Can it be all of 50 years since this newspaper flagged “The day of the Kerry dancers”, when Mick O’Dwyer’s young team tore through Dublin to dethrone Kevin Heffernan’s surprise All-Ireland winners from the previous year?
The match was year zero for modern football and with the veil of monochrome thrown aside, the great city-country rivalry over the following decade broke over the country in vivid colour broadcasts.
Kerry would win eight All-Irelands in 12 years and fell just short of a pioneering five-in-a-row in 1982, when Séamus Darby’s late shot – in the timeless words of goalkeeper Charlie Nelligan – shook raindrops from the Kerry net.
Lights out
It’s a tale told threadbare but the 1975 final was not an exhilarating contest and was chiefly notable for being the first 70-minute All-Ireland and the rise of O’Dwyer’s dazzling collective of roadrunners, who added to the catalogue of Dublin manager Kevin Heffernan’s Wile E Coyote dealings with Kerry.
RM Block
There was one other development of note. Kerry captain, Mickey Ned O’Sullivan, 23 years old, abundant 1970s blond hair flying as he fearlessly ran at the Dublin defence, lasted until the 17th minute.
From heedless of danger to nearly headless: Dublin full back and captain Seán Doherty came in with a high challenge that nowadays wouldn’t be broadcast until after the watershed and there ended Mickey Ned’s day. Concussed, he was removed to the Richmond hospital, leaving 19-year-old Pat Spillane to raise Sam Maguire.
Speaking in his lovely waterside home in Kenmare, he briskly retraces the contours of that lost afternoon.
“Naturally you would probably like to have had the opportunity, but it never affected me in any way.”
Really?
“You were only collecting it on behalf of the team anyway and the most important thing was that Kerry won. That was the purpose of the exercise. The presentation of the cup is only symbolism.”
He parked the incident with Doherty, who died last July, a long time ago, saying simply that they were different times and that a Kerry defence would have done the same thing.
Golden years – golden jubilee
The bond between the Dublin and Kerry teams from 50 years ago is one legacy that remained strong. Last April, a commemorative function took place in Kenmare’s Sheen Falls hotel and was well attended by players from both teams.
“Looking at the whole thing in hindsight, there’s no reference to winning medals,” says O’Sullivan. “When we met the Dubs in Kenmare, what mattered was the friendship and the respect players had for each other.
“They had been through similar journeys. They shared conflict on the field, but they shared great friendships off the field and now the only thing that matters are the friendships.”
The MC on that occasion was Dara Ó Cinnéide, three times an All-Ireland winner. He and the Golden Age were both born in 1975.
O’Sullivan has commented that his generation weren’t quite as close as their Dublin counterparts, something he partly attributed to the groups’ respective ages – their opponents having been older, to start with.
Ó Cinnéide has the same inkling. “I don’t sense that with Kerry – I mean I’m sure there’s a lot of loyalty there but ...”
“The Dublin team are a seriously impressive group, even to this day. I went over and gave David [Hickey, doctor and Palestine activist] a hug. He’s one of my heroes – for what he’s doing right now. It was just such an emotional night.”
O’Sullivan, captain 50 years ago, was also a key influence on his team, liaising closely with O’Dwyer, who had been a team-mate in the few years their playing careers intersected.
One of a number of players who were studying physical education, he has had a lifelong interest in the game, for instance advocating a requirement to kick after two handpasses – “it would be easy to referee it. Two hand passes and a kick.”
The style of 1975 was unfettered by such concerns.
“Coaching didn’t really exist at the time, and we were very fortunate, the team wasn’t conditioned to any systems. They played with spontaneity, because they had to make the decisions in the heat of battle.”
For O’Sullivan, the Kerry tradition of winning plays a vital role in the county’s success.
“That is the legacy of tradition, and it’s much more difficult for a county to make the breakthrough when you don’t have that expectation. There are sports psychologists being paid now to convince teams they are capable of winning, or individuals, whereas it was built into the culture of Kerry.”
Coming down
When he took over as manager at the end of 1989, the golden years were well and truly over.
“I insisted on getting the under-21 team and I blended them in with the seniors, and that’s where it started. Jim Gavin [Dublin five-in-a-row manager] brought in guys every year. That was the succession plan. If you stop growing, you go backwards.
