Star burns brighter
HE kind of grew up here in The Greyhound. It’s where he used work, collecting glasses for Aidan and the boys; where he was christened ‘Star’ after one of the punters linked his sporting prowess and the blue emblem on his Orlando Magic jacket together and where he got back his mojo for football as well.
There was a time Kieran Donaghy had been “fed up with the flippin’ thing”. He remembers an U16 county final for the Stacks against Beaufort when he was put in full-forward, far from the more familiar terrain of midfield.
“Late on in the game I caught a ball, and Jesus, I was a good enough ball-winner but I couldn’t do anything with it, only lay it off, the same thing as I do now,” he recalled.
“So I was running around looking for someone to lay it off to when my man was after slipping and I was completely free. I got called for over-carrying. I turned around and the posts were two yards in front of me. I could have just turned around and kicked a point. The sides were level at that stage but then the boys went up and kicked three points unanswered. Feckin’ hell. After that I had no interest in football and, yerra, I was no good at it.”
Basketball was his game and one he was good at, spending half his time going to and from Dublin training and playing for Irish underage teams. But then Aidan in the bar took over the junior Cs in Stacks and cajoled him to join in with them.
Donaghy would have known most of the boys from frequenting The Greyhound, so he’d team up with them for training every Monday and Wednesday, and then on the Friday for a game, followed by a great night’s craic in The Greyhound. And that’s how the love affair with football started, really; just as a bit of craic, before he was called in the following summer to the Kerry minor panel the week of their All-Ireland semi-final.
A Stacks team photo from that year hangs above us as we talk over lunch in the Greyhound. Over in the far corner are another couple of photos that document some of his other rites of passage. One is an old black-and-white photo from the 1987 Munster final replay in Killarney, with Jack O’Shea hunched over a distressed Pat Spillane lying over by the stand wire.
Within touching distance of them is a four-year-old Kieran Donaghy.
“I don’t remember how Spillane ended up over the sideline. Probably [Niall] Cahalane thundered him out over it. Christ, another few feet and I’d have been absolutely killed, broken limbs and everything.
“What I remember about that day is my dad opening the wire and slipping me in, and then after the game, me getting lost. I was lucky my mum and dad had said to me that if I got lost, to tell a guard who I was. So I had to say, ‘I’m Kieran Donaghy and I’m lost.’”
Beside that picture is another photo from a Munster final, only this one is in vivid colour and that four-year-old kid is now a 23-year-old flying machine pulling down a down a ball while a grounded Nicholas Murphy and a couple of other powerless red shirts can only look on. The hangtime and the action shot is as impressive as the iconic image of Seanie Walsh out-jumping Brian Mullins that inspired the sculpture that greets you as you enter Donaghy’s hometown of Tralee but for Star that 2006 drawn Munster final was one to forget.
It was his first championship game against Cork but he was sent off for receiving a dubious second yellow card which meant he missed the replay in Cork.
“I was depressed afterwards but all the Stacks fellas were telling me, ‘Oh my God but that was some catch! You were way up!’ I was even higher than I am in that pic there. I was on the way down by that stage. But then that night the boys texted me saying the TV cameras didn’t even get it; they were looking at some replay or something.”
It’s fitting that these couple of framed photos are from a Munster final in Killarney. It’s probably Donaghy’s favourite fixture, the one that sustains him during the grim toil of the early season.
“I love driving into Killarney the morning of a Munster final, especially when it’s Cork, just seeing all the people and jerseys out and you can sense the buzz already building. That’s one of my favourite things about being a Kerry footballer.”
But if the day itself thrills him, the week leading up to it nearly kills him. You’re not able to go flat out in training because Jack is holding you back for Sunday. You can’t wait for the game itself. And then there’s dealing with all the match talk on the street, which is kind of hard to avoid when you’re a 6’5” county full-forward working with Ulster Bank, bang in the middle of town.
Weeks like this past one, it’s not just the Cork defence you’re thinking of how to slip, but for their own sake, the Kerry public too.
