WINS AND WARS
In the glory days he was so glorious that Frank became better known as Brian McGuigan’s dad.
These days Brian McGuigan sees himself mostly as little Cara and Jack McGuigan’s father.
Everything in his and Jennifer’s life revolves around them. When you’d initially arranged to meet, he had to cancel: sorry, have to mind the kids. When Mickey Harte told him in November he’d have to train six times a week if he were to play for Tyrone in 2013, he had to say no – too much time away from the kids. Back in the day when they were carefree and single, Kevin ‘Hub’ Hughes and himself would hit the town together and paint it red. Now when they meet up with their wives it’s for a meal and while they still talk a bit about football they find themselves talking even more about their kids.
There’s more to him than being just a father and husband of course. He’s a publican. And he remains a club player, still lacing them up for Ardboe.
Just last weekend they won the Ulster club league, beating Ballinderry in the final in Carrickmore, his wee brother Shay firing over the points, and Brian typically providing the ammunition. Later that evening they all convened to Forbes, the bar he helps run, where they held a night at the races to raise funds for the team. He’s deliberately taken a step back in the dressing room this last year or two, let some of the other lads be the ones to speak up, but when there’s a score to be carved out or taken or a bob or two to be raised, he’d like to think he’ll still be the one to roll up the sleeves and get it for the club.
For the most part it’s a quiet and contented life he lives now but at times he shakes his head and wonders.
Often it’s with a smile. He recalls the first time he met this journalist, 10 years ago, when I went up to Ardboe to interview his dad. Back then Brian was too shy to go on the record then which was fine because Frank had enough to say for both of them in a hugely personal, revealing interview, but Brian did agree to stand in for the photograph, in the background, in his father’s shadow, because in the public consciousness that’s exactly where he stood in the McGuigan household.
Now when he looks back at that photo of his 23-year-old self shyly, almost furtively, smiling, he’s struck by how slim he was.
“Just where did those 10 years ago?” he smiles again. “They just flew! I thought we’d play forever.”
Sometimes though he looks back with a frown because he’s just about able to look at anything at all. To this day his eyesight is still impaired after that shocking, cowardly hit he was subjected to in a club game back in 2007. For days he was blind, his eye having been effectively squashed. For weeks he could not lift his head. Instead he had to lie face down towards the floor and peer through a face-hole on his bed to watch the flat-screen TV his family had positioned on the ground; if he lifted his head at all, to even go the toilet, he was told he could lose his sight for good. A year later he would be back winning another All-Ireland.
It’s probably the most cherished of the lot. 2003 was for Tyrone, 2005 was for Cormac, 2008 was for himself and Mickey Harte and the faith they had that he could come back. But he was probably only half the player he was because he could see only half of what he once could. And that still eats a bit of him.
“I’d still have a lot of anger about that to this day. I’m more or less working off one eye. I have to wear this special lens but I still have no peripheral vision on my left side. I feel I’ve lost out a lot on life. To lose so much of your sight through playing football is hard to take.”
Regrets so, he has a few. Like not having studied more and got a few more qualifications to his name.
“It’s only when you’re finished playing inter-county that you see how much your whole life was centred around it. I’ve been doing some work with the GPA this year, talking to students, about how to make sure they don’t neglect their studies and their (professional) career. Darren Fay told them the same thing. He won an All-Ireland when he was just a young fella and got offered a job, won another All-Ireland and someone gave him a better job but when the bust came and that job went he had no qualification to fall back on.
“I did a higher national diploma in sports studies after school and went over to Bradford to study some more but after six weeks I dropped out because between the U21s and the club football was going well. I went working on the sites and was making so much from it I didn’t want to go back to college and forgot all about it. Now I’m working in the bar and it’s going ok but it’s getting tougher all the time. I’ve nothing to fall back on so I told those young lads not to make the same mistake I did.”
