ALL-IRELAND SFC FINAL: TOM HUMPHRIESasks Darragh Ó Sé about the highlights of his 16-season Kerry career, the lowlights, and whether he'll be extending that intercounty vocation into next year.

HE WORKS daily in the most humbling of environments, making his crust as an estate agent on Tralee’s Street of Champions. Micko has a fast food joint across the way. Mikey Sheehy, the Bomber, Seánie Walsh and more all toil within hailing distance.

He walks in the considerable shadow of his uncle Páidí, like Sheehy one of that rare breed (five men in all) with eight All-Ireland senior football medals in the drawer. He plays for club and county with two brothers of considerable accomplishment.

He wears the jersey of the most storied and glorious county in football.

And yet he stands out luminously, as one of those footballers for whom the Christian name is sufficient for recognition and discussion.

He is an Ó Sé and a proud one, but first and foremost he is Darragh. His own self.

Sixteen seasons shedding sweat in the Kerry engine room, the most demanding job in football, have led to this. Next Sunday, he plays his ninth All-Ireland final, his 81st championship game and strikes out looking for his sixth All-Ireland medal. He does these things with the same ravenous hunger with which he went about winning his first medal.

In that sense, he is a warrior of the old school. He draws his motivation from a well that never runs dry. Kerry.

“I get great motivation out of just playing for Kerry. I love the jersey. I like the golden years. I like the history of everything that went before. I like that we are a little continuation of that. I enjoy that. I just like Kerry football, the whole thing, the big package.

“That’s doesn’t work for everyone. Other guys, it doesn’t do it for them. Management’s job is to get those guys ticking. It is a tough job, but for me that’s it. I just love playing for Kerry.”

That sense of spiritual communion between Darragh and those who pay to watch him accounts in part for his enduring popularity in a county where criticism is often swingeing and harsh. He began playing before the time of radio phone-ins and internet chat rooms, but in his spirit, his demeanour and the style of his play he seems to embody the sporting aspirations of the unique football county he sprang from.

His reputation is larger now than it was mid career.

That’s Darragh Ó Sé.

He represents the essence of the game in Kerry and his decision to cling perhaps by the fingernails (if that is what it took) to a place on the team and the panel when anybody else would have walked off into a golden sunset represents what every Kerry fan thinks they would do too.

But every Kerry fan doesn’t have to slog around Fitzgerald Stadium shedding the pounds that accrue to a man of 34 years of age when he takes the winter and spring off to be there for his new baby.

When Ella arrived seven and a half months ago he was far from decided about his footballing future. He came back in the end just to have a go at it. There was the bit of hunger left and he craved the challenge. At 34 the metabolism slows and you have to work twice as hard to get the fitness back. He worked harder than anyone. Summer was hardly started before he was back in the cockpit.

“This year is a huge bonus. This was a big year at home for myself and Amy. To come back in the spring and to go through the mill? I’d often say when I was struggling, what the hell brought me back? But I wouldn’t change it.

“Even when things are going bad for me personally I am competing at a level that at my age I would hope to compete at. There is nothing to compare to a team victory. All the work goes in by everybody and the victory is shared by 36, 37 people. That is huge.

“For me that is the real enjoyment. You can look forward to that sense of achievement in winning. Doubting yourself and coming through. All the combinations. Am I good? Am I feeling gammy? It is a great game. If it were PlayStation it would be the best game ever made. This game is so great because there are so many variables. It’s human beings. Nothing will compare. Of course, there is family and work etc, but in general day-to-day stuff nothing will give that buzz again.

“That’s what is enjoyable. It is for yourself, in a sense. The challenge of winning. Enjoying the game, competing, getting fit again. Disappointment is part of that too. At the end, though, it is still worth it. Had we lost against Sligo, say, it would still have been worth coming back.”

Really?

“It would of course. If I got five or 10 minutes with those players, playing in the Kerry jersey with them. It would, of course.”

So coming back. It wasn’t imperative that you had to start every game. You would have taken the five or 10 minutes if necessary? “I came back with an open mind. We had new management. I didn’t know what they were thinking. It was a vague thing. I didn’t know where I was, playing-wise. I don’t pick the teams. It just fell the way it did.