“Kerry were a victim of their own success for 12 years. I was on the management team for maybe four years, and if it wasn’t broken why fix it? We were winning All-Irelands. In fact, we should have brought in a few players on to the team every year. So, the comfort zone set in.”
He changed the team, raised eyebrows by hoping every player would feel better for the experience of playing for Kerry – “probably a bit too idealistic”, he agrees.
There was progression – two big wins over Cork – but defeat by Clare at the end of the third year caused consternation from which there would be no recovery.
“We were a little bit overconfident because we had our mind on – probably my fault – on Dublin, in the All-Ireland semi-final. It was disrespectful to think we could beat them without peaking, although five years later, half of that team won an All-Ireland.”
It was O’Sullivan’s final act as manager despite that significant progress. The Munster final in 1992 was also Jack O’Shea’s last match for the county.
No way back.
A tough act
A four-time footballer of the year, O’Shea occupied a special place in Kerry affections, even though too young for the 1975 team, which contained five players who would win eight All-Irelands: the late Páidí Ó Sé, Ger Power, Denis Moran, Pat Spillane and Mikey Sheehy.
They were a stunning team and O’Dwyer kept them relentlessly competitive. The training might have been old school but the results were unprecedented.
Ó Cinnéide remembers his father and godfather and their reverence for O’Dwyer’s team.
“I remember my father coming home from one of the All-Irelands, maybe ′79, and he had a scraw, a bit of the turf, from Croke Park. It was up on top of a press in the kitchen for years. He used to spin us a yarn, that Mikey Sheehy kicked a free from that scraw and it flew into the crowd and he caught it.”
The Kerry GAA Yearbook was like an annually updating bible. “I remember telling a neighbour of mine, a schoolmate, ‘watch the way Jimmy Deenihan sits. He must be f**king bad – he wouldn’t smile or anything, like – and you’d be going, ‘yeah, yeah, that’s the way he should be’.”
His own intercounty journey began the year after Jack O’Shea’s ended but for a young player, the decline that set in could be a bit suffocating. Ó Cinnéide remembers his first day on a train, going to and from the 1991 All-Ireland semi-final defeat by Down as a 16-year-old.
By now, an alien spirit of bitter pessimism was setting in.
“I remember on the train, and we were lost, making it ′87, ′88, ′89, ′90, and now ′91, a fifth year without anything. I was 16 years of age, listening to my father’s conversation with fellow Kerry supporters. ‘It’s not as if there’s anything coming through; the county championship wasn’t this or this’ – it was all negative.
[ Ciarán Murphy: Kerry have pointed us to Gaelic football’s bright futureOpens in new window ]
“I’m thinking, they have no faith – you know, there’s an old saying, mol an óige … I’d never do it now in front of young lads. You’d always try and build them up, but like, that shadow that was cast for us.”
Historian Richard McElligott, author of Forging a Kingdom, a definitive account of the GAA’s establishment in Kerry, grew up just after the era. He had a poster of Jack O’Shea on his wall.
“I stared at that for years,” he says, “and grew up revering O’Dwyer. Like every single person in Kerry, we had The Golden Years in the VHS player. You know, my dad had it on every cold night in winter. Nothing on TV? Yeah, stick that on.”
That video did so much to keep the legacy alive in Kerry. Even in 2011 when the county returned to All-Ireland combat with Dublin after 26 years, players respectfully related how they had grown up watching The Golden Years.
“I was just listening to Gary Breen [former Ireland soccer player, born in London to Irish parents – his father from Kerry],” says McElligott, “a couple of weeks ago on some podcast and he’s saying how he could remember growing up, that he could still name off that Kerry team in a heartbeat.”
Manifesting destiny
The rise of Ulster teams in the 1990s was partly built on Sigerson Cup success at third level and the dawning realisation that All-Ireland winners, even from Kerry, were mortal like everyone else.
Ó Cinnéide eventually figured out the reverse implications, playing for UL.
“I remember Anthony Tohill [Derry All-Ireland winner] was a colossus in those years, like. When I started college, I remember hearing about how he had massive hands, you know, and they beat us in a Sigerson semi-final. At full-time, I shook hands with him and I was thinking, ‘my f**king hands are just as big as his’.
