Tom Humphriesbelieves Kerry have chosen the right man to lead their quest for another three-in-a-row.
SO. WHAT'S your problem with Paul Galvin? Listen. No need to say anything. He knows. He knows that you clocked his name on the cover and maybe shot a glance at his dark eyes and brooding desperado stare and just shook your head. "That tramp Galvin?" you muttered. Eh, no thanks.
Ah, he knows. Gunslingers were never loved. And when you have a face like a charcoaled likeness on a wanted poster and a reputation to match, well, the best you can hope for is to be feared and respected. Affection is for obituaries and sad-luck dames. He knows, he knows.
You don't know him though. You think
you do, but you don't. He knows you better.
He has heard you, heard you cawing from
the bleachers probably. You have booed him
off the field, haven't you? He laughs to himself and shakes his head as he remembers the times you did that. The Dubs last year. Cork. Cork. Cork. Armagh.
He thinks the first one was Limerick in 2004. He was coming off the field and he heard the boos and the catcalls and realised, "it's me. I must have upset somebody along the way." And that was it. He found he could live with it.
It's harder for his parents than it is for him and sometimes they skip big games altogether rather than listen to the symphony of abuse a crowd can muster for their son. He has the ability to ignore it all. But sometimes - ah, don't flatter yourself, just sometimes - he'd like to have a quiet word with you about it.t was it. He found he could live with it.
It's harder for his parents than it is for him and sometimes they skip big games altogether rather than listen to the symphony of abuse a crowd can muster for their son. He has the ability to ignore it all but sometimes, ah don't flatter yourself just sometimes, he'd like to have a quiet word with you about it.
Take a few weeks ago. He had coached the senior team from St Brendan's, Killarney to an All-Ireland cC
Take a few weeks ago. He had coached the senior team from St Brendan's, Killarney, to an All-Ireland colleges final. For all he had given them the kids had inspired him and refreshed him in equal measure. So in Portlaoise he was happy and engrossed for a little while on the sideline till he became aware of what was unfolding behind him. A kid with a megaphone, not 10 yards away, leading a chorus of 50 chanting schoolmates.
"Galvin is a wanker! Galvin is a wanker!"
Over and over again.
His own pupils and charges sitting there bemused and amused waiting to see what, if anything, he would do. He wanted to turn around and throw his arms out wide and say: "Listen, come on lads, today I'm a teacher."
Yerra, he was young once himself though and knew nothing would pump up the volume of the chanting more than recognition of it.
Galvin is a wanker! That doesn't shock you to hear that sung, does it? Or that towards the end of his time teaching in Coláiste Chríost Rí in Cork, a job and a place he loved, he just got fed up of going out in Cork and being physically and verbally accosted? You're not moved? Maybe it's the face. Maybe it's the rap sheet.
Maybe it's the tats you don't approve of.
His body, uniquely perhaps for a man who, all going to plan and to form this summer, will lift Sam Maguire, is a gallery of tattoo art. His skin houses a number of pieces and is right now awaiting a new inking he thinks will be that line from Dylan Thomas, "rage, rage against the dying of the light".
He thinks long and hard about each tattoo before submitting himself to the needle of the same artist in Tralee. His first tat was a Crucifixion on the left shoulder, which he chose partly because he is, as he says with a smile, "a good Catholic boy" and partly because he saw one on Keano, whom he worships as much as a good Catholic boy can without breaking the commandment about false gods.
He has three stars on one shoulder commemorating people he felt close to in life who have now departed. Two uncles, Jack and Michael Galvin, and his cousin Conor Smyth. He has two hands clasped in a gesture of prayer with a prayer in Latin over it ("Shit," he says "I'm only realising now! Is the religious theme coming in a bit strong here?")
Don't worry. He's not looking to peddle a hagiography here. He shares his idol's indifference to the perfume of self-promotion. If you want to throw stones and point fingers it's grand. He knows you. He's used to it.
"The day will come when nobody is saying anything about me. Then it will be over and out." Until then he will rage, rage against that old dying of the light. He'll listen to the megaphones and the bawled insults. He believes that so long as he has rage he has light too so he'll absorb the opinions of trash-talking wing backs. He'll absorb more than that if you want.
Against Longford a few years ago, a defender grabbed him by the cojones and squeezed as if he needed juice from them. Against Limerick once, the same thing.
The tats get some mean reviews. His hair gets taunts and pulls. All the usual wind-up stuff.
"The really good players don't do it though," he grins. "That's my line anyway!"
The face? The attitude? The tats? Nah, he reckons more than anything it comes down to the way he plays football. The reputation he sends into battle before him as an outrider does its own damage. The reputation buys him a catering pack of enemies. The reputation distracts those enemies and beguiles them. He takes the hits and draws the stings. And he knows you would like nothing more than to hear him sing an aria of contrition. He knows you. You don't know him. Just the reputation.
