The Big Interview with Barry Moran: Tall tales, crazy days and friends forever
Mayo’s Barry Moran, left, and Donal Vaughan celebrate victory over Kerry in the 2017 All-Ireland SFC semi-final replay at Croke Park. The pair are huge friends and Moran was a groomsman at Vaughan’s wedding.
Look, we could get all serious here from the get-go. Like with the memory that triggered you to put in the call to him in the first place — the time he was parachuted in to play as a towering sweeper in front of Quinlivan and Sweeney when Mayo previously met Tipperary in an All-Ireland semi-final and he put to an end any chance of an upset.
Or what it was — and is — like for him to six times have been on the Mayo team bus heading into Croke Park on All-Ireland final day and never leave with Sam Maguire at the front of it.
But to know Barry Moran, really we’ve to take you on to the back of that bus and how a weekend such as this would usually begin for the Mayo boys.
That was his favourite place and favourite time, being with his favourite people. With the M7 and the likes, counties like Limerick, Waterford, and Tipp that traditionally would have travelled up the day before a big game in Croker now prefer to sleep in their own beds. The Mayo, Kerry, and Donegal boys don’t have that luxury: they’re simply too far away, the roads are too bad. But rather than look at that as a considerable disadvantage and inconvenience, Moran saw that as an edge.
“One of the great things about having been involved with Mayo was that we were lucky to play in Croke Park a lot. And looking back, the fact we had to be on the road for so long so often meant we had a camaraderie that most teams don’t have.
“Like, you were with these guys for the guts of 72 hours. We had our routine. We’d leave Castlebar on a Saturday morning and not arrive back until sometime on Monday afternoon because we’d stay up in Dublin and go out together after the match. It was like a weekend away with the lads.”
Typically at the back you had Aido, Cillian, Boyler, Dillo, Evan Regan, Robbie Hennelly, Moran himself with his namesake Andy in the vicinity too and Mickey ‘C’ Conroy soon having them in stiches about some night out or an old war story from the John O’Mahony or John Morrison days.
“I always say about Mickey,” Moran smiles, “that he will take a story and make it 20 times worse or more hilarious than what actually happened.”
Coming from a raconteur as Moran himself, it’s quite the compliment.
Normally they’d land at their team hotel in the greater Dublin area around lunchtime, then go for a runaround in some nearby pitch. Then they’d head back and chill out for a few hours. Moran regularly roomed with Cillian O’Connor, a fellow avid fan of and so they’d wire the laptop to the TV screen and take in the genius of David Simon and Larry David.
Sometime after dinner, there’d be a team meeting to reaffirm how they’d be going about their business in Croker the next day. And then after the game, which normally they’d win if it weren’t the final itself, they’d head out on the town and create and cement bonds that have lasted into retirement.
He’ll offer 2016 as an example, starting with the game before that Tipp match that prompted your call.
In the quarter-final, Mayo, after stumbling through the qualifiers, had ambushed a Tyrone side coming off winning an Ulster title and been talked up as the side most likely to put it up to Dublin that year. After coming on in Mayo’s three previous games that summer, Moran had been rooted to the bench.
So, half-wanting to blow off a little steam as well as begin celebrating the fact he and the team would have another day out, he nudged Michael Hall beside him as the panel sat in the lower Cusack Stand taking in the day’s other All-Ireland quarter-final between Dublin and Donegal.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
Initially Hall didn’t understand what he meant. He barely knew Moran. It was only his first year on the panel, having won an U21 All-Ireland in Ennis against Cork earlier that year, just as Moran himself had 10 years before that again. That was the age difference: 10 years. Rookie and vet.
“I’d say Michael was afraid to open his mouth sitting beside me because normally I’d be yapping and messing, but that day I wasn’t saying much until I went, ‘Let’s go.
“So we got up and slipped out, saying nothing, until Cillian spotted and followed us. ‘Where are ye going?’ I said, ‘Look, great win, but I was expecting to play. I need a pint. We’re going to get in a few before we meet up with the rest of the boys in Dohenys and Nesbitt’s at nine.’ So Cillian says, ‘Sure I’ll join ye.’ “So we got a taxi back to the Regency, or the Bonnington as it’s known now. Dropped our bags off, got showered and changed, and then grabbed another taxi.
