Dalo’s life even more tormenting without torment of management
After Dublin were shocked and dumped out of the championship by Antrim in 2010, Daly couldn’t bring himself to go home so he took the turnoff for Galway instead and with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes, booked into a city hotel and “stole away to the bedroom like a convict on the run”.
A day later, driving down by the Clare coast, he was feeling little better. “Walk away from this,” a voice in his head said. “Go back and run your shop and pub, you eejit.”
Similar sentiments and self-doubts plagued him throughout 2014, a season that is vividly and intriguingly recounted in his autobiography, Dalo, which is released this week, published by Transworld Ireland.
By the season’s end he decides to finish up with Dublin, six seasons on, and in the words of his inner demons, go back and run his pub, the shop having since closed.
Yet it emerges very clearly in the book why he stayed on so long in Dublin, why he stayed three years with Clare, and why inevitably, he’ll manage some other county team again.
Because life is even more tormenting without that torment, the gazing out at sea even more anguished and vacant in its absence.
In one scene in the book the Dublin team are having a team meeting during a pre-championship camp in Portugal. In an adjoining room separated by a curtain a golf group are having a small presentation of prizes.
“That’s the mundane out there,” Daly tells his players. “You can have the mundane for long enough when you’ve packed up hurling. You can worry then about the captain’s prize and the bit of crystal but what we’re involved in here is serious, serious business.”
Or, as he and his old mentor Len Gaynor would say, it’s really living, so live it, love it, embrace it.
We predict the GAA world and greater public will love and embrace this book too, for there is nothing mundane about it. It is an exceptional book, surpassing even Jack O’Connor’s marvellous Keys To The Kingdom as the most insightful, satisfying and complete account by a GAA manager.
A lot of the credit for that must go to Daly’s choice of ghostwriter. Christy O’Connor has already penned two Irish sports classics in Last Man Standing and The Club and here again he brings us into the dressing room in a way only he can. Not only has he played the game but he coaches it, including the Dublin goalkeepers, so his familiarity with that team’s set-up as well as Daly’s personality is a huge advantage.
But his journalistic experience and detachment also allow him to probe and draw out of Daly material and reflections that an ordinary insider never could.
While there will invariably be the usual odd mutterings and complaints of the sanctity of the dressing room being compromised, Daly’s clear affection for the inhabitants and spirit of that dressing room overpowers any such argument and whim.
The most overused word in the reviewing of any GAA book is “honest” but in the case of Daly it is fully appropriate. Here is a book and a man brimming with honesty, humility and above all, humanity.
Like Shane Curran’s also impressive recent autobiography, we get a full picture of the man and where he comes from: small town Ireland, recounted with much humour and love.
Like Curran, he talks about the anguish of closing up his own business, though the experience seems to have hit the Clarecastle man harder, his disposition not quite as naturally sunny as the Roscommon man.
Daly though has enough resilience and perspective to weather such setbacks, which is why, like Curran, he can ultimately handle the setbacks a GAA team or game can throw at him.
His eldest daughter, Orlaith, has suffered from a neurological condition which triggers seizures. His wife, Eilís, had a cancer scare. His father died when he was just seven and Daly is still troubled by the fact he didn’t go to the funeral and a proper goodbye. He lost his brother Paschal prematurely too. The day of the 1998 All-Ireland final which Clare should have been contesting, Daly found himself back home, for the wake, walking the village’s deserted streets. “I wasn’t thinking of missed opportunities, fallen glory or what could have been,” he writes. “I was only thinking of Paschal.”
Daly’s had his own health scares too. But here he is, still standing and still laughing.
The glory days with Clare and the wild ones that went with it are recalled fondly, including his complex but ultimately respectful, even endearing relationship with Ger Loughnane.
“Ah, Dalo,” Loughnane greeted him with a smile after their last game together, the 2000 Munster semi-final to Tipperary, “defiant to the last.”
Clare had been beaten that day but Daly, Clare’s best performer on the day, remained unbowed.
It’s the same here. His stint and last season with Dublin might not have finished up like he’d have wanted but he and his book emerge as a winner.