"The reputation? Is it deserved?" he muses, and allows the point. "It is deserved, I suppose. I have done things that have got me in trouble. I've got away with things too. I don't claim to be victimised. You would have to ask one by one.
"I've no bother with certain things. I wouldn't be exactly proud of them, but you do what you have to do. I have had things done to me and I never go bitching. You take it. you give it. Is it deserved, the reputation I have? It probably is, really."
Two words to describe his style? Aggressive and confrontational are the ones that spring from his own lips first. He works that unpromising seam right on the breakdown of play. Aggression is his instrument.
"If you are tracking a wing back that wants to take you up and down the field all day there are things that will slow him down. In the modern game a wing forward can be more of a defender than a wing back. If you are going to be serious you defend."
So he is a firm believer in laying down his markers early on. He isn't bothered much by trash-talking, but he loathes chit-chat, especially the stuff in club games about mutual friends and bits of gossip. He blanks it.
"I'm all for setting my stall out early for how we are going to play this. Tackles to be made. Hits to be put in."
He isn't just the bane of the wing-back community. He likes to bring down the behemoths who roam lár na páirce.
"You have big payers around the middle of the field for every county, (Ciarán) Whelan and (Nicholas) Murphy and (Paul) McGrane. Big men. You can pressure them and make it difficult around that area, curb their influence. I always enjoy pitting myself against them."
He always knows when the boneshaking, shoulder-to-shoulder collision has done its damage. "You would hear an old noise escaping out of him, kind of a gasp. You know?"
This is an area maybe you haven't thought about. Galvin isn't small, but he has the frame of a jockey on to which he painstakingly grafts as much lean muscle as he can without stealing anything from his speed. The rest of his armour is abstract, pure courage. He goes into fissure gaps and thudding collisions with a bravery that is just the far side of reckless.
In 2004, in Croker, he collided with Ciarán Whelan. He had whiplash for three days afterwards.
"I hit him a shoulder. It was my first championship game in Croke Park. Quarterfinals. I went into a somersault. For three days after I was in bits, the ball spilled away. Christ, those guys. I love trying myself against those guys, the Whelans, the McGeeneys and these lads. I've always enjoyed competing against them."
It isn't easy. If you are to survive you need technique and timing. You can't, he says, go in with loose arms and loose legs or they will smite you, they will break you down. And even if you are good at smiting them you will do it two or three times in a championship game. You won't get more chances than that and even if you did your body couldn't take it.
Against Monaghan in Croke Park last year it was a carnival of big hits early on. He collided hard first with Paul Finlay. Bang! Then with Dick Clerkin. Crash! And finally Rory Woods hit him a belt. He never saw it coming. He was dealing with a high pass. Too high. He went up, turned it over, landed, spotted Declan O'Sullivan and . . . Wallop! The collision with Finlay did more damage he reckons, but the aggregate was devastating. After the Woods hit the feeling went from his arm completely. Twenty minutes in and he felt like he had been using himself as a crash-test dummy. The right arm was gone: dead and limp. He couldn't move it. He had nothing; no movement, no feeling.
The first law concerning the work he does is never to let the pain show. He has the recovery from these incidents down to 20 seconds. So, he never let the signs show. He got strapping and ice at half-time, but the feeling didn't return. He went back out.
Sometimes he gets hit so hard that there is almost no pain, just a trick of the brain, half déjà vu, half life flashing before him. His nerve endings don't register the physical toll till later.
In the All-Ireland last year he just drove in on the break early on and saw, at the last instant, a big red wall, Derek Kavanagh (he thinks), coming against him. Kavanagh was full pelt, so was Galvin. They ploughed into each other.
"Some jolt," he says, speaking as a connoisseur of jolts. The head went on the blink. The body didn't have to deal with the impact till later.
If you are going to carom into bigger men there are things you must do to prepare. You must acclimatise your body or literally it will go into shock. So in training he hits and takes the hits as if he were friendless on the Kerry team. And in the off-season he gets himself right.
The hits, these collisions between bodies moving at maximum velocity, literally throw his body out of sync. In the close season his hip and back are out of kilter. He does physio and core-stability work and puts himself together for another summer of dodgems.
Changed your mind yet? You boo him and hate him. You'd want him on your team though, wouldn't you? Not yet? What do you need to know? More about his work with kids' teams?
About him taking the Sam to a homeless centre in Cricklewood? That he is reading Jack Canfield's The Success Principles at the minute?
You want to know about the sessions he puts himself through on his own? That he is kind to little children and old ladies? Nah, just rewind a bit there, you say. Forget about the hits. Talk about the digs. Talk about the stuff even he says he isn't proud of. Throw that up on the table till we look at it.
