Mikey Boyle and the sobering chapters of a Kerry hurling story

A share of his eighteen year with Kerry were spent in the hurling weeds but the Ballyduff veteran appreciates the Kingdom's recent resurgence all the more for that. 

NEXT GEN: Bobby Boyle helps his father, Mikey carry his hurleys and helmet off the field after last January's Munster Hurling League game against Cork at Austin Stack Park. 

Mikey Boyle has lived through several different eras of Kerry hurling. Across 18 seasons in green and gold, he bore witness to good times, bad times, times of scarcely believable indulgence, and changed times that brought unfamiliar authority, discipline, and suffering.

36-year-old Boyle recently called time on half a lifetime spent toiling and thrashing in the green and gold. The Ballyduff clubman was a Kerry minor footballer in 2005 and a Kerry senior hurler in 2006. The latter remained his existence until he pulled the shutters down at the end of this season.

A gross understatement would be that Kerry hurling in 2023 is unrecognisable from what it was in 2006.

Kerry hurling in those days was more glass half full of something from the bar than a glass half empty at the lack of progress being made.

We’ll let Boyle in here. These are insights that can only be told first-hand.

“When I started, away games were just a booze cruise, maybe for the first three or four years you couldn’t be trusted like,” he begins.

“I’d have gone once or twice, but never as much as the boys. They loved it and away games to them were like going away on a stag nearly.

“I remember they’d go and play the game dying sick with drink. I remember one player making a big speech one year, not to go drinking because we were going to give it a right lash the following day, and he’d to be lifted out of a nightclub later that night.” 

It was a time when the players didn’t look after themselves and nobody looked after them. You were “very lucky”, according to Boyle, to be given a pair of socks and shorts as the season began.

“And if you made it anyway in the Christy Ring, you were lucky to get a t-shirt. There were sandwiches for training, but there was no such thing as a dinner. There were no bags of gear like there are nowadays. I always say to the young ones now coming in that you don’t know how lucky you are. I remember one time coming in, you had one pair of shorts and you had to mind them for every game.” 

The young ones wouldn’t know what to make of those times and the questionable levels of application. There was one particular spring where Boyle went playing a soccer match for Rattoo Rovers a few days before a Kerry hurling game.

Punishment was being dropped by then manager John Meyler for a league fixture away to Derry.

“Instead of carrying us and punishing us above in Derry by playing us, he dropped us and made us stay at home. So what did we do only go out drinking all weekend.” 

Boyle enjoyed the craic, the clatter of pint glasses, and the easy going approach that came with the status of Kerry senior hurler.

But he enjoyed far more when all of that was stripped away. He enjoyed when Joe O’Connor introduced awful minestrone soup and butterless sandwiches. He enjoyed when Joe would banish them out of sight to conduct their warm-up in isolation after they arrived late to training.

He enjoyed Éamonn Kelly’s strictness. He enjoyed being so afraid to tell Kelly he was injured that he went out and just trained through the pain instead. He enjoyed when current manager Stephen Molumphy brought them to Bere Island and Kilworth, and unleashed literal hell. No stag feel there.

“They came into the room at 4 am with bangers and sparkler things, threw them into the room and bang, and smoke bombs going off and everything. Carried us out then and told us we’d thirty seconds to put on what we had and thrown into the back of a van. You were in a team; it was delta, bravo, that kind of thing. You had a team, you were given a map, and you had to find four things in the middle of the night. They were setting off flares and if you got caught, your team was surrendered.

“The next day then we went to where they did Hell Week. My God almighty, that was tough. I actually got best trainer of the weekend that weekend, and got a jersey for it. We had to carry logs up and down hills all the time. It was deadly. We had bags over our heads, pouring water on us. We couldn’t see what was going on, lying down, and if anyone did anything out of the way there were punishments. If you were given a certain task and did anything out of the way, you’d suffer.

“That’s what they were trying to teach you, if you did anything out of line that your team suffers for that.” 

Through suffering they took steps forward. Attitudes switched. Ambitions shifted.

“I enjoyed it all, but I really started to enjoy it when it started to get serious,” said the long-serving Balyduff forward. “At times, especially when Molumphy came in, it was so strict that you were seeing results and things changing.” 

Boyle: "Instead of carrying us and punishing us above in Derry by playing us, he dropped us and made us stay at home. So what did we do only go out drinking all weekend"

THE results that standout across 18 seasons are captaining Kerry to second-tier Christy Ring glory in 2011 and the standing ovation he received from the 60 people in attendance at St Conleth’s Park Newbridge when substituted after hitting 4-1 from play in the 2015 Ring semi-final win over Kildare. They'd again go the distance that year.

Regrets? There are a few. In later campaigns, there was Kerry’s failure to land the now second-tier Joe McDonagh Cup. They endured three consecutive final defeats in 2020, ‘21, and ‘22.

“The one against Antrim that we were down so much (in the first half), that one haunts me still.” In earlier campaigns, he regrets his “fucking around” and wasting a lot of his good years.

“The older I got the more I realised I was getting closer to the time that I can’t do it anymore and there’s a lot of me that has resentment towards the younger me who didn’t put in the work that was needed and I didn’t get everything out of myself that I could have.

“It wasn’t until Éamonn Kelly’s time that my attitude changed, and I became a better player and a better leader. I remember the time we played Carlow in Tralee in the championship semi-final. I got injured that year and put on a load of weight. I came back then for the final and I was being slagged off on yer man’s, Colm Parkinson's, podcast. “I went away then and lost two-and-a-half stone just to prove him wrong. I would be demented that way.” 

He is privileged to be able to line out with his eldest son, Killian, at club level. Mikey was a Kerry minor footballer when Killian came into the world in 2005. After Gillian gave birth, Mikey marked the arrival of his first son with a few pints. The Kerry minor football management didn’t take kindly to the act and dropped him for the All-Ireland quarter-final. He was returned for the semi-final and introduced as a sub in the one-point defeat to Mayo.

It proved his final outing for a Kerry football side.

“Hurling was always number one, but no fella will ever turn down the opportunity to play with Kerry (football). The opportunity never kind of arose. Being honest, to look at me you’d say no way in the world. I was a small little barrel, you know like? I was never going to be called up. I wasn’t the typical look for a footballer that time.” 

Back to his sons and the family that he will now give back to. Bobby, aged 10, is mad to share the same experience as older brother Killian and line out with dad.

“He said to me in the car the last day, ‘what age are you now?’ I said, 36. Then he said, ‘but I’ll be on in another seven or eight more years, can you hold on until then?’ “I said ‘no, like’ and he said, ‘can’t you go in goal for a few years’. So Bobby is really looking for it. My father played until he was 45.” 

Would anyone bet against Mikey Boyle doing likewise.