Interview with Brian McEniff: Keith Duggan finds the Donegal manager facing yet another careerwatershed with a passionate desire to balance the books

Today could be the end. Down, the landed gentry of the Ulster game, on a slippery day in Clones. Yeah, they could finish a man all right. Brian McEniff cannot predict what he will feel afterwards if he is finally and irrevocably to become an ex-manager.

The truth is he is reluctant to contemplate the dreadful sound of a door closing in his mind. To hear himself wishing all the best to a group of players whose youth still astonishes him. All he knows is that with Donegal's next loss, he will leave the intercounty scene.

"There is nothing left in the tank. I'm just going on automatic."

McEniff, who cuts a notable figure in GAA circles with his peaked hat and affable tones, is famous for having a constitution as tough as old leather and the brass neck of a successful businessman. But cut beneath that and a sentimentalist stands before you, a sometime piano player and a balladeer of great football stories, a bit of a dreamer.

Photographs consume him and in the living-room are a few of the iconic images of Donegal's sole All-Ireland success, in 1992, but mostly family snaps and black-and-white portraits of his parents and in-laws that hint at a way of breeding: proud, stern.

His way of talking about football is photographic. He possesses a disconcertingly vivid eye for football seasons that most of the participants must have forgotten. At one point, he finds himself explaining about the cause and effect of the incline of a pitch - "near Mickey Kearins's home place in Sligo" - on which Donegal played a challenge game shortly before the championship season of 1984. He still wishes he hadn't played that game.

Of the thousands of games he has been involved with, his recall for each is total. And now, as he sits eating an ice-cream wafer in the family kitchen while the tourists amble along Main Street, Bundoran, on a drizzly Thursday in July, he is happily recalling the really great occasions. The unforgettable games that shaped him.

"I was playing for Main Street A, a terribly bad side, against the East End. Master Owen McGuinness used to run these Gaelic leagues in the car-park.

"McGuinness was a remarkable man. He was at me to play the football but I wasn't really bothered so the first day I didn't turn up. He slapped me for that and I took umbrage and so I turned up for this match and he put me in goals. We lost by 13. When I went home, my father asked me how I got on and I told him 13 goals went by me.

"That week, he took me up to see Sligo Rovers for the first time and I saw this guy from Dublin called Hanley diving everywhere. The next day we were out against Main Street B, a team that included my great friend Peter 'The Fat Man' Quinn. I had the pleasure of saving a penalty from the Fat Man and only let in the one goal. We won the game, and thereafter I developed a love."

The McEniff name has become synonymous with Bundoran. It was an uppity sort of seaside resort when John McEniff visited there in the 1940s to say goodbye to his sister before he sought the better life in Minneapolis. Wading in the Atlantic was about as close to America as he got.

He stayed, married and eventually bought the Holyrood, then a modest nine-bedroom premises on Main Street. When Brian was 17 he completed his father's epic voyage, taking the train to Dublin and a boat from Liverpool to Glasgow to Montreal and eventually Toronto for a 16-month stint as an apprentice hotelier.

The strangeness of that experience - the snowdrifts, the dark winters, the Canadian lifestyle and the sheer distance from home - shaped his notions of identity and locality. As he says, he left with a head full of the rock'n'roll tunes that swept Ireland in the late 60s and then roamed the Irish haunts in the west side of Toronto just to hear the pining ballads and céilí songs filled with the empowerment of foreign perspective.

"My father, though he never had a formal education, had great penmanship and he would have written to me through that year and a half. You could read his letters many times. Now, I would have written any rubbish that came into my head, I just couldn't do it. But I was there about 16 months and eventually I decided to phone home. In those days transatlantic calls were a big thing.

"Bundoran two-two was the number. But I think it would have cost me about a week's wages. It was coming up to Christmas. And they were pleased to hear from me but my father would have given out about this tremendous expense of a phone call when a letter would have done."

When he returned, McEniff threw himself into both football and the family business with a restless energy that has persisted now that he closes in on the age of retirement, a luxury he laughs away. He will concede he has retired as a football player but nothing more.

Although he remains a diligent and astute businessman with considerable clout in the hotel industry, he explains that the nationwide accumulation of premises was something of a domino effect, that it was never really plotted.

And similarly, everything that happened on the Gaelic fields that so obsessed McEniff just happened. The bones of his story are well known. A prodigious player, elegant and ruthless, he was sacked as manager of the county three times before returning to inspire the long-promised September of 1992.

Deeply attached to that team, he unwisely stayed on after seeing Derry dethrone them on a cataclysmic day of rain in Clones. The 1993 Ulster final should in retrospect have marked The End. But nobody wanted to call time and they limped into the summer of 1994.

