3 JUNE 2023, Parnell Park.
A smallish man radiating charisma is making his way along the sideline as the Meath team comes out to begin their warm up for the Tailteann Cup group game against Down.
Another smallish man, oozing his own charisma, is standing a few yards back in a Down tracksuit. He calls out at the other man. They eye each other. A flicker of recognition turns to a smile, grows to a full beam.
Sean Boylan, herbalist, hurler, former Meath football manager and life-long friend of Tony Wilson of Factory Records and The Hacienda, looked up to see Pete McGrath.
Boylan’s life was one of variety, back now to help Colm O’Rourke and Meath.
McGrath’s? Less so.
Played senior football for Rostrevor in the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Taught in St Colman’s and continued a legacy of footballing excellence that Ray Morgan started.
Born in 1953. Lived in St Colman’s Gardens in Rostrevor, alongside older brothers Hilary and Pat, sister Irene and younger brother Matthew. His mother was Eileen Cole, from Rostrevor. His father was Peter McGrath, of Glasgow. He was keen on joining the RAF and his mother instead sent him away to work at the seaside resort town of Warrenpoint, with the gorgeous wrought-iron balconies and another life that didn’t involve war.
Seventy years on, young Peter never left the house. In between, he brought two All-Irelands to Down, the first when he was just 38, in 1991.
Against Meath. The team that had come out on top of the four-game epic against Dublin in the Leinster championship. In an Ireland scratching around for a sporting storyline after the towering Italia ’90, Meath and Dublin plugged into the mains. The GAA turned up all the amps to 11.
Meath made it in the end. Boylan drove them to an All-Ireland final.
But McGrath and Down were not into easy sentiment. After Down beat them, McGrath unleashed the Churchillian side of himself after the team came back to Newry.
Addressing the wedged crowd, he cast a hand over his players, forcefully saying into the microphone: ‘Here is the team… that beat the team… that couldn’t be beat!’
Thirty-two years later, McGrath and Boylan meet again. Both addicted to football.
“I went down and had a good chat,” says McGrath.
“He was standing there and the team was warming up. I said, ‘Right Sean, you better go and do your work.’
“And he said, ‘Oh no, I am just an observer here.’”
**
Soon after Colm O’Rourke took over the Meath team, he wrote a newspaper column in which he mentioned he intended to ask Boylan to come back in whatever role took his fancy.
Boylan is a few years McGrath’s senior and the links with Down are multi-layered. A few years back, the current senior manager, Conor Laverty, recruited Boylan to act as a mentor to his U20 team that won the Ulster title.
McGrath will happily admit that if such an approach had have been made, he would have considered it. But he knows deep down that it wouldn’t be enough for him.
In 2018, we sat in the same room, the same chairs, the same Down teams on the wall, alongside pictures of Michael Collins in full military garb and that image at Croke Park in 1919 of Arthur Griffith, Eamon de Valera, Laurence O’Neill and Collins sitting down at a match – Harry Boland was the referee by the way — and we talked Down football.
Twenty-four years on since he won his second All-Ireland with his county, he refused to rule anything out.
“The issue of at some stage in the future, if things turned a certain way, would you like to manage Down again… there’s a hint of sentiment there maybe,” McGrath said that day. “You are tugging at the heartstrings…”
And with that, the tears fell. It meant that much.
Five years on, we are in the same chairs, the same pictures – sporting and political – are on the walls. And you ask: would you feel the same way today?
“I think that’s passed now. Whenever you do something that brings success, that you enjoy and it becomes part of the very fabric of what you are and what your life is all about, when that comes to an end, you always think there could be a second coming,” he explains.
“And I think that should have come in 2009 to be honest. I had the U21s then [he won the Ulster title at that level in 2008 and 2009]. It was a situation that was very favourable. It didn’t happen. Things moved on, and you had Fermanagh after that and Louth and all the rest.
“I think there comes a time in your life when you have to move on here. Psychologically move on.
“County football has allure. An aura. A Magnetic pull. If you have been in it, then you never lose the desire to be a part of it.”
For all the fronting, watching Down run out onto the pitch this Saturday will catch him in the throat. He knows that.
“When you get a situation where Down are in a final playing against Meath in Croke Park, there’s going to be a big, big crowd there and it is an important game… Well it awakens all kind of emotions and memories.
“In the immediate aftermath of 2009, I felt hard done by. I felt bitter, even. But I came to realise that I had to move on. The people who made the decision at the time, they would have done what they felt was the right thing for Down. I know those people, I am friendly with them and I respect them.
“There comes a time when you have to realise that it is time to let go.”
But a backroom role? A confidant for players, meeting them for coffee in Newry, whispering small bits of encouragement to those on the physio table?
No.
“I still see myself as a frontline man. I am much happier hands on coaching a team on the sideline.”
