Building up GAA players as celebrities is just crazy
Ex-Rossie star Frankie Dolan knows how publicity’s glare can take a painful toll
THERE was no trigger when Frankie Dolan reached his breaking point. He was sitting at home one afternoon in 2009 when it happened. ‘I just started roaring crying for no reason. That is not like me. I hardly ever cry, it was probably all the emotion of everything got on top of me. It was probably the last straw, it had built up, built up and built up, and the next thing my head was not good,’ he recalls.
While there was no tipping point, there had been a slow build-up of trauma that was all the harder to deal with when you are a well known inter-county footballer.
And he was one of the most intriguing figures in the early noughties, a player whose genius – and apparent appetite for conflict and controversy – meant his profile dwarfed Roscommon’s status as a team deep in football’s pack.
He will, however, be forever remembered for an evening in 2002 when a pre-Championship teambonding session turned into a scene from Men Behaving Badly.
A beery night reached its climax when Dolan and three teammates returned to the Derry hotel they were booked into and decided to play a game of pool with a twist during the early hours.
Dolan proposed a game of doubles of shirts and skins, and he ended up captaining the latter. It was one of those moments designed to be stored in the memory and recalled for laughs down the road.
But that moment of bare-cheeked madness was captured, without the protagonists’ knowledge, by CCTV and when the identity of those involved became evident, the image was splashed across the pages of a tabloid newspaper.
For all his years as a player competing at the highest level – his greatest memory delivered an AllIreland title with the St Brigid’s club in 2013 in the autumn of his career – it irritates him that that one incident has come to define him in the eyes of many. Being reminded of it on a daily basis had an oppressive and depressing impact.
‘Yeah, it does grate with me. At one stage, I was better known as a pool player than a Gaelic footballer,’ he concedes.
‘At the start I blocked it out of my head but it just continued on and continued on. I was working on the road for a company at the time, Tullamore Frozen Foods and every place, every outlet, big or small that you would go into, they would be slagging and messing with you, the usual craic… “I didn’t recognise you there with the clothes on”.
‘But listening to the same old stuff over and over again took its toll and eventually I had to get away.
‘I went off to Australia for a couple of months and it was the best thing I ever did, it cleared my head.’
But only for a while there were other things simmering inside his head, too. He was only starting out in his inter-county career when his parents, Frank and Rosaleen, separated just weeks after he had won his only Connacht SFC medal in 2001.
He was old and bold enough – he was 23 at the time of the split – to deal with it but the break-up of a 20-year marriage made waves in rural Ireland.
And the reality is that age never fully insulates individuals from the impact of the family-unit dissolving.
‘I would be the kind of person who would not be one for spilling my emotions,’ he admits. ‘I keep it to myself and that was the worst thing I probably did. All that stuff that had been going on over the years just came out that day and I had not a clue as to what was going on.
‘In fairness to my wife Caroline she put me in contact with a counsellor in Athlone and I had a couple of meetings with her and it was the best thing I did.
‘I always thought I was at fault for all this stuff that was going on but when I sat down with her for a couple of meetings, she let me know it was not my fault.
‘Those counselling sessions cleared my head, it cleared my conscience and I have never looked back since.
‘I think I have become a stronger person since because she did so much great work with me.’
That strength was needed. Even though Dolan’s inter-county career was over before the bile truly flowed from social media’s sewer, he still got a sense of what current players have to face.
‘I remember one letter in particular that was sent to the house in Kiltoom. It was just a person being totally jealous because I had some success as a footballer. ‘I don’t remember what was in it but I remember thinking at the time why would someone take the time and effort to write an anonymous letter and then go to the trouble of posting it.
‘I remember I didn’t even read it all and I just f**ked it into the fire.
‘You don’t tend to get a lot of positive stuff, particularly in Ireland. If an Irish person starts a business in America, they will stand behind him and build him back up and if he is successful in that business they will love him.
‘But if that happens in Ireland, the opposite tends to happen. For some reason, and I don’t know why it is, but there tends to be a lot of negativity and we love putting down our own.
‘And then to make modern Gaelic footballers into celebrities is just crazy. It is a pastime and social media has a lot to answer for.
‘Some people can deal with it but a lot of people can’t. People have to realise that not everyone is strong enough in the head to take it on board and it does not end up well for a lot of people which is really scary given where social media could be in five years’ time.’
The sense is that the opportunity to put his life story down on paper in his recently published autobiography, Outside of the Right, was a cathartic experience for Dolan, but it was also an opportunity for one of Roscommon’s most enigmatic players to reach out to a public that has not always understood him.
Then again, they were not the only ones.
Roscommon may not have had a more naturally-gifted player – he was just as good in soccer having been on the books of Athlone Town and Bohemians while also turning down a trial across the water with Reading – but they only saw the very best of him in a short window.
After he returned from that stint in Australia, he played the football of his life in 2003, memorably scoring 25 points in back-to-back games against Offaly and Kildare while being marked by two All-Star decorated defenders in Cathal Daly and Brian Lacey.
Yet within two years, he was gone, dropped from the starting team by Tommy Carr – which prompted a walk-out before returning when the Dublin man stepped down mid-season in 2005 – and he was cut from the panel when John Maughan took over in 2006.
In the end, Maughan had a change of heart but Dolan regrets his brief comeback in 2008 when Roscommon were in chaos and his appetite for the inter-county game had been dulled.
His parting of the ways with Carr and Maughan could be lazily interpreted as the inevitable outcome when a maverick is asked to serve
‘I WANTED THE BEST FOR THE TEAM, NOT TO CAUSE TROUBLE’
under two ex-army men, but, then, so was his first manager Gay Sheerin.
Dolan believes the difference was Roscomman man Sheerin made an effort to get to know him, while Maughan may have based an evaluation on the word of others.
‘I would like to see inside people looking after the county, who know the players, who can deal with the likes of Frankie Dolan or whoever, who wear their heart on their sleeve and who are not afraid to talk.
‘I only wanted to get the best out of the team and that was the only reason. I spoke my mind not to start trouble, I am not that kind of person.
‘I only spoke my mind to get the best out of my team so we could try and be successful,’ he laments.
After a stint managing St Brigid’s, he remains involved coaching in the county academy where his sons Ryen and Jack are headed and his heart is still with the primrose and blue, but he is uncertain about Roscommon’s football future.
They head out today in Dr Hyde Park against Galway in the Connacht SFC and he fears the worst, while long-term the chances of a county of Roscommon’s size contending for an All-Ireland are less than slim.
‘I would like to think we would be competing for a Connacht title. When you go outside Connacht and look at Dublin, Kerry, Tyrone and Donegal there is a big step-up and we don’t have those players, we don’t have the quality or the numbers.
‘You will see a lot of young lads travelling around the world in the next year or two, especially after Covid having hindered travel for the past couple of years. I think some counties might find it difficult next year.
‘Would you bother if you are from Roscommon throwing all your effort to try and compete with Dublin and Kerry?
‘If I was a young lad now I know I would be thinking about it.’