“I said to the driver, ‘Can you take us to some place quiet within five minutes’ walk of Doheny and Nesbitt’s?’ I didn’t want to be going into some place mobbed with supporters.
“So the driver said, ‘I know just the spot.’ The Ginger Man. It was perfect. And for those couple of hours, myself and Cillian had the greatest chat and craic with Michael before we walked up and met the rest of the team. Michael is a quiet, solid lad, but you know yourself, after he’d get another pint into him he’d loosen up a bit and you discovered he was a very witty fella. To this day we’re still good friends. A year or two ago we went to the Irish Open together. And it’s all from that weekend and what happened over those 72 hours.”
Mention of 2016 — “It’s gas the little individual moments that you can piece together and remember and laugh about” — there was that subsequent semi-final against Tipp.
Although Moran through his body of work with Castlebar Mitchels was on his way with O’Connor to becoming the most influential and successful Mayo club player of the decade, he’d been reduced to a role player on the county team.
Although he had entered the 2012 All-Ireland final in pole position for an All-Star, the game and especially kickouts had changed, meaning he became more of a horse for certain courses.
In 2015, Noel Connelly and Pat Holmes threw a curveball at Donegal by giving Moran his first start of the championship and deploying him as the country’s tallest sweeper to successfully curb the aerial threat of Michael Murphy in that year’s All-Ireland quarter-final. A year later Stephen Rochford reached for a similar playbook to stymie Quinlivan and Sweeney.
It worked. While Moran was nominally a midfielder and contested every long kickout, he’d dash back to essentially act as a double full back whenever Tipperary had possession. Afterwards the leading games analyst, Rob Carroll, calculated that it reduced by a third the number of passes Tipperary had played into their full-forward line the previous day.
The following month, Mayo would lose the All-Ireland in the most agonising and closest way possible — by a point, after a replay with Moran coming on in both games. Yet looking back on it now, more than two years retired, he remembers 2016 more for the laughter than the pain he shared with his teammates.
For one thing, that was the year they had the camp in the Curragh.
Moran had no idea what they were getting into. Earlier that weekend they’d played a pre-championship challenge match against Meath out in Abbotstown. When they got back on the bus and learned it was heading to the Curragh, Moran scoffed at the murmurs they’d be getting the full military treatment there.
But they did. Get in line! Where are you going?! March together! Colm Boyle, about as tough a marine as the GAA could produce, was scolded by one drill instructor for having no shorts: all he had was his Mayo togs, just like everyone else.
They started off having to haul fake bodies and pass them on to one another, then grab a sand bag each.
“Of course, me being stupid and trying to be the hard man, I said, ‘Sure I’ll take the biggest, heaviest one. We’ll only be a few minutes doing this anyhow.’
“Half an hour in we were crawling up this hill on our knees with this bag. I turned around and there was Mickey C behind me, after untying his bag and letting the sand out while he was crawling along, giving me the hush sign with his finger. And there was me with this massive bag on my back, absolutely fecked and this sergeant major roaring at us, ‘Get up!’
“After an hour he said, ‘Right, dump your bags’ but I’d copped that he was going to tell us to pick them up again, so I said, ‘Okay, I need to get a light sand bag quick.’ So I spotted one of the younger fellas, ambled over towards him and the poor young fella ended up with my bag.
“So we did another hour of that and then we were told we were getting back on the bus and heading to the pool. And I thought, ‘Ah, that’s grand’, so I’m laughing and joking and pulling the piss out of Boyler and everyone else. But then getting off the bus, Evan Regan glares at me. ‘What are you so happy about?!’
“I said, ‘Sure the worst is over, we’re only going in now for a recovery session.’ He said, ‘What the feck are you on about?!’ Regan was right. They were no sooner in the door when they were ordered to strip off down to their shorts and be poolside within 30 seconds. This sergeant major was even more merciless than the one before. Get into the water! Get out of the water! Forty press-ups!
So ask how he now looks back on his 14 years on that senior panel and never getting his hands on that All-Ireland medal, he looks at what he gained, not what he lost. The friendships. The memories.
Take Aidan O’Shea. For almost a decade he and his brother Seamie stood between Moran getting more minutes in his favourite position of midfield, just as he and the Mitchels were the biggest obstacle to them and Breaffy winning a county championship. Some of their in-house battles were ferocious.
