INTERVIEW KERRY'S PAUL GALVIN: Tom Humphriestalks to this year's player of the year about the year previous, the one that made him as a player and as a man

“Is this a book you would wish your wives or servants to read?”

– Counsel for the prosecution, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, to the jury in the Chatterly Trial 1960

PAUL GALVIN sips his tea. He reflects on how quiet life has been since the All-Ireland final. He cut loose for a couple of days, surfed the big wave for maybe half a week, but then he went back to the teaching and a life where he burns the candle at neither end. He’s not complaining. Satisfaction has a different flavour when you are older.

And he is the man who pulled a U-turn on the road to perdition and drove back. In the summer of 2008 he was the man you wouldn’t want your wives or servants to watch.

He would walk into a GAA disciplinary hearing and feel the disdain and disapproval pouring towards him as if the goatee and the tats advertised the barely concealed presence about his person of a tail and cloven feet and maybe small, satanic horns beneath the hair.

You know the bones of his story. In June of 2008, playing his first championship game as captain of a Kerry team setting out for three-in-a-row, he gets involved with his marker. The context is a game in which there were six yellow cards in the first 25 minutes. It should have been a stroll but turned out to be a dog-fight. Galvin felt he was being wound up.

First day out as captain. One yellow. More of the same. He spoke to the linesman about his problem. Nothing. Next thing. Paddy Russell is crooking his finger at him.

“Paddy, what are you doing?” he asked two or three times. Paddy Russell’s way of saying goodbye was a second yellow.

Slapping the notebook from Paddy Russell’s hand. Back to linesman. The little bump with Tomás Ó Sé. Off. His case becoming one of the sideshows of the summer.

It was a soul-destroying season. He’d started working for it on December 5th, 2007. He knew in his heart, knew it was going to be a struggle to pull a third successive All-Ireland out of the team. He felt Kerry had hit a plateau as a team and the players had gone a bit “individual”.

“What I did was a selfish thing. An individual act of petulance. As a group we had gone our own ways as well. Lots of different directions. If you want to win an All-Ireland you have to have that togetherness and trust. It didn’t take what I did to see that fellas had gone offside. I trained away and trained away for the rest of the summer. I was always hoping, but couldn’t give up.”

His case unfolded. He has strong opinions on three matters. Paddy Russell. The GAA. The media. But first he has to say something, has to point out that the country behind him is what gives him the view he has now.

Last summer changed him as a player and a person. It was a long, hard climb to redemption and last night in City West.

“I’m more relaxed. Ultimately, this was great for me. I needed it to happen. At the end of the day I have opinions on things, on the referee, how the case was handled, opinions on how the media operated. I have opinions on all these things. But at the end of the day I needed this. I was going on to the field at times for Kerry too aggressive, too pumped up. I was involved in scrapes I didn’t need to be involved in. I have a different outlook on the game. I have. I am more relaxed. I enjoy football for what it is now.”

He has those opinions though.

He has carried them for a year.

He watched The Sunday Gamethat night and appreciated that everything looked worse than it had felt at the time. Still, it was a few days before he saw that the responsibility was his.

“It didn’t dawn on me at all at first. I was in a strange place at the time. People see an on-field incident in isolation and see it for what it is, maybe. Obviously, there is a way more to it. That wasn’t the act of a guy who is just frustrated over a referee calling him over to book him. There was a lot of other stuff.

“We all have football lives and personal lives. It wasn’t a moment of madness, it was six months of frustration and things going on in my life, from being handed the captaincy and not being able to play through the league because of injury, to a lot of other things in my life.

“I was focusing on how I felt I was wronged. There was finger-pointing from me initially. I just had to face up to the fact that I was way out of order and you can’t do things like that. It only dawned on me a few days later what had happened.”

And? “Two things. I had to look at myself in the mirror. And I thought to myself, Jesus, they will go for the kill here.”

What hurt him most was the impression left by the shove on Ó Sé, his close friend. Tomás didn’t realise he already had his first yellow. “He was looking at me thinking that I was going mad because I was just getting a yellow card. Tomás grabbed me. He says, ‘Calm down, you’ll ruin your year’. I was walking off the field.

“I turned around and said to him, ‘I am f***ing gone’. That was a bit of a misunderstanding between us, but it looked terrible for two fellas in the Kerry jersey.”

He called Ó Sé the next week. “Jesus, man, I am really sorry about Sunday.”

