1981: A year that confirmed Kerry and Micko's place in the annals

Of all the hundreds of thousands of words that have been devoted, or related, to the deeds of O’Dwyer, the most brilliant lie in the book written by Owen McCrohan in 1990: ‘Mick O’Dwyer: The Authorised Biography’.

It is a work of great insight; indeed, it is not too much to say that it is a work of art in terms of its content (the design of the book and its printing does not match the quality of its words).

Too often, biographies (and even more so ghosted auto-biographies and memoirs) make the fundamental mistake of boxing off the lives of their subjects into neat packages. 

Every aspect is explained and justified, logic and reason run through the pages creating an inexorable sense of the inevitable, as if almost everything was pre-ordained in a sort of manifestation of destiny.

McCrohan’s book is not like that. It is a book that does not claim to answer every question or reveal everything about its subject. It is intimate and wise, but it does not pretend to be omniscient.

At the time of its publication, Con Houlihan wrote most revealingly that, having been physio to the Kerry team between 1975 and 1986, Owen McCrohan became “about as close to the manager, Mick O’Dwyer, as a mortal man could be.” In acknowledging that there was a significant element of O’Dwyer that was unknowable, Con Houlihan was exactly right.

It is obvious from Owen McCrohan’s book that the Mick O’Dwyer he wrote about was a man of multitudes, that he was complex and even contradictory. This multi-layered viewing was especially important given the fact that so much of O’Dwyer’s life – as a footballer and then as a manager – was lived out in the public eye, with all that that can mean for how someone can be perceived.

During those decades he was as famous as almost any man in Ireland. Everywhere he went, people flocked to him. In Langton’s pub in Kilkenny, for example, he was sitting at a table after going to mass on a holy day when one after the next people just wandered over and sat down and chatted to him. 

In the street, outside the pub, a man says to him: “Mick, I’d know your skin on a bush!” Again, it is as if to recognise him is to know him; the notion took hold that what is seen is real and true just because every approach draws an unfailingly polite and apparently open reception from O’Dwyer.

But this public construction was both real and unreal. In all that is written and said about Mick O’Dwyer, what emerges time and again is his capacity for what might be politely considered an ambiguous relationship with truth.

So it is that a journalist visiting Kerry to write about “the real Mick O’Dwyer” was advised by Pat Spillane: “Don’t believe a word he tells you.” Owen McCrohan says of this view: “Anyone who knows the man would endorse those sentiments. Better than any politician he can contort and distort words to his own advantage.” 

There can be little doubt that this ability was vital to his approach to managing footballers, extracting every last ounce from them. It was also hugely useful as he accumulated one business success after another.

Fundamental, also, was his energy. He did not stop. It was not that he went from one thing to the next, it was that things overlapped, ran into each other, merged into a sort of never-ending whirl.

Finding ways to capture that is not easy. Perhaps a way is to remember that in 1980, by which time he had managed Kerry to four All-Irelands in six years, he was still turning out for Waterville at 44 years of age. 

Indeed, in that year he played brilliantly in club football on Ogie Moran, the brilliant centre forward on his best Kerry teams, who was in the end the winner of eight All-Ireland medals.

He continued to play into his late 40s. He remained an outstanding footballer right to the end of his days playing and had the great joy of playing in the same team as his sons. And it is this love of football that is so central to his psyche. 

He said: “I played, not for honours or medals or to break records, but purely because I loved the involvement of the game. I was still getting scores up to the end and I enjoyed every minute of every game.” 

By then, through the 1980s, his business interests had extended across two hotels, a taxi service, an undertakers, and the sale of second hand cars. He drove the country, also, giving training sessions and making presentations, clocking up mile after mile, and had a young family at home.

And all the time, or so it seemed, there was undiminished good humour. He was distinguished by the sheer zest for life and an interest in and enthusiasm for everything that was pulled within his orbit. He was almost always “at his effervescent best, bubbling over with all his irrepressible high spirits.” 

Such was the scale and persistence of his exuberance that it can only have been genuine. 

But it was not the full story. There is a reminder again of his contradictions, of the challenges to reconcile in accounting for his thinking: this man who appeared to love being at the centre of things, who spent his life in conversation and in company was also a self-confessed loner. He spent hour after hour driving around the country’s roads on his own: “There are times when I want to be alone.” To this end, also, he travelled occasionally on his own to America and to Australia avoiding contact with anyone who might know him.

The novelist Henry James wrote in his famous short story ‘Louisa Pallant’: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart”. This is a dictum to cling on to when thinking and writing about Mick O’Dwyer and what it was precisely that defined him.

What can be said about him, without question, was neatly encapsulated in the words of Owen McCrohan: “Forget about accepted norms and proprieties. This man is an original.” 

And that is it really: It is not so much that they broke the mould when they made Mick O’Dwyer; it’s that he broke the mould himself, again and again.

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