DALY THE GOOD, THE BAD AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
Double All-Ireland winner and former Dublin boss opens up about his battlesaway from the game
I was the first one in my class to be short a parent, a huge part of my life that wasn’t closed off
GROWING UP, Anthony Daly was shaped by a man who wasn’t there. He was just seven years of age when his father, Pat Joe, died and he analyses the effect this had on him with startling candour in ‘Dalo’, his autobiography. When he grew into adulthood and into the story of Ireland as a charismatic Clare captain, he was shaped by a man who was vibrantly there in his life and he is just as frank in detailing his deep, sometimes fraught relationship with Ger Loughnane, who appears in the pages as another towering influence.
They are not the only ones. His wife Eilís and mother Mary emerge as comprehensively realised characters, as does his late brother Paschal, whose sudden death from a heart attack in 1998 devastated the family.
Of the people mentioned above, just one, Loughnane, is a hurling figure.
The others are family, and it is rare indeed to find an Irish sports book that casts far beyond a playing field or a dressing room for its vital characters.
That willingness to share his entire life makes ‘Dalo’ outstanding. It ranks as one of the best books of its kind, and will eventually sit alongside the autobiographies of Dónal Óg Cusack and Jack O’Connor as Irish classics.
The book was written with journalist Christy O’Connor who makes the story sound like the authentic Daly from the beginning and, in particular, that wrenching loss of his father in October 1977 at the family home in Madden’s Terrace in Clarecastle.
In remembering the effect the death had on his mother, Daly poignantly but expertly describes the bewilderment of loss. ‘We have no patent on tragedy or death or anything like that. There are thousands of worse cases in this country every year,’ he says now, sitting in a quiet corner of a Dublin hotel.
‘All I could talk about is the effect it had on our house, and the effect it had on myself as a person, and the whole aura around that. I was the first one in my class to be short a parent. I’m talking about the late 1970s and, for me, it was a huge issue at the time and a huge part of life that probably wasn’t closed off.’
He did not go to his father’s funeral, entrusted instead to the care of family friends for the day. That left him im with a haunting sense that he never properly said goodbye.
The death left his mother withh a large family to rear on a widow’s pension. There is sadness and rawness ss in his description of her life narrowing wing and growing smaller after her husband usband died.
‘We got her back to bingo about bout four years after my father died, ed, and that’s Friday night down in the local hall,’ he remembers.
‘Outside of that, outside of f going to Mass and a few funer- rals and family weddings? Well,, she was a good woman to go to the matches and the lads would bring her.
BUT THERE was a crushh in 1996 coming out of the e Gaelic Grounds after the e Munster semi-final, the e day of the late Ciarán Carey point. She got caught in that crush and she got an awful fright and never went to a match after it. That was another little social outlet gone from her.
‘S ‘She really dedicated herself to the hom home, to bringing us up as best she cou could and being there for us all. The dad was missing and she was going to mak make sure she did a good job of trying to ra raise us as best she could.’ Th The book is dedicated to her: ‘To my mother, for giving me a great upb upbringing.’ D Daly married Eilís Murphy the week aft after leading Clare to their third Al All-Ireland title in 1997. Within a year, he was called a wife-beater by a Waterford player in the drawn Munster final.
Addressing it is brave; he could h have refused to acknowledge the r rumours in the book.
‘I knew it was out there, but it had been sort of forgotten about,’ he explains.
‘But, by God, we didn’t forget about it. And I know of a couple of people who relayed the story and by God when I see them on the street in Ennis I don’t run across the road to say hello to them.
‘It was the fella from Madden’s Terrace lifting the Liam MacCarthy twice, getting married the following Saturday and hitting off to Mexico on the honeymoon,’ he shrugs, referring to the jealousy he believes resulted from him, born and reared in a modest house in Clarecastle, becoming an All-Ireland-winning captain.
‘It was unfair stuff. There was nothing to it. I wasn’t shy on the pitch to hold my own on the verbals front, but I never really started it and I never got into any personal stuff, ever.’
Eilís fought and beat ovarian cancer, and her battle is shared with the reader, as is the fight of their eldest daughter, Orlaith, with epilepsy. This is not a story of a hurling life, but the life story of a man who is famous because of hurling.
HE SAYS, with a smile, that his regular Christmas present is the latest sports autobiography, and he knew enough of the genre to know what he did not want to write. ‘Some of them, I just closed them up after three or four chapters. I didn’t want to read match reports,’ he says.
If family has given him the richest nourishment in his 44 years, then hurling has provided almost as much goodness. No team emerged from hurling’s revolution years as boldly as Clare.
Daly was their leader, but Loughnane was their master.
There has never been a GAA manager as mesmeric or divisive, and his relationship with Daly was extraordinary.
There is a moving description of the pair embracing in the dressing-room after Clare lost to Tipperary in the 2000 Munster semi-final. It was the end of Loughnane and it would be the last time Daly played a Championship match for the county, too.
In 2004, he was named Clare manager. He writes of the pain caused by Loughnane’s criticism of his management during the three years he spent in charge. Their relationship was brittle, but, in late 2006, after Daly’s departure as manager, he was leaving a funeral in Ennis when he met Loughnane and his wife Mary walking up the street.
‘There was no one in between us and we were 25 yards apart, and I said to myself, “Jesus, look who’s coming”,’ he recalls with a laugh now.
‘I didn’t want to walk past him. It wouldn’t be in my heart. He made me the man I was in lots of ways. I would have had nothing only for him, I guarantee you that,’ he says plainly.
‘Len Gaynor [Loughnane’s predecessor] brought us a huge amount of the way, and I hope it comes across in the book what Gaynor means to me, but I certainly wouldn’t have had the success I had only for Ger Loughnane.
‘Overriding any newspaper column, that man meant more to me than that. So we had a chat that night and we were away again.’
Daly brought his Dublin team to play a Clare side last May for the Ger Loughnane Cancer Challenge, and Loughnane officially launched ‘Dalo’ in the Temple Gate Hotel in Ennis last Thursday night.
His promotional duties for the book are slowing down and he’s beginning to think about his future since stepping down from managing Dublin in September. He admits there were ‘soundings’ about the Galway job, and he has some business plans, too. Life hurtles on and Daly is braced for it.
He knows what it can bring, good, bad and everything in between.