“People come up to you and ask ‘How’s Paul’s leg? ‘How are ye going in training? Are you going to win?’ You can’t be downright rude to people and walk right past them, so you figure out ways of answering without answering.
“The best way is to try to stay in motion, and go, ‘We’ll be okay! Go on, I’ll talk to you again next week!’ That way you keep them happy and they didn’t get anything out of you and you didn’t sap yourself off energy talking about who’s going to mark you and how you’re going to play. Because if you stop and answer one question, they have another question, and you end up going, ‘Jesus Christ, how am I going to get out of here?’
“Ringing someone on the mobile as you’re going out the door is a good one for me. But I’ve been on the phone, walking down the street, and a fella wants us to stop and talk — as I’m talking on the phone already!
“I’ve sometimes wondered, do they see the phone or do they just kind of say, ‘Feck it, I’m going to stop and talk to him anyway’? I wouldn’t do that to my girlfriend, if she was on the phone, but still you’ll have fellas ploughing ahead! ‘How are you going to get on at the weekend?’ And you’re like, ‘John, I’m going to have to call you back here!’”
And he laughs. They’re the rare ones. But God, how did Mikey and Power and the boys manage without a mobile back in the day? There’s a real sense of anticipation about this particular showdown with Cork, but it’s funny, as much as a clash against the old enemy sustains them for the first half of the year, once the game’s played, it’s quickly forgotten.
Beating Cork on their own patch last year was a huge high at the time but it was totally obscured by what happened later against Down. There was no medal presentation for winning Munster last year. He hasn’t got his medal yet and it’s never crossed his mind to ask for it.
The Down experience was surreal and then all too real. With three minutes to go Donaghy found himself for the first time ever in Croke Park realising even grabbing a ball and creating a goal wasn’t going to save Kerry. Then later that evening he found himself on the train home, getting his head around the idea that for the first time since he’d been on the panel, Kerry’s season wouldn’t be stretching into September.
But life goes on, life went on. That same day, a good friend was getting married and so Donaghy and his clubmate Daniel Bohane stopped off in a bar in Tralee for a few quick ones before slipping in when the band was in full flow. By the early hours the need to keep the head down had been overcome by the need to get down.
It’s not a wedding video Donaghy is in a rush to see but the memory triggers a smile, how one of the worst footballing days still ended up one of the great nights.
Going back to the club and going all the way to the county final helped as well. Watching Cork and Down run on to Croke Park from the vantage point of a corporate box prompted some unpleasant flashbacks of missed goal chances in the quarter-final but once the ball was thrown in on All-Ireland final day, Donaghy found himself just absorbed in the game itself.
He didn’t send any Cork players a text of congratulations — “I wouldn’t have any of their numbers” — but he says he was happy for Graham Canty and Nicholas Murphy for all they’d given to football. He also observed with interest how Cork grew throughout the year.
“I’d say they learned a lot after the game [in Cork] against us. You could see it against Dublin. They knew how to win the game, mind the ball better, not do anything silly like Dublin did, committing rash fouls and turning the ball over. Cork were far cuter, drawing fouls, tipping over frees. They brought themselves back into a game they shouldn’t have been in.”
His first season without reaching an All-Ireland meant his first winter without a team holiday so in January he took off for Florida with Hillary. They took in a couple of Miami Heat games, including LeBron James’s first home game against the Cleveland Cavaliers since he infamously left them to take his “talents to South Beach”.
Early the following morning Donaghy was running the sands of South Beach himself to keep in shape for the upcoming league opener against Cork when he spotted Magic Johnson. Then after shooting the breeze for five minutes with a hoops legend, Donaghy went about becoming one himself. By the beach was a playground, Flamingo Park, like something straight out of White Men Can’t Jump, with Donaghy ideal for the role famously played by Woody Harrelson.
“I’d no gear on me, only a pair of trainers, shorts and a baseball cap. I’d say all the boys saw me coming, saying ‘This white boy hasn’t a clue anyhow.’”
