned to the team and Tom slotted in at centre-back. Pat Spillane had taught his right leg to do everything his left leg couldn’t do and was on the cusp of the best football of his career. Jacko was revived. So was Bomber. Charlie Nelligan was only twenty-seven and eager to get on. Their new captain, Ambrose O’Donovan, came from Gneeveguila, a little village tight on the border with Cork. He joined Jacko at centrefield, and helped stir the fire again.
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