“Coming back in I knew there was a process to be gone through. The midfield that were there through the league were super. They won every game, but you have to believe you will start. Training is no good unless you believe that. The same as the fellas I compete with for the place, they have to believe they will start too or they are no good either. And that makes for good football. For aggressiveness and physical play. And that brings the team on.

“There is a bond there. You know you wouldn’t be where you are but for those players who push you on. There is a fierce competitiveness there between you as individuals, but at the same time there is a bond because you know that by competing as hard as you can with each other you make the team better.

“There is a common goal. That is the reality of it. There is a good unity that comes from that. So, when I came back, being part of that was what I was looking for.”

Sixteen summers, five All-Ireland medals, nine All-Ireland finals, four Kerry managers, 12 midfield partners, 21 different counties played, only one of which he never got the better of.

Tyrone are missing from next Sunday’s final. Will-o’-the-wisps vanishing again when Kerry most badly wanted to play them.

Regrets?

“Yerra, we have had our cracks at Tyrone. We wouldn’t be too caught up about it. We had our few chances at them and by and large most teams that beat you deserve to beat you. I felt maybe last year we shot ourselves in the foot a bit, but it’s like Tipp against Kilkenny. I hold no resentment toward them and Tipp must be the same way. Tyrone held the cup going home at the end of the day. That’s sport.

“Last week Tipp put in such an admirable effort to win. Like the Marty Morrissey thing. I could see Brian Cody’s point. They put in the effort to win when it got tough. A free over the bar from 100 yards after Benny Dunne was sent off, the Shefflin penalty. The Comerford goal.

“For such an excellent team Kilkenny deserve their accolades. They don’t care about records. They want to get as much as possible out of the group that is there now. I understand that.”

Meath in 2001 is the one game that he can’t explain to himself. It defies analysis. Refuses to be parsed or dissected or reduced in significance by the passage of time. Tyrone rank surprisingly low on his list of regrets.

“People ask if beating them (Meath) the last day (in the All-Ireland semi-final) fixed that. No. It didn’t really. It’s not the same team anymore. We don’t know what happened that day. Meath were as good as us. They won the All-Ireland in 1999 and we won in 2000 so we weren’t 10 or 15 points worse than them. That day and losing the club final to Caltra in 2004, maybe losing to Armagh as captain in 2002 – they were the worst.

“Tyrone, you’d have to package the games together. Would I have liked to have beaten Tyrone? Of course. But I don’t lie awake at night. Tyrone? I can look at the games and say this went wrong or that went wrong. I don’t lose sleep over it.”

All that costs him sleep is the buzzing of his mobile the odd evening when Paul Galvin sends him reports on training written in the style of Ross O’Carroll Kelly: “Dorra, I said to Jack, roysh, these fockers . . . ”

The pair travel from Tralee to Killarney together for training a few times a week. Old stagers who don’t feel the need to talk about football anymore. Either that, or the car journeys are a chance to escape the talk about the game which permeates all aspects of Kerry life like a constant light drizzle.

This season has been typical of the goldfish bowl existence the Kerry footballer endures. Rumours swirled over the heads of the panel from the time they lost against Cork until they beat Dublin in Croke Park.

Then, of course, the rumours cleared like a morning mist.

“It got exaggerated this year. The management were looking for something to buck things up perhaps. The boys (Colm Cooper and Tomás Ó Sé) weren’t far offside, in fairness. Where it got messy was that it made the papers. The lads have families.

“It went too far in that respect. Management are management and they have to do their job, but in Kerry you have the rumour machine. It is crazy. Everyone gets sucked in, like your man in Willy Wonka getting sucked into the machine. Everyone in the county is like that.”

Darragh’s way of dealing with it is perhaps the healthiest and most novel. “I can’t help adding to it! Somebody would ask me something ridiculous like ‘did Donaghy and Galvin have a big fight in training?’ Sure you can’t help but look surprised and say to them, ‘well, sorry, I can’t comment on that’. And you know then that it will take legs. You can make it fun then. I go into training and tell the lads, knock a bit of craic out of it.

It’s easy for me, I’ve been around the block for so long. If you took any notice of the stuff you would go mad. My wife couldn’t believe this craic at first. How is it happening? These rumours, where are they coming from? The one thing about Kerry people is that we have writers and poets and we love a good story.”