He remembers telling Darragh Ó Sé and others that these reputedly galactico talents were no better than their own generation.
On their way to the 1997 final against Mayo, Kerry players spotted a familiar face in the crowds.
“Jack O’Shea – and he’s wearing a Kerry jersey. You’d think he’d be wearing a T-shirt or something but no, he was wearing the Kerry jersey, and he put up his fist and raised it towards the bus.”
Perpetuating a Kingdom
McElligott points out that the county jersey has a special status. “I think Kerry got the concept of a county team quicker than other counties. Even the hurlers in 1891 were an amalgamation. The first football win in the 1903 All-Ireland was technically Tralee Mitchels but there were also Dr Crokes representatives.”
He says that in a geographically disparate county, the football team united everyone. This was particularly important in the aftermath of the Civil War, with some of the best players in internment camps.
Through the agency of three remarkable footballers, John Joe Sheehy, active in the IRA, Con Brosnan, a Free State army officer and Joe Barrett, another republican, the county team was put back together again.
Brosnan allowed Sheehy, who was on the run at the time, safe passage to play for the county in a Munster semi-final after which he was allowed to melt into the crowd and escape.
By the end of the decade Barrett gave up his right to captain Kerry in 1931 so that his political rival Brosnan could lead the team to what was a three-in-a-row.
Mickey Ned O’Sullivan references those times in passing. “It’s like Con Brosnan said, ‘whatever’s for the good of Kerry football’.”
Legacy
For the current generation, the golden years are ever more distant but Gavin White, who captained this summer’s All-Ireland winning team with a MOTM display in the final, can still frame the reference.
“I was lucky enough that in my own club, we had the Gooch [Colm Cooper] playing for Kerry and for Crokes and he was obviously excelling in his career at the time but as a defender, I would have looked up to the Ó Sé’s, Marc and Tomás, as well as Darragh.
“Then you see the link with Páidí and the influence that had on the three of them – it just shows, I suppose, the culture of Kerry football.
“I keep coming back to the responsibility to leave the jersey in as good a place as you found it, so that the next generation can carry the legacy, just like the great players of the past have done for us.”
[ Donegal pip champions Kerry with 10 All Star nominationsOpens in new window ]
The golden years impacted in a different way for White. If O’Dwyer had one besetting regret, it was the late defeat by Offaly, which cost Kerry the five-in-a-row in 1982. In his first year, captaining Kerry in 2019, the team reached the final, as the last obstacle for Dublin’s five-in-a-row.
“At the time when you were playing, you tried to blot out as much external as you can. But obviously when it’s all done and dusted and there’s a big talk of Dublin winning five in a row – which they truly deserved – you still probably realise then, the magnitude it has for Micko’s team at that time and how hard-won that five-in-a-row is.”
The brightest link
For McElligott, the continuum is the most impressive thing.
“You go to 1914. Dick Fitzgerald is the superstar of the GAA world. In the 20s, he’s now a selector and Eamonn O’Sullivan comes in, in 1924 and coaches on and off over the next 40 years, a bridge all the way up to the 1960s. By his last All-Ireland in 1962, Mick O’Dwyer is on the team, a link going all the way to 1986.
“Then you have Páidí Ó Sé from that team, managing the next couple of All-Irelands. Páidí brings in Jack O’Connor as a selector. You could stretch back from Jack all the way back to Dick Fitzgerald when you think about it. All these links.”
So, O’Dwyer’s team for all its status, is also simply a link?
“Maybe the brightest link, the most polished one, but it’s still a link in that chain. I mean, that’s what’s so great about it.”
See yiz in Coppers
The night of the final, Dara Ó Cinnéide recalls finding himself in Copper Face Jacks nightclub – “for the second time in my life” – when David Clifford approached.
“I don’t really know David or Paudie although I know their father and uncle. David comes over and says, ‘I want a picture of you and me with the Sam Maguire’, and we had a brief chat at about three in the morning.
“He says, ‘remember those two kids, who used to be collecting the footballs for you when you trained in Fossa?’ I said, ‘stop, you’re joking me – I do, I do actually remember you and he says, ‘yeah, that was us’.”
Another link in the golden chain.
