The Kieran Shannon interview: Mickey Harte - the patient pilgrim

Mickey Harte has been confronted by hellish personal experiences, from a brush with cancer to the deaths of his daughter Michaela and two brothers.

He has been questioned in his county after a barren spell followed his breakthrough glories, but a deep faith in God and in his own ability to change and adapt meant he never questioned his beliefs.

Even if he’s not quite ready to absolve all sins.

The morning after Tyrone edged Monaghan to qualify for the county’s first All-Ireland final in 10 years, Mickey Harte passed on breakfast, watched the game back, then drove about an hour from his family home in Ballygawley to a lakeshore just past the sleepy border village of Pettigo. There, he left his car, paid the ferryman, and boarded a boat to take him over to the fabled Sanctuary of St Patrick on Lough Derg, a world away from the madding crowd of 50,000 in Croke Park.

It was a retreat he’d been looking to get in earlier in the summer, only Tyrone’s manic schedule in the qualifiers and Super 8 meant it was impossible to accommodate in his diary. This particular Monday though was the last day of the year any boats would be heading to the island and something inside was telling him that he just had to do it, All-Ireland final pending or not. Training would have to be pushed out to Wednesday, by which time he would be back from his pilgrimage, a few hours short of completing a 72-hour fast. Before he and Tyrone could attempt to kick down heaven’s door again, first he’d have to spend some time in purgatory.

Upon arriving on the island, Harte and his fellow pilgrims surrendered their footwear, a state of undress which they would maintain for the remainder of their duration on the island. As he shuffled to and forth from the various stations — or penitential ‘beds’ — to pray, his feet would be pierced by the jagged stones.

Sleep was also considered superfluous, at least on that first night, as they instead spent the wee wee hours plodding around the basilica saying the rosary every hour. The only drink on offer was water and black tea; the only food, a slice of toast without butter, which he claims “wasn’t pretty to eat”. The staple diet here was Mass, prayer, confession, benediction. Not exactly the kind of Monday Club his players of yore would sign up for after a big championship win in Croke Park, but for Harte this was more his scene than theirs ever was.

“I just think Lough Derg is a great way of bringing people to a spiritual level — and the same level,” he explains to you in the more familiar and comparatively luxurious surroundings of Kelly’s Inn.

Nobody is better than anybody else when you’re walking around on your bare feet and you get this sense that we can all identify with each other.

We’re all going to pray, we’re all going to be hungry, we’re all going to be tired, and we all have to face up to this within ourselves, even though there’s people around you, which is good to have.

“So, it’s a great template for life. There are places you need to go with yourself and your God. All the while, there are people around you on their own journey and a shared journey, to a place of a higher spiritual value. So you can identify with them.

They’re hungry, you’re hungry. They’re tired, you’re tired and, yet, there’s still a determination within you and them to do something so challenging but rewarding.

It could also be taken as a template and metaphor for both Harte and Tyrone football over the past decade.

On a personal level, he has been confronted with the most taxing, purgatorial, even hellish, experiences, from a brush with cancer three years ago, to the death of his daughter Michaela, as well as losing two brothers just weeks either side of that tragedy in Mauritius. Only he knows what he had to summon up within himself, what it was like walking in those shoes, the pain infinitely worse than walking barefoot around those penitential beds, yet eased by the kindness and support of thousands of others.

As for football, it has been a testing too, for him as a manager and for the county he has loved and served so long. Losing a daughter in such circumstances could have cast football into irrelevance, but for Harte it only reaffirmed the wisdom of Dónal Óg Cusack’s take on death and the sport you love — and that Michaela loved: If you could live again, you would only play the game more, or support or manage it more, because that is living.

So, he continued as Tyrone manager, leading them in the sacred quest that pursuing another championship can

become. The journey has been tiring, but all through they have remained hungry, no-one more than him, and no-one more mindful either that it has required being strong enough to stand alone, despite the comfort that there was a group of them in it together.

