By coincidence, Mick O’Dwyer was born about one month into a significant football championship. It was the 50th running of Irish sport’s biggest competition and at the same time, an important season for Kerry.
The previous year, the county didn’t even enter the championship because in 1934 a vote of the Kerry county convention had prompted the withdrawal of the county football team from the following year’s competition as a protest against the treatment of prisoners on the Curragh.
Mayo people will wistfully recall 1936 as the year the county won Sam Maguire for the first time, in the semi-finals defeating Kerry, who after the political hiatus had regained their Munster title.
At the funeral in Waterville on Saturday, celebrant Fr Seán Jones referred to the collection of offertory gifts beside the altar and specifically a small replica of the Sam Maguire trophy, which had inspired so much of the deceased’s life.
He said that Mick O’Dwyer, “kept this miniature one as a reminder that the real one was never too far away. And the real one is only about three-and-a-half months away”.
The laughter and applause masked the fact that this was the governing reality of O’Dwyer’s life. He may have professed how lucky he was to have been born in Kerry but there is a relentlessness to the demands and expectations placed on those who take on the burden of playing for and especially, managing the county.
The late Páidí Ó Sé caused controversy during his management of Kerry by referring to the county supporters as “the roughest type of f***ing animals you could ever deal with”.
Current manager Jack O’Connor has spoken about how isolated he felt when first appointed – his mother’s last words to him had been a plea not to take the position – as someone who hadn’t won anything with the county and with the entire golden years’ generation in the gallery, watching.
In recent times, Eamonn Fitzmaurice as capable and assured as he was and having pulled an All-Ireland from an environment dominated by Jim Gavin’s Dublin, still attracted flak.
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“It gets louder the longer you stay,” he said afterwards, “and I don’t like the way that was affecting the group. The players get it in verbal form and written form. Players and management and selectors too. I have a box full of anonymous letters.”
Mick O’Dwyer’s eight All-Irelands in 12 years is unlikely ever to be emulated. It has influenced, especially within living memory, the expectations in the county. Yet Kerry is different. They move on, gathering titles. The next eight may have taken three times as long, 36 years and the eight prior to the golden era spanned a roughly similar 34 years but there they are, reaping Sam Maguires at a rate of one every four or five years.
Of course, these numbers are simply fantasy for virtually every other county, only two of which have won more than eight All-Irelands in total and Galway, just about, with nine.
For all Jack O’Connor’s early insecurities about his status in the county, Kerry is a meritocracy. Like the Clintons with the US Democrats, if you win, you go quickly from outsider to establishment.
Half of Kerry’s All-Irelands since the 1980s have been won by O’Connor, who was the go-to appointment for a third term when the county absolutely needed that silverware and he has an excellent chance of making that five in a few months.
If O’Dwyer was, as he acknowledged, “obsessed” with football, he also managed to communicate something of that condition to his players, who without reservation followed the punishing protocols of preparation willingly and largely without regret even though the debt run up on their bodies would one day crystalise.
Páidí Ó Sé, one of the many players who followed him into management, used to winter well before facing the music at the start of each new year.
For the process of what he called “getting yourself arranged for O’Dwyer” Ó Sé would every New Year head over the hills from Ventry into Dunquin and Slea Head for nearly three hours of stamina running.
If Kerry is a world of its own, the equally striking legacy of Mick O’Dwyer was in other counties where he brought confidence.
Outside coaches weren’t unknown in the GAA in 1990, even high-profile ones: Cavan’s All-Ireland winning captain Mick Higgins lent his expertise both to Longford, during the county’s most memorable era in the 1960s, as well as to Brian McEniff’s first Ulster winning Donegal team in 1972.
But O’Dwyer was, in the words of Laois footballer Ross Munnelly on last Friday’s Late Late Show tribute, “box office”. On the same programme, Kildare’s Johnny Doyle described how O’Dwyer was introduced to a packed crowd at the 1990 county final like some exotic South American soccer player being unveiled at an excitable European club.
He had the zeal of old-style missionaries. Fascinated by cars, he liked the long journeys from Waterville to wherever the gospel was being preached, happy to harness all that thinking time as he covered roads that only improved by the end of his career.
The energy was overwhelming. I remember at an obscure double bill of Leinster under-21 semi-finals, one of which Kildare won during his time, he bounded into the dressingroom almost radioactive in his enthusiasm. How could those young players not be profoundly affected?
He received things in return, of course, like the opportunity to take his son Karl, who moved to Kildare where he still lives, to both victory over Kerry and an All-Ireland final in 1998.
Another achievement that must have meant something was Wicklow’s longest championship run, in 2009, culminating in a third-round qualifier win over Down, the county that tormented his playing days and who have to this day never lost in championship to Kerry.
You hope that on the sideline of an Elysian field, he stands – liberated from old age and illness – programme rolled up behind his back, his beady eyes trained on some other-worldly match, formulating how he will determine the outcome.
He was widely quoted as believing with humility – and realism – that he was “blessed to have come from Kerry” but that is a circular argument. Extraordinary personalities like Mick O’Dwyer are what have made the county what it is.
