Browne has managed to leave major impression
Much-travelled Browne always proud of native shore
‘SAVAGE LOVES his native shore. Because I do,’ said Wexford town native Frank Browne as he put the finishing touches to a stream of stories from a lifetime in G.A.A.
Much like the Bard of Ballycarry, James Orr, Frank has had his battles. He’s won some, lost plenty too, but the sense of enjoyment he has derived along the way has made it all worthwhile for the warm native of Kennedy Park.
The people of Wexford will know Frank but might have missed parts of a remarkable story that takes in playing, coaching and managing, in both football and hurling. It all started at home with the Harriers and Sarsfields, but soon distant fields were calling.
‘The last game I hurled in Wexford was the county Minor ‘A’ final, the Harriers hurled the Rapps in Wexford Park in 1987,’ Frank remembered.
‘We were beaten by the Rapps, by four or five points. I was full-forward, [and] actually corner-forward that day, God rest him, was Mikey Sheil.’
While his older brothers, Paud and Justin, went on to be stalwarts in Páirc Charman, a different pathway called for Frank. Just a teenager, he packed his bags and headed to the north-west to start a new life.
‘I trained as an air traffic controller and I worked in Knock airport,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what brought me to live and work in Mayo. I was 17, I left school and did a year of an apprenticeship with ABS Pumps in Sligo, but it just wasn’t for me.
‘I ended up then, between the jigs and the reels, getting a job being an air traffic controller which was amazing. I remember 18 people started the course and six passed. The drop-out failure rate was huge at the time, but it’s something I really enjoyed.’
Little did Frank know at the time, but his work in the aviation industry would have a huge impact on how he took to G.A.A. management. At that stage he was just a young player, looking for a way to keep hurl in hand.
‘Word got around, there’s a guy from Wexford here and he plays a bit of hurling,’ Frank recalled of the local chatter. ‘You almost got head-hunted then. The guys in Tooreen said “will you come and hurl?”
‘Sure, it’s all I knew so of course I’d go. I hurled with Tooreen for a couple of years but I lived in Ballyhaunis. They had a really good under-age structure but they had no Senior team, so in 1996 we said let’s form our own team here now in Ballyhaunis.
‘We split from Tooreen at adult level, and that led to a huge amount of really good rivalry, really healthy rivalry, no badness about it at all. Then in 2001, one of my best sporting days, Ballyhaunis won the Senior hurling title.
‘I hurled the middle of the field. Actually Keith Higgins, four-time All Star, was wing-forward, his brother Pierce was middle of the field with me, brilliant day.
‘I remember Tooreen beating us by 30 and 40 points and we’re thinking, what are we at here at all, but we kept plugging away, we kept our head down, working away, and suddenly then Ballyhaunis went on to win nine county titles in a row.’
Frank got a decade in the Mayo county colours too, with the small ball naturally. And while G.A.A. consumed his sporting life and he would go on to have success in football, hurling was always his number one.
‘I hurled for Mayo for ten years, loved it,’ Frank beamed. ‘I suppose one of the highlights for me, in 2001 I was 31, coming towards the end, and the famous Mattie Murphy from Galway came in to coach and manage the Mayo hurlers that year.
‘We were beaten in an All-Ireland Junior final by Meath in Enniskillen that year but, you know what, at first I thought to myself, I’d love to go into coaching and management after watching Mattie.
‘Mattie had managed Galway Minor teams, he had managed the Galway Senior team, jeez he was way beyond his time, he was the best man to read a game I’ve ever saw.
‘He’d nearly say in the fifth minute we’re going to score a goal and they are going to score a point after, he was that good.
‘Ah, he was a brilliant hurling man, a brilliant coach, a brilliant motivator. I hurled away, I was what you’d call a journeyman, but i loved it. The friends I made, they are still my best friends to this day.
‘I lost a daughter in 2004, she was only six months old. It was the friends I made through hurling, football and G.A.A. that brought me through it, good decent people.
‘Please God, when the pubs open we’ll have a few bottles of beer and still talk about the good days and the bad days, the fights and the fallings out, we’ll chew the fat and go to games.’
The year with Mattie at the helm inspired Frank to pursue a managerial career in Gaelic games. His first port of call was with the Mayo Senior hurlers in 2006 and, while he stayed just a season, it was eventful.
‘We were beaten by Kerry [in the league final], there was a huge row because the All-Ireland Under-21 football semi-final was played in Cavan, and we played Kerry in Ennis.
‘Keith [Higgins] was our main man but he couldn’t play because he was captain of the Under-21 football team. He went on that year to be Cadbury’s young footballer of the year, won the All-Ireland with Mayo Under-21 and played in the Senior final, but no doubt if we’d have had him there [we’d have won].
‘John Michael Slattery scored a goal for Kerry with about 30 seconds to go to beat us by a point, otherwise we’d have went up to Division 1B which would have been a serious acheivement, you’d have been knocking the door of the big boys.’
Frank made an unusual jump for 2007, when he took the reins with the ladies’ county footballers, and the four years he spent in two spells over the Mayo women went down as probably the most significant of his managerial career.
‘In 2007 I had a year,’ Frank remembered. ‘Won the National League, won a Connacht title, got to the All-Ireland final, fell out with the County Board in 2008, and didn’t go back until 2015.’
In the meantime he enjoyed other success, as Browne took the Leitrim ladies out of Division 4 in a two-year spell in the O’Rourke county.
Next up was an interesting spell with Longford hurlers in which the memorable days kept coming.
‘I spent three years managing Longford hurlers,’ he said.
