‘I’m so glad I shook his hand’ - Seán Cavanagh on his chance last meeting with Art McRory

Seán Cavanagh was navigating his way out of the Moy Tír Na nÓg club car park on Tuesday night when he spotted Art McRory.

Cavanagh wasn’t sure when he had last met the man who gave him his senior intercounty debut, but it was probably before Covid. So, he paused his rush out the gate and stopped for a chat.

When Cavanagh got home, one of the first things he told his wife, Fionnuala, was of his chance encounter with a godfather of Tyrone football.

“’You wouldn’t believe who I just met down the pitch?’ I said, when I got in the door. ‘Big Art McRory’.

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“For me, even as a 40-year-old man, and despite the fact it was over 20 years ago when he coached me, he was somebody I genuinely always had huge respect for.

“It was almost a privilege to see him on Tuesday night, going away you were left feeling, ‘God, wasn’t it great to meet Art’.”

News emerged on Wednesday morning that McRory, aged 82, had died. Cavanagh was shocked and saddened to hear of his passing, but thankful at the same time to have been granted those precious few moments in his company just hours earlier.

Moy were hosting Killeeshil St Mary’s in an under-16 girls’ league game on Tuesday night, with McRory going along to watch his granddaughters play for the visitors.

“I hadn’t seen him in a while and I was picking up my wee girls from football, just driving out of the car park and he was walking in for the game afterwards,” says Cavanagh. “He looked very fit and healthy, and he was chatting a lot of sense too.”

But then that was Art’s way. Anybody who encountered the Dungannon man will tell you about his dry wit, often laced with purpose and rationale.

Cavanagh was just 19 when joint managers McRory and Eugene McKenna called him up to the Tyrone senior panel. He came off the bench in the league final that April as they beat Cavan to claim the county’s maiden Division One crown.

Of the 15 players that started in that league final for Tyrone, 10 lined out in the 2003 All-Ireland final. Indeed, when you incorporate subs, 14 players that featured in the 2002 league decider also played some part in the All-Ireland final the following year, including Cavanagh.

When Tyrone travelled to Wexford Park for an All-Ireland qualifier in June 2002, Cavanagh alighted from the team bus clutching a fizzy energy drink and a packet of crisps.

“My body shape was completely different back then, I was kind of quite heavy,” recalls Cavanagh.

“I just wasn’t as focused on conditioning and training the way I should have been. I was starting corner forward that day against Wexford and as I got off the team bus with a bag of Tayto cheese and onion and a bottle of Lucozade, Art pulled me to one side and sort of jokingly goes, ‘You know what big man, if you got off that stuff I can tell you now you’d be one of the best players in the country’.

“He said it with a laugh but at the same time he kind of had a way about him, he’d be able to say something and it lived with you. He was famous for the one liners, but there would always be a very important message buried within what he was saying.”

Cavanagh took the advice onboard. In 2003 he was voted Young Footballer of the Year. In 2008 he had become the best player in the country, winning the Footballer of the Year accolade.

As a coach, McRory wasn’t afraid to push boundaries and explore different approaches. Cavanagh recalls sceptical Tyrone players giving each other comical looks when McRory first instructed them to do single leg squats.

“I was thinking this man is mad in the head. It felt at the time like we were doing some sort of a kung-fu move,” says Cavanagh.

“But roll on five or six years later and some of the top strength and conditioning coaches are telling us single leg squats are going to keep you right in terms of improving balance, strength and power. I remember thinking then, ‘That man Art wasn’t as mad as we thought he was!’ He was ahead of his time.”

The week before the Red Hands faced Dublin in the 2018 All-Ireland final, Cavanagh met McRory and the conversation quickly moved to football. Cavanagh had retired in 2017.

“He was joking, ‘The one thing I’d be doing on Sunday would be having you on the edge of that square’. We had a laugh about it, but then because of Covid and everything I’m not sure if we got to see each other much after that.”

Until Tuesday night, a short meeting that will stay with Cavanagh for a long time.

“Art was saying he was just delighted to still be able to go out and watch some football. We chatted for a couple of minutes. I told him it was great to see him, which it was. I shook his hand, I’m so glad I shook his hand.”

In a tribute to their former manager, Tyrone GAA stated: “Art revolutionised Tyrone GAA and in doing so made life here so much better for tens of thousands of people, people who have gone ahead of us, people who are still here, and people who have yet to come. That’s real legacy.

“Tyrone is now a different and lesser place without him.”