He has heard volumes of stories about himself, naturally. Many of the great ones are about Jack O’Connor and himself sparring off verbally, sometimes physically. He tells you this and then pauses unable to help himself. The mischievous grin gives him away.

“Of course, you wouldn’t know what’s true and what’s not true there either! Ah, there have been several good ones about myself. A lot of them would be related to where you were seen. You could be working in Kenmare, meeting a client, and be spotted there.

“You would be somewhere else the following day. There’d be two different rumours going then as to what you would be doing in those places. This is the ideal rumour scenario. Was he drinking? Was he not? What was he doing in Kenmare? Same as in the other place?”

He heard one story this summer concerning Tadhg Kennelly. A man just approached him, a reliable man offering the currency of solid sources. He swore the story was true.

“He was there, apparently. I asked him. I said, ‘Are you sure of that’? He said he was, he was 100 per cent sure. This is a decent man. He was totally convinced, but I happened to be there at the function he was talking about and nothing happened yet this poor man believed it like gospel.

“Sometimes then there are rumours that I put out myself. A few years ago I made one up about an incident at training.

“I told a certain barman in Kerry that Barry O’Shea had a row with Páidí in training and it got messy and continued in the showers where Barry hit Páidí. I said to him, ‘You have to keep that under your hat now. Please.’ Four or five days later your man rings me, abusing me. ‘That never happened.’ I said, ‘but sure I assume you didn’t tell anybody, did you’? ‘Ah, fuck you!’ he says.”

It all helps, he reckons. It relates to what Páidí said about the rough animals. It just all adds to the joyful mystery of what Kerry football is. No matter where you go in Kerry there will always be talk of the football and rumour and anecdote and innuendo.

“That contributes to the interest and the culture of it. You are never far from it. That brings a seriousness in itself, it brings its own pressure. You don’t want to be part of the team that comes home without the bacon. It can be constructive.

“In the panel then when the stuff is going on, well I don’t really buy into the siege mentality stuff, but it works in a way You’re dealing with it. If you get caught up in it you won’t see the wood for the trees at all.

“At the end, the beauty of the Kerry rumour machine is that it work so efficiently it defeats itself. The rumour spreads like mad and at the end of the day there will 10 or 12 different versions of the same rumour going around the county and nobody knows what to believe. Sure you have to enjoy that!”

And so?

Is next Sunday the final curtain.

“My last game: I don’t know. I’ll retire when Maurice Fitz retires! Maurice always says to me that he is still available for selection, he never retired. I haven’t thought about it this year. I have enjoyed every minute and every second. I came on the panel in 1993 and we had a great bunch of lads. Ogie in charge. Good spirit there. We were good, but just not good enough. Cork were strong, the northern teams were strong, we had an excellent minor team in 1994 and good under-21 sides after.

“But from my point of view, those years gave me great grounding – 1997 for me was so special I appreciated everything that came after.”

He delivers a lengthy encomium on the merits of this Cork team and their manager, Conor Counihan. Then he sighs.

“Sure, it’s a huge challenge for us, but where else would you be at this hour of life, but in Croke Park on Sunday? It’s a Cork- Kerry game. It’s an unknown. How good they will be? How good we will be?

“I get sick of this thing in a way of arguing that we are underdogs or they are underdogs. It’s Cork v Kerry. Anything can happen. There are no underdogs.”

“You can sit down afterwards and say how did I compete here, how did I do there? I broke even here etc. Next day, it’s Pearse O’Neill or Alan O’Connor or whoever, they are all big bruisers so you would challenge yourself again. If it is not happening for you, can you make it happen for somebody else. That is the real enjoyment. You can look forward to that sense of achievement. That is what I will miss too.”

He gets up, proposes coffee next door with Mikey Sheehy, greatness supping with greatness. They are joined by John L McElligott and the trio rib each other mercilessly with a humour and a frankness built on a sure foundation of respect and friendship. That’s Kerry, the great reeks of football history are always towering over you.

Next Sunday, win or lose, Darragh Ó Sé joins that elite group of men who have lived and thrived at the highest altitude.