What about breaking the jaw of Liam Foley of Ballylongford in a club game a few years ago? What about the provocation that led to him almost getting his ear split by a Cork player coming off the field after a league game around the same time? What about being dropped by Jack O'Connor because he couldn't trust him not to detonate on the field?
First you should know this. He learns. He moves on. There was a picture taken and published in a local paper last September after Paul Galvin won his third All-Ireland senior medal. You might have seen it? Galvin on the field in Croke Park hugging and being hugged by the first Kerry fan to have reached him. The fan was a man called Páidí Dineen.
Now hit rewind again. Go back to an under-14 hurling game in Lixnaw years and years ago.
Galvin, who is by upbringing and inclination a hurler, is playing at centre back. He is very small for the job, but outrageously talented. Lixnaw are losing and the ref has just given a free in.
And the little centre back puffs his chest and jabs his finger and with no expletive deleted or unused tells the referee what he thinks of the decision. He cringes when he thinks of it now, but that day sure he thought he was the first young fella ever to demur to a referee, thought he was the smartest kid on the block. He told him! And the referee showed him the line. His first sending off. The same ref would send Paul Galvin off another couple of times before he was out of his mid-teens.
The referee was Páidí Dineen.
There's something about Galvin, a passionate sincerity informing even his worse misdeeds. You could send him off three times for abusing you and still be first on the field to embrace him on a good day.
Galvin reckons he got sent off 15 times in that period. One day after a sending off he gave his gear, his stick and his helmet to his parents to bring home so he could go gallivanting with the lads. When he got home it was all left outside the back door for him. He would have to learn.
He did. He has to work on his discipline like he works on his shooting. Back in 2004, having been dropped by Jack O'Connor for the Munster semi-final with Cork, he got in for the final against, Limerick. He flaked a fella after 20 minutes but managed to stay on the field.
He realised though he could have and should have been sent off. In a tight game he could have been the difference.
"I realised I could cost Kerry games. My indiscipline. That day against Limerick there was a concerted effort for 20 minutes to wind us up. They were taking turns at it. I got involved. The boys went mad above in the stand. There was some ruaille buaille. I realised they had me where they wanted me. I said, 'Galvin, you are some f***ing eejit'. I really learned a lesson that day."
He slipped against Armagh in Croke Park in 2006 at a time when the game was in the balance and the same cold sweat poured down his neck. Kerry survived. He got back on the wagon. Learning.
And what about young Foley's jaw? "There was a bit of stuff going on there. I don't know what to say. He was a lad getting a bit carried away. I didn't mean to break his jaw either. I don't know if I would regret it. I haven't thought about it all that much since."
At the time though it exercised his imagination hugely. He incurred a six-month suspension. He heard about it one day in Tralee talking to a petrol attendant. "You're getting six months, I hear."
"Who told you that?"
"Sure, that's the word."
"Ah, not at all. The club say three months."
A couple of days later he got the call. That was that. Six months came down the tube. He felt that along the path from a punch thrown in a club game to a six-month suspension there were people eager to give him a kicking. He felt let down by certain people, heard little stories back about lads sticking their tuppence worth in. It got nasty. He took the names down as he heard them, wrote them in a little black book and looked through the list before big games in 2006, taking motivation from the roll call.
If that sounds dark and sinister, listen, it was just a way of taking a negative and getting something useful out of it. It's a trick he has. He sees the funny side of it all anyway. Life went on.
"You have to go back after all that. I don't know how to act around them. I'd be looking at this fella and that fella. Was he for me or against me? The usual parochial stuff. You don't know who you're not supposed to be talking to after a while. I'd see a fella coming towards me and be thinking, 'What side was he on? Sure I'll just ignore him anyway.'"
He is a positive person, he reckons, but in times of trouble he likes to surround himselfwith as much positivity as possible. He enjoys, for instance, his chats with Eamon Fitzmaurice, a man who could get rich supplying bespoke silver lining to dark clouds.
"I can ring Eamon and say, listen, something terrible has happened. I was in at a game I lamped a fella and now I'm getting six months and Fitzy will say, 'Sure he was looking to get lamped this long time. Six months! Wow! Imagine the shape you'll be in when you come back. You'll get the chance to do this and that and then you'll be back flying.' "
Changed your mind yet? Caught a sense of the honesty and the intense loyalty at work here?
Understand that, for all his differences, Paul Galvin is the same but with less fuss? All GAA is local and at the end of the day when you subtract the tats and the baleful stares, the disciplinary record and the unlikely upbringing in the true faith of hurling, when you take all those things away Galvin is a perfect example of Kerry's golden lineage, one of those players to whom Kerry turn occasionally to give something a little different.
From the Bomber, who took a couple of years of honing, to the Gooch, whose physique wouldn't have got him a trial in most counties, Kerry football has a genius for thinking outside the box. Galvin is one of those choices, the perfect riposte to the puke-football era.