‘The Chairman rang me and said, “Frank, look, we’re going to pull out”, and I said, “you can’t pull out of the competition, I’ll come in for a couple of weeks. If we’re going to lose a game we’ll lose it on the pitch.
‘We’ll get 5 together somehow or other, and if we get beaten by 15 points at least we’ll die on the pitch with our boots on.”
‘We went up to play Fermanagh in Enniskillen with 16 people in the first round of the Lory Meagher, and we got the shit beat out of us, but I kind of said I’m going to give this another year here, no way is hurling going to be let die in Longford, I’m going to keep at it.
‘The next year we got to the Lory Meagher final and Warwickshire beat us. The following year we beat Fermanagh in the final, it was a great day, I remember people saying to me, “ah sure it’s only the Lory Meagher, Frank”.
Being an air traffic controller is such an advantage when you’re coaching. You learn to be very decisive
‘I’d say, sure it’s the only competition I could win. I wasn’t in the Liam MacCarthy, I wasn’t in the Nickey Rackard, I wasn’t in the Christy Ring, I couldn’t win them!
‘It’s like if you’re a Junior ‘B’ team, the only thing you can win is the Junior ‘B’ county final, that’s all you can do.
‘That was a brilliant day. There was a stronghold of hurling people in Longford too, really hurling fundamentalists as Liam Griffin calls them, that just love hurling.’
By now Frank was approaching a decade in management. He had used what he had learned in his working life to his benefit in the management game and was ready to take another shot at the Mayo ladies’ job.
‘I’ll tell you what, being an air traffic controller is such an advantage when you are coaching teams. You learn to be very decisive in making decisions. Sometimes you are standing on the line and you are watching the game going on in front of you.
‘Will I do this, will I not do this, will I change this guy, will I do that? By being an air traffic controller, the average decision-making time for an air traffic controller is about ten seconds. You make a decision, you make [another] decision.
‘I always felt I wanted to go back to the Mayo ladies while Cora [Staunton] and Yvonne Byrne and some of those players who were still there from 2007 where still there, and go back and let’s have one last cut at this. I felt I had unfinished business.
‘I had the most amazing journey, with the most amazing group of people. You hear this talk in sport the whole time and you think, “ah, for f*** sake, will you stop”, but we were like a big, giant family.
‘We fell out with each other, we killed each other, but ultimately we loved each other, it sounds really corny. I had ferocious fights with Cora Staunton, ferocious, we turned the air blue, the two of us, but if you came in and said a word against me, we’d all turn on you kind of thing, you know.
‘We had a big, giant stupid family, an amazing journey, absolutely, I had a brilliant time. The largest women’s sporting event on the planet in 2017 was the All-Ireland final in Croke Park, 49,000 people at it, I was centre of it.
‘Imagine a little boy on the street growing up in Wexford thinking I‘d be on the sideline on All-Ireland final day with 50,000 people, sure I was living the dream. There was only one problem, we got beaten!
‘At the end of the day we lost a game of football. One of the classic things we did, we promised the people in Temple Street, we promised we would come in after the All-Ireland final, win, lose or draw, we’d go to Temple Street, and we did.
‘I remember I got into the bed about quarter to seven and got up about quarter to nine to get on the bus and go to Temple Street. It was the last thing I wanted to do but we made a promise, we were good people.
‘Just because we lost a football match didn’t mean we turned into bad people overnight, so we went into Temple Street and went around.
‘Actually Temple Street tweeted that afternoon, they had a picture of us coming out the front door and the Dubs were going in after winning, fair play to them you know.
‘Temple Street tweeted: “The first ever losing team to visit Temple Street after the All-Ireland, Mayo ladies a real touch of class”.
‘Do you know what, that was nearly better than winning any game, because it was a touch of class from the players you know. Every player turned up. Sometimes you have to stand for something and we stood for something, that was our culture, that we’d do that.’
Frank went back to his first sporting love last season. He took up the challenge of the Dublin Senior camogie manager’s position, but his three-year project was ended prematurely after one.
‘I thought we were getting somewhere,’ he said. ‘I always thought it was going to be a three-year project.
‘After year one I was kind of saying, okay we have ourselves established, and the County Board just decided to go in a different direction. Look it, that’s their prerogative and there was no fall-out, there was no bad feeling, it was just they chose to go in a different direction.’
For 2020 it was a change of pace for Frank. The opportunity to go across the border to Galway, as a selector with an immediate All-Ireland challenger, last season’s runners-up, was simply too tasty to turn down.
‘Going over the border, it’d be kind of like living in New Ross and going across to the Rower now, you know, or to Inistioge, you’d be kind of getting some funny looks.
‘But I had met Tim [Rabbitt], I had crossed swords with some of the players, the likes of Tracey Leonard and all that during my Mayo days. I met the manager and we kind of thought, maybe, you know, we’re really close to getting over the line here.
‘We’re really close to winning an All-Ireland here, maybe I could bring something different, a different attitude, or a different look, or a different vibe, or a different coach or something different, and that’s what we were doing.
‘Until the “cidona” virus came out we were making great progress, we were,’ he joked.
Like everyone else, Frank Browne doesn’t know when he’ll be back on the sideline. However, if the past decade-plus years are anything to go by, the Wexford native and his team won’t be far away from the action at the business end of the season.
What’s even more certain is that he’ll love every step of his G.A.A. journey, as the poem outlines:
‘The savage loved his native shore, though rude the soil and chill the air;
‘Then well may Erin’s sons adore, their isle which nature formed so fair.’