**
Two full decades of his life was devoted to managing Down.
He was still in his 20s when he took on the Down minors. He did that gig for seven years.
He was handed the senior gig prior to the 1989/90 season. He knew them. He puts the figure at around 90%, those that had passed through his hands at minors or with the school.
Managers handle things differently with their former players. Brian McEniff in Donegal for example, has a habit of calling up dozens of his former players for a quick chat on Christmas Day.
Unless they meet at wakes, then the only time McGrath will come into contact with that generation is at matches or else a rare anniversary event.
It’s funny. Conor Deegan and other players have said in the past that when they do get together, they assume all the old roles they played three decades ago. You have the serious types and the jokers. And still they gravitate to Wee Pete. Seeking his attention and approval. Marvelling at the condition he is in, making a quick promise to themselves they are going to get back to a bit of running and pull away from the table a small bit.
“I know the 91 and 94 squads as a unified group have got a WhatsApp group. I do not join any WhatsApp groups,” says McGrath. “The simple answer here to your question, is that it’s no.”
McGrath knows that time has a habit of making the edges fuzzy and taking the harsh focus off. Their All-Irelands were not won in straight lines.
For example, in McGrath’s first year, 1990, they drew against Armagh. Ross Carr was dropped for the replay. He was then left off the panel for the following National League.
He rediscovered serious form for Clonduff in the county leagues under Frank Dawson. McGrath and Murphy checked him out and after one game, asked him back.
Said they were going to win the All-Ireland. That there were full 15-a-side games in training every night and everyone was champing at the bit.
“Even at that early stage, listening to Pete and John, they had a definite design on the summer,” said Carr.
“But they definitely exaggerated the passion that was among the players. The first night I went to training, 12 people trained. There was also about seven or eight with injuries, but there wasn’t 25 or 30 people there. When we got to the All-Ireland final, we needed two changing rooms to hold all the players on the panel.”
There were other incidents. After they were beaten by Derry in Newry for the 1993 Championship, the 0-9 to 3-11 scoreline earned it the title The Massacre Of The Marshes.
Afterwards, McGrath told BBCNI reporter Jim Neilly that everyone involved in Down owed their supporters a massive apology.
It brought recrimination. James McCartan went off to play soccer for Glenavon. Greg Blaney stayed away and moonlighted as a hurler for the resurgent county team in the small ball code.
They returned in just perfect time to ramp up preparations for 1994 and the second All-Ireland. The coverage leading up to the All-Ireland final was dismissive of Down in some parts.
The Meath midfielder, Liam Hayes, was in his bombastic pomp as a journalist.
“He had a line on the day of the match; ‘This Down team doesn’t know how to win an All-Ireland. Doesn’t know what it takes.’
“Now, what he meant was, for example this Dublin team had striven for years and still hadn’t won an All-Ireland, while Down had come out of nowhere to win an All-Ireland. So they don’t really know what it takes.”
A day and a half later, and Down are back in Newry as All-Ireland winners. McGrath has another quip prepared:
“Liam Hayes says in the paper that this Down team doesn’t know what it takes to win an All-Ireland. Well, as far as I am concerned, we don’t know what it takes to lose one!”
If he wanted to spend time with them, he could. But he has no interest in their preferred collective pastime of playing golf.
“When I do meet them, they are good people. You know, we had our differences in the past and all the teams and all the managers and players do,” he says.
But he knows that their time is coming and almost gone, too.
“I was thinking the other day how many have actually dipped their feet into management? Eamonn Burns, God rest him. Deegan… Barry Breen was actually with the Down minor squad in 1999 as part of the backroom team.
“Greg was with Paddy O’Rourke. Ross (Carr), of course. Wee James. Mickey was with me with the U21s. Paddy, DJ, so a lot of them have managed Down teams.
“But I think since James stepped down from his role last year, I think the book is closed on the men of the nineties. I think the ’90s has been consigned to our much-vaunted history!”
Note how he describes that. ‘Much-vaunted.’ As in, it is praised more than it deserves to be.
On 8 June 2002, it was all over. He brought a team down to Pearse Park to face Longford in a Round One qualifier game. In goal, Mickey McVeigh was still there.
In each corner up top were Mickey Linden and James McCartan.
But they lost, 1-16 to 0-14.
As the final seconds ticked away, he met the gaze of the late John Murphy.
“It’s over, John,” said McGrath.
“It’s over, Pete,” came the reply.
And that was that. He was 49 years of age at that point; the same age Mickey Harte was when he was first given the Tyrone job.
**
There’s another thing.
When football means that much to you – as in, everything – you have to wonder if your life experiences were sufficiently wide.
What if Pete McGrath had married and had children? What if he was running round now on the school-lift circuit with all the other hard-pressed grandparents? Would football have meant as much?
