He forgets nothing. You’ll see him about Clones on Sunday, dapper still, sallow, smiling: without question the most famous and ultimately the original face of Donegal football. He skipped into his eightieth year – that birthday occasion will fall on December 1st of this year – by recovering from a serious health scare which he recounts now, sitting in his conservatory on a bright breezy morning. The family home is on Station Road, in the heart of Bundoran and it was from there that he made an unexpected midnight trip to Derry. It happened just before Christmas last – on the Saturday, in fact, which marked the first anniversary of the death of his brother Pat.
“I sold the lotto tickets for the club, as usual. And it was also the anniversary of Hugh Daly from the West End, who was my daughter-in-law’s father. But I didn’t go up to the Northern (hotel) with them. And I was at home I got a sensation which I thought might be a hernia, but it started to travel up to my chest.”
He phoned Raymie Daly – Hugh’s son – who was up in the Northern and who works with the health service. He’d had a few drinks so took a taxi down and within minutes had an ambulance called. “Michael Milly’s son was in the ambulance. They got this boy in from Kinlough to give me morphine and away we went to Altnagelvin hospital. We were there at half past two in the morning. Out of the taxi. On to a trolley. Fifteen minutes later, one stent in. On a bed and back to Sligo hospital the following day for one day.
“And that was it done. Because the boys responded so quickly. Poor Cautie got an awful scare. I can still see her on the Station Road in pyjamas, in tears. She says, `you’ll come back’. I said, `I’ll be all right’. But they kept giving me morphine.” He pauses to remember the gravity of the night and then smiles as another salient fact comes to mind.
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“An hour and five minutes to Altnagelvin,” he announces, and he can’t help but be a bit proud of the rallying skills of the ambulance driver.
Spend any time with Brian McEniff and you’ll find a world that is parsed into eight decades of unconsciously collating names, places, people, dates, events, Gaelic football and business connections, stories, locality and family into a formidably sharp lexis-nexis that forms part of his social history. He’s surely one of the very few people on earth who’d take time to figure out who-is-who in the midst of a heart attack. He commands an absurdly vivid recall of . . . everything: conversations, games both obscure and vivid from 50 and 60 years ago and feels almost honour-bound to place people within the context of their world.
On Friday, for instance, he and Cautie headed up the Northern hotel to celebrate the wedding of their grand-daughter Shauna. He hoped to go dancing for his first time in a while. Maybe play the piano late on. He’s a pioneer but he is a night owl, too. When he’s explaining who the groom is he effortlessly summons an image from one of the many teams he coached.
“A lovely fella . . . his father was John Todd Ward. He was the best underage footballer I ever had. That includes Seanie [Brian’s eldest son] and Fintan Lynch and the whole goddamn lot. He was just a bit small and slight, so he never played much after 16. But he was super. And then he would go on and play soccer with Cliffony Celtic.”
He has an endless mental Filofax on players. The last team McEniff coached was the Bundoran U-14s, three years ago, when he was 76. In years to come that side can count themselves as the last of a gilded bunch.
McEniff created the modern Donegal football tradition. He was player-manager on the first Donegal team to win an Ulster championship in 1972, was an All-Star in 1972, was player manager in 1974, spent a haunted night on a park bench in Dublin in August 1983, hours after Galway had edged them out of an All-Ireland semi-final. And, of course, he was the manager of the team who won Donegal’s first All-Ireland 30 seasons ago.
He’s been exiled and restored more often than there is room to recount here, and it’s arguable that his finest hour was in 2003 when he took a freewheeling Donegal bunch that literally nobody wanted to manage – “and I went back. Like a fool”– and guided them to an All-Ireland semi-final. The players of that generation often talk of receiving calls from the manager at all hours: he operated as a patriarchal figure. There’s very little evidence of a Gaelic games background at all in the house and although we are ostensibly here to chat about the defining summer of 1992, it’s not easy because he is impatient when it comes to old news.
“I keep telling people, `forget about the past’. I would have hardly any jersey of any kind left. I couldn’t tell you where the All-Star award is. I think Seanie might have broken it when he was very young. I’d have the odd photograph.”
The one concession he makes is the All-Ireland medal from 1992.
“I would have that, yeah. Beside the bed. What made the All-Ireland medal for me was that the boys bought it for me. They all chipped in to purchase one for me. I wasn’t entitled to one from the GAA at the time. It was a bit crazy. It may have changed since, I don’t know.”
Of all the teams he has managed, when he is talking about “the boys” he means the 1992 bunch, some of whom are hitting 60 now.
“I just love the boys. The unfortunate thing is me and [Martin] McHugh haven’t spoken for15 years, which is rather sad. I don’t really know what is behind it. I have tried my best. And I would love to see hm. Because I would think of the good times. When I do think about 1992, I remember I ran on to the pitch after the whistle, and I hugged him. And where it started with Martin was, I went to the county final in 1980 and saw him play. I did something my wife told me not to do. I went off to a county board meeting to elect a county manager. She said, `don’t come back if you take that job’.”