“The [2015] summer Aidan was causing wreck at full-forward, we were having this training game in Tullamore where I dropped back in front of him around the square and I kind of caught him with an elbow.
“Afterwards we didn’t say a word to each other, having our meal. But then we went out and he got into my car because he’d drove the night before. And within five minutes it was like it [the row] had never happened.”
They say that All-Ireland winning teams have this bond that lasts forever, that if ever one of them needs help, any of the others would drop everything and help them out. But that’s not just the preserve of those who win it all. When you’ve come as close as often as these Mayo players have, you’ve a connection that’s as tight as any of the sides who pipped you.
A few years ago he remembers getting a call from O’Shea and knowing immediately by his tone something was up. Barry, are you around? Moran said, yeah, he was. Everything okay? O’Shea explained a relative had an accident with their car. They were fine but the car wasn’t and they needed a spin back while it was towed away.
Aidan was out of the county and needed someone he trusted to help his family out. So he called a member of his other family, the boys at the back of the bus.
O’Shea has regularly reciprocated favours such as that. Take Moran’s current job workplace. Contrary to his fun-loving personality, his day job is serious and responsible: he’s chief financial controller of the major multi-national plant Abbvie-Allergan in Westport. It was O’Shea who alerted him eight years ago that there was a [more junior] vacancy going there. While O’Shea didn’t get Moran the job, he got him to send the CV off.
Then there was the time with ‘Shoe’. Like in any dressing room, in Mayo nicknames are constantly coined and handed out. Moran was Big Bird. Bird for short. After a game with the Mitchels in which he’d controlled the skies, a club member commented that he was “flying, like a bird”, only for a more senior club member to overhear it and quip that he was more like Big Bird of Sesame Street fame.
Donie Vaughan’s reward for establishing a highly-successful shoes business was to be dubbed ‘Shoe’.
When Shoe got married a couple of years ago, Moran was his groomsman. Whenever Moran had maybe a drink too many on some of those nights out in Dublin, it was inevitably Vaughan who made sure he got back to the hotel alright. “You could rely on Shoe with your life.”
But that didn’t mean they were immune from any confrontation or wind-up. One weekend morning ahead of training in MacHale Park and after they’d all undergone a hydration test, Vaughan stormed in to the warm-up room where Moran was getting a rub from one of the medical team. Vaughan had a urine sample in his hand. Next thing he flung its contents at Moran.
“I bolted up. Made a go for him only for the lads to hold me back. I was going, ‘Jesus Christ, Shoe, what’s wrong with you?! That’s out of order!
“So I head out back towards the dressing room because I’ve to change out of this shirt covered with piss, when Cillian and Diarmuid follow me out. ‘That was bad form, Bird. That can’t go unchecked! You have to get him back! Eye for an eye!’ So they’re edging me on and I’m all riled up. I mean, I’m thinking vicious thoughts.
“So I storm into the dressing room like a bull and Aidan’s there. ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you?’ And I’m like, Shoe is after throwing piss at me, that’s what’s up!’”
So O’Shea let him stew some more. That’s not on. What are you going to do? Until eventually he let Bird in on what everybody else knew. Vaughan’s sample was only some Lucozade Sport. They were just winding him up and getting him back after all his own pranks and slagging.
You could say now the band has started to break up. Mickey C retired days after letting the sand out of that sand bag in the Curragh. Dillon retired shortly after the 2017 All-Ireland. Then Bird flew away in the summer of 2018, to take up a position for two years in the beautiful Alpine town of Annecy, half an hour from Geneva, before lockdown triggered him and Áine to return home with little Seoidín a few months earlier than planned.
“To be honest, going away was the best thing that happened. I always knew it was going to be hard to step away from the lads when you knew them so well but this way it was a clean break.
But it’s even better now being back. He again sees the lads. The other day he caught Mickey C, who lives only half a mile down the road, pushing a pram: funny how things have changed.
But some things haven’t. The back of the bus gang, or the New York City Raiders as they call themselves after an escapade there many years ago, still meet up most Saturday mornings. It used to be for breakfast in a local café but these days they now meet in the green by the courtyard, called the Mall, with their takeaway coffees and maintaining their social distance, so they can still tight.
Other boundaries are also respected, like the sanctity of the current team bubble. “We don’t even talk about football,” says Moran.
But sure why would they need to when it has given them so much else?
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