For sure, it’s been challenging, but like that feeling he got on the boat leaving the island, it’s been wholly rewarding too.

*****

Not long into the conversation and Harte lights up, raving about the brilliance and innovation of Dublin.

The Dublin team of the 1970s, that is.

He’s been asked about how he and football have evolved in the 16 years that he’s been in senior inter-county management, but he feels he has to bring you back a good bit earlier again. You want to talk about the genesis of the sweeper?

For me, this all begins with Tony Hanahoe, Bobby Doyle and, obviously, Kevin Heffernan as the instigator,” hedeclares.

“Here was Bobby Doyle, a corner-forward, who was just as comfortable out the field, because he was a footballer, he could carry the ball and knew the right thing to do with it. The corner-back in those days had the mentality: ‘I’m a corner-back, so I’m going to do what corner-backs do — hold my man tight, get the ball, shift it as quickly as possible.’ So, right away with Bobby Doyle, they faced a dilemma: Do I go with him out of my

comfort zone and not know what to do, or do I stay here?”

What did they tend to do?

They kind of held back for long enough, but they didn’t position themselves as the modern-day sweeper.

Hanahoe at number 11 presented a similar puzzle for centre half-backs. What a player, Harte gushes.

“Tony Hanahoe didn’t care whether he was seen or not. Traditionally, the centre-back was seen as this saviour of the

defence, the heart of the defence, a real stopper with real physical presence.”

“With a Hanahoe, what did you do? Should you stay or should you go out?”

The ’80s weren’t quite as daring. You had Pat Spillane, alright, happy to sporadically drop back to help out his defence, though whether that qualifies as puke football or not, Harte will leave that to Pat and others to decide. The Armagh team of the late-1990s/early-noughties significantly turned up the dial. Then, right on their heels came Harte’s Tyrone.

Looking back on that now seminal summer of 2003, football as it was played was so innocent. All these dynamic duos inside, with huge tallies in brackets after their names: Sweeney and Devenney with Donegal; Joyce and Savage for Galway; Clarke and McDonnell for Armagh; Canavan and Mulligan for Tyrone; and most delightfully of all, Mike Frank and Gooch with Kerry. It couldn’t last.

“It was a forward’s paradise! A forward’s paradise! Because, generally, it was just two-v-two inside. Players out the field had become better at delivering quality ball into those men. It was no longer hump it in and hope they win it; it was quality ball, but then people began to say: ‘We can’t let this happen anymore.’”

The likes of Armagh, with the blanket, and one of the McEntees acting as a sweeper; and Harte, with Gavin Devlin protecting the ‘D’, Brian Dooher all over the pitch, Enda McGinley as a bigger, more physical Bobby Doyle, coming out around the middle of the pitch, wing-backs, like Philip Jordan, and even corner-backs, like Ryan McMenamin, bombing up and back the field. Puke football in some eyes, total football in Harte’s.

Jim McGuinness’s Donegal project, he agrees, represented another quantum leap in the evolution of how the game is now played. Though Harte lost all three of their head-to-head championship encounters, there is nothing begrudging in what he has to say about McGuinness, only respect.

I always found him very affable. A genuine, sincere man. I like the way he does things. I think he’s good to listen to.

"He sees what’s happening and can articulate what he sees happening and, as a coach, he brought things to the next level. He brought a structure — a very specific, almost rigid, structure — to this whole art of defending in numbers.”

That respect is mutual, all the more since their 2011 faceoff in Clones. The game proved to be a watershed in Ulster football, ending the 12-year-old Armagh-Tyrone duopoly, but McGuinness would remark straight after the game how it showcased why Tyrone had been such frequent and brilliant champions — and an exceptionally-coached team. The way they moved the ball in and around his massed defence and worked up a 0-4 to no score lead after 15 minutes, 0-6 to 0-1 after 30 minutes. It had been a masterclass in intelligent football.

