Kieran Shannon: Frank McGuigan lit up lives far beyond Tyrone
Frank McGuigan, one of Tyrone's greatest ever footballers, died at the weekend aged 71. Pic: INPHO/Andrew Paton
In all the years – decades – I’ve been writing for papers, I’ve never got a reaction like I did to an interview with a former player a week out from the all-Ulster All-Ireland final of 2003.
Tyrone-Armagh was on its way to becoming the most intense GAA rivalry of the 21st century, eliciting a dislike of each other that Dublin-Kerry never has and, for all the passion it now engenders, Donegal-Kerry never will. Hate is a strong word, but in those years that’s how those counties felt about each other, the idea of either county being denied either the first or second All-Ireland in their entire history by the crowd just across the county bounds.
And yet as tense and strained as relations were in those heady years for both, there was one thing both tribes shared and loved. Frank McGuigan. What an article that was ye did. What a footballer he was. Various awards would come from that sitdown I had with him in his house in Ardboe one evening that wondrous September but probably the greatest measure of it was the volume of emails and even calls and letters I’d receive and how a considerable proportion of them were from Armagh football die-hards.
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The admiration and awe that McGuigan could prompt from those outside his own county was something I was already aware of. When I was writing up the piece, Eamonn Coleman told me how he’d regularly cross the county bounds just to see McGuigan play; only Mick O’Connell and Jim McKeever could take a ball down out of the air as gracefully as him, a knack he developed from throwing a tennis ball on the roof of his parents’ home and catching it at the height of his jump.
Martin McHugh, now known as Mark’s and Ryan’s dad just as Frank would become known as Brian’s, recalled how the same year he came back from America and famously took Armagh for 0-11 from play in the Ulster final, the pair of them played for Ulster in the Railway Cup final. That day in Ennis, McGuigan won a ball with his back to goal and made a swivel with his hips that completely floored Connacht’s Stephen Kinneavy before slotting away the winning goal. “I’ve never seen a move like it before,” said McHugh, “and I’ve never seen anything like it since.”
In Tyrone, though, was where his legend loomed largest. Mickey Harte, who played with him on the county minor team that won the 1972 Ulster final minutes before McGuigan would then turn around and play in the senior final, argued the solo dummy should really be known as the McGuigan dummy as it was McGuigan who invented the move.
And then there was Peter Canavan. At a press gig ahead of that 2003 All-Ireland final, he spoke to me about how as a 13-year-old he went to that 1984 Ulster final against Armagh with his father, Seán, and saw for himself McGuigan score those 11 points – eight with his left, two with his right, one punched over the bar. He went straight home that evening and out into the back garden and started pretending he was McGuigan: one shot off his left, the next with his right.
A few weeks later his father was able to track down a video of the match and as a present gave him a copy of it. “I must have watched it three to 70 times,” said Canavan, and for the rest of that summer and the rest of his teenage years he’d replicate it and what he saw in Clones. Canavan never played underage club football but a vision of Frank McGuigan more than compensated, and that same 2003 season he’d kick 11 points himself in an Ulster final, some of the assists provided courtesy of McGuigan’s own son, Brian.
What prompted so many people to reach out after that sit-down with McGuigan though wasn’t just how it was a reminder of what a fabulous footballer he was but a revelation as to what an honest, self-deprecating man he was.
In our interview, he’d open up that he no longer drank because he used to drink too much. It started off innocently enough. Wherever he’d go in Tyrone, people would want to buy the great Frank McGuigan a drink and who was he not to oblige rather than possibly offend them? But then it became the norm, a habit, addictive. There were games he played for Tyrone having drunk the night before. A few months after winning that Ulster in ’84 he drove his car into a wall, finishing his football career and very nearly finishing his own life, still just 30 years old back then.
And still he kept drinking. When the boy Canavan made it to the 1995 All-Ireland final, McGuigan didn’t even make it into Croke Park to see him; instead he lay in his car in Dublin, drunk. It was only the same year Brian won a minor All-Ireland that he went for help and entered a rehabilitation clinic in Derry for six weeks. It wouldn’t save his marriage to Geraldine, the beautiful woman he met in his years in New York, but it’d revive his friendship with her and save his relationship with his children.
“I’m five years not drinking now,” he’d tell me, “and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I wouldn’t have what I have with Brian and the other kids if I hadn’t [got himself help]… Looking back, I’ll never understand why I drank after the accident. That’s my one regret. That I let myself crash. When Brian and the boys were starting out in that school field back there, I couldn’t go down with them. I don’t mean coaching them; I mean just kicking around with them.”
The great news was that he’d still get to share a field with them, coaching some of their Ardboe teams, and get to see – soberly – them win multiple All-Irelands; Brian running the show in 2005, Tommy getting the winning goal in 2008, Frank junior being part of the 2003 panel as well. Over the years, I and various other reporters would sporadically call into Ardboe and always there was a warm welcome, his sons being as affable if less gregarious than the King himself.
Just like he could do anything on a football field, Frank McGuigan could say anything off it; in 2005 after Brian was omitted from that year’s All-Star selection, Frank told me and my paper he was going to hand back the one he won in 1984, the scheme was now discredited! Ahead of the opening match of the 2009 championship he claimed that game against Armagh didn’t really matter (“It’s not a championship match! The Ulster championship is not there anymore!”).
He even said he didn’t get all the fuss either about the game between the counties 25 years earlier when he went for 0-11. “It’s just a thing that happened,” he said. “History has no bearing on my life.” Don’t know about that, Frank. What you did that day and many others from Ardboe to Gaelic Park in New York had a bearing on plenty of others, not least young Canavan who’d go on to make quite an impact on others himself. Thanks for brightening ours up.
