From the archives: ‘I told him if I have to steal the Sam Maguire, it’s coming in that gate next year’ – Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh

The veteran’s valedictory commentary had him declaring Cork as the new football champions before exiting the stage to a blizzard of tributes. He was 80 years old and his performance had lost none of its trademark vibrancy. He could still cut it. Had he wanted to, he could have gone on.

But nobody goes on forever. By then he had been broadcasting for over 60 years, having done his first match in 1949, commentating on the Railway Cup football final. The time had come for the broadcasting Methuselah to retire.

Ten years on, on a warm June evening, Ó Muircheartaigh takes a seat in the ample back garden of his home in the Meath countryside, where he lives close to Kilcock. He says that not all that much has changed in his life. He did not stop going to matches and he still plays golf.

He has been climbing mountains, keeping fit through a daily exercise regime. He is often called on by charities and other organisations to lend his voice to promotion campaigns. Though almost 90, he remains agile, in good health, and over the best part of two hours the stories, mostly of players, trip off his tongue.

Two that spring to mind are triggered by talk of the matches that bookended his long career. His first assignment, that Railway Cup final, happened when he was just 18 and a student at the teacher training college in St Pat’s, Dublin. The second story relates to the 2010 All-Ireland final but, as he once said when a wasp entered the commentary box during a live match broadcast, we will deal with that one later.

The day Ó Muircheartaigh started out, 71 years ago, Michael O’Hehir covered the Railway Cup hurling final, and Christy Ring was on the field, winning a seventh inter-provincial medal. In 1963 Ó Muircheartaigh was commentating when Ring won his 18th and last Railway Cup medal in Croke Park at almost 43 years of age.

Ó Muircheartaigh got to know Ring better in later life and had a privileged and revealing view of him in action as a selector in the late 1970s. “He was a great selector,” he says. “RTE decided they wanted to put someone on the sideline on All-Ireland final day when Wexford were playing Cork in 1977. I mentioned it to each county chairman and neither of them minded if I sat in with them. But on account of Ring being with Cork I sat in the Cork dug out.

“He was sharp as you could be. I remember early on somebody got the usual thing that selectors get when there is a bit of panic. They weren’t going well, Wexford had got two goals. ‘Shift the corners! Switch the corner forwards!’ a selector shouted. And this fella was jumping out and Ring caught him by the leg and said, ‘I did that five minutes ago’. And he had done it.

“He won two All-Irelands for Cork as a selector. He used to go on mad runs along the sideline. He’d make a run and he’d come back with an idea. He came back that day and said to the others: ‘There is a weakness in the Wexford defence and not one of you can see it’. He’d be insulting them, you see. ‘I’m putting Jimmy Barry-Murphy centre forward and watch him!’ says Ring. Others would have an idea and in case it didn’t work out they’d keep their mouth shut. He didn’t.

“Then the following year they were playing Kilkenny. Again he jumped out of the dugout and was gone like a mad man and then he’d come back with an idea. ‘If we don’t shift Johnny Crowley from centre back, forget this, go out and give them the bloody cup’. Somebody said he was playing a great game. ‘He was’, says Ring, ‘he’s lost three balls in a row to (Mick) Crotty. I am putting him out on the wing, I am putting Denis Coughlan in and the two of them will play well’. And he was gone. There was no consensus.”

He remembers vividly the last time he met Ring, who died only a few months later in March 1979. “It was New Year’s eve. I was going back to the Gaeltacht and I saw this car pulled up on the side of the road, and the light on inside, and a man and a woman in there and they were eating. I thought they were lost, you see. ‘Twas dark at this stage. It was Ring and the wife.

“They had brought the son over that day (from Cork), it was the last day of the year, to leave him for a week to learn a bit of Irish. And it was a wicked frosty night and I said, ‘You’ll stay in Dingle tonight? I can fix you up. Anyone in Dingle will be glad to give you a bed’. ‘Oh no, I can’t. I promised the 10-year-olds in the Glen that we’d be out pucking in the morning.'”

Warming to the theme, he wheels out another Ring story. For some time, Bob Hyland wrote articles in the Irish Press during the winter on famous players. After he published an interview with Seamus Bannon of Tipperary, an All-Ireland winner in the 1960s, his next appointment took him to Cork to see Ring.