So in the scheme of things Killarney’s not that big a deal. Yeah, it’s another regret. Not so much what he wrote about it but rather what he did down there, that he was even down there at all. ”
But,” as he says, “you take chances in life and you have to accept sometimes they don’t work.”
This time last year he was not playing with the county either and wasn’t missing it a bit. But then Tyrone had a bit of an injury crisis and Mickey Harte and Stephen O’Neill both came calling.
“Stevie came down to my house before training one night and said that the team could really do with me back. Mickey had already been on to me a few times through the year so when he called again two weeks before the championship I found it very hard to turn him down. He’d done so much for my career and been through so many hard times I felt I owed it to the man.”
McGuigan didn’t want to go back in before the opening round against Armagh lest it would distract and even demotivate some teammates, so he and Harte agreed he’d watch that game in the Athletic Grounds like an ordinary supporter before returning to training the following Tuesday night. Teammates welcomed back with open arms and then when Harte brought him on in the closing minutes of the Ulster semi-final against Donegal, he sparked a late if ultimately failed revival.
His cameo a month later against Kerry though had no upside.
In his eyes, Tyrone were doomed from the moment the draw was made. Normally they’d relish the challenge of Kerry. This time, deep down, they feared it. Too many of the veterans like Sean Cavanagh were out injured. Too many of the young fellas didn’t have the mindset or belief or application to win major honours.
“Going down I was thinking to myself it was probably the game we didn’t want and it was the game Kerry did want.
We might have had a chance if it was in Omagh but not down there. They still had most of their players that had played us in the glory years and they were definitely hurting and we knew that the crowd was going to be really behind them. A tide was coming at us and on the day we just couldn’t stop it.”
McGuigan couldn’t stop his frustration from showing either. Only minutes after he was brought on and with Kerry in complete control he was cynically fouled by Declan O’Sullivan in a game littered with cynical fouls from both teams.
When O’Sullivan protested his innocence to the referee, a furious McGuigan charged from behind to elbow the Kerryman in the midriff.
O’Sullivan went down, David Coldrick’s red card went up. And with that both the contest and Brian McGuigan’s inter-county career was over.
“It was pure stupidity on my part. There was a lot worse that went on in that game but it had got to the point someone had to go and for pure stupidity alone I deserved it. I got away with a few things like that over the years but that day I didn’t and it was only right I didn’t. It had no bearing on the result, Kerry were going to win well anyway, but the way they were able to hold on to the ball with the extra man, it was embarrassing. After we came in to the dressing room I apologised to Mickey and when he called us into a huddle I asked him if he could let me speak to the boys so he did. I apologised to the boys but be honest I couldn’t look them in the eye. I kept looking at the floor.”
The career might have finished there but not the controversy. A few days later McGuigan wrote his weekly column for Gaelic Life in which he had some withering observations about a couple of Kerrymen, including Colm Cooper and especially Declan O’Sullivan, accusing them of standoffish and unsporting behaviour through the years.
“The one thing that is going to stick with me is the sight of Declan O’Sullivan smiling and sniggering when he got me sent off,” wrote McGuigan at the time. “People might turn around and say I got (Down’s) Gregory McCartan sent off in an Ulster final (2003), but as I’ve said before, I never wanted to get him sent off. I regretted that he was. O’Sullivan, however, I felt was more than happy to have got me the line.”
McGuigan also outlined they had a bit of previous. Two years earlier when Tyrone beat Kerry in a league game in Omagh thanks to a scrambled injury-time goal from Colm Cavanagh, McGuigan sought out O’Sullivan to shake his hand but claims he was rebutted. Such an unflattering portrayal of one of Kerry’s stars did not go down well in the Kingdom. McGuigan is loath to reheat the flames of that article, as much as he has no regrets about writing it. “It’s how I felt at the time and when I write a column I don’t tell any lies. If I do I’m only cheating the people who buy that paper.”
What he does find rather unfortunate is that some of the more complimentary remarks he had to make about Kerry players and personalities went largely unreported in all the rehashes and summaries there was of his column.
