The GAA’s Quiet(est) Man

Kerry’s Mike McCarthy survived a decade at the highest level in the GAA without once sharing his thoughts with the public. Until now. He sat down with Tony Leen for his first – and last – interview.

EVERY interview has cause and context. And there are only two reasons this one is taking place.

Mike McCarthy wants to seal a few whisper-draughts. And his bursting pride in his one-year-old son. He’s fighting with himself on the latter.

“That’s pure pride,” he sighs, shaking his head, “just being a father.”

It was Dingle’s Jack Ferriter who arrived into Kerry training, that merciless bear-pit, and lobbed the ‘Zizou’ moniker at Mike McCarthy. It stuck. Zinedine Zidane, so many boxes ticked. Socially gauche, awkward eye contact, footballing elegance, brooding, impossibly quiet.

“Feale Rangers played (McCarthy’s) Kilcummin in a county championship game a few years ago,” his erstwhile Kerry colleague and selector Eamonn Fitzmaurice recalls, “and we were three points up with time running out. Mike cut in for goal and I remember Darragh (O Sé) had told me how he was deadly for finding the net. I fouled him and took the yellow card but he went berserk. We met around midfield a few minutes later and he was still frothing about the foul. He just couldn’t understand how anyone could be so cynical playing football.”

It’s sometimes hard to grasp that McCarthy, recently retired for a second time, is still 32. He winces, not for the last time in this interview, at how that sounds and needs to explain it away.

“Genuinely I was quitting in 2006, I had no intention of coming back (in 2009),” he whispers, fixing his stare on a spot on the glass table in front of him. “People mean well, asking you to come back, but some fellas prefer to be left go.

“Jack (O’Connor) had been onto me a few times, Pat O’Shea and Dr Dave Geaney before him, and I never had the urge to go back. Watching Kerry win the All-Ireland in 2007 made it a lot easier for me to stay away. I thought that would be the hardest part, but it was the opposite. Because you’re happy then that you haven’t left them down.”

But the first twinge unsettled him as Kerry succumbed to Cork in the replayed Munster Championship duel in Páirc Uí Chaoimh in 2009.

A storm was brewing in McCarthy’s head.

“The next day outside mass in Castleisland, the two Healy-Raes were canvassing and even they were onto me to go back. I went into McDonald’s in Tralee that evening, and one of the young fellas inside there asked me would I go back. If you’re not safe in McDonald’s, you’re in trouble.”

He had found his game again out on the prairies of centre back and midfield with Kilcummin and before the birth of their first child, McCarthy and his wife Eileen headed away to the sun. Life was good, but about to get complicated.

“That Sunday evening I had a few cans, maybe the mind was a big weak when Jack (O’Connor) rang out of the blue. I went outside to take the call. They’d just lost that game to Cork and eventually he asked me to think about it overnight and he’d meet me in the Hotel Europe on Monday. One plus kept ringing around my head: wouldn’t it be special to have the cup for the child? It sounds stupid, but only someone who has a child can understand that.”

Because this is his first and last interview, I committed the reporter’s crime of showing the subject his quotes before publication. Well, nearly. There is an important element I didn’t reveal back to Mike Mac because he may instruct me to bin it, and render the whole thing pretty worthless. Should you camouflage a defining element of his, and other’s, personality. Players who couldn’t believe that they belong, and failed for that reason. Donncha O’Connor reversing out of a Cork trial because he saw the quality of player arriving.

McCarthy nods approvingly at that story. His Kerry career is now over and only looking in a rear view mirror does he sense he belonged on that elevated plateau. Self-confidence is not in Mike McCarthy’s vocabulary. He didn’t make the St Brendan’s College football team in sixth year. “I wasn’t good enough, there’s no doubt about that.” But less than a season later, he was a Kerry minor.

When Páidi O Sé called him for a senior trial in 1998, he presumed it to be a piss-take and almost hung up. When he quit Kerry football in abject frustration in 2006 at being manacled to the full-back line, he never protested because in McCarthy’s view, he wasn’t good enough for the half-back line and, well, players shouldn’t lose the run of themselves anyway.

“What drove me when I was full-back or corner-back was fear. The more afraid of a player I was, the more alert I became. Jack (O’Connor) was always on about confidence, but I was the opposite. The more afraid I was, the better I played. However, the older I got, I lost the fear of being beaten by a fella. That was a bad thing as a full-back, but out the field, confidence does help more.

“It was a psychological thing with me in the full-back line. I spent so many years running after fellas, doing what they did, going where they went. After a while, it was nice to have a fella running after you. In the half-back line, there’s actually a lot more happening. You have to be a lot more alert in terms of space, and judging where you think the ball is going to be put. A lot more thinking.”