Tomás replied with genuine bafflement: “About what?”

Galvin explained.

“Oh, yeah. Yerra, never mind that, how are you?”

And that was it. Through the long hard summer that followed they would joke about it. Galvin would bump into Ó Sé during training and say to his friend: “Listen, I suppose there is no chance this is all a dream?”

He stresses again that he takes responsibility for what he did. But those issues still linger.

“Paddy Russell had sworn omerta for the day. The whole day long. How you can be a referee in a top-class intercounty game and not open your mouth to players? How can you do that? Early in that game there was dangerous tackles flying in. Clare were giving a few and we were giving a few back.

“Declan O’Sullivan went through early on, as he does, and the tackle was a punch in the nose which bust his nose. Declan was bleeding and looking at the ref. Paddy passes me on his way out. I said, ‘are you going to leave that go’? There was no reply at all.”

He remembers those ticking seconds before his dismissal. Telling himself to keep calm now. Asking Russell again and again what was he doing, why was he booking him.

“There was nothing. To me that is unacceptable. I am captain of the team. I have made efforts to communicate with him. I have been ignored. I can’t excuse what I did, but I started working for that season, that game, six months previously. I was getting no feedback. Not even a syllable of a word.

“Normally, I would never go to a ref or linesman about anything. I have often been the guy on the other side. I said, okay, this year I will take a bit of responsibility. I will go to an official. The response was omerta.”

He contrasts what happened that day with a rugby game, where the whistle is never blown without the referee explaining what he is blowing it for.

“It isn’t about having a go at Paddy Russell, but subsequent there was no word high up or low down about the referee’s performance, which in my view was nowhere near what was needed. He came out and wrote a book afterwards. He had his say. His performance was way off what I would expect. If I performed as poorly as he did I would be gone, taken off.

“Communication is a huge thing. How can you justify not communicating? I was wrong to slap his notebook. I have nothing against the guy. But you can’t referee a game and not communicate with the players.”

Then his summer turned into a series of appearances in dry-as-dust committee rooms. His outsized reputation as one of the game’s desperadoes would go in before him and he, Paul Galvin, would follow a few minutes later.

“I felt it the minute I went into those rooms. Disapproval. Bar one guy on those committees, they wouldn’t stop for you on the corridor to say hello. One guy stopped me and said, ‘whatever happens, I hope things work out okay for you’. Otherwise, it was utter hostility, open hostility. I felt like a criminal. They weren’t hiding it.”

He was determined he would go in, answer his case from the dock. “Have you anything to say?” he was asked.

“This is the Thursday after it had happened. It was one tough week in my life, being dragged all through the media. So they asked had I anything to say. I gave an apology and tried to explain where I was coming from.

“Next thing one of their mobile phones rang. I am finding it tough to speak at all, finding it very tough – this all meant so much to me. He answers the mobile phone. And he starts talking . . . ‘Hello, hello? It is, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, go ahead and do that. I’m in a meeting. I have to go. Yeah, go on.’ I should have stood up and left.”

He took a deep breath instead. Carried on.

Then there was us. The media. We wanted him. Either hung, drawn and quartered in opinion columns. Or sitting down and hanging other people in interviews. He declined. Turned down all media requests.

“I have no bother if people ring me up. If I want to do something in the media, I do it. If not, I say no. But every single member of my family was contacted. My brother was contacted repeatedly by a journalist over a period of months. My sister was contacted by email. My parents’ house was rung repeatedly. This is having already turned these people down. I can’t accept that.

“I had a researcher from a radio show ring me asking if I had any comment. I said no thanks. Five minutes later she is on the phone to my parents. That is unacceptable. My father ended up on the air before he knew what was going on. He is a gentleman who would be too nice to say no straight out.”

Another paper went into the Bebo site belonging to his girlfriend, Ciara. Lifted the lot and ran two pages, including private pictures of Galvin at a wedding, other pictures taken at a party. That still hurts.

“The week of the game, the All-Ireland final, another fella rings me and says, ‘listen, do an interview, I’ll bat for you big time. Give your side’. I say no thanks. He comes out then on the weekend and he dismantles me. Where is the integrity there?”

He had a summer of feeling he was public enemy number one.

Paul Galvin versus the GAA.

Paul Galvin versus all right-thinking folk.

It ended with a few minutes at the end of the All-Ireland final and the shouts of triumphant Tyrone men in his ears.

