LOCKER ROOM:It was fitting that Billy was in Croke Park late last week to be honoured with a Hall of Fame award
HOW STRANGE it is to be girding our brains for an All-Ireland football final involving Cork and for there to be no Billy Morgan on the horizon. Since the mid-1960s Billy has been the face and the heartbeat of football in his county, one of those hugely charismatic and recognisable figures who seems to transcend the game. This year, as Cork go about what has been the protracted business of fulfilling themselves, Billy is looking after the intermediates in his beloved Nemo.
It was fitting, then, that Billy was in Croke Park late last week to be honoured with a Hall of Fame award. One of the great outlaws and among the most iconoclastic figures of the game, there’s a little bit of Billy that you guess finds the whole Hall of Fame idea suspect, but on the other hand he has such a love of the company of football men the chance to be inducted among friends had its appeal.
Billy and Croke Park. He reckons the first time he played there the Beatles were in their pomp. He played the 1966 All-Ireland senior semi-final against Galway and he played the under-21 final the year before against Kildare.
He loved the place. The crowd weren’t in right on top of him, even at the Hill end. He never found it intimidating, not even in 1974 when the phenomenon of the raucous Hill was born while Dublin were taking Billy’s All-Ireland champions apart in an epic semi-final.
In the context of yesterday’s game those were innocent times. You listen to Billy talk of the fun and the craic and you wonder if we don’t make too much of a small thing when we begin turning a square ball into a conspiracy theory greater in size than the Kennedy assassination and the faking of the moon landings combined.
It’s football. It’s life. Stuff happens. Passions are supposed to be like that. Not cut and dried and covered in the deadening influence of “technology”. Billy Morgan was about passion as a player and as a manager, and as a Hall of Famer one thing strikes you – time heals everything.
That semi-final of 1974 is worth recalling on the day after the GAA took another step away from its people by fencing some of them in yesterday. It was a great and boisterous day. Cork got a penalty which Jimmy Barry Murphy, at the time the most glamourous man alive, put past Paddy Cullen (top-five in the glamourous man charts).
The excitement of the penalty was quickly forgotten about. A spectator ran onto the field and confiscated the ball in protest. Billy recalls that, and another rogue element, with a grin.
“We actually had 16 players on the field at the time! When we got the penalty Martin Doherty had come on for Ned Kirby. Now, Ned Kirby didn’t know he had been taken off. He didn’t have any part in the play, but there was confusion.
“Kevin Heffernan ran onto the field to point out that Cork had 16 players. Ned, still oblivious to the fact he was being taken off, pointed Heffo back to the bench, telling him to get off the pitch!”
Heffo’s own divilment in the run-up to the game is well recorded as the fun of Billy teasing Jimmy Keaveney with the Sam Maguire one night in Cork in late 1973 got deliberately lost in translation and became a taunt. On All-Ireland semi-final day Billy had to rugby-tackle his old friend Keaveney as he went over the Cork line. A young fella called Brian Mullins scored the penalty that followed.
Billy lived, played and managed through it all. Most people thought that the Cork team which lost that day had another two or three All-Irelands in them.
“I suppose that was the problem,” says Billy with a grin, “we thought that too.”
Of course they got imprisoned in Munster for years by Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry, and one still admires the bravery and chutzpah of O’Dwyer for going every year into a defeated Cork dressingroom containing the utterly dejected Morgan and telling the occupants cheerily that they were the second-best team in Ireland, a magical line which bugged Cork and demeaned Dublin at the same time.
The occasion of Billy’s induction into the Hall of Fame brought to mind his peripheral role in one of the great and most entertaining controversies of the 1980s: The Day Cork Went for Their Train.
It is too difficult to unravel the complicated politics of Cork football or the motives of the dons of the county board, but Billy wasn’t – as is widely thought – manager that year. His relationship with the blazers of Páirc Uí Chaoimh was one of mutual disdain, and whatever success and messianic passion Billy brought to Cork football was usually repaid with a knife to the back. So in 1987 he was training the team, but an assembly of hand-picked wise men had been elected to actually pick the team.
A young Cork team came into their dressingroom having drawn a league quarter-final with Dublin. Cork had just won the second division and got promoted and the game against Dublin was a useful outing.
Billy was almost the last into the dressingroom. He arrived to scenes of confusion about the prospect of extra time. The selectors were huddled inside in the toilet area discussing the issue. Billy was summoned inside for consultation. One selector, a county board grandee, was pushing for Cork not to play extra time. The others were slightly dubious. Billy, who seldom knowingly agreed with a county board man in his entire life, suggested that another game at this level would be beneficial to a young team.
Billy didn’t know that not playing wasn’t an option. The week before, the Cork County Board had been notified there was to be extra time in the event of a draw. “As far as I know, some of the others didn’t know that either.”
Billy wandered back out into the dressingroom, and soon after the selection committee followed with an announcement that they had decided not to play extra time.
Billy just shrugged, thought nothing of it. Con Murphy, chair of the county board, was pushing still that Cork should go out.
“I never denied my part in it, but I wouldn’t exaggerate it either. It wasn’t my decision or even my place to make a decision. They just asked me to put in an opinion. Then the train excuse! That made it more embarrassing.”
Cork announced they couldn’t stay, they had a train to catch! A brilliantly whimsical excuse which may be printed on Frank Murphy’s headstone when he passes away.
The Dublin team re-emerged onto the field. The ball was thrown in with just one side on the field and worked down toward the Canal end for Barney Rock to put into an empty net. Nobody was quite sure of what would happen if Barney had put the ball wide and Cork had failed to take the resultant kick-out. It was a farce, but life wasn’t so serious then. It was fun, too.
Billy walked out of Croke Park and up to Meagher’s pub in Fairview for a few drinks with his Dublin friends. Keaveney was in there with Seán Doherty, the 1974 Dublin captain.
“The funny thing is, it was me that was slagging them at that stage. I remember pulling Seán Doc’s leg about what a shower Dublin were to take a game in those circumstances.”
Any time afterwards when Billy would be involved in games against Dublin he would hear the voices behind him urging him to hurry on now before the train left the station.
It is typical of the man’s character that the public imagination made him a central figure in events he had just a small walk-on part in and typical of his good humour to take it all on the chin. Last week he joined Keaveney on the Hall of Fame wall.
Hopefully somebody in Croke Park will sit the old friends down soon in front of a tape recorder or a camera and get their memories that future generations may look at them and learn that it’s not all life and death. Sometimes it’s county board spoofers as well and the trouble they might get you into.
