Educating McGuinness

I remember the evening I first heard a certain scooter crunch across the gravel of a certain fabled backyard near a certain storied village where the wisdom of uncertainty has always been a driving force.

Nancy peered out the back window, saw the owner step through the step-through frame and remove his rust-coloured helmet, broad-brimmed beret, red and white keffiyeh, and still-lit cigar.

He shook his hair free in the breeze and began walking towards the back door.

He had the makings of a goatee, leathers that squeaked while he walked, and an acoustic guitar slung across his back.

Nancy has always had a fondness for the bohemian type (she still has posters of Gino Lawless on the bedroom wall) and immediately regretted that she’d got her own hair set that very evening.

“Bonjour, mon ami, I’m still in school, I’ve come a long way,” were his first words, “and I’m here to learn.”

“You’ll be in school a long, long time yet,” were my first words, “but your real learning will only start when you get out of the lecture hall. You’ve come a long way, young fellow, but you’ve a lot longer to go.

Even Dominique Rocheteau had to serve his time around here. “Comprendez-vous?”

And so began my long, arduous, strained friendship with one Jimmy McGuinness. He was 13 at the time: and not even on the county minor panel. It wasn’t the standard profile of the boy wonder, but if my line of work were easy, they’d all be at it: Dwyer, big Joe, Morgan, all of them.

We changed his attitude. We changed his side-to-side gait. We changed the carburetor on his Lambretta. We failed with the facial hair, but there’s only so much you can do over the course of one evening.

He unfurled his ideas about how the game could be played. All-out attack. All-out defence. The four-man full-forward line. The two-man full-back line. The zero-man midfield. The 14-man team.

“Can you play two across the goal-line, Noel?” he asked.

“Yes, but not in camogie or ladies football, you should never put two women under the one roof,” I replied.

As he talked, he moved individual Gitanes around the table. For long periods, we spoke exclusively in a French dialect found only on the lower slopes of the Pyrenees, except the occasional times when I would reply in Arabic to keep him guessing.

He had a plethora of ridiculous ideas, utterly devoid of any logical base, let alone historical precedent. As If you tried them at training, the players would rebel. If you implemented them in a match, you’d be chased out of the county.

As you can appreciate, I was deeply interested.

“You’ll go a long, long way,” I said to him as he departed that night, hours after midnight, “but not on that yoke. Trade her in and buy a right yoke for yourself.”

“Au revoir, mon ami,” he roared as he swung it out the gate and off into the night.

“Oh, he will fail, he will be derided, he will be doubted, he will be sneered at, and with any luck at all, he will be chased out of a county or two,” I observed, “and all with good reason, because he will get it badly wrong on many occasions, but failure is the best education of all, better than any university as he’ll one day discover, no doubt.”

It was then I noticed he’d left his guitar after him. I picked it up and started to strum and hum: “Jimmy comes from Glenties, man; and sometime in the future Jimmy’ll be winning plenty, man; Jimmy’ll rack up nearly as many medals as a certain Noelie, man...”

The song, like Jimmy himself, needed more work. But we had time.

Every summer, he stayed for weeks on end. I saw him grow from boy to man, from goatee to salt-and-pepper, and, crucially, I presided over his subsequent, crucial return to boyhood.

Because to be a manager you must be a boy: you must dream, you must see possibility where others see limitation, you must turn your back on all conventional wisdom.

Last week, on the Barcares coast, down from the very village where I conduct my annual summer school on threatened dialects, I reflected long and hard while gazing out across the Mediterranean.

You see, it all goes back to the league game this year in Ballyshannon. I stood there on the terrace behind the Donegal dug-out. Jim saw me. He acknowledged me, and even favoured Nancy with a wink.

They beat Mayo off the field that day.

Afterwards Jimmy came up onto the terrace to thank me for, and I quote, “all you taught me, Noel, without you I wouldn’t have done half what I’ve done. It’s going rightly nicely now. Are you doing a bit with James Horan?”

I shrugged in a non-committal way.

“If you are, Noel,” he added, airily, “the very best of luck with it.”

As it happens, I wasn’t doing a bit with Mayo.* But Jim didn’t know that. He should have been afraid. Caution is the by-word of the successful manager.

Donegal are the undisputed team of the year, and no-one can ever take that away from them. But I know where I’ve booked my hotel room for next Monday night.

“James comes from ‘Tubber, man; he walks with his hands clasped behind his back, man; and he’s about to end the greatest famine of all, man...”

Still needs a bit of work: my quest for perfection is constant.

* Not then, anyhow.