“I think to an extent there is a lot of truth in that,” he says. He’s given this a lot of thought. Decades worth.
“When anyone looks at their own lifestyle, their own life chronologically and what took up your time, all the things you did that you did that was worthwhile…
“In my life, most of them involved football. Even teaching in the college, football was such a big part of that as well.
“Football is at the core of so much and if you see me talking to someone on the street, you can be quite sure what I will be talking about.”
He continues, “I’ll give you an example. I go to the Buttercrane shopping centre and get my breakfast there the odd morning. Sometimes, I meet a man there. He’s an elderly man from Downpatrick, and he will be with his wife and he always wants to talk about the ‘90s.
“I was in a wee restaurant yesterday speaking to somebody else and this man comes up with obviously his grandson. And the first thing he says to me is: ‘We are the team, that beat the team, that couldn’t be beat!’
“But then half a minute later he said to me, ‘I lost my son a fortnight ago.’
“Forty-three years of age. And I am not even sure what this man’s name is. But his son was killed by the sting of a wasp because he didn’t have his epi pen with him.”
Slips into another anecdote: “The other morning, I met a local woman, Grace Trainor. She told me she had an uncle who was coming down to visit. 90 years of age. I said, ‘Yeah, if you see my jeep outside the house, bring him in.’
“So he arrives here yesterday. This 90-year-old man, you’d swear he was 75. He sits here and talks about Mayo and if they will ever win an All-Ireland while he is around.
“So that’s football! Generally the people I meet, the whole texture of my life, football is always prominent. And it’s very, very hard to get rid of it.
“The county thing? For many years I would have loved to have come back but other people were appointed. And I understand. At the end of the day, the ‘90s are a long time ago. Doesn’t seem it to me though.”
**
It’s 2019. Louth are having a torrid time in the National League, losing all their league games and being relegated from Division 2.
McGrath had been approached to do the job and said no. Louth came back. He spoke to a few friends in the county from the time he won the county title as manager of Cooley Kickhams. Everyone said they had no business being in Division 2. Players were scattering everywhere. And yet McGrath took it on through his affinity to the county.
Sam Mulroy is a young lad but he has him in, learning the ropes of senior county football. He suffers a bad ankle injury in the first O’Byrne Cup game. He keeps showing up and going to training sessions anyway. McGrath hands him books throughout the season.
One day the phone rings. It’s Jim Gavin, looking to travel for a challenge match with Dublin, to keep the fringe players occupied and happy. McGrath agrees.
And then he sees the Dublin team taking the field. Jack McCaffrey. Stephen Cluxton. Diarmuid Connolly. Jesus Christ. A hammering then plays out.
Afterwards, McGrath asks Gavin if he could do him a favour and present a book to young Mulroy. Gavin agrees.
McGrath sets it all up after the teams have eaten together. Pays a little tribute to Mulroy and what a great young lad he is. Gavin presents it. The book is the autobiography of Jim McGuinness. Diarmuid Connolly sees this and his face is like thunder. Gavin makes the presentation anyway.
“And by the way,” Gavin tells Mulroy at the end of it, “That book would make a great doorstop.”
**
At this point, the door opens. His brother Hilary enters. Immediately, the pride of the younger brother leads Pete to say, ‘This is Hilary, my brother. Former Down player. One of the ’68 vintage.”
Hilary and his wife Phil enter. The brothers and Phil instantly engage in low-grade ragging and teasing of each other. Hilary had been to the Big Breakfast in Newry’s Canal Court that morning as a Down GAA fundraiser.
He relishes telling all the anecdotes from the talk event. Seamus ‘Banty’ McEnaney was there and in typical good cheer, combative as ever. Tea is taken. While Pete is in the room, the talk is exclusively about football and concludes with a short assessment of the fortunes of the Rostrevor minor team, of which Pete manages and who lost a Division 2 final a few nights before. A missed penalty. Damn it, anyway.
In the last decade he spent four seasons in charge of Fermanagh, and then one with Louth. He’s now with his own Rostrevor club as well as the St Mary’s Aghagallon senior footballers in Antrim as well, joined by his nephew, also called Peter.
This year, Aghagallon have had a reasonable league campaign and avoided being dragged into a relegation scrap like last year. He is looking forward to the championship when only two can emerge from the group that includes St Brigid’s and Moneyglass.
He’s enjoying it. The players are genuine and working hard. It’s all he asks.
He looks at the work Mickey Harte has put down in Louth, just a few months younger than him. And Jack O’Connor at 62. Colm O’Rourke too. He’s glad that he still has the ability to connect with young men. He knows that ageism is common, but he mercifully avoids it.
But he’d also contend that from a young age, he was at the cutting edge.
“I think what we did in the nineties was groundbreaking stuff,” he maintains.