Ó Muircheartaigh takes up the story, at a point where they had met, and were driving in Hyland’s car. “Ring said, ‘You were talking to the Bannon man. And you said, that he said, that you’d need a nice tuft of grass taking a line ball?’

So Bob says, ‘Oh he said that alright’. ‘Stop the car,’ says Ring. He got out with a hurley and sliotar. He put the sliotar on the road. He stood back, and cut the ball and sent it off the ground and sailing into a field. And as he was sitting back into the car he said, ‘Will you write to Bannon and tell him that grass never grew on the Mardkye Road.'”

Ó Muircheartaigh breaks into laughter.

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The other story is brought to mind by his last game as commentator. Down, managed by James McCartan, lost to Cork 50 years after becoming the first of the six counties to win the All-Ireland senior football championship.

“That was huge,” Ó Muircheartaigh says, “because they had never won even an Ulster title until the year before that. They won their first Ulster title in 1959. Normally when that happens, that satisfies them for a while. I still remember, they came flying out onto the field, this was the (’59 All-Ireland) semi-final and Paddy Doherty got the first point but Galway were too smart for them.”

He recalls James McCartan’s father, James senior, a member of the breakthrough team and twice Texaco Footballer of the Year. “He was a single-minded, tough man. He had a wicked determination.

And some time after they winning it the second time (1961), I was up in that part of the country. He lived in a unionist sort of a place. He’d a pub there and I was talking to him, I called to the house. I said to him: ‘You had the greatest determination on the field of anyone I ever saw.’

“‘I’ll tell you about that,’ says he. ‘Did you know my father?’ I said I didn’t, saw him a few times alright, but never spoke to him. ‘If you knew him, you’d know why I’m that way.’

“He said that when they were beaten in the ’59 semi-final in Croke Park, his father was waiting for him in Clonliffe Road. He had, I think he said, a little mini. He sat into it. And, he said, ‘He started there and he didn’t stop until we got in the gate at home. I hadn’t opened my mouth. He was saying, why in the name of God didn’t you do this that time you got the ball from Paddy Doherty? What were you thinking? I put up with all that, until I got out of the car outside that gate you see there now. I put my head back in and I told him, If I have to steal the Sam Maguire it’s coming in that gate next year and that will shut you up. That’s what made me the way I am.'”

Ó Muircheartaigh’s vast career span enabled him to see McCartan junior scale the All-Ireland summit as a player in the 1990s and his enchanting rhapsodies were still in vogue when McCartan had moved on to manage a Down team in an All-Ireland final. He is frequently asked to name the best players he saw. Seán Purcell is up there but he admits he might be biased because they were in college at the same time. Mick O’Connell is in that company. And John Egan, “the best man on that team” as he puts it during a chat about the Kerry side that emerged in 1975 and later won four in a row.

They had a relationship forged in football but that extended well beyond it. Years after retiring, Egan was recovering from an injury in the national rehab centre in Dun Laoghaire where Ó Muircheartaigh would regularly visit. “Kilkenny were hurling well at the time,” says Ó Muircheartaigh. “We were sitting down in the visitors’ area having a chat. And this woman swept around the corner. And she saw myself and John, and she looked at me and said, ‘I’m from Kilkenny. Will anything stop us?’ That’s the way she put it. ‘Will anything stop us?’ And I said, ‘Now, it’s early in the year. Tipp are there.’ I was trying to cool her down. ‘And Galway are there’. And so on. It meant nothing.

“She looked at John. She didn’t know John. He was a good while retired that time. She said, ‘Would your friend have an idea?’ And she was looking at John. And John didn’t say much. ‘Mam’, he said, ‘did you ever hear the saying, there’s many a slip between cup and lip?’

“Before she left, I told her who my friend was. Six All-Ireland medals. He was captain when they were going for the five in a row. You could say he had it in his hand, but it didn’t happen. That shook her, you see. And she took off then, and when she was gone around the corner, John said to me, ‘she’s thinking now’. Ah he was a wise man.”

Three years ago in his native Sneem, a striking bronze statue of Egan was unveiled, capturing him seated on a park bench holding a football. Ó Muircheartaigh was one of those present. “Now he spent much of his life in Cork as a Garda and he was not noted for giving out summonses. It wouldn’t be in his nature. But the Cork people were very good to him. Niall Cahalane, all of those, they looked after him. He was a gifted player.”

