Tony Leen: It feels like a small piece of the Kingdom itself has died

One fine morning in Cork Dwyer pressed twenty quid into my daughter's hand for her first communion. I felt a relationship change.

CENTRE OF THE KINGDOM: Kerry captain Jimmy Deenihan, second from left, make his captain's speech, in the company of An Taoiseach Garrett Fitzgerald TD, GAA president Paddy McFlynn, teammates including Jack O'Shea, Páidí Ó'Sé, Ger Power, Tommy Doyle, Murt Galvin, manager Mick O'Dwyer, Tim Kennelly, Kerry County Board Chairman Frank King, Ger Lynch and Charlie Nelligan, following victory in the All-Ireland Senior Football Championhip Final match between Kerry and Offaly at Croke Park in Dublin. Pic: Ray McManus/Sportsfile

We walked the strand, breakfasted and golfed together (hastily), shared drives that had a vague sense of crashorama when he had the wheel, and for more than 12 years we argued football and reshaped them into columns for this newspaper.

Those pieces – often as devilish as their author - were chiselled and shaped in bars and cafes, empty and overflowing dressing rooms, the front seat of his BMW, the windswept fairways in Waterville, and several unlikely points between Portmagee and Portlaoise. Wherever I could corral his attention for half an hour.

And for a long time, it was still tricky to divine how close and trusting our alliance was. This was a tough onion you peeled from the outside. I was conscious this was a business arrangement but one fine morning in Cork he pressed twenty quid into my daughter Ellie’s hand for her first communion in Ballinlough and a relationship became a small friendship.

Don’t ask how that kind and unprompted gesture franked the connection with Mick O’Dwyer, but it did. I viewed him differently after.

Dwyer – we always dropped the O’ and never needed the christian name in Kerry – had a pejorative name for being tight and too clever by half with his money but as I get more sense now, all I see is any generation of 60-year-olds who become thrifty via good sense and judgement. Who make snacks at home rather than being Dick Turpin-ed at the motorway service station. What Dwyer relished was the art of the deal, whether that be in the motor trade, at the Strand Hotel at home or those notorious backstreet alliances with Bendix or adidas. He just wanted to be ahead.

We did a column on the day Laois won the 2003 Leinster football title in the tiny manager’s dressing room cupboard in Croke Park that I never even knew existed. Mícheal Ó Muirceartaigh stuck his head around the door for a word but that apart, we could have been in a confession box. The delirious dressing room beyond barely knew I’d been there, but the column was, as ever, uplifting and devoid of cliché. He always had a rib-tickler for Cork in his Examiner pieces, and had the odd poke too off Jack O’Connor after he took over in 2004. His Dromid neighbour would always call into the shop in Caherciveen the morning before the big championship Sundays to see whether Dwyer was praising or poking him.

The generosity of his spirit was manifestly evident the first time we met over 40 years ago – in the wake of the 1984 Fianna Fail Ard Fheis when I was dropped off in Newbridge on the way home to cover Kerry’s National League defeat to Kildare. I had no spin home and when the well-known reporters had finished jousting with him after the game, I somehow summoned the courage to ask had he room in the car for the ride home. And that was how I shared a mad Mercedes drive down to Castleisland with Ballinskellig’s Jerry O’Sullivan in the front, Diarmuid O’Donoghue, Mikey Sheehy and myself in the back. It wouldn’t matter if it was several decades later, there is nothing as surreal as listening to the RTÉ radio report of Kerry’s demise alongside its architects.

He dropped me off late at the fountain in Castleisland and I thumbed home the rest of the way but we never engaged after as just a manager and reporter. At least I didn’t feel so, though he was never shy to set you right when the moment demanded.

The rules of engagement never changed. If there was a day in Dwyer’s life that he wasn’t about winning, I missed it. He could have enjoyed gratis anything he wanted off Noel Cronin’s menu in Waterville Golf Club but every time he cleaned my clock over 18 holes, he ordered the best from the menu (prawn cocktail, then steak) and I copped the bill. He manipulated a golf ball to his will in the same way he manipulated the personalities of football’s finest. It wasn’t always by convention but it always got the job done. Victory was always sweeter when it was against the head.

His successes as Kerry, Kildare and Laois manager will be recalled in rich detail elsewhere today but if the essence of great management is turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse, the footballers of Wicklow will take no exception to championing his Tommy Murphy Cup success with the Garden County in 2007. The previous summer we were strolling up the hill in Alvor on the western Algarve when the phone pinged. Dwyer was on the other end, laughing before he even asked had I drink taken or addressed the fact that he’d agreed to take the helm in Wicklow. Arthur French was to blame, he said. I thought he’d finish a laughing stock and said so. I paid for that meal too.

Mick O'Dwyer in his home town of Waterville in County Kerry when he retired in 2011.

We sat alongside each other in the lower Hogan for the 1997 All-Ireland, the match programme scrolled up tight and taut as he willed Kerry and his remote cousin Denis Dwyer well at wing forward. Maurice ran the table that day and Dwyer gushed in placing Ned's son on the pantheon of Kingdom immortals. He got into Páidí’s head the year after when Kildare ended Kerry’s All-Ireland reign in the semi-final. It didn’t hurt either that Karl, his son, was a Lilywhite thorn in Kerry’s side. There was always a sense that his son didn’t get a fair crack off his native county but it remained unsaid. Dwyer would never down the empire.

If you could see his son John around Denny Street in Tralee or Robbie in Barry’s in Douglas in Cork city, or Karl above in Kildare, you’ll never believe Dwyer is truly gone. Sadly Haulie is already above as gatekeeper but none of the boys would forget a hard-won upbringing that had no silver spoons with it. His late, lamented wife and mother of his children, Mary Carmel, often spoke of Dwyer’s ‘swinging brick’ of a heart and it was true that when he pointed the car north with relish, she was the mother of the house and business in every sense. Football always came first for the man of the house, but in his defence he was quickest dressed and departed manager from a dressing room I ever saw. He wanted to get back for the late pints – pouring, not drinking them.

By serendipity, himself and my own late father were on the same hospital corridor in Cork a couple of years ago to allow me sneak down to the last room on the left for the better part of a week. By now, his was less a voice than a whisper, but the smile was real and the eye as waspish as you’d like. Ballymacelligott had been promoted to Division One of the County League and before he asked me to go downstairs and get him a can of cold 7-Up, he wondered ‘how will ye get on with the big boys..?’ We talked about good golf and bad, good health and bad, when were Cork getting their shit together, and whether Kerry would do it in 2022. He perked up that summer.

He was of Kerry alright, every bit of it, and the sense is there now that a small piece of the Kingdom itself died around 4am Thursday morning in a Kenmare nursing home.

Late in ‘22 Jack O’Connor and his son Cian landed into the house down by the golf links with the cannister, Kerry’s 38th and first for too long. It was photographic gold but behind the symbolism, Jack O’Connor would reflect how there was a palpable feeling of warmth and joy in the room. Everyone left the moment the better for it.

That was the Micko effect.