After that goal I was told I’d be set up... then it all went wrong
‘ITS MENTION ANNOYS ME, IT MEANS YOU WERE NO GOOD’
SEAMUS DARBY is shining a light on the darkest junction of his life’s journey, and his face is as animated now as it was when he performed that crazy dance on Kerry’s five-in-a-row grave. His story has been well told but his gift is that when he tells it, he paints the most vivid of painful pictures.
A decade has passed since that goal and the London streets he is walking through have never felt meaner. He is a 40 something scratching a living at the lowest end of the pub market. Eventually, he comes to a fork in the road which is brutishly illuminated.
‘I remember a guy asking me if I would take over a pub for him in Hackney and the poor man later committed suicide. He was after getting the pub for nothing and he asked me to run it,’ says Darby.
‘I went down there in the middle of night and it had no light. It was pitch dark and I got into this f**king bed and woke up the next morning and the bed…. Oh Jesus, you would not put the dog in it. And I thought to myself what the f**k are you doing here and you after coming from a good home, good wife, beautiful family. And I just thought to myself, this is not for you Seamus.’ And it wouldn’t be. In a couple of months he will celebrate his 68th birthday and where once resided mid-life torment, there is now tranquillity. That is not something he takes for granted because he knows he has been dealt a hand of cards that were designed to make the recipient fold.
A quick recap – the instant fame attached to the most famous kick of a football in GAA history was blinding and the drink culture that came with it fractured relationships.
A wrecking ball of a recession in the 1980s brought his successful shop in Edenderry to its knees, and when he tried to bounce back by buying a pub in Borrisokane, it brought him there too.
Mortgaged to the hilt, the premises in Edenderry he put up as collateral was swallowed whole.
‘I can remember coming off the field in ’82 and some Offaly supporter putting his arm around me and telling me that I would never see a poor day and little did I know what was ahead of me,’ he smiles
What was ahead of him in 1990 was a boat across the Irish Sea when he was 39, with little more than loose change in his pocket to sustain.
‘Yeah, I have had bad times and I mean f**king really hard times.
‘I actually got a chance to go to America at the time but I was still with my wife and I had three young kids. I felt that America was really the last straw and if I go there I am not even going to get to see my kids. But that was a tough period.
‘I remember being very down because I had no money, absolutely no money and f**king no way of getting it. I never really gave up hope.
‘I was running old pubs and they were only s**t holes really but they were somewhere to live. And that was kind of the start of it. At least I had a roof over my head and a chance to take in a few pound.’
Courage and core values pulled him back from the brink. He double-jobbed initially, working on the roads and the railways with Murphy’s during the day, dispensing ale in the evenings.
In 2002, after 12 years in exile he came home and bought the Greyhound Bar in Toomevara which he still runs.
And when he does his stock-check now, he has reason to feel good.
‘I am actually very proud of the fact that I could have gone the other way and thrown in the towel but I am a fairly positive kind of guy and the glass is always half full instead of half empty.
‘And thanks be to God I am in a very good place now.
‘I get on very well with my ex-wife and my kids. They are all in Edenderry still and all my grandkids are there.’
The spotlight is back on him, albeit it is much gentler now. In the football year that is in it, his phone is set to melt this summer. Already an acclaimed documentary, Players of the Faithful has been aired on RTÉ while Darby (left) is one of six GAA legends to be featured in the latest series of TG4’s Laochra Gael. There are times when it irks with him that all he is remembered for is one kick of the ball – after all it is often forgotten he started in the 1972 All-Ireland replay win over Kerry.
‘It annoys me a bit because it really means you were no good.
‘Or that you were there and you got one kick and it changed the world. I was around for a long time and I was out for six years, from ’76 to the 1982 Leinster final. I obviously was not good enough for those six years and Eugene McGee didn’t see any point in having me there,’ he reflects
But as to the moment itself, does Liam O’Connor’s looping centre, his catch over the head of Tommy Doyle, that turn and left-footed finish play on a loop inside his head? Not likely.
‘I don’t think about it too much. I am not a teenager anymore and I have more important things to worry about than the goal,’ he suggests, a reminder that four years ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer which was successfully treated.
‘The first time it really hit me was when I was sitting up alongside Richie Connor at the Dublin/ Mayo All-Ireland final two years ago and Dublin were winning by two points.
‘I just said to Richie “Jaysus, if someone from Mayo can get a goal here...” and I hadn’t the words out of my mouth when it dawned on me that this is exactly where we were all those years ago.’
And this is where he is now. A life well and hard lived but he has no regrets, nor least about the moment which some choose to define him by.
‘Oh God no… No regrets whatsoever.
‘The way I would look at it is that there are an awful lot of better players than me that it didn’t happen to or did not even win an All Ireland and they are just forgotten about.
‘When I am dead and gone and when my kids are dead and gone and my grandkids are around, they will still be hearing about it.’