The Big Interview with Donie O’Sullivan: Memories and friends for life
He knows: the name hasn’t echoed through the generations the way old comrades like O’Connell and O’Dwyer have. Just as he barely knows any current Kerry player personally since Johnny Buckley opted out, he suspects none of Peter Keane’s charges up to possibly this week would even have known of him, a state of affairs that would have hardly perturbed his modest nature. Had he been one that craved the limelight then maybe he would have taken up the offer to play with the New York Jets all those years ago.
Tonight the Munster Council will admirably honour its duty as guardians of the sport’s history by inducting him into their Hall of Fame, reminding folk that there was a time Donie O’Sullivan was among the finest footballers in all the land. But should he fall into the company of a fresh-faced countyman like fellow corner-back Tom O’Sullivan or even fellow East Kerry man David Clifford at tonight’s function in Castletroy, the one bit of wisdom he’d have to impart is this: it isn’t whether time remembers you or not but that you cherish your time and the opportunity it presents to make friends for life. Opponents as well as teammates.
At the moment, you might curse Con O’Callaghan and Johnny Cooper, or at least the fact that they’ve kept denying you your first senior All-Ireland medal but in tim e— and before you or they retire — you should come to realise that ultimately we’re all on the same, losing, side.
Ninety minutes in O’Sullivan’s company and it’s striking how little he talks about all that he won in the game: the first-ever club All-Ireland title, back when a divisional team like his own East Kerry could claim it; lifting Sam Maguire as Kerry captain 50 years ago next September; making the first ever All-Star team and the one the year after it again; all the O’Donoghue Cups he won with his native Spa as well as with his adopted club of Dr Crokes.
Instead he talks more about the big games that he lost and how they were good for him and the friends all around the country that to this day he cherishes more than any medal collecting dust in a shelf.
When learning that you hail from Cork, he asks if you know of Con Paddy O’Sullivan from Urhan. When you say you don’t, he smiles wistfully. “Of course, you’d be too young.” He then explains how O’Sullivan was a totem for Cork for years at midfield, was one of their main men when they reached the All-Ireland final in ’67. But more than that he’s been “a good friend when times have been bad”.
Con has been like an angel of mercy. He lives near the [Cork University] hospital there and we’d often call in to him when visiting John Dowling; John was ill up there for a long time. Con was great to us that time, and [other former Cork players] Gene McCarthy and Johnny Carroll too; I know them well, we’d often still meet. And the same with Kevin Dillon down in Clonakilty. Pat Griffin died recently and when we’d call down to him, Kevin was so good to all of us.
All around the country it’s the same. A few years ago he called into Brian McEniff’s hotel in Bundoran as he hadn’t seen Brian since his brother Seán’s passing a few months earlier. McEniff wasn’t at the hotel but informed the receptionist to keep O’Sullivan there for 20 minutes; he was dropping everything and heading straight over to see an old friend.
More than once Seán O’Neill has stayed in his house out in his homeland of Tiernaboul, out by Spa on the Cork side of Killarney, and whenever he’s been up in Belfast he’s often called in and stayed with O’Neill. Last year to mark the golden jubilee of Down’s third All-Ireland triumph, O’Sullivan went up to Mourne Country accompanied by Brendan Lynch and Tom Prendergast where he’d greet his direct opponent that day, Mickey Cole, like a brother.
That says a lot about O’Sullivan’s nature as it does about the passage of time. When Down foiled Kerry in ’68, it was the fourth All-Ireland final or semi-final defeat of O’Sullivan’s career at a time when he had yet to know what it was like to walk off the field a winner in September. But looking back, those defeats were the making of him. As a man going through life as well as a player.
“At the time the defeats looked terrible but looking back they were good for us. You know that Johnny Cash song and he’s talking about going down to Jackson and his wife [June Carter] sings for him to go on ahead, ‘you big-talkin’ man, make a fool of yourself!’? Well, that could have been us had we won all the time! You could have got false ideas of one’s self. So it helped with our humility, and, I suppose, our resilience. When you’ve been down and lost and then come back and you win, you appreciate it all the more. And you’d learn later in life that there are a lot tougher knocks than losing an All Ireland semi-final or final.”
That’s why he’ll always be able to identify his happiest day in Croke Park. It wasn’t lifting Sam Maguire in 1970; instead it came 20 years later in a game he wasn’t involved in. Meath and Down were playing a league final. O’Sullivan went to the game in the company of his then 11-year-old son, Eoin, who a year earlier had been diagnosed with leukaemia. For months it looked like Eoin wasn’t going to make it.
