Jim Brogan recalls that the last time Paddy Cullen joined his old Dublin team-mates was for last year’s 50th anniversary of the extraordinary, breakthrough success of 1974 when Kevin Heffernan’s team emerged from a lifetime of mediocrity not only to snatch an All-Ireland but to begin a record-equalling sequence of six finals.
“That made it a very special day for everybody that he turned up,” Brogan says of their meeting.
He looked in good shape for a man carrying the burden of serious illness. “Well, Paddy would not appear in public without looking well. That was part of his character.”
Brogan, a member of the Dublin panel in the 1970s and one of Cullen’s selectors together with Pat O’Neill 20 years later, remembers how the senior players were so influential in those years.
“They were made up of a group of elders, who had been playing for Dublin before 1974 – a bit like wandering around in the desert – and they were the core, the essence of the team when successful. It was peculiar in that you had this cohort of blokes whose championship experience up to ’74 had been defeat, defeat, defeat.
“They were, up to then, basically nonentities in the sporting world. Everybody knows about Paddy’s save from Liam Sammon [in the 1974 All-Ireland] but it was probably the most important moment of the year. Where would the team have gone if that penalty was scored and Galway had won the final?
“What demons would have been released in players’ minds? That penalty was a turning point. If you had said then that this team would play in six successive All-Ireland finals and win three, the attitude would have been, ‘you’re hallucinating’.”
The Cullen persona was so recognisable down the years – extrovert, making wisecracks, apparently not taking himself too seriously – that it is easy to forget he was a driven player, a serious performer with four All Stars.
After the 1977 All-Ireland final, Dublin having won with a fair bit to spare over Armagh, the late Mick Dunne was on his usual beat for RTÉ, interviewing inside the dressingroom.
Having watched it at the time, the abiding memory is how furious Cullen was at conceding three goals – regardless of winning back-to-back All-Irelands. The mask slipped, revealing the competitor rather than the quipster everyone was used to seeing.
“He wasn’t some guy who arrived in Parnell Park,” says Brogan, “threw his bag up and cracked a few jokes, went out and spun the hour before coming back in. He wasn’t like that. He was very focused, maybe not in the data-driven way guys are now but he thought a lot about it and how to improve.”
One of his best-known anecdotes, told again on Friday’s Morning Ireland by an emotional Alan Larkin, was the one about Cullen, who had been a replacement on an early All Stars tour, pointing to the sky at a passing plane saying that a year later Dublin would be making that trip to the US.
As a yarn its resilience is that it resonated with all the players, even though it was probably intended more as a self-deprecating quip than inspired prophecy.
“Everyone there would have remembered that,” says Brogan. “It was so fanciful for this particular group. It gives an insight into the sort of guy he was. Even then, he was an elder statesman for most of us. He meant it as a joke, but it became more and more real as time went by and the team progressed.
“It’s funny that anecdote is one of the first things that comes to mind when you think back to that first year.”
He remembers the two years in management in the early 1990s. Cullen’s upbeat personality was the accompaniment to some achievement, winning a league for the first time in 13 years and a Leinster after a seven-year wait. Both years ended in disappointment, including the 1991 epic four-match first round against Meath.
“They’re the positives,” recalls Brogan. “The four-in-a-row thing was extraordinary for everyone involved, although it didn’t turn out well for us. Go to any Meath event and they only play the four-in-a-row even though they were in All-Ireland finals. For a rookie management being involved in that was fairly challenging.
“I know him as a footballer but he also had businesses. In a way his pub was very much Paddy. People would go there to see Paddy Cullen and meet him. If you said ‘howya’ to him, he would open up his eyes and for however long the conversation, you were the most important person in his world at that time.
“I’m sure success made a big change to his own personal life in terms of who he was and what he was and the resulting opportunities, but he was a good guy. There are anecdotes that when he was in sales, he was really understanding about other people’s personal situations and that was one of his special qualities. He could show empathy that others might not be able to.
“Really, he was just a lovely guy, one of those fellas.”
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