Kieran Donaghy undecided on Kerry future after winning Sports Book of the Year

Kieran Donaghy being Kieran Donaghy, the stories about the stories are nearly as good as the stories themselves. Winner of the 2016 Eir Sports Book of the Year Award for his autobiography What Do You Think Of That?, Donaghy is full of yarns when he sits down with the gathered press. So much so that he spends more time kicking himself about what he left out than luxuriating in what he produced.

“I’ve done that about 20 times since it came out and I get frustrated, like, ‘Why didn’t I remember that before?’ I was telling Kieran [Shannon, co-author] that last night and he was saying ‘Ah sure we’ll have it for the next book.’ There’ll be no more books! It’s ended there and if there is more to my story it won’t be going into a book or it won’t be going into this book anyway.”

His story is still a bit betwixt and between. His book is written as the farewell of someone walking out the door and that was certainly the headspace he was in when they worked on it. But sitting here, three weeks before Christmas, he doesn’t honestly know if he’ll be giving Kerry one last go come 2017. It’s more likely now than it was a few months ago but that’s not saying a lot.

“I don’t know if there’s any deadline. Eamonn [Fitzmaurice] hasn’t given me any deadline anyway. The understanding we have is to play away with the basketball and see how the body is and see how I am physically. And mentally too because there’s days I wake up and I’m just thinking that the gig is up. And there’s mornings then that I wake up and think maybe I can give it another year.

“It would be great if it was just a footballing thing. If it was a footballing thing, you could go back every time. But there’s so much going on now. I’m travelling over and back to the UK with work, I’m up and down the country. I was in Wexford last week, I was in Clonakilty, I was in Mayo. I’m doing a good bit of driving and that’s not good for me. And a lot of the driving is going on now because I just couldn’t do it during the season.

“So there’s that. There’s Hillary, Lola Rose. There’s the basketball. There’s loads going on. To be honest, I planned on probably announcing something around when the book came out. But I literally don’t have a clue what I’m going doing. The publishers  wanted me to say I was either going or staying and I was like, ‘Lads, I’m not coming out with something here and then four months down the line saying, fuck it I want to go back or I want to quit.’ So I’m keeping schtum for the next while to see where it takes me.”

The book is him, high up and low down. His relationship with his late father has had a lot of play since it came out but one of the under-rated aspects to the book is the effect his dyslexia has had on him over the years. Donaghy regularly gets phonecalls from parents these days asking him to talk to their kid about dealing with it and he wades in with a full heart to see what help he can be.

"It's basic spellings and numbers with me. I was even in the hotel this morning with Kieran Shannon and I came down for breakfast and your one says, 'What room are you?' And I says, '343'. And she's like, 'You're not on my list for breakfast'. Your one told me when I checked into the hotel, 'You've got breakfast here in the morning'. So I was like, 'No, I'm on the list alright' and I was looking down through it and it was 334! So I turned around to Kieran and looked back at your one, and she was a foreigner, and I said, 'I'm dyslexic!' and just kept going, on for breakfast.

“I went through the whole of my schooling and even a lot of my adult life not knowing and I didn’t know what to think really, just that I couldn’t fucking doing it. Hillary sent me off the get checked up and your one knew, she said I knew after 10 minutes of the hour examination that I was what I was.

“But yeah, no they’re being spotted in school now. But it is still termed something, you know? So you still ‘have’ dyslexia. When you’re 10-years-old and you hear that you think, ‘Jesus, what’s this about?’ I’m going down to a school in Waterford now after Christmas and I’ve done quite a number of phone calls since the book has come out. I’m just telling kids that, ‘Look, listen, it’s going to be a bit harder for you in school, you’re probably going to have to work a bit harder at home’. There’s no probably about it, you’re going to have to work that bit harder.”

What Do You Think Of That is published by Trinity Mirror, €18.99