Keith Dugganon how history and its proximity to the town of Killarney have imbued Fitzgerald Stadium with a magical aura
In July 1982, a number of Cork footballers were rattling down the road to Killarney. It was one of those indolent, feel-good Irish summer days and having engaged and worried Kerry in the drawn Munster final in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, the group were in fine form.
Dinny Allen was driving and the radio was on. After a time, they heard the mischievous voice of Mick O'Dwyer imparting something urgent. This was the height of Kerry's pomp, when the five-in-a-row seemed predestined. But the Cork men were in ebullient mood, as they knew they had the champions in trouble in the drawn game.
O'Dwyer sounded gloomy about Kerry's prospects on the radio. John O'Keeffe was definitely out. Pat Spillane was doubtful. Mikey Sheehy had been struck down with flu. Allen turned to Colman Corrigan, the youngest player in the car, and stuck out his hand.
"Congratulations, Corrie, boy. You are after winning your first Munster medal. They are not going to turn up at all."
Corrigan had first played in Fitzgerald Stadium three years earlier as a minor. Leo Goold - father of Fintan who will play tomorrow - had once told him about the sensational atmosphere when Cork won the 1972 Munster clash between the counties.
Killarney was comic-book busy, as though the pubs and restaurants were on the point of bursting from the crowds that settled in the town for the weekend. Goold said there was no place like it for atmosphere. It felt like that in 1982 when Cork took the field, ready to face down Kerry.
"We took the field with a massive sense of expectation and you can sense that all over Killarney," Corrigan recalled of 1982 this week.
"Particularly when you approached the ground, the energy around the place was something else. Cork people come down and make a weekend of it and the town is packed. The ground is this kind of amphitheatre. Like you can hear what people are saying in the crowd in a way you never would in Croke Park. And the funny thing is, it is not that intimidating.
"If you did a survey of Cork players, I would say that a vast majority would enjoy coming to Fitzgerald Stadium. But in 1982 the whole thing got to us. And we got the shit hammered out of us, basically."
That was Kerry's eighth successive Munster title. Just 17,000 people showed up the following year to witness a last-minute goal by Tadhg Murphy on a wet day in Cork city that halted Kerry's period of dominance.
Apart from those isolated periods when Kerry football was low or when Cork produced superb teams, Kerry were the perpetual favourites in Munster. But that never detracted from the enthusiasm or the intrigue of Munster championship matches when the counties met in Killarney.
"You take the likes of Dinny Allen," says Corrigan. "It was wasn't until 1983 that that generation got their first medal. Tom Creedon, my own club-mate, who played in nine Munster finals and died tragically in 1983, never got a Munster medal.
"There were Cork players who would have given anything to have beaten Kerry. When I won my first and my fourth, both meant the same. I think even guys like Danny Cullotty and Barry Coffey who won seven provincial medals would say every single one is ferociously precious."
Dara Ó Cinnéide played his first senior championship match in Killarney in 1995. It was a rare heatwave summer, but the atmosphere in Fitzgerald Stadium that afternoon was chill as news broke that Paddy Ban Brosnan had passed away. It was, of course, an impoverished period for football in the Kingdom, whose teams had failed to win an All-Ireland since 1986 and were regularly forced to play second fiddle to Cork.
"We went in there hopeful of beating a Cork team that had been in an All-Ireland final two years earlier," Ó Cinnéide says now. Cork, however, won by 0-15 to 1-9.
"What I remember most about the game is that Colin Corkery was taking a free from the sideline and he had to ask some of the crowd to move back to give him room. The place was always crammed. There always seemed to be more than the official capacity. I know that in 1976, they had to get a lot of supporters to sit on the sideline because they were worried about a crush and there were huge crowds in the mid-1990s as well."
Training and playing with Kerry for over 10 years meant Ó Cinnéide grew as familiar with the Killarney ground as though it was a second home. It was a place of ritual. The Kerry dressingroom is closest to the gate. It was fitted with ice baths in the 1990s, a luxury Ó Cinnéide cannot be sure was ever extended to visiting teams.
Bernie O'Connor, who passed away last year, was the groundsman throughout Ó Cinnéide's Kerry career.
"As a free-taker, the field was immaculate because it wasn't really cut for hurling so there was a bit of give underneath the ball. And Bernie worked as a psychiatric nurse in St Finian's, but he was fiercely proud of the pitch. I know that if ever anyone in RTÉ ever said the field was looking a bit poorly, he would take it very personally."
The strong association between Fitzgerald Stadium and the adjacent psychiatric hospital was recently brought to light in Weeshie Fogarty's study of the godfather of Kerry football, Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan.
Fogarty grew up a stone's throw from the stadium and, like many people, was deeply influenced and impressed by O'Sullivan when he went to work under him as a psychiatric nurse in St Finian's.
Fitzgerald Stadium was one of those unique triumphs of vision and hard graft that distinguished the GAA as an amateur organisation. Dr Crokes formed a committee in 1932 with a view to selecting a suitable site.
The pillars and concrete walls were designed by Michael Reidy, the principal of the Killarney Tech. John Galvin, the town surveyor, provided the necessary levels.
Dr O'Sullivan also got around 50 patients working daily on the project for the next four years in what was a pioneering example of occupational therapy. It fostered a sense of community and purpose among the inmates.