“I couldn’t agree more with him,” Harte smilingly enthuses all these years on. “We should have had the game finished by half-time. We knew not to carry the ball into the nest. That they actually liked you to carry the ball at them. It’s the same now; you can maybe take on one man, but you don’t carry the ball into meeting two or three men, because there’s only going to be one winner, and it’s not you, so, we were moving the ball slick through our hands and we were playing with more of a degree of width than you’d have had up to then to try and stretch them, though it wouldn’t have been as sophisticated a level as it would be nowadays.

“But we didn’t take enough of our scores and before half-time [Kevin] Cassidy threw up a big one to make it a two-point game. It was such a non-reflection of our dominance, but after that, it gave Donegal the confidence to think: ‘We can handle this, our system will work.’”

A few months later, Tyrone crashed out of the championship at the All-Ireland quarter-final stage in a more conventional game of football. Too conventional for Tyrone’s benefit.

The scoreline is still etched in Harte’s mind: Dublin 22 points, Tyrone 15, with Tyrone kicking the last three points of the game to make it somewhat respectable. If the previous year’s quarter-final defeat to Pat Gilroy’s team — “that day, Eoghan O’Gara got the goal off the post” — was the beginning of the end for his great Tyrone team, Diarmuid Connolly and Brogan racking up 0-12 from play between them as if it was mid-summer 2003 marked the end of the end.

That was the day. That was the day that proved to us that we no longer had the legs and the lungs to play a toe-to-toe game against the likes of Dublin. We tried to be more offensive that day, but we no longer had the players to play that way, so that’s when we began to see we needed to be more mean and structured at the back, to bring us through this period of the development of a new team.

He knew that would involve some pain and take time, like those American college and professional basketball coaches he’s studied have long appreciated; a Coach K in Duke, a Brad Stevens in Boston, hailed as a guru these past four years with how he’s brought through youngsters and blended them with veterans, even though they’ve yet to contest an NBA finals. In Boston, they’ve trusted the process, knowing they’re building towards something special. In Tyrone, such trust in the process and Harte weren’t as pervasive.

“I’ve heard ridiculous statements, even at board meetings, with club representatives saying three years ago: ‘It’s seven years now since Tyrone won an All-Ireland!’ A condemnation, if you like, of what we were about and notwithstanding the fact we hadn’t won an All Ireland in 119 years prior to 2003, but there was no longer a group of high-calibre players [like the class of 2003] coming through together. We were building something for the future, believing those who were there at the time were achieving as much as was possible at this time.”

For him the key constituency was the players. Trying to hold on “to real quality players with lots of experience while also recognising they no longer had 70 minutes of their quality anymore”. Like a Conor Gormley staying on in 2013, a Sean Cavanagh and Joe and Justin McMahon hanging on until the county got back to winning Ulsters in 2016 and 2017, surrounding the Mattie Donnellys and Peter Hartes and Tiernan McCanns with enough experience to get Tyrone back to the top table. If they ever left it.

He’s proud of how those players and Tyrone in general hung in there during the so-called lean years. Four All-Ireland semi-final appearances. Reaching a league final where they only lost by a point to Dublin. Making the All-Ireland quarter-final round every year bar 2012 and 2014.

Even a good number of those defeats come with an asterisk in his eyes. “I don’t want to be going into refereeing decisions,” he says, before going into… refereeing decisions.

Take that 2014 season which could be perceived as his lowest point, the county exiting the championship after only two rounds of the qualifiers. They ended up in the backdoor only after losing by a point to Monaghan in Ulster. Malachy O’Rourke, he accepts, had grounds to wonder why there wasn’t more added time played in last month’s All-Ireland semi-final, but who remembers Harte had similar cause for complaint when the same two counties met in that Ulster semi-final back in 2014? Harte certainly hasn’t forgotten, his team on the attack when Eddie Kinsella blew up at least a minute early.

Then, there was resultant qualifier defeat to Armagh in 2014. Before the ball was thrown, in a melee broke out.