Next Saturday, June 13, would have been his birthday. He died aged 59 in 2012.

* * * * *

Ó Muircheartaigh developed a close relationship with Kerry players of the 1970s and ’80s while training those based in Dublin. When Mick O’Dwyer was appointed ahead of the 1975 season, the county chairman Ger McKenna made contact with Ó Muircheartaigh to put a proposal to him. He wanted him to look after the training in the capital. “They were young but they were good. Kerry were beaten in the All-Ireland minor by Galway in 1970, in a replay. Galway only got one player out of that game, and Kerry got nine.”

Players from Mayo, Leitrim and other counties made up the numbers when they trained, with Charlie Nelligan, Jack O’Shea and Ger Power among the Kerry footballers based in Dublin around that time. “We had great fun,” says Ó Muircheartaigh, “there was no big responsibility. I rang Ger and said, ‘Now these lads are going to be well fed’. And they were well fed. They got steaks in the best places in Dublin.

“And the last thing we’d do nearly every night, most nights, I used to play a bit of golf, I’d have clubs in the boot. Myself and Jack O’Shea, and he could be a good hurler, he’d be good at anything, we’d put a ball on the sideline, and have a little competition striking it long. And that would be the last thing we’d do. I think there is too much seriousness about training now.”

Did O’Dwyer send instructions up from Waterville? “No, because Micko had no instructions for himself! He hadn’t really. He used to have an old book but there was nothing in it, and he’d be shaking it sometimes. Micko reacted to the moment. And he had great faith in them. He was good to give confidence. He was the best ever to convince people who had no chance of getting on the team that they were never nearer the team than now. And it was a good thing, you can only pick so many.

“I remember when they won (the All-Ireland final) in ’75 he came out to the house with me afterwards (Ó Muircheartaigh then lived in Blanchardstown). The players would all be gone to the pubs. We went out to the hotel in Malahide later. We were on our way to my house and Micko was talking to himself, ‘Jaysus, I knew they were good but I didn’t think they were that good.’ And they played beyond themselves that day. They were all triers.”

* * * * *

Ó Muircheartaigh worries that those in charge of teams have become too earnest. County teams now shut the training gates to the public. The dressing room is off limits. The idea of different county men training together in Dublin is, in the context of today, for the birds. “It has gone too formal,” he laments.

“It is a while since Seán Kelly was president. And he came home from one of the All Star trips and said the big drinking days for players are over.”

He didn’t need to be told. “I don’t know where it was we were, abroad, but Donal Óg Cusack was a day late coming. Work kept him. And I was in the foyer of the hotel when he came in. And the first thing he asked me was, ‘Where was the gym?’ And I said, up until now everyone that would come in that door would ask you where is the bar? It had started that time.”

He speaks of Kieran McGeeney captaining Ireland to victory in the international rules series. “He was very committed and they won the matches and he had played very well. And myself and two others were going out golfing early the following morning around 7 o’clock.

“The players had a big night the night before. I saw him coming out of the gym. And I went out to see him and I said, ‘Kieran, it finished yesterday. And ye won and you were the captain. Where’s the need for this now?’ He mentioned the club at home, Mullaghbawn, they were playing the next Sunday. He wasn’t going to be caught out.”

When Tyrone beat Armagh in the 2003 All-Ireland final, he noticed McGeeney staying on the field during the presentation. “I mentioned it on the radio. Next time I met him I said that was a great gesture by yourself now to be there. ‘You know why I was there?’ he says. ‘I don’t’, I said, ‘I’d say you could be good friends with Peter Canavan, who was getting the cup’. ‘I was there,’ he says, ‘I made myself suffer.’ That’s him.”

He knows that modern managers or players won’t be paying too much heed. That is the way of the current generation, having veered inexorably towards a level of monastic devotion and commitment that would leave the players of yesterday dumbstruck. The informality of yesterday though is missed. He was there for the best of those times.

But the budding commentator will certainly listen to what he has to say. “I always say to people who might be starting, you are talking to the people who are not here. And that it is important to them to be fair and to give as much information (as possible). You know, we are an inquisitive nation.”

This interview was first published on June 7, 2020