Armaghs Magnificent Obsession
Thursday, 29th December 2002
Magnificent Obsession. By Philip Lanigan Copyright The Sunday Tribune. December 29th 2002 The sight of Marty Morrissey loitering with intent it was nothing new at a post-All Ireland meal, yet few in the function room at the Citywest Hotel were prepared for what happened next. Maybe it was the warm glow that stemmed from having the Sam Maguire at arm’s length, but for the first time all year, Kieran McGeeney dropped his guard in front of the cameras. The smile was like the first shaft of sunlight after a storm. But then, it was that kind of day, a day when his expression seemed to capture the mood of the whole county. He cried when John Bannon sounded the final whistle. “I don’t think I’ll ever get a high like that again,” he says of the 20 seconds that followed, 20 seconds that are frozen in time. Tony McEntee wrapping him in a bear-hug as he collapsed to his knees on the Croke Park sod, the match ball, fittingly, in his hands; being buried beneath a mound of exuberant supporters and then catching Joe Kernan’s eye through the pandemonium. “I’d say there were 50 yards between us and if we were young lovers you’d put a tune to this,” is how the manager remembers the 50-yard dash and embrace. All the years of waiting – “130 years of frustration” as McGeeney put in his speech – seemed to be etched in the lines of his face as he stood on the podium. Until that moment of release when he became the first Armagh man to lift football’s glittering prize. “When somebody tells you all your life that something is beyond your reach, that it’s impossible, that you’ll never get there, and then you do, well – there’s that feeling that the work and toil that you put yourself through for 13 or 14 years has all come to fruition.” Kernan uses two words to describe his captain – “solid steel.” The proof? Just take one good look at the photograph above, taken before Armagh’s Ulster first round game against Tyrone. The essence of one player, distilled into a single frame. Intense. Driven. Unyielding. A footballer separated from his team mates by his own obsessive will to win. “I can’t imagine anybody in life wanting to be average at something, or come second,” he says. “We all like to be regarded as being good at something; it’s just a matter of finding what your niche is.” If the stoney-faced exterior is an image he has cultivated, it’s because it suits him that way. In his dealings with a typical media scrum on match day, he’s always accommodating, if cautious. One to one though, he’s engaging company. Trying to make sense of it all hasn’t been easy but the past three months have been sprinkled with epiphanies. The GPA awards provided one. He booked the cup for the function, travelling up to Armagh the previous night and collecting it at one in the morning from Oisin McConville, who had it for another function. A couple of hours later, he arrived back at his house in Dublin, placing it on a chair in his room as he tried to snatch a few hours sleep. “It was one of those moments. Lying in bed, I just turned over, and I could see the street light coming in from the window at about three in the morning and the Sam Maguire sitting at the foot of the bed.” What the achievement has meant? “Have you ever lived through one of your dreams? Have you? Well, I’ve been lucky enough to do that.” Not that he’s going soft. If Kernan says “he’s mellowing” (a verdict, when relayed, that prompts another smile), it’s all relative. He doesn’t smoke, and his manager can testify to his drinking habits. “The night of the All Stars things are always a bit rushed, and he says, ‘Joe, I’m going to go to the gym.’ And I said, ‘you haven’t time. Will you leave it just for tonight?’ That’s Kieran. He wanted to go for an hour for a workout, to prepare for the few beers he was going to have.” The management put a lot of store on mental preparation, on getting the whole team in the right frame of mind. Some examples? The orange wristband worn by every squad member. Al Pacino’s storm-force speech in Any Given Sunday played on the team bus. The goodwill message from Muhammed Ali, a copy of which was slipped under the door of each player’s room in the Citywest Hotel on the morning of the final. “People might say, ‘what has that got to do with gaelic football?” says McGeeney. “But you have to look for what it has to do with football, look for the motivation in it, because motivation always comes from within. Things have an impact on you if you want them to have an impact. Sometimes it’s the small things that can make all the difference.” A game of inches. It’s been the Armagh mantra all summer. McGeeney has always been fascinated by what makes winners, especially those that were able to ‘transcend their own sport.’ He’s an avid reader (not to mention movie buff, Elvis fan and someone known to strum a few chords on the guitar) and has digested biographies of Ali. But the man he holds up as the greatest athlete that’s ever played sport is Michael Jordan. “When you listen to him talk, he didn’t want to be good, he wanted to be the best. He didn’t even want to be a winner; he wanted to be the best at winning. Each step he wanted to take had to be a step up; there was no such thing as taking a step to the side. He pushed himself to the limits. He just wanted to find out how good he really could be.” He saw him play once in Boston during the early 90’s, “back when you’d have your summer free with Armagh,” and the memory stayed. “You have to admire people like that. People think that when you get to that stage it’s pure talent, but it’s not. If somebody said to you ‘who’s the best footballer, Georgie Best or Roy Keane?’ Who would you pick?” Best is the answer he’s fishing for. “But then who would you want on your team? You’d have Roy Keane.” McGeeney was never the child prodigy with the god given talent; rather someone who worked relentlessly at his game until he reached the top. It’s clear who he identifies with. “I like watching Roy play,” he admits. “He just wants to win – hates losing. For all the stuff people would say about him, I think he’s a great team player. I know he gives his team mates a hard time but that’s part of sport. I heard a great quote from a manager who said, ‘I hate to see people turning up to see challenge games in disco trousers and scoring 2-6. Give me the man, whose back is up against the wall, who’ll always produce the goods under pressure.” Is that his barometer of a player? “That’s everyone’s barometer. You want somebody that you can rely on, someone that you can trust.” At half-time in the All-Ireland final, the Armagh centre-back was the man with his back against the wall. The Kerry game plan of playing around him, rather than through him, was working perfectly. His marker, Eoin Brosnan, steamed past him at one stage after a one-two near the sideline, only to see his shot for goal miss by inches. While Kernan bounced his own All Ireland losers’ plaque off the dressing room wall at the break, the team captain was struggling to find the right words. “I found it very hard to speak to the players. Talking about things is all very easy; it’s actually doing it that’s the problem. Although I knew that I was trying hard, I knew I wasn’t doing all the right things. So I wasn’t going to give off to people. You can never say to someone, ‘I’m going to have a brilliant game’ but you can promise them that you can try your hardest, that you’ll run until you drop.” He kept his promise. Nineteen minutes into the second half, his diving block on Dara O’Cinneide snuffed out a goal opportunity. O’Cinneide put over the resultant 45 but the point had been made. Kerry would have to scrap for every ball. They weren’t to score again. It was a day when he recognised the debt of gratitude he owed to the people around him. In the pre-match parade, he looked up to spot Charlie Grant, the man who introduced him to football in Mullaghbawn. He doesn’t quite know how she managed to pick her way through the crush, but as he lifted the cup, his mother was just yards from the podium. His father has since promised to pen a poem in honour of the occasion but there was another reason why it was an emotional family reunion when he met his whole family later in the upstairs bar in Croke Park. His brothers Patrick and Declan were there, but it lifted him to see that so too was 25-year-old sister Sinead. “It took four morphine injections to get Sinead through the game. She has Crohn’s disease, a disease of the bowel and she doesn’t be well at all. She missed all of the celebrations. She tried to make it to the banquet that night but she had to be brought to the hospital and had a major operation the Wednesday after the game. So it was hard on everybody at the time.” He was at Croke Park recently to endorse a football and launch a special Armagh kit for children. All part of a charity fundraiser, with a percentage donated to the Craigavon Area Hospital where his sister is treated. “You wouldn’t be where you are but for your family,” he says. In his view, Patrick was actually the one with the most natural talent; he was just prepared to make the greater sacrifices. This is a man who has no cruciate ligament in his right knee. No kidding. After he tore it eight years ago, he decided against an operation. Instead, he built up the muscles around it by doing rehabilitation work in the gym “everyday for six months.” He lifts up his shirt to reveal shoulders that hang like a coathanger, a consequence of dislocating the joints in both. Still at school when he broke onto the Armagh senior panel in 1989, it was ten years before he won an Ulster title. But despite the mental and physical scars, he never stopped believing that someday he would get to live out the dream. When he lifted the same trophy this year as captain, his words at Clones were, “it’s not the cup that I want to lift.” The sense of focus is frightening. He didn’t prepare a victory speech for the final, only because, “I wanted to keep all the available space in my head for the game.” So what’s the motivation now that he has realised his ultimate ambition? “If somebody asked me now if I wanted to win another one, what am I going to say, ‘ah no I don’t think I’ll bother?’ it depends what you want in life. If we win two All-Ireland’s we’re up with the best. We’re not just a good team then, we could become a great team.” For someone who turned 31 in October, he admits that, “it’s going to be hard, I’m not getting any younger.” So what happens if he walks onto a field after Christmas and the same hunger isn’t there? “If I come to January and I kick a ball and I feel like that, I’ll probably walk away. But I can’t see myself feeling like that.” One particular exchange illustrates why: -- If you retired now, with one All Ireland medal, would you be happy? -- No. -- Why not? -- Because I’m a greedy fucker. I could go out next year and people will say that if you play badly, you could ruin everything you’ve done this year. But that’s not what it’s about. I get a buzz out of playing football. There are still challenges there for us. We’re in the preliminary round next year and no team has ever won an Ulster title from the preliminary round. -- But if there is one lesson from the careers of the likes of Ali or Jordan, it’s that not even the greats know the right time to get out. Why not quit and be remembered as the All Ireland winning captain, the Texaco Footballer of the year, the All Star centre-back? -- That’s not why I played football. I didn’t play football for everyone to remember me. The real self-satisfaction is knowing that you did your best, that you became the best you were capable of becoming. If I played my football to keep everybody else happy, I would have quit football a long time ago. Next year I could go out and people will say he’s past it, then so be it. You have to follow your own path. After the All Ireland semi-final defeat by Kerry two years ago, his Armagh team mate Aidan O’Rourke sent him a quote from former American president Roosevelt. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.” That quote now sits underneath his writing mat in his office at the Irish Sports Council in Dublin. Motivation? The thought of being back in the arena for another year is enough.

Magnificent Obsession.