BOOK MICHAEL DUIGNAN:HE WAS a tough, athletic combatant on a hurling team whose players always seemed complacent and amused and could reasonably be classified as both hurlers and magicians.

No team seemed to turn it on as unexpectedly or delightfully as the Offaly hurlers did in the 1990s and it is hard to believe that over a decade has passed now since they won their most recent All-Ireland title, transforming themselves – at least in the popular illusion – from has-been barflies to All-Ireland champions in a matter of weeks.

The fact that so long had passed was one of the most solid reasons Michael Duignan could come up with for not writing a biography. He has a fairly good memory and certain incidents leap willingly from the general swirl of memories.

Like that debut in the All-Ireland semi-final against Galway, in 1986. Duignan was just 18. His first start and there is Brendan Lynskey’s face, inches from him and the Galway man is giving him a look that communicates both menace and pity as he says, “A mhaicín, what are you doing here? The minor match is over”.

Seconds later, the ball was thrown in and he felt Lynskey’s elbow in his nose and stood watching, indignantly, as the Meelick man took off down the field. Welcome to the big time, baby. How could he have known then that, years later, Lynskey would become a business partner? Or that the match would mark the first of 15 seasons playing for Offaly?

People like to believe that sports careers follow neat, chronological patterns and on paper, season after season, they do that. But the truth is more complicated – games and rivalries and teams and people and disappointments and triumphs all overlap and become entwined so that, by the end, it is almost impossible to sort them out.

So the idea of committing his story to paper didn’t sit easy with him. To begin with, no other Offaly GAA person had ever “done” a book.

Not Séamus Darby, not Martin Furlong nor Matt Connor nor any one of the Dooleys or the Whelehans or the Troys.

No, the Offaly way was to scribble an unexpected masterpiece on to a summer Sunday sky and then get on with the business of living life. So if those gods hadn’t picked up the pen, Duignan wondered what business he had doing so.

"I felt my sporting life might have been interesting enough, but not that it merited a book," he said this week, reflecting on the imminent publication of his biography, starkly titled Life, Death and Hurling.

It took a while before he was persuaded into seeing the bigger picture, by Liam Hayes, his publisher, and by Pat Nolan, with whom he worked on the project.

The bigger picture was where hurling fitted into his life and his family. Duignan is nationally known as a long-haul Offaly hurler and later as an analyst for the Sunday Game.

But, beyond his immediate family and close friends, not so many people knew of his wife Edel’s death from cancer in 2009, some seven years after her initial diagnosis. The couple had two young boys, Seán and Brian, and through her illness Duignan was grappling with the economic hurricane that blitzed his auctioneering and property businesses. So when he decided to tell his story, he produced a book and the title is about as far removed as could be imagined from the happy-go-lucky nature of the team with which Duignan won All-Ireland medals.

Life, Death and Hurlingis not a straightforward sports biography – there are triumphs and some reminiscing about the high times for Offaly hurling, but Duignan chooses to introduce himself to the reader at a time when he was in a fairly bleak place. In February, 2010, his phone rang and he saw the name of Pat Cleary, his former Offaly team-mate and friend, flashing.

Word that Duignan had been involved in a pub altercation had travelled, partly because it entailed the arrival of an ambulance and gardaí to the place in question (although nobody was seriously injured). The shameful aspect of it was that it happened after a funeral of someone Duignan liked and respected. Worse, a poor barmaid had inadvertently caught an elbow.

It was just the latest incident involving Duignan. A few years earlier, he had put some guy through the front door of a pub. He threw a fist at an opponent during a junior B hurling game. He snatched a mobile phone from someone who was taking film of the Offaly football players letting loose after they were knocked out of the championship. He returned the phone, but when a row over the incident sparked up again outside, he let fly. So the phone call came from concern.

“He (Cleary) began to reel them all off. Not just the skirmishes, but other scenes when I would have heated arguments with fellas,” Duignan writes. “Okay, sometimes, whoever I was exchanging verbals with would be bang out of order themselves, but I’d have to meet fire with fire every time. I couldn’t just make my point back at them – I had to ram it down their throats.”

It took a few days before Duignan finally admitted to himself that what Cleary – and other friends such as Joe Dooley – had been telling him was true. He had lost his way.

“The most worrying thing was that I didn’t see it myself,” Duignan says now. “There was one particular dust-up, but most of it was my mood and attitude. I wasn’t able to relax and was never wrong in my own mind.

“And then I moved on not thinking that the other party might be very upset about this. I lost all that reasoning. It was a hard thing to accept because I was so embarrassed about it all. My natural inclination, always, would be to get on with people. But when I was able to be honest with myself, it changed everything.”

He half-jokingly describes the book as a “gigantic counselling session” and what emerges is an exceptionally frank account of the long struggle Edel faced when it became apparent her illness was worsening rather than improving.

What also emerges, almost inadvertently, is a portrayal of a fairly typical Irish couple who grew up in the 1980s and found themselves caught in the vortex of the economic boom. Duignan met Edel at work in AIB in Rathfarnham in the early 1990s. By then, he was already established as an inter-county hurler so, from the beginning, she understood the demands of his training schedule.