“I can remember the winter of ‘93, the fellas went to Jordanstown for a battery of fitness tests which was not terribly common at that time for a county team to do that.
“We went to the Glens of Antrim for a week away in Waterfoot, which again, at that time was not terribly common.
“But you are right. I think we’re living in a society where if you’re beyond a certain age, well, I mean, you know, you’re out of touch, you think that people who are over 60 or 80 that they all go and live in a cave somewhere, and don’t know what’s going on around them in any sense.
“People say, this old-school theory and this old-school concept, and it’s not really relevant because it’s all about data and stats and GPS, analysis and, and all that has its place.
“In the cut and thrust of the season there’s a big commitment, but there was a commitment in the nineties as well.
“Some people think of the modern game as something totally different in every sense from what preceded. They think is nearly a different experience and something that is no or very little connection with what’s gone before. And I think that’s a mistake.”
**
Down football. Much-vaunted, he says.
Last year was a low poin with players using a training weekend to partake in a pop-up stag weekend. Manager James McCartan left the team WhatsApp group, then was convinced to see the year out.
They washed up in Division Three. They didn’t get out of it, but the Tailteann Cup final represents a chance to escape that reality for a spell.
McGrath sees parallels in himself and Laverty.
“The advantage Conor Laverty had going into this year was the fact that he had managed the U20s for 2022 and 2021.
“So he knew a lot of the younger players coming through and they won an Ulster title two years ago. So I think Conor had a knowledge and an understanding and an experience of a lot of the players who he brought in as well as being a teammate; he has the Kilcoo lads who he’s brought in as well.
“Generally, the bulk of the squad is made up of people who Conor would have known quite intimately as footballers and probably as people as well.
“Whereas James just had it and took on a job really, you know, and where do you start? I found that appointment a bit mesmerising to tell you the truth. I just couldn’t figure it out. He would have been in a very difficult place, I empathised with him.”
He adds, “Conor Laverty is a very talented coach. No doubt about that, no doubt about that.
“He thinks a lot about the game, and he’s got players in the team with pace. I saw a lot of the national league matches, McKenna Cup matches and that.
“I think they will score at least two goals against Meath. I think they’ll get through for two goals and if they do, I think they’ll win it.”
**
Our time is finishing up. We are onto the ageing process.
He turned 70 a couple of weeks ago. Every day, he either runs or lifts weights. Since Covid though, he’s not pushing the same kilos.
“There’s no doubt as you go on your life, your levels of strength and power diminish,” he smiles.
“John Morgan, who was the guru of weight lifting up at Burren, he said, ‘You can’t stop the biological clock. You can slow it down, but you can’t stop it.’”
A book he is devoted to, one that he has handed out many times and replaced it on his shelves, is The First Twenty Minutes by Gretchen Reynolds.
“It emphasizes the importance of exercise,” he explains.
“The book is very, very thoroughly researched and dealt with, for example, a bus driver or a train driver and the conductor. And they follow these people and did the research on the driver because he’s so sedentary, and the conductor.
“The difference in life span is quite, quite dramatic.
“It’s a very funny book too because it’s very funny, you know, and the importance as you grow older, of resistance training, it helps you retain bone density.
“You see people, and they’re stooped because their bone density is decreasing all the time.
“And the bones are literally go from there to there, turning, sustained, actually straight up like that.”
And then he is going over the event of a few nights previous, when his Rostrevor side missed that penalty and lost narrowly in the league final. The players were up at the clubhouse getting some food when McGrath instead went home and dug out an article from last May, written by Tommy Conlon, about Ronan O’Gara and Johnny Sexton.
There was a pair of paragraphs in it that he wanted to show the young fella who took the kick.
They read; ‘What separated them from many of their peers was that the burden of being the general, the quarterback, the pilot, seemed to liberate them rather than diminish them. They had the ego for it; they had the competitive arrogance; they had the big swinging personality to go with the big swinging job. They had the courage to take the punishment that comes with playing in the eye of the storm; they had the bottle to make the play whilst being broken in half by tackles; they had the psychological resilience to cope with debilitating injuries and with all manner of crisis in performance, or disaster in execution of their work.
‘They could personally lose games on a single decision or a pulled kick or an intercepted pass. Then they’d have to take the public flak, beat themselves up in private, and come out a week later to step up to the plate again. They went down to the dark place many times and re-surfaced to ride the waves again.’
He cut the piece out, put it in his pocket, and went to the clubrooms. He took the boy aside, explained the significance of the O’Gara-Sexton rivalry, and their mental strength.
A few days later, he bumped into the boy’s father and he couldn’t thank him enough for how he put everything into context, how much that one act meant to him.
And again, the tears gather up in Pete McGrath’s eyes. Not for a job of managing Down. But for the positive effect he had on a young lad from his village, and the gratitude of his father.