“With most players, you’re pushing them to get the extra 1%. With Tomás, you were pulling him back”

JACK O’Connor and Brian Cody were chatting in the function room of the 2009 All Stars when a conversation across the room caught their eye.

Tomás Ó Sé of Kerry and Tommy Walsh of Kilkenny.

They wondered whether they were observing the best No 5s of all time in hurling and football, but not for long.

Ó Sé’s confirmation yesterday that his Championship appearance record will go no further than 88 battles in the green and gold was delivered in the manner of his stellar football career: no bunting, straight as a bat, to a fellow Gaeltacht man.

Tradition and piseogs have a fundamental role in the Ó Sé family. When the country mourned the death of Páidí last December, his own storied career filled the page columns and airwaves for a week. His legacy to Kerry football was undoubted, but the role he had in the development of Kerry football’s first family merited greater scrutiny.

“He’s the greatest Kerryman I’ve every known,” is a sweeping statement to be sure, but when its author is Tomás Ó Sé — a footballer who will always figure prominently in the pantheon of Kingdom greats — it has to be taken on its merits.

It’s not that their father Micheál or uncle Tom were not influential in the progress of Fergal, Darragh, Tomás or Marc. But Páidí left the boys with forever feelings they would feel duty bound to replicate. Whether that was the regular flow of Kerry legends through the front door or the punishing self-development regime or the superstitions P O lived by, they each in their way shaped the Kerry careers of Darragh, Tomás and Marc — and by extension framed an entire era of football success in the county.

Mikey Sheehy said yesterday that the public house debate in Kerry over Tomás’ right to be called a football legend would be succinct. The famous Kingdom attacker is uniquely placed to discuss Páidí and Tomás, having played with one and worked with the latter as a selector on Eamonn Fitzmaurice’s management ticket. His verdict is unequivocal.

“Just the best number five ever to play the game and one of the best Kerry footballers of all time,” said Sheehy. “What astonished me was his appetite for work, whether it was in the depths of winter or the hard ground of summer.”

The 35-year-old winner of five All-Ireland medals is one of the few footballers who smiled more when his body was battered from training torture.

“Pain and fatigue is a player’s enemy, but for Tomás it was the reassurance he needed that he was ready for battle,” says Alan O’Sullivan, the Kerry trainer from 2009-2012. “With most players, you’re pushing them to get the extra one per cent. With Tomás, you were pulling him back.”

In a rare interview with this newspaper two years ago, Tomás offered an insight into the dúchas that moulded him.

“It was middle of the Championship so we’d be off school for the summer. On his night off from Kerry training, Páidí would do his Slea Head run of around 13 miles, over the mountain and back around. When he was doing that we’d be setting up the hurdles for him on the beach. They used be stolen on him because the run would take an hour and a half so our job was to bring the hurdles and his boots down to the beach. When he was finished he’d leap into the sea, head up home and go into a salt bath with a glass of port to warm him up. That’s no lie.”

However from the time of his first senior championship appearance in 1998, Tomás was setting his own clock. The conventional wisdom back west is that Darragh is the most astute, Tomás the most competitive and Marc the most cultured of the famous Árd a Bhothair brothers. And though Darragh may the most imposing, he never met an opponent in Croke Park as strong or stubborn as his younger sibling. Tomás Ó Sé brought a compelling cocktail of talents to the football field — an ability to run as fast with the ball as without it, an attacking ambition that a new generation of wing backs like Jack McCaffrey now copy, and that refined sense of white-line fever that made him a fearsome assignment for any opponent.

In the 2009 All-Ireland final — one of the most enjoyable afternoons in headquarters for Ó Sé — Conor Counihan built much of his tactical strategy around defusing the attacking time-bomb that was Tomas Ó Sé. Watch the throw-in. Paul Kerrigan is marking Ó Sé, not the other way around.

He is also a serious physical specimen, with a playing weight of 14 stone and tree-trunk legs that give him unique power speed and vertical jump. Alongside the 12th fairway at the Fota Island Golf resort is an imposing stone wall that shouldn’t bother a golfer of Ó Sé’s ability (he now has time to reduce his 12 handicap).

On the one occasion it did, his playing partners measured the wall over their heads and watched in awe as Ó Sé put his two hands on top of the wall and bounded over it in one leap. If I ever needed an eloquent example of the physical difference between mortals and sportsmen of a higher plateau, it was that moment.

Mikey Sheehy corroborates this: “I walked past a hundred GAA players lying on physios’ couches and I’ve seldom seen someone with the power and physique of Tomás. He was one of the few players who could run faster with the ball than without it. He used that to good effect, scoring 3-35 in championship football from wing back.”

What is fascinating too is the depth of respect he commands among his peers, many of whom he might have given a clip or two to over the years. When Tyrone’s Brian McGuigan barked at Declan O’Sullivan over the sending off incident in the 2012 All-Ireland Qualifier in Killarney, he made a point of mentioning the Kerry players, particularly Tomás Ó Sé, he respected. Perhaps too, they respected his low bullshit threshold. Baseball cap pulled down low for fear of recognition, Tomás was always the first into training, the first out of it, and the first out of a match dressing room, irrespective whether it was winning or losing.

He had his preferred preparation techniques, but being psychologically ready for battle was the most important of all. The night before the 2009 All-Ireland semi-final, he was too ill to join in the team kickaround. The following morning, he skipped breakfast, scraped himself off the bed and made a man of the match impression against Meath.

The oddest thing is that his remarkable Championship stats embellish his standing in the GAA, but don’t define him. He is the quietest and most modest of the Ó Sé brothers but his words in the dressing room carry a weight few others can match. He had his cranky moments on the pitch, but even at 35 no-one in Kerry every suggested he was past his sell-by date.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice will find a new No 5 next season, that is for sure. But his dressing room has had a giant-sized hole blown in it by the loss of another Ó Sé from Ventry.