Having been sprung from a hurling household he played football with Finuge but that was eight miles away and just as remote to his core passion as a kid. Galvin can remember standing in the field in Finuge listening to Jimmy Deenihan give advice. He knows he was about nine at the time, though perhaps Deenihan's outfit dates the occasion more precisely.
"I remember exactly what Jimmy was wearing. He had this awful shell tracksuit on, a pair of Adidas boots with a huge tongue on the front. And he was telling us the importance of foot-passing. He was a good player, far removed from the corner back he was for Kerry. He had a very precise style of kicking, always off the laces. I remember him telling us the importance of this style of kick pass."
Football was a curiosity. His youthful memories centre on trips to Tralee to see county hurling finals. His heroes were a few lads from around the club. Johnny Conway, a guy still involved in the club, a great goalkeeper, a Kerry hurling goalie. He always admired Johnny. Or Seán Flaherty. Seán was a corner forward, a very good hurler. He loved to watch him. And guys at other clubs. Over in Ballyduff, the Hennessys. He always liked them. Growing up those were the guys he looked up to.
Kerry football hardly existed until he saw the Kerry's Golden Years video. "Jack O'Shea to Páidí Ó Sé and Páidí Ó Sé to Jack O'Shea," he says, laughing. "Who were these fellas?"
He played the same game as them but it was as remote a thing in many ways as the scenes and the names on the video depicting Kerry's pomp.
He remembers one day in 1996 going with his buddy Trevor McKenna to watch the Kerry minors playing. On the way out the gate afterwards somebody passed a comment.
"I suppose the pair of ye'll be in here next year with the minors."
Ya what? It had never crossed his mind. Why would it? But he got a call from Charlie Nelligan a few months later, a call to go in for Kerry minor trials. So he played minor. A novelty he might tell grandchildren about one day.
When he was 21 or 22 and in UCC, doing well as a wing back with the college footballers, people began asking him if he was getting a look in for the Kerry seniors and if not why not. It took the question being asked to force him to wonder the same thing himself. Again the call came. He joined the Kerry panel under Páidí Ó Sé, but it was Jack O'Connor who invested the faith in him. Galvin bought into the cause.
"I grew up as a hurler, but, in my heart now, I am a Kerry footballer. I don't get the chance to hurl now.
"My heart is in the Kerry jersey, I am really proud of Kerry football and really proud to play with the lads that I am buddies with now. Hurling will always be there, but I take a lot of pride in Kerry football and I'm doing my best for it. I go back hurling every chance I get, but I am a Kerry footballer now."
Finuge made it a couple of years ago to an All- Ireland junior final and then last year surprised themselves by annexing a county title, the first since the Deenihan days. And thus the captaincy of Kerry was handed to Paul Galvin, a man perfumed with the whiff of cordite.
He feels the honour with a passion and a purity that becomes the heritage of Kerry football. Injury kept him in the solitary of physio until a fortnight ago and there is an ache in his heart for every chance he missed to lead a Kerry team out onto the field in the league.
The jersey and the friendships of the men who wear it have inspired him right from the beginning. He remembers when Jack O'Connor took him aside and told him he wasn't playing him in a Munster semi-final against Cork because he couldn't trust his discipline. He felt such an overwhelming sense of hurt he couldn't eat the team meal or speak. He pushed some food around a plate and then got up and left.
He thought that summer he wouldn't make it and by then he wanted desperately to make it. He got taken off against Clare with a good 10 to 15 minutes left. Got dropped for the Cork game.
He issued an unwise flaking in the Limerick match and his marker Stephen Lucey got man of the match. He knew from what he was feeling that he was now a football man and it mattered to him in a way that went to the core of him.
He laughs. The journey. He knows that at home there are people who would be delighted to see Kerry depart the All-Ireland championships early in any given year, allowing Galvin to return to hurling with Lixnaw. He was part of a golden generation within the club which won everything up through the grades and whose third county title last year represents half the total the club have won in their long and epic history.
"I played in the county final last year. I came on with 15 minutes to go. I stood in for the team photo at the start and I was there in my tracksuit. That was a killer. The buddies I grew up with, they are still playing, but at least they play football too. I can get my game with themplaying football."
That's Paul Galvin. If he's honest he enjoys the odd scrape. And he doesn't worry about pleasing you. Honouring the jersey, honouring the friendships, honouring the family, meeting his expectations of himself - these are things that matter to him.
So this is his time. For a team emerging steadily from the shadows cast by the men of the golden era, for a time when change and tradition have to rub along, for a period when football's constant evolution has once again seen Kerry figure out the way to be cutting edge, he seems the perfect choice as captain and emblem.
Still got a problem with Paul Galvin?