They didn’t mention that he’d mentioned that Paul Galvin had sent him a signed jersey during those lonely, anguished months in 2007 when he feared he might never see or play again; that gesture was sincerely appreciated by McGuigan. Likewise the get-well-card he received from Jack O’Connor around the same time; that he’d found Tomás Ó Sé a “gentleman” and the pair of them had got on “like a house on fire” on All Star trips.
If he had gone on he could have said the same about Eoin Brosnan from their time playing for Ireland in the 2004 International Rules series. There’s a fuller picture involving his relationship with Kerry but it would be a falsehood that fuller picture didn’t involve uglier elements.
“Maybe I have the wrong perception but it’s my perception that there were a few Kerrymen that never accepted Tyrone as force that beat them,” he says now.
“If a different team like a Dublin had beaten them they could have accepted it better.”
At the heart of it all was Tyrone’s yearning to be respected by Kerry. When respect wasn’t shown on one side, the other took umbrage. But that respect was there, mutually, if begrudgingly.
They might not have gone on, O’Sullivan might have rubbed him up the wrong way, but McGuigan can’t deny O’Sullivan was the other great centre half forward of the noughties.
“Look, Declan O’Sullivan and Colm Cooper are two of the best footballers of our generation. The only man I’ve seen mark O’Sullivan out of a game was Cormac McAnallen (in the 2003 All Ireland semi-final) – and back then Declan would have been only 19 and playing at full forward. He’s so skilful and direct; the only way you can really stop him is by fouling him.
“It just annoyed me that after that game in Omagh he wouldn’t shake my hand, that he just walked off. But maybe that’s a sign of how much he just hated being beat. Maybe he’s a bit like me that way because I always hated losing too. The next time we meet it could be awkward because of what I wrote but it’s what I thought and felt at the time. I can’t take away from the man’s football. ”
McGuigan also took some more heat for a recent column which painted an unflattering picture of the future state of Kerry football but again he believes they need to be viewed in their proper context.
“Look, I have the greatest respect for Kerry football. With the players they have, I’d put them right up with Dublin as favourites for this year’s All-Ireland. But what I said in that article was they haven’t got the same standard of players coming through. That’s just a fact. If there had been structures in place they might have but the reality is they don’t have that same quality of player coming through. But then who has?”
Looking back, Kerry made him. While his career finished in defeat by Kerry, the moment that defined his Tyrone team and their incredible emergence was a victory against Kerry – August, 1997. With the last kick of an All-Ireland minor semi-final Mark Harte equalised in Croke Park, then scored 12 points in an epic replay in Parnell Park. Mark’s father though was the real catalyst for it all.
“What made our team different to any other Tyrone team was Mickey Harte created this mindset that when we’d go down to Dublin we didn’t care who we were playing. I think that came back from his own minor days when the rest of the team were maybe happy to win Ulster and give a decent showing in Croke Park and that would be it but Mickey wasn’t the same as the other boys he played with. We could easily have lost to Kerry in ’97 and it would have been the same old story but once we beat them our team felt it didn’t matter who were playing, we were going to win.”
Now he finds Tyrone supporters expect their team to win every time; that in a way Harte has created a monster that sometimes threatens to devour him. McGuigan believes they need to be patient but only for so long – unlike this past year or two, this Tyrone team will seriously threaten for honours – if Sean Cavanagh and Stephen O’Neill remain fit. McGuigan’s old clubmate Gavin Devlin has injected some fresh enthusiasm into the management team. Unlike last year, the players are totally committed. Harte is insisting on nothing less.
With that meant saying farewell to McGuigan, or McGuigan saying farewell to him. It was without acrimony; together they won six All Irelands through the grades and years. Come next month and the lead up to the Donegal game he might wish he was out there but that moment will pass. He’s happy enough where he is, in the stands, knowing that while he no longer can see it all, he did it all, down on that field.
His wins over Kerry, not his war of words with them, are what will endure.