It’s a recurring, and troubling theme in Kerry. Footballers caged as full-backs. Not since Barry O’Shea in 1997 has Kerry sent out a custom-made No 3. Everyone since has been a dancer dressed as a bouncer. Seamus Moynihan, Mike McCarthy, Tom O’Sullivan. Now it’s the same with Marc O Sé and Tommy Griffin. Too many footballers?

Tom O’Sullivan tells a story, which McCarthy confirms, of the pair of them, standing in the square soaking up their last few minutes as Kerry footballers in the one-sided All-Ireland final win over Mayo in 2006.

“Tom was meant to retire too,” McCarthy protests. But in truth, his own mind had been made up earlier that season. Whacked out at 28.

“It is ridiculous now, the commitment level is frightening. We were out in Portugal in training camp that year... Jack had a reference to drinking in the book...”. He fixes on that glass table again.

“You’re taking your own holidays to go out training, it’s a bit much. I don’t disagree with the rationale, you have to do that today to keep up, but that was too much for me. Jack was right to give us a doing over it, the county board had paid big money to go out there (McCarthy and another player went offside for an afternoon). It’s a great week of preparation, you fit in 10 or 15 sessions, but for me the commitment level was getting too much.

“Anyway, the body is gone now. Last year I spent more time on the physiotherapy table than out training. The achilles, the knees, a slight tear to anterior cruciate ligament. Wear and tear, the specialists said. The speed is gone too, 2009 took a lot out of me. I want to be able to play ball with my young fella in 10 years’ time, rather than dragging my legs after me. My father used be beating balls over my head, and giving out to me for not fielding them. I want to be able to do that with the small fella.”

The birth of young Mike McCarthy last November changed his father in a way he just couldn’t have conceived of. The accompanying picture of the child is published because McCarthy wants it for the child’s memory box. The cutting will be folded alongside his fourth All-Ireland medal from 2009 in the young man’s memory box. And one day Eileen will sit him down and tell him about his father’s achievements because Mike won’t.

And he’ll learn he was the biggest single reason his dad came back to play with Kerry in 2009.

“The change (out the field) was a carrot, but not the main thing,” McCarthy says. “Jack had tried that earlier in the season. It was a combination of playing well with the club, watching the boys lose in Cork, and the small fella. When the idea had set in, I said it to Eileen, and we discussed putting the child in the cup. You do these things as a parent. Last season (2010) I had hoped to even bring him up the steps of the Hogan Stand, but that obviously didn’t work to plan. They are ideas in your own head. They motivated me. You think you get great enjoyment out of an All-Ireland, but it’s nothing compared to fatherhood.”

He admits to a bad feeling in the approach to the Down quarter-final last August, his last, low day in a Kerry jersey he wore with distinction for 11 seasons. A decade and more of Maurice Fitz, Seamus Moynihan, the Gooch.

“Those fellas bring you on, I was very lucky. Maurice Fitzgerald would sell me a dummy and curl it over from 50 yards. You’d be humiliated and in awe at the same time. Moynihan was the ultimate professional in everything he did, on and off the field. He used be on to me all the time about things, and reflecting now, everything he said was class advice. Gooch v Maurice Fitzgerald? God, I’d prefer not to mark either. Gooch is more of a danger goal-wise, Maurice was more of a turn and bang it over from the corner flag. Take your pick.”

He believes a lot in fate and luck, most of all in terms of his own advancement. It might sound limp, but only if you didn’t know Mike Mac. How he turned around Kerry in that 2009 qualifier campaign? Luck.

“Antrim played a sweeper and we had a free player. First it was Marc (O Sé) and then I was given the free role. There was a 10 minute spell when there was no-one on me and I got on a lot of ball. Eventually they put a man back on me and I was very quiet.”

The quarter-final against Dublin, setting up that killer early goal? Luck. No genuinely.

“I was told before the game that my man was going to be a third midfielder, so I knew I was going to be pushing on. The early play moved left, there was space in front of me, I took a gamble. When you see the Gooch, you give him the ball.”

And so on.

“I always felt I was lucky to be there (with Kerry). It doesn’t dawn for a long time that you belong. My generation grew up on the Golden Years, which isn’t always the best thing. It takes a career to realise that you might have deserved to be there.”

Even in team meetings, with a thousand thoughts in his head, constructive thoughts, he’d shy away from articulating them. When he did, they came out wrong. Or so he thought. Four All-Ireland medals suggests otherwise. And interviews with the beloved press? “I always thought, if you’ve nothing to say, then don’t say anything.”

His football talked loudest, always.