I only ever heard Jim Gavin curse once. It was January 2016 and we were in the corridor in Parnell Park after an O’Byrne Cup match between Dublin and DCU. I was in a bit of a daze – my father had died the previous November and this was the first time I’d ventured out to a game since the funeral. I was in that early stage of grief, bruised and delicate, distracted and boundaryless.
So when Gavin asked, off-hand, “How’s life?”, I blurted out that it wasn’t great actually. That my dad had died a few weeks back. That he’d had three types of cancer and was only 62. Jim could see that I was a bit shaky and consoled me. We chatted for a few seconds, the usual condolences. At the end though, he gritted his teeth, shook his head and all but spat: “Fucking cancer.”
It has always stayed with me. There was a decency to it, a bolt of fellow feeling at the whole rotten injustice of the disease. Like anyone with a death in the family, I must have had a few hundred of those short conversations across that winter and they were all meaningful in the moment. Yet that small flash of fury on my dad’s behalf still chimes, a decade on.
Still, I came away from the exchange half-laughing. It was like hearing the Pope curse. Throughout his time as Dublin manager, Gavin gradually wore down the press pack with his own brand of ultra-anodyne, deeply-jargony non-speak. Jimerish, one of the lads called it, leaving the rest of us seething we hadn’t thought of it first.
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“Fucking cancer” was one of the very, very few times he let slip what we all kind of knew. Namely, that it was all a pose. The greatest trick Jim Gavin ever pulled was to convince the world he is a boring man. A huge NFL fan, he embodied an old dictum of Bill Parcells: “We are in the business of collecting information. We are not in the business of exchanging information.”
It suited his mission as the Dublin football manager to be as dull as possible, so as dull as possible is what he was. That’s not going to be much good to him now, of course. If it’s true that he’s going to give a presidential run a go, he won’t be able Jimerish his way to the Áras.
You can soft-soap a crowd of GAA hacks with talk of process and performance continuity and vertical stretch. You might even get away with it in actual politics, where you can trade on your record and move the conversation around to policies and plans and Getting Things Done. But that stuff isn’t going to butter many parsnips out on the presidential hustings, which is essentially The Rose of Tralee with fewer gúnaí.
Given all that, what would Jim Gavin, the presidential candidate look like? The short answer is that he will most likely look like whatever it takes. Gavin is, above-all, a thoroughly mission-orientated type of dude. Give him a brief and he will fulfil that brief. Outline for him a desired outcome and he will plan a meticulous route towards it.
If that means opening up a bit and laying more of himself out there, there’s every chance that’s what he’ll do. Granted, he may well go about it by doing up a vast spreadsheet of anecdotes and one-liners to be deployed at specific times and events but Jim gonna Jim. He bored us to tears with all that talk of trusting the process but he was never lying about it.
The big question isn’t so much how he’ll go about it as why he might want to. Gavin is only 54, he is highly successful in his field as COO of the Irish Aviation Authority, and he has two teenage children. Spending the next seven years in a ceremonial role that takes him away from the ebbs and flows of normal life feels, at first glance, not very him. Like the kind of thing he’d be honoured to be asked but would politely decline.
And maybe that’s still going to be how it all ends up. Billy Kelleher is clearly intent on giving him a run for the Fianna Fáil nomination, which will either stir his competitive juices or make him realise once and for all that it’s a world he wants no part of. But there is definitely a strong strain of civic duty in Jim Gavin, not to mention the attraction of becoming the Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces that made him.
On the night Nelson Mandela died, Gavin was watching the news when a quote from the great man flashed up on screen. Gavin paused the TV and took a picture of it. “I saw it and thought, ‘This is gold-dust,’” he said at a Sport Ireland conference in 2017. “It said, ‘What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.’”
My reaction at the time was to harrumph that he could make a difference to the life of a GAA reporter if he kept his Mandela quotes for Leinster championship matches rather than hoity-toity conferences.
But maybe he had a longer game in mind all along.