But as they’d learn, this white boy could jump, twice even slamming it down, and by the day’s end, Woody was known as Manu Ginobli after the three-time NBA champ from Argentina renowned for his all-action style.
“I played for about five hours one day. Hillary was lying out on the deck and I said: ‘I’m going out to play a bit of basketball, I should be back in an hour.’ But I just couldn’t leave!”
Since his return, it’s been all football, no hoops. He kicked a couple of stunning points from the flanks that first day back against Cork down in Tralee, further evidence how his game has evolved and improved since his breakthrough season of 2006.
“It’s something I’m trying to bring more to my game, taking my own score. I’m staying on after training and having a good few kicks, but it still doesn’t come naturally. Even Jack will be saying to me, ‘Have a go yourself’, but most forwards, they grow up knowing nothing else but looking to take their own score and kicking loads of balls at the posts. I played most my underage football in midfield, trying to set up other fellas.
“I want to get the ball to the fella I think is going to score. If I’m 40 yards out, I might have a chance of scoring but if I can get it to Declan O’Sullivan, he has a better chance of scoring. If I haven’t scored in a game with 10 minutes to go, I’m not thinking, ‘Jesus, I’m full-forward and I’ve yet to score.’ Once we win I couldn’t care.”
He doesn’t care where he plays either. For years Liam Hayes has been beating the drum that Donaghy should be restored to midfield while more recently in this parish Dara Ó Cinnéide wondered had the full-forward experiment run its course. Donaghy can’t see himself starting at midfield though. He might move out for a few minutes to give someone a breather and he finds that bit of variety is good for him, but that’ll be about it.
“Against Tipperary there was a stage when there was no ball coming in [at full-forward] and it was a bit boring, like, so it was nice to get out around the middle for a few minutes. It’s my natural position really, but I just feel I can benefit the team more at full-forward. But look, I spent two years sitting on the bench trying to break into the team. I don’t ever forget that, so I don’t mind where I play, as long as I’m out there.”
The simple thrill of just being out there was brought home all the more in 2009 when his summer was ravaged by injury. He hurt his foot in the league final and no sooner was he back for the qualifier against Longford when shortly after half-time, he had to hobble off again. Outside of the last 15 minutes against Cork in the All-Ireland final, it would be the only playing time he’d see that championship.
Yet looking back, it’s now one of the most satisfying seasons of his career. He couldn’t quite rank it as high as 2006 when he astonished and transformed the football landscape but he says he cherishes that 2009 medal more than 2007 when he stunned Cork for two goals in the All-Ireland final.
We mightn’t have seen as much of him but he found out so much more about himself, between all the travel and waiting for scans and operations; the early-morning aqua jogging sessions with Alan O’Sullivan, the pair of them bringing their dogs along on for the run; the fear he wouldn’t get back; the fear he could break down again and the commitment and resolve. He didn’t just swan on to play those final 15 minutes of the season. That All-Ireland was won in the gym and on the beach, long before he skipped on to that field.
He’s more seasoned and refined and worldly than the ebullient, fresh-faced 23-year-old we all got to know and love in 2006, but there’s still a wonderful openness and energy about Donaghy and his enthusiasm for playing for Kerry remains undiminished.
In some ways it means even more now. He knows his teammates so much better. “We’re all friends,” he says, “we all love each other’s company, love going for pints together, love winning.” He knows the Kerry public better too, how demanding they are — “Down here no one really cares about what you’ve done, they just want to know what you’re going to do” — but they’re lucky expectations are that high.
“You look at Carlow beating Louth a few weeks ago, fellas running in and diving on to the pitch, their first championship win in years. We’re blessed. The only time it feels a bit of a slog would be in January, but you go through it because you know you have to put it into the bank and with the help of God, in four or five months’ time you’re playing Cork and 40,000 people are watching you. They’re the days you look forward to, a sunny day in Killarney.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