He laughs. He took the job. He did come back. The Bundoran team was due to travel to America: a reward for winning the county championship of 1979. McEniff skipped it so he could go manage Donegal playing Tipperary in Ballyshannon. A young McHugh kicked 0-9. McEniff dismissed all counsel that he was too small to make it at the senior county grade.
“He was special. He was. The only thing ahead of him ever is Murphy. And I always remember what Larry Tompkins said when I asked him about Murphy a few years ago. ‘The best footballer in Ireland for the last 10 years’.”
They held an informal reunion a few weeks ago to mark the 30th year of their All-Ireland win and he was in his element.
“We had a lovely day. I remember after 1992, my wife said to me, “your head wasn’t good.” I said I did my best to keep my head on my shoulders. And she said, `well, it wasn’t good’. Because Cautie would tell you the truth. It obviously changed me somewhat. But I wasn’t long getting back to it because I had to. I had a family and a business to run.”
The extraordinary part of McEniff’s story is that he somehow found room and energy to build the Donegal football tradition while steadily establishing the family brand in hospitality, with six hotels now operating in the northwest area.
“I didn’t set out to do that,” he says, and returns to what was a seminal time in his life: working in Toronto, Canada, in the mid-1960s, spiritually removed from Ireland and receiving letters from his father, John, many of which elaborated on his concern over the debt for the 22-room Holyrood hotel which had bloomed from the original guesthouse on the main street.
“He had great penmanship for a man who didn’t have formal education. And this debt was gnawing and gnawing at him. I was working like a dog in Canada, I was working two jobs. And I used to send him home money. But still it was gnawing at him and eventually it gave him a stroke from which he took a heart attack and died.”
He gave up football for a time to devote himself to the family business –- his mother Elizabeth, an, energetic born businesswoman from Carrickmore urged him to go back. Education was important in the house. And hard work. His older brother Sean led the way in local business. Over the decades the brothers expanded and chased the local tourism industry during the volatile years when holidaying in south Donegal was not a natural choice. When he wanted to expand the Holyrood –- a ballroom and more beds – most banks would not entertain him, and he ended up meeting a man in Dublin.
“A boy called Charlie. And my contact there was he used to fish the Bundrowes. And he used to come into the Holyrood for breakfast in the morning. Money then was 8.5 per cent. And I paid him 12.5 percent. And I opened it the night Padraig McShea [his former Donegal team-mate] got married. I left the wedding early and opened the hotel. And three weeks later the banks went on strike for six months. And I used to go down to meet Joe Brennan at Laghey and he collected the weekend money and lodge it with Finance Ireland. I had two summers behind me. So I fell on my feet.”
His brother Sean, who died in 2017, was a gregarious and limitlessly energetic figure, developing hotels and the local amusement scene and a canny local politician with national connections. Together they were a force of nature in reimagining Bundoran from a fading 19th century coastal retreat into a viable tourist proposition. They gave employment in the locality during decades when the State offered little or nothing. All the brothers were close: Sean left a big void.
“He is an awful loss to here. Sean was like PV Doyle or one of those men. He could just see a situation. Like, it was him who came up with the idea to buy the Great Northern. I was up to my arse in debt, and he came in a fortnight before Christmas. I tried to run him. And when he built the amusements, he knocked a beautiful café. To the ground! Rubble. And knocked our home house in the process.
“Sean had…no fear. We played Mountcharles one time when I was in boarding school. This fella made a swinging kick at me and missed. I went in and scored a point and by the time I came back out, Sean had come out up from right half-back with this beret on his head. He had floored the other boy and was shouting, “Don’t you touch the cub.” He feared nobody. Big men, small men. The only game he really played was table tennis. He was an excellent table tennis player. Very aggressive.”
McEniff still keeps an eye on the business but in the main his sons and daughters run the hotels – Cautie and he have a family of 10. He enjoys the buzz of it. Bundoran is his world. He walks Rougey, the spectacular ocean path. He talks with Martin Carney at least once a week by phone. Battles a sweet tooth. Fields endless phone calls. Walks up to the pitch on Bayview Avenue to watch training.
You’ll find him selling club lotto tickets outside SuperValu. Doesn’t golf. On Sunday, he will head to Clones with McShea, his lifelong friend and former teammate. They are thick as thieves and have in common an eye for a good suit and a wicked sense of humour.
“I think there is 14 of the St Joseph’s team from that started in ‘63 to finish in ‘76 dead,” he marvels. “There’s five of the 1972 team gone.”
He names them all and could give you chapter on verse on their lives. Those names will probably come up in conversation when McEniff and McShea set off. But not in a morose way. They will bomb happily through the day. There are still so many stories to tell and still Donegal to fret about. Brian McEniff will be in the crowd and in his element.
An hour and five to Altnagelvin. Thirty years to 1992. That busy mind flying, always, in every direction.