"I think it was an amazing thing," says Fogarty now. "I suppose life in the hospital wasn't that stimulating for many patients and to involve people who were closed off from society in a project of this magnitude was unprecedented really. And I think their contribution had largely been forgotten about."
O'Sullivan suggested as much in biographical notes he had written and which are enclosed in Fogarty's book, A Man Before His Time.
'It [ Fitzgerald Stadium] remains as a permanent memorial to the great footballer it commemorates, but even more so to the gigantic work put into it by scores of patients, who spent four industrious years in its development.
The whole story of its construction has the makings of a modern fairy-tale. It has been necessary to put all this on record, because it is remarkable with what brevity can memory be clothed in this mundane world of ours.'
A fear that O'Sullivan's mammoth cultural and sporting contribution to Kerry was being forgotten provoked Fogarty into researching his life story.
O'Sullivan passed away in 1966, just four years after his retirement.
In addition to training Kerry to eight senior All-Ireland championships, he had a remarkable intuition for sports training and managed to write a seminal book on GAA training, The Art and Science of Gaelic Football, while devoting himself to the rehabilitative process in St Finian's.
Indeed, the hospital seemed spiritually linked with Fitzgerald Stadium during that period. There is a marvellous photograph of O'Sullivan in his suit watching Kevin Coffey and Pat Ahern duel for the rights to a high ball at a Kerry training session while the steep roofs of the hospital loom in the background.
Convenience and cost were probably the chief concerns in choosing a location for the ground. But the proximity of Fitzgerald Stadium to the town is what gives the place its magical aura.
Fogarty still likes to walk through town around midday on the day of Cork-Kerry championship meeting, just listening to the people. Eamon Horan, a long-time GAA correspondent with the Kerryman newspaper, believes that each championship clash between the counties felt like a new and complete story. The first games he watched still stand out.
"It was a perennial rivalry. You would watch these teams parading around the field and the view was inspiring. I was there as a spectator in 1953 when Tom Ash and Seán Kelly got two goals for Kerry. Two years later, they were back there for another cliffhanger and Kerry won by two points. Dr O'Sullivan said the advantage was "hometown". The following year, an Army officer, Niall Fitzgerald, kicked a huge match-winning point for Cork that landed on the roof of the net. I think the Cork-Kerry games in Killarney down the years are a highlight of the GAA calendar."
In 2002, on the day that Ireland lost on penalties to Spain in the second round of the World Cup, Kerry and Cork met for what went down as the wettest Munster football final ever.
Dara Ó Cinnéide had never seen the field more sodden. It was a poor game that ended in a draw and two nights later Micheál Ó Sé, the father of the three brothers who backboned the senior team, passed away. That sad event eclipsed the importance of the replay.
That game stands out for its sheer misery. But as Ó Cinnéide says, "a hot day in Killarney is hotter than anywhere."
Colman Corrigan's senior debut in 1982 happened to be a scorcher as well. He reckons the humidity in Fitzgerald Stadium is strangely intense on hot days. Trounced by Kerry, the Cork men were parched when they made it back to the dressingrooms.
The showers were broken and so bucket after bucket of ice-cold water had been left in the dressingroom for the visitors to make their ablutions. Corrigan was disappointed with the result but he was still kind of thrilled by the novelty of the whole experience and he watched as Declan Barron, the classy full forward from Cork's celebrated 1973 vintage and kind of a god to Corrigan, made his entrance.
"This was a roasting hot day and lads were lashing into the buckets. Sure there was deep heat and the odd sod falling into the buckets. And Barron came in anyway not realising what these buckets were for or if he did, he was too thirsty to care. Over he went and took a big swig out of one of them. It never seemed to do him any harm."
Five years later, Cork again drew with Kerry in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, but this time a late Mikey Sheehy goal had saved the pulse of the aged All-Ireland champions.
"We made up our minds that day in the dressingroom we were going to finish the job in Killarney. We could not wait to get down there. We just blew Kerry away. The match was over at half-time but at the final whistle, the crowd that came on to the field and the scenes were unreal. It was an August bank holiday so people were staying around. And that night there was the sense that this was the final nail in the coffin of a great Kerry team."
Corrigan's career was sadly compromised after he tore his cruciate ligament on an All-Star tour to -New York. Although he missed out on Cork's 1989 All-Ireland success, he managed to return to win another Munster medal and an All-Ireland. He will be back in Fitzgerald Stadium tomorrow as an adviser on Billy Morgan's backroom team.
Ó Cinnéide waited until 1998 for his first championship victory in Killarney. Kerry were the reigning All-Ireland champions and a tense semi-final encounter was defined by a Maurice Fitzgerald goal.
"There were accusations that Fitzy had done a bit of a Séamus Darby on Mark O'Connor. It came from a long ball sent in from Liam Flaherty and they said Fitzy gave a bit of a nudge. And he had been have a terribly quiet game since this but sure he finished the goal as only he can."
There is an argument that the potency of the Munster final has, like all the provincial contests, been diluted by the qualifying system. Ó Cinnéide though, is not so sure.
Kerry have not actually won a Munster final in the stadium since 1986. But neither have Cork won there since the day Paddy Ban Brosnan slipped away.
"I am sure Kerry won't want to be the first home team to lose there in 12 years," Ó Cinnéide says. "And I imagine they would prefer not to be going through the back door route this year. It will be the same for Cork. This will be a typical Killarney game."