They moved to Naas and later to Durrow in the midlands and, in 2005, Duignan set up an auctioneering and property company which did extremely well initially. But as he reviews the fast times, it becomes obvious he was never fully comfortable nor believed what he saw. In one incident at Punchestown, he recalls being in the company of someone who sniffed at the quality of champagne on offer with the brusque instruction: “Take away that shit”.

Instead, he bought a couple of bottles at €250 each. It was a small, sparkling illustration of a society gone wrong. Duignan cut his teeth in the banks when they were run along the traditional lines, where the bank manager ran each branch as a little fiefdom and played it cautious.

“It was an incredible transition. Edel and I bought our house in 1994/95 and we, as two permanent pensionable bank employees, struggled to get a mortgage ourselves. That was how they vetted it.

“Banks were just starting to get into the mortgage business then. In a way, the banks decided who could get on in society because they decided who they would back financially. But it went from that to this situation where vast sums of money were given out and everyone became a developer. I was in commercial auctioneering and you could see this thing going mental – six and seven times salaries to mortgages. And one part of you knew it couldn’t last.

“And another part said you are a fool not to be in on this. I tried to spread myself across the board with shares. I never saw it collapsing so quickly. The one thing now is that the banks are taking no responsibility. And my attitude would be if you borrow money, then you borrow money. You owe it.

“Still, the banks made the mistake of making it too easily available. And it is hard to see how this country can recover when the level of personal debt is huge. From my point of view, it is hard to find yourself back at square one after working for 25 years. But you deal with it.”

Experience has taught him how to categorise financial worry. The book is in part a tribute to his wife’s courage and good humour and also recognises the subtle ways in which she prepared him and her two boys for how life would be without her. He admits she would probably be surprised at the idea of him writing a book, but believes she would understand his reasons.

“In terms of the hurling, Edel would probably say he’d have no trouble talking about himself. I think all players have an ego. You have to have. She would have smiled at that part of it. But in terms of her story, I did think about it and she was so private about everything.

“But I do think she would understand where I was coming from. The idea was to tell the story from the cancer sufferer’s point of view and accepting things and dealing with it. We sat down to work on the book just 12 months after Edel died, so it was raw enough. I think in ways now we might have been too private and tried to deal with it ourselves.

“Edel was remarkably tough mentally and physically and was always in good form when she went out. She had a code when she needed to be alone – the bedroom curtains would be drawn when she didn’t want to see people. But for the most part, people knew that she was sick, but probably never really knew how sick until the end.”

The one consolation through the seven years Edel fought her illness was the friendships that the couple had developed, many through hurling.

If anything, Duignan understates his importance to the Offaly teams he played on, but makes it clear that he was extremely ambitious in his approach.

The boozy, happy-go-lucky element the Offaly men cultivated had elements of truth – they were no strangers to the occasional late night – but it masked the fact that they were ferociously serious about what they wanted to achieve in the game.

There is a riveting account of the dogged, tough 1995 Leinster final against Kilkenny and the madness of the hurling summer of 1998 is always worth revisiting.

Duignan’s realisation that it was time to bow out is also wonderfully truthful and glum – it was a humdrum league game against Limerick and he had possession and he went to lay it off to John Troy, as he had hundreds of times before. But now Troy was a second slower arriving and he was a second too slow in flicking the pass and as he got rid of the ball, TJ Ryan clattered him.

“I remember going off the field at the end of the game thinking, ‘I’m not going to get a chance to get him back for that’. I knew I was finished. Only seeing out time.”

A few weeks later, he had a blow-out driving from Killarney for training in Tullamore. He couldn’t get a replacement tyre and ended up having to stay in Limerick for the night. He called Edel and said: “I can’t do this anymore. It’s crazy stuff.”

The friendships endured after the team broke up and it is those times that he remembers as clearly as the games. He is amazed now at his attitude to his retirement when he finished up with Offaly.

“I have said it publicly that being an inter county GAA player does make you a selfish person because your entire schedule is based around you. We never went on a summer holiday outside Offaly trips and we even got married in October.

“It becomes about you. Then you retire and you think – Jesus, I am after giving 15 years here. I need a break! Nothing about Edel or the boys. And you don’t think like that.

“I look back now and wonder. I do think it is something that GAA players struggle with when they retire. A lot of guys do go through a hard time trying to replace what they leave behind.”

Soon, though, the Duignan family had more pressing concerns. He is as surprised as anyone to find himself revisiting the glory years for Offaly and his own role in them.

It is as if life just speeded up and this book is the first chance he has had to try and make an honest appraisal of where he finds himself now. Michael Duignan rarely showed vulnerability on the field, but as he sits forward in a chair in a hotel foyer, it is clear that he is apprehensive about what this book will bring.

“My own mother didn’t know some of the things in the first few pages,” he laughs. “And I was very conscious of Edel’s family. I didn’t discuss the book much with anyone because it is just my take on things. I am glad that I did it and I’m a bit nervous too. So I don’t know how people are going to take it, but the initial response has been very supportive. Brian has already started reading it.

“He is only 11 now. Seán will read it and I hope that it will help them to understand everything that has happened to us. I suppose it was in the back of my mind that the book was always going to be there as time goes on.”

“Okay, sometimes, whoever I was exchanging verbals with would be bang out of order themselves, but I’d have to meet fire with fire every time. I couldn’t just make my point back at them – I had to ram it down their throats