Colin Sheridan: This is not Halloween. I am Andy Moran's ghost

Former Mayo footballer Andy Moran. Picture: INPHO/James Crombie

For the weekend that’s in it, here’s a piece about the Ghost Writer. Much like a fella who might find himself at a swingers party in Rathmines on a Monday night, let me tell you straight up, I don’t usually do this sort of thing.

I never saw myself as somebody who would want to ghost-write a book. Why would I, when I never read those books in the first place? Save for all the times I find myself in other people’s houses, stalking their bookshelves like a deer hunter, waiting to find some rare, beautiful stag, like “Brian O’Driscoll — My Year in the Centre”, just so I can slide it out of its cosy home on the shelf, read 50 pages, before reluctantly returning it and spending the next week wondering “how did Drico’s weekend getaway to the Big Apple end up?”

I am dead serious about this. I love these books, but I had convinced myself I don’t read them, so I can’t write them. All the times I interviewed myself in the car, this is what I told the imaginary Tommy Tiernan seated beside me.

More pertinently perhaps, I never saw myself as being somebody who would be asked by anybody to collaborate on such a project. This is not self-deprecation or false humility, it is a fact. I am not of this industry. I am untrained. Unwashed. Unsullied. Ungood. I am a late arriver. I assumed every journalism course out there had a ghost-writing module. Like History of Magic at Hogwarts. Therefore, more than anything else, I was unqualified.

So, when a back channel communique reached me that Andy Moran, one-time Footballer of the Year, two-time All-Star and All-Time Mayo great, wanted to talk, I thought there must be some kind of mix up. What did he want with me? Was he trying to sell me a gym membership? Had I accidentally insulted him in a column? Was it the other Andy Moran, the one who serviced my car back in 2012, whose birthday still mysteriously pops up on my google calendar every year? There was no conceivable reason to send a message to me. Writing his book was not something I entertained as a possibility. I just presumed he knew I didn’t read them. And that I was completely unqualified to write them.

He hadn’t, it turns out, and didn’t seem to care.

“You’re from Mayo”

“Yeah, but so is Sally Rooney,” I countered, certain he had drink taken.

“No...you get it.”

There was much more to it of course, but in an effort to act somewhat cool, I told him I’d sleep on it, carefully neglecting to tell him I had my mind made up halfway through the phone call when I realised he was the Andy Moran, and not the mechanic who fixed my car in 2012.

And so the process began. Andy Moran, retired footballer, podcaster, father, husband, business owner, coach, everyman wanted to write a book, not about himself, but about his journey as a Mayo footballer, the countless lessons he learned along the way and the many, many people who influenced and supported him. There was to be no talk of curses or heartache or bad luck.

There was to be no ignoring Mayo’s inability to cross their sporting rubicon, either. As he regularly pointed out to me, he played in six All-Ireland finals and never won one. If anyone was qualified to unpick the whys and the whatnots of all of that, it was him.

Writing about Mayo football from my admittedly limited perspective has always been a labour of love. On the good days, I am a kid staring at a sky full of stars. Writing about it through the prism of a guy whose perspective is that of 17 years and a plethora of platitudes was like talking to an astronaut who’d lived in space for 20 years. I am nerdy about few things. Listening to Andy Moran talk about why he loved the pre-match parade before an All-Ireland final so much made me inexplicably giddy (spoiler alert — he loved it, in part, because the warm-up usually creased him, and the parade was a chance to catch his breath. Warm-ups crease me too).

Discussing the mechanics of Cillian O’Connor’s equalising point in the dying moments of the 2016 final was to be in shuttle with him, hurtling through the earth’s atmosphere. There was no labour in the listening, only in doing justice to his voice.

For those of you who have ever encountered Andy Moran, either publicly or privately, he is that rare phenomena of what you see is exactly what you get. There is no duplicity. There is only Andy. His infectious enthusiasm for everything he does is complemented by a near obsession with figuring out that which he does not already know. Critically, he is a man fully aware of his own limitations. His humility in trusting others (me, in this instance) was a lesson in leadership. The greatest challenge I had as his ghostwriter was to pressure him to put more of himself in it. Another thing I was not prepared for when we started.

Having never done it before, I wasn’t sure how “method” to go into my role as Andy’s voice. At one point I started fist-pumping rudimentary achievements, like the kettle boiling and being let out in traffic. There was a lot of pointing into space as I walked down the street. I found myself stretching a lot in the kitchen. I almost started meditating. We are often told that age is just a number. I am 41, some four years older than Andy, and had lately come to believe that those who said it were engaging in wilful condescension.

Since giving voice to Andy’s journey of reinvention, I have cause to believe otherwise.