That was not of our doing at all. That to me had to be orchestrated and had the effect Armagh wanted. Mattie out of self-preservation wrestled with someone, the two of them got booked and then a clumsy tackle later and Mattie gets a second yellow card.

"We had given Armagh an awful hammering in the McKenna Cup that year [5-16 to 0-7], so they came with vengeance on their mind and executed it to their benefit. So, while that result was a horrible one for us, it did not diminish the possibilities that I felt existed within our group. I still felt we could come back to a high level again.”

Sure enough, the following season they were back in an All-Ireland semi-final, where they had defending champs Kerry on the ropes. In the closing minutes, they were denied a second penalty which, says Harte, “was more of a penalty than the one we got. If we get that penalty, we’re in the final again”. The following year, they went even closer to making it to the last game of the year; in his eyes their quarter-final clash with Mayo was a de facto semi-final and Tyrone won it “everywhere but on the scoreboard”.

Even their 2013 semi-final against Mayo, which they lost by six points, was contentious in his eyes. For him, it swung on Peter Harte having to go off injured after just six minutes, when Tom Cunniffe thundered into him; later Stephen O’Neill also had to hobble off well before the game’s end.

No matter that Cunniffe’s shoulder is otherwise unanimously perceived as one of the great and fair championship hits of recent times or that Cillian O’Connor also had to be carried off after only 10 minutes into that same war of attrition; that Harte viewed the loss of his nephew (“it was a late tackle; Peter was going for the ball, the man that met him went for the man who was open”) and his team through such lenses explains how he and Tyrone kept going to make it back to this final.

It’s precisely that sort of selective, almost obstinate, thinking and optimism which has propelled Tyrone through those testing times.

Did his own self-belief ever waver through the lean years? That he ever felt it was time for a new man, a new voice?

“I was never worried about that at all. I’ve always believed that I have the capability of moving with the situation that’s in front of us. People love the idea of change and that idea that everything will be better because of change. That presupposes that change can’t take place within the same head and, if I wasn’t changing my thinking and not adding value to what we had here, there was no point in staying.”

What helped circumvent same voice syndrome was enlisting new voices, if

familiar, beloved faces. He looks at the coaching team he has around him now: Gavin Devlin, Stephen O’Neill, Peter

Donnelly, John Devine, all players on the team of 2003. That’s been a hugely rewarding part of the process, observing their transition from boys to men to now fellow mentors.

I don’t really like people describing me as this wonderful and astute manager,” he says. “I see myself as the co-ordinator of people of quality and someone who is open to learning.

All these years on from his pioneering collaborations with the likes of Denise Martin and Peter Quinlivan, he’s still

actively and enthusiastically involved in the video analysis process. Technology and support staff have changed hugely over the past 15 years, but the core and thrill of the exercise remains the same.

“I just love getting players on camera doing things in a game that we’ve been talking about and working on in training. I love being able to nail that, to show how they nailed that. I just think it’s so good for them.”

One piece of footage he has shown and watched time and time again: The Super 8 game up in Ballybofey. Kieran McGeary, who he first saw back in Cookstown playing for one of Peter Canavan’s school teams, tracking back to intercept a pass heading straight for Jamie Brennan. Then, after breaking the ball loose, McGeary pounces on it, gets fouled, but immediately springs off the ground and takes a quick free to set in motion a pivotal score. For Harte, that encapsulated why Tyrone won that game, what the modern Tyrone footballer — the modern Gaelic footballer — is all about.

“The game is now back to where I like to be anyway. We need complete footballers. We need people who can defend, who can tackle, who can go forward and score and people who can [track] back. To me this is the honest game we’re playing now.”

It may not be a forward’s paradise, but it’s close to being this particular manager’s.

*****

While he was in Lough Derg those few days after the All-Ireland semi-final, Harte found there was a particular comfort and challenge in reciting the rosary countless of times. Why not say the prayers just once with meaning? For Harte, you can never say the sentiments within those prayers enough.