Caitie McEniff heard on the radio that her husband had retired immediately after a limp defeat to Tyrone. That autumn, he yearned to go to see the first game of the National League against Down, the then All-Ireland champions. But he knew to give his old friend PJ McGowan the courtesy of distance, aware he couldn't stalk the corridors anymore. So he trained a reserve team against Downings in Bundoran, Michael Ó Muircheartaigh crackling on a battery radio.

Gradually, McEniff indulged in his great love: being a supporter. Over time, he could enter Donegal dressing-rooms without fear of being obtrusive. Even so, he only invoked the privilege a handful of times.

"Like, I went down after the 1998 Ulster final that Declan (Bonner) lost. I shed a tear that day because we were robbed. I went around each of the lads and spent a long time with Big Brian Murray. The Sham, we called him. I think that was his last game for the county and he was hurting that day all right."

Last summer was like a perfect release; Donegal on a roll and he free to enjoy it. For decades, he daily drowned himself in the internecine details of local football and, suddenly, he was just like anybody else, a paying customer, a face in the crowd.

If you had told him halfway through the All-Ireland quarter-final against Dublin, say, that he would be the next Donegal manager, he would have laughed.

Even now, his return is a bit like a riddle he can't solve. Circumstances and pressure and his own foolishness, maybe. He was chairman of a county crippled with domestic disputes and with a county team nobody wanted a piece of. It was like he was last man standing. And suddenly, one Sunday morning in Castlefin, there he was. The man in the peaked hat.

"I didn't know these lads at all. Aidy Sweeney, Cassidy. If I met them wearing suits, I wouldn't have known a shite who they were."

And they did not know him. For the first frosty nights they kept warm with words but then reality set in and McEniff was shocked. Football was a different landscape. This is no country for old men and all of that. Donegal's league tailspin was well documented and the old feeling of despair crept up on him.

In August 1983, Donegal lost an All-Ireland semi-final to Galway in Croke Park on a gloriously hot day. After the game, the team went to the Skylon (which McEniff now owns) and steaks were ordered. Hundreds of supporters showed up and McEniff couldn't bear it. He ghosted his way to the southside in a taxi and spent the evening on a bench in Belgrave Square just thinking.

"Boiling my head, I call it. I often do it when there are family or business or football troubles."

But he was younger then. Now, Sunday after Sunday provoked such solitary sessions until at last, after another defeat against Kerry, the young players spoke up. They demanded another physio and a change in training - and made other small requests.

McEniff listened and felt glad. It was like their first real communication, a bridging of the generation gap. Back in 1992, he had played against some of his players and they were hard, tough characters full of bluster and attitude. Words came sharp and frequent and rarely weeks went by without a quarrel, but that was the dynamic that made the team.

This new bunch of boys were polite and quiet and hard to reach but slowly they have all begun to read from the same page.

A few weeks ago, McEniff rang Peter Canavan to sympathise on the passing of his father. He knew the Tyrone man would probably find it hard to lift his heart for football in the week afterwards.

He explained how, back in 1968, he was captain of St Joseph's when they played Crossmaglen in the Ulster club final and how his own father, John, had died. Told him how ruined he felt and about how the All-Ireland title the club went on to take was always tinged with sadness.

It is like he played that 1968 season yesterday. And 1978 and so on. The fuzziest season is probably the current one. He is a veteran in the management game, an old fox, but when he talks of just surviving on a day-to-day basis, you believe him.

"Tonight, I just want to get my thoughts together for the few words I will say to the boys, stop to do the county draw on the way home from training and fall into bed. That is the way it has been."

This week, he sat down at his kitchen table faced with a forbidding pile of paperwork and just mined his way through it all. That is how he has been conducting business, in brief, exhausting bursts. It can't go on. See, for the first season ever, he has been running just to catch up. Somehow, when he wasn't looking, Donegal football landed back on his lap and both he and it began to stumble.

The businessman in him, with his obedience to ledgers, feels a responsibility to at least wipe the slate clean and leave the team where it was last year, at the All-Ireland quarter-final stage. Then, all debts will be squared and whatever happens, he will feel like his own man.

But the footballer in him, the goalkeeper from Main Street A, is already sucked in.

Hear him talk about his boys now and it isn't the gang from 1992. He has caught the addiction again. It is all cycles. Today is a big day in the life of Brian McEniff, a small-time epic that will be played out a stone's throw from his father's old place in Newbliss.

Lose this afternoon and McEniff will address his young team and say thanks and that will be that. There will be no bitterness: just a funny end to a year that felt like it never fully began. Win, though, and he might just get to introduce himself for the first time.