He came very close, he says, to packing it in, and still feels that probably he should have walked away. He couldn’t do it. Not if there was hope. Not if there was one player in the team who would be disappointed in him for going.

“It’s a regret, but I needed the experience of it too. I needed to feel all that stuff to actually grow up and learn a lesson. If I had walked away maybe I would have come back the same way. I took it that I would have to suffer through it, train all summer with the lads, but not be part of it.”

His anger and frustration hadn’t cleared by the time the season expired. It was this time last year, on a mid-term holiday with Ciara, when he had his Damascene moment. He was, he says, poor company in Marbella, still brooding. But his brain clicked. It was time to move on.

Somewhere along the way he found himself. He read. Talked to people, Jack O'Shea in particular. Jacko's mantra was composure. At all times. On and off the field. Composure. He read a book called The Success Principles. Lingered long over a chapter on taking 100 per cent responsibility for your life. Said the words again.

“I was wrong. I have to start again from scratch. Ultimately, I look in the mirror. I was out of control. I looked at it on TV and I had lost control. Here I was, a decent player who would be remembered for that. I felt I was too good a player for that, so I had to become a player again. I was too good to be acting the way I was acting.

“I wasn’t performing to my best. Too aggressive. Too hyped up. I learned a huge amount about myself from it. I am not a buffoon. I knew what I had to do.”

And so he re-emerged into the light of a new season. He dragged Kerry through the league. Playing with intelligence and purpose and verve. He was a new man, and through spring and early summer all you could hear was Paul Galvin’s redemption song.

And then. Páirc Uí Chaoimh. A replay with Cork. Straight red. Recidivist! “Ah God. I just said to myself, you must be joking. I caught Noelly (Noel O’Leary), swung a bit of an arm at him. I did enough, I suppose. I got the card and really felt that was it. I felt I had played so well during the league and played well against Cork the first day.”

This time he was almost certain he would pack it in. He arranged a meeting with Jack O’Connor in Kenmare. Told O’Connor he felt it was time to leave it behind. He’d let Kerry down and Jack down and let himself down. He was going to be a summer sideshow again and he couldn’t justify sticking around for this one.

“I was very down. I said, ‘Jack, I think I have had it. It’s time to hold the hands up and wander off.’ But Jack is Jack. He just said ‘Yerra no, you’re fine, you’re fine’. I don’t think he listened to me or entertained it even.”

Strangest thing. Two days later he had an itch. Get out of Dodge. Drive. He picked up a buddy. Drove to Killenaule to pick up another. Hit the road. The three of them. Galvin still housing a head-full of black.

They ended up in Kilkenny. Went down to Nowlan Park. Galvin was a hurler before ever he was a footballer. There was an air of pilgrimage to it now. It was the day before Kilkenny played Galway in Leinster and there was a bit of activity over tickets.

“I walked in to have a look around because I really admire those Kilkenny lads. Straight away I met Ned Quinn. He stood there with open arms. ‘Ah Jaysus, are you lost?’, he says to me.”

Never a truer word.

“Genuinely, I was half-nervous going in there. Thought I might be told to feck off out of there. But I ran into Ned and he gave me a big welcome. We walked the pitch together. He told me great stories about the Kilkenny boys. We went into the dressingrooms. Sat down. He showed me where Tommy sits, and Shefflin. All these fellas.

“Then up to the clubhouse in the corner, all the memorabilia. He talked me through all the photos on the walls. I came back out thinking, maybe I am not such a bad fella. Ned took so much time to show me around and make me feel welcome. I came out and said to myself maybe the GAA ain’t so bad. Maybe I still belong in it, the same as ever. That day was a turning point. I went out that night in Kilkenny. Nothing to drink. Got up and felt like a new man. Never looked back.”

He came home and decided to go at it all properly again.

He spoke at times with Tommy Walsh and Eddie Brennan. Heroes who became friends and sounding-boards.

He listens to his music now before games. Gets lost in it. Relaxes. Loves the game for what it is. This summer we saw Paul Galvin for what he is and what he can be. Oddly, he never looked at Darran O’Sullivan with so much as a sliver of envy.

“Ah, it’s funny. People thought I would be a great captain. I was probably the worst captain Kerry ever had. And Darran is such an easy-going young fella people wondered. But he was a great captain. Great guy and a great captain. That’s sport.”

That’s Paul Galvin.

From the rogues gallery to Citywest and player of the year in 12 months.