You’d be going into Crumlin Hospital, blaming everything. Why should this happen to us, to Eoin? Then you’d say, ‘Well at least in Eoin’s case, there’s some treatment, some hope; other children are just dying. Then a year later you’d nearly feel guilty because he’d survived and so many other poor kids there hadn’t. It made you appreciate every blessing in life.
That league final on a lovely sunny April afternoon was one of those blessings. A teacher for most of his professional career, it reminded him of that poem of Kavanagh’s, Canal Bank Walk. Spring was in the air and redemption was pouring over him, going to and watching the game with his son. In the darkest hours in Crumlin, Eoin had feared he’d never get to see another game, and how “my youth will be gone”. Even when he’d survive, he’d be told he could never have children. Last year his wife had a child. Eoin himself is now a doctor. A story that his father’s old teammates and opponents alike bask in upon meeting up.
Of course, occasionally they will look back and with fondness of the old days when they themselves were in their youth and prime. He still speaks fondly of the generations before him in Spa that cultivated a love of the sport and founded a club that he would derive so much satisfaction from. He lights up upon recalling the years when Spa would be playing and winning games in September, and how the sound of the barking dogs bringing in the cows would get earlier by the week.
O’Sullivan was amazed to learn he’d be honoured by the Munster Council tonight; he genuinely claims to have been merely “a fair to middling player”. His senior career suggests to the contrary but at underage it’d be fair to say he was no blue-chip talent. He never made a St Brendan’s colleges team. He didn’t make the Kerry minors either. And when he lost a 1961 All-Ireland junior semi-final to Louth, he was sure that his last chance of ever playing in Croke Park was gone.
As it turned out, it wasn’t. He was out there on the field with Mick O’Connell for the 1962 All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin when O’Connell put on what is generally considered one of the greatest display of his or anyone’s career, kicking a point from either sideline. And yet, if you look at the archive his old late great pal Weeshie Fogarty established on the Terrace Talk website, O’Sullivan’s campaign that year finishes there. There is no Game 4: the All-Ireland final, against Roscommon. Why? Because he was a seminarian at the time in Maynooth. College had started back up. And so the day of the game, O’Sullivan wasn’t even in Croke Park. Instead he listened to it on a radio in the seminary.
“That’s just how it was in those days. The gates were never locked. I could have walked out if I wanted to go, so there was no point feeling sorry for myself.”
Nor does he have any regrets about declining the opportunity to be a pro American football player. A few years after opting not to pursue the priesthood, he was studying educational psychology in St John’s, New York, where the New York Jets also trained. O’Sullivan by then was not just renowned in Ireland for his capacity to kick an O’Neill’s so long and accurately off the ground, but had grabbed the attention of the college football coaches who enlisted him to be their kicker. When the college paper wrangled a couple of Jets to join with him for a photography and kicking session, a bit of crack turned into something more serious: Hey man, this Irish guy can really kick!
As TJ Flynn would beautifully put it in Princes of Pigskin, a 2007 ode to 100 former Kerry greats through the years, “The [Jets] had been pinging seven irons all along. O’Sullivan showed them how to use Big Bertha.”
Their coach Weeb Ewbank offered him a contract. Their quarterback Joe Namath, infamous for his Hollywood lifestyle and good looks, also recruited him: see you at camp next summer! But Namath didn’t. The photo in Sports Illustrated was the last they’d see of each other. A couple of years later Namath and the Jets made it to the Superbowl but O’Sullivan was just happy to have made it back to September in Croke Park.
Even at that stage I thought this [Ireland] was a better country to grow old in. And I missed playing here with the club and with Kerry and the lads. In American football, the kicker isn’t really part of the team. I often feel as if there’s someone guiding you through life, and that home was where I was meant to be.
O’Sullivan will be 80 himself next March but he continues to be sprightly in body, mind and spirit. He still enjoys football; wouldn’t be a fan of the new rules but would admire greatly the Dublin team Gavin built as well as how Mayo and Kerry have gallantly gone about trying to foil them. But it’s the current players themselves that he hopes are truly appreciating this window in their lives.
He hopes that in time they will have friendships as long lasting as those he maintains with the likes of O’Connell, Tom Long and his old Spa clubmate Mick Gleeson, men “who in the bad times, have been there”.
“Enjoy every minute of it,” he says when asked what advice he’d give for any current player. “Even the bad times are good. Don’t mention the word sacrifice or anything like it. You’re in your prime. There’s the sheer enjoyment of playing and there’s the real benefits of the friendships you’ll make, the contacts you’ll get to have, for life.
“In old age you’ll appreciate it all the more.”