The value [of repetition] is thinking about what you’re saying. You’re asking Mary, the mother of Jesus, to pray for us, to intercede for us and to help us through life, and not just now, but in the hour of our death, so how can you ever say that often enough?

“The Our Father asks great questions of us as well, you know. It’s a very challenging prayer: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ I mean, that’s a challenging one” — he giggles softly — “and the more you say it, the more you think: ‘This is a challenge.’”

Well, since you mention it, Mickey. Do you forgive RTÉ their trespasses?

He nods, smiling. Fair question.

Okay, so I’m not taking this as anything personal, really. It’s an institution that I’m against here, and the institution to me here is a faceless thing, and there are certain individuals within it who have done things they should not have done.

“RTÉ to me, as an entity, is not something that I feel I have to be forgiving in any way towards. My challenge is that I don’t feel angst towards individuals, even the individual [John Murray] who did the skit bit [in which he played ‘Little Girl from Omagh’, less than five months after Michaela was killed]. It’s just like the people who killed Michaela: I am not in this daily thinking: ‘God, I despise them’, or ‘I’d love to do this or that to them.’ Through the grace of God, I just leave them, I leave them be, but as a point of principle, as far as RTÉ is concerned, I am not speaking to them, because they didn’t do the right thing at the right time.”

Not even Brian Carthy, a close personal friend?

I talk to Brian as a person, as an individual, but I’m not speaking to him on behalf of RTÉ.

You say they didn’t do the right thing at the right time. Can they do anything now?

“No. No, that’s history. That’s gone, that’s over, and it’s not a big deal. I’m not seeing this as something where forgiveness comes into it. I’m just seeing this as a point of principle that I’m prepared to go with.”

What would you hope that they take and learn from your stance?

“I hope that they learn that you can’t walk over people and expect then to curry favour with them again in a short time as if nothing had happened. I think that’s a trait they have used over time.”

On Lough Derg he also went to confession, to forgive his own trespasses. Such as? “The idle talk I might say about people. There can be little things that irritate you, or that you allow irritate you and sometimes in company I might express that annoyance and give out about them.”

Are we talking about some people from RTÉ again, only this time located in The Sunday Game studio?

“Well, people of that ilk, yes,” he says, laughing, “but you have to learn to be aware of it and to reduce it, reduce it.”

Another person would have abandoned or cursed their God after what happened to his daughter on her honeymoon, but if anything Harte’s faith is stronger.

God has been so good to him, he says. At the start of 2015, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. The first two courses of post-surgery treatment were unsuccessful, but against the odds, the third attempt worked. At the end of last year, no more maintenance treatment was required.

If I had to get the whole bladder out and get a reconstruction done, I would have been out for two or three months. It would have been the end of my football career, no doubt, so I have so much to be grateful for.

So he gives thanks whenever he can. He was recently bequeathed a key to his local church in Ballygawley, allowing him to go in there in his own time, so he’ll often slip in there early in the morning and put out the blessed sacrament on the altar and present himself to God in adoration.

That’s why not getting to St Francis because his visit clashed with All-Ireland final camp didn’t bother him. “I have something better than I can go to any day,” he says. “I am so blessed that I have that opportunity.”

He was so blessed to have 27 years with Michaela, too.

“She never leaves my mind, but thanks be to God now, it’s not all about the sense of loss. It’s about the sense of what we had together, what we had in life.

That actually outweighs the loss and it’s brilliant to be able to go there and reflect on that. I still miss her so dearly and I’d LOVE her to be there, but I feel she’s smiling where she is.

"I feel she’s still influencing this whole affair, as she always did in her own imitable way. She was a great believer in God’s bigger plan. That was her catchphrase: It’s not part of God’s bigger plan, God has a bigger plan. When we lost to Down in 2008: ‘God has a bigger plan.’ And I think that taught me to be patient. I’ve used that word a lot in the last number of years, patience, we have to be patient.

“It’s not always in our time, sometimes it’s someone else’s decision what happens, but when it does, you have to be ready to work with that plan.”