Documentary a brilliant portrait of a true great

Damian Stack looks at some of the stories making backpage news over the past seven days

THERE was a devilish glint in his eye. A smile, which started at the corners of his mouth, began to spread across his face. After sixty years in the public eye, he was still getting a kick out of it.

It’s not every man who can walk down the boardwalk in his home town and casually greet a statue of himself with a knowing wink. Mick O’Dwyer is no ordinary man. He is who he always has been. The quintessential Kerry man.

He embodies, better than probably anybody else, the best this county and its people has to offer. He’s the cute Kerry man who turned a profit on his very first football and bought himself a second. He had style and panache both on and off the field.

Watching the brilliant Loosehorse documentary on the great man last Monday evening, O’Dwyer – Dwyer in the vernacular – caught the imagination of the entire country all over again.

This brilliant man’s passion and enthusiasm was every bit as infectious now to those of us watching as it was to all those greats of the game he inspired over the generations as player and as manager.

Early in the documentary there’s a scene of him in Fitzgerald Stadium. Sitting alongside greats of the game Maurice Fitzgerald, Ogie Moran, Eoin Liston and Micheál Ó Sé, he’s swept along with the action as it unfolds out on the pitch.

At one point Bryan Sheehan shrugs off the challenge of a couple of Kerins O’Rahillys players and Micko positively purrs.

“Sheehan’s the key man today,” he says approvingly.

The documentary was at its core a love story. When he says he hopes to die while watching a game from the sideline or in the stand – though not for some time to come – we should take him at his word. It’s food and drink to the Waterville man.

Micko loved football and football loved him. Watching the archive footage he cut the most elegant figure with ball in hand. That alone was an important reminder to a lot of people of my generation and those below it – Micko was first and foremost a footballer.

In our imagination he’s the guy stalking the sideline rolled up match programme in hand spreading the bible of football – Kerry football particularly – to counties in need of that little sprinkle of magic.

There he was in Micko in his pomp, looking every bit as fit as any modern footballer shooting the most brilliant points you’d ever care to look at. Points over his shoulder with his back to goal. Points from every angle. Everything he did he did with class and that’s where the genius of this documentary lay.

Its makers – much as they did for the similarly excellent Giles – let the subject speak for himself. We didn’t need to be told by a succession of talking heads that Micko was a class act, all we had to do was watch him in action. His charisma and his dignity shone through effortlessly. Inevitably there was a certain amount of wistfulness as O’Dwyer reflected upon his eighty two years on planet Earth. In as much as he didn’t regret a single thing he did, in as much as he enjoyed a life well lived, loss is inevitable, nothing lasts forever.

O’Dwyer – still sprightly for his age – no longer manages a team and it’s a loss keenly felt. He sits in Croke Park on a chair reserved for managers and reflects that it’s a place he never sat before, preferring instead always to walk the line.

He reveals that in the last couple of years he’s largely lost the use of his left hand, meaning he can no longer play the accordion or play golf and, yet, not even that will dent his undeniable spirit.

Looking straight at camera he holds up both his hands and says he’d still be able to catch a high ball if it came his way and you don’t doubt him for a second. The man is indefatigable. Who else other than Micko could rejuvenate a side crushed by the loss of the five in-a-row – something he thinks about at least once a week he says – and go on to win another three in-a-row? You could, of course, argue that an hour long documentary isn’t nearly long enough to do justice to the breath and depth of this man’s life. There’s a certain validity to that, but it also sort of misses the point. Micko painted a portrait of the man. It captured his essence and did so in a way accessible to more than just GAA people.

It’s fitting too that this documentary was done – not to be morbid and not to suggest he’s going anywhere any time soon – while he was still alive with his active participation. Too often we wait until people are gone before honouring what they mean to us. The good people of Waterville didn’t make that mistake and so erected the statue with Dwyer hale and hearty. Neither have the makers of this documentary. We owe them – and Micko – our gratitude.