Kerry All-Ireland winner Marc Ó Sé on keeping the Kingdom magic alive
THERE are days when you can be codded in thinking that time has stood still. I drove past my brother Fergal’s house recently and, if I didn’t know better, I would have been convinced he was growing balls instead of grass on his front lawn. He has a set of goalposts too and it was like the Ard an Bhóthair of my childhood when Fergal, Darragh and Tomás kicked me around the back garden.
There are differences of course, but only in economies of scale.
We had only the one ball then and the one set of goal-posts, and they were not your standard stainless steel, assembly-job either
The two downpipes on the gable wall served as uprights, a third ran conveniently at a slope parallel to double up as a crossbar. That was my first theatre of dreams and my parents’ field of pain. We banged balls off windows and when we were on our second broken one, my late father took out an injunction on us playing there and we were banished up the road to the patch of grass outside the church.
We broke a window there too and we were read out from the pulpit by Monsignor Ó Fiannachta at 10 O’Clock Mass.
The mortification visited on my parents meant the ban on Ard an Bhóthair was lifted and our college fund was drained by window-pane replacements.
That is football. We played, we laughed, we played some more and laughed some more. And we still do.
What does Kerry football mean to me? I don’t even know where to begin to answer that question. I suppose if it didn’t exist, the human condition is such that we would have found a way to adjust but I can’t imagine I could have squeezed as much joy out of that grey sterile world as I do out of this wonderful technicolour life that kicking a ball has given me. I started out cycling a seven-mile trip back to Gallarus as a nineyear-old and I am finishing out driving the bones of an hour from Tralee – every day is rush-hour in West Kerry when the roads are full of tourists – and, amazingly, it is still the same to me. I still want to get out there, I still want to test myself, I still want to be at the heart of the parish and the pride it gifts me. I rarely think about it, but it is a rare thing to travel this far into life still clinging to the joy of my childhood. You would get strange looks as a 38-year-old if you were still clutching your favourite teddy bear, but people take no notice of asking if you are still going to be togging when you are 39. I know my good fortune. There is not a day when I don’t give thanks that I was born a Kerryman, and the cherry on that green and gold cake was landing on this earth into Ard an Bhóthair,
My first memory is being lifted up on top of the lorry the day my uncle brought Sam Maguire back home. I was just five but your memory would have no editing power if it could not frame a moment like that forever.
The impact it had on all of us was huge. In my playing time when we brought Sam back, we had to make a request and wait in an ever lengthening queue if we wanted to ‘book’ it for some event.
Perhaps it was because we were winning it so often back then, but getting your hands on that chalice was never an issue.
There were 26 of us in Cill Mhic a Domhnaign National School in 1985, and Páidí made sure that Sam had one overnight stay in every pupil’s house.
Think about that – the most precious prize in Irish sport and it went from breakfast table to breakfast table. That is privilege for you. That is Páidí for you.
He knew what he was doing too, planting seeds and hoping for shooting football giants to emerge.
My father, Micheál, was cut from a different stone but shared the same love of the game. He was a grounding and nourishing influence. If I played really well, he would say ‘you were grand’ and if I played poorly, he would turn around to me and say ‘I thought you were really good today’.
He was ying to his brother’s yang, I have a memory of the front page of the RTÉ Guide prior to the 1986 All-Ireland final and it was a picture of the Kerry team in Munster blue that beat Meath in the semi-final. It made me curious and I went off to Páidí’s bosca – he had this box where he kept all his gear – found it, threw it on and was drowning inside in it as a sixyear-old would.
In comes Páidí, ‘listen boy, you have to earn that,’ he says.
I reminded him of that when he stripped one of my jerseys off the washing line and handed it to some tourist who wanted a memento from his trip West. There was no earning involved there, or if there was I did not see it.
But I get what he meant, nevertheless I would say it was a conversation that was a bit premature for a young fellow trying to swim his way out of a sea of blue cotton.
Páidí’s great strength was to impart emotion, stressing the importance of place and history.
I know people look at us and think it is all about DNA – all four of us that played in that back garden togged for the Kerry minors – but it is about education, too. I won an All-Ireland under Pat O’Shea in 2007 but he gave me something far more precious than a Celtic Cross.
When Tomás and I were still in national school he came calling as a coaching officer and took all that passion which my father and Paidi had planted and distilled it into skill. You learned to kick with two feet, learned to play with your head up, learned that football without moving is like dancing without music. They go together.
And Pat O’Shea would not have wandered onto our patch of grass if the Kerry County Board did not have the vision to appoint him.
And we would not have developed the skills he imparted if my father’s namesake, Micheál Ó Sé, better known to many as a broadcaster, did not coax and coach us right through the grades with An Ghaeltacht along with Liam Ó Rocháin.
And I see it happening all over again. We have a dear friend in our club, Tommy Muircheartaigh. He is a development officer beating the paths to schools that Pat O’Shea once did. And then in his own time he is back with An Ghaeltacht doing the job Micheál Ó Sé once did.
And my nine-year-old nephew Niall is beating the same path back to Gallarus that I once took.The temptation is to say that is the Kerry way and it always will be.
But that would be arrogant and dangerous. The truth is that the only way you keep the magic in our lives that is Kerry football is by working hard at it.
It should never be taken for granted.
It is too precious a thing for that.