For years, David Burke’s mortality as an intercounty player has been harassed by events and stalked by assumptions. First, he fell out of favour for two seasons in his early 30s, an awkward time when usually there’s no talking to the tide. Then he crocked his knee and was stranded for a summer as the ship sailed without him. Last year? He was sent off against Dublin with Galway’s season hanging by a thread. The presumptive endings kept mounting. Surely now? Not now.
Other stuff was circumstantial. For three years he was the oldest player on the oldest panel in the championship. The gap to the second oldest continued to grow. During the winter Galway grasped the need for renewal and 57 players were auditioned by the new management. They said they were “looking to the future.” Three more starters from the 2017 All-Ireland final were let go. Burke turned 35 in January. They were desperate to keep him.
He was like Wile E Coyote, the indestructible character from the Roadrunner cartoons. Remember? It didn’t matter how many times he fell to the bottom of the canyon.
Whether Burke was captain or not over the years, his influence in the group regulated the temperature. He was a hedge fund for trust. Burke was personable and smart and hard and classy and the Galway dressingroom was not always teeming with strong personalities. As a leader, he was irresistibly attractive.
“He always had that air about him,” says Fergal Moore, the former Galway captain. “He was quite young, say, in 2012 [when Galway reached the All-Ireland final] but he was one of the leaders driving it on. Even his clubmates on the panel looked to him for guidance and to set the tone. It was striking for a young lad to be able to command the respect of his clubmates like that.
“If you came to any St Thomas’ match in Galway over the last 10 years, when they went on their big run, [seven titles in eight years] he was as much manager as player, calling the shots on the pitch and organising. That’s just the way he is.”
Kevin Lally worked with him for three years with St Thomas’ and another three years under Henry Shefflin with Galway. What he saw was a lightness of touch. Gavin Lee was invited on to the Galway panel as a teenager during Shefflin’s time. On his first night at training Burke walked with him from the dressingroom to the pitch and paired off with him for a puck before the session began.
“They had never spoken to each other before in their lives,” says Lally. “It was more or less, ‘Come on, you come with me, I’ll put you under my wing.’ Made him feel welcome, made him feel at ease.”
Burke was captain when Galway won the 2017 All-Ireland, their first in 29 years. Micheál Donoghue took over as manager at the end of 2015 after a player heave against Anthony Cunningham. Dissent had been simmering for months. In a secret ballot after the championship, 26 players voted for change and six voted in favour of the status quo. Burke and Joe Canning were among the six.
Burke was part of a leadership group, locked in shuttle diplomacy between Cunningham, the panel and the county board. The complication for Burke was that Cunningham was a clubmate and a good friend of Burke’s dad. Burke’s loyalty to him was unwavering. Within the group, though, it left no stain on his status.
“That’s an understated part of what Micheál did when he came in,” says Moore, “but it was a huge thing, to be able to stitch all that back together. He made Davy captain and Joe vice-captain and that wouldn’t have succeeded only the lads had the credit in the bank and they had the respect of everyone. The choice of captain and vice-captain was a central part of stitching it back together.”
During Donoghue’s four years in charge Burke was Galway’s captain and they were “very close,” says Canning. That relationship ran into turbulence, though, after Burke was dismissed on a straight red card against Dublin in Pearse Stadium last summer.
Shefflin was incensed by the decision and by Donoghue’s behaviour as Dublin manager. In his post-match press conference, he spoke about “the opposing manager in the linesman’s ear, telling him it should be a red card”.
Donoghue took deliberate steps to bandage the wound before it festered. “Micheál reached out to him,” says Canning. “I think trying to get Davy back for another year was one of the first things Micheál did [when he was reappointed to the Galway job].”
Burke’s All-Ireland winning speech in 2017 lasted eight minutes and was one of the most striking in modern times. With the help of his mother, he wrote it three days after the All-Ireland semi-final and stored it away in the event of a happy ending.
Four years earlier they had lost their team-mate Niall Donohue to suicide. Burke and Donohue were the same age and had been friends since they were children. In the speech, he didn’t just remember Donohue but he took time to laud the work of Pieta and the Charity Chariot.
Watch his body language. He’s always looking out for others to see if they’re doing their job ... People like that are very hard to come by
— Joe Canning
“The night before the final David went up to Rakerin cemetery to leave two sliotars at his friend’s grave, before going out and giving an exhibition in Croke Park,” said Conor Whelan in The Sports Chronicle, years later. Whelan was Donohue’s cousin.
“And then with the speech he put the subject of mental health into the consciousness of every person looking in from all over the world. We all have a responsibility to raise awareness around mental health, fight to eradicate the stigma that is attached to suicide and to address the silence that can follow far too often. David’s speech on the highest platform of them all shattered the silence.”
When he became captain Burke wanted to create a different atmosphere in the dressingroom: better relationships, more connections, far beyond the send button on a phone screen and the empty calories of social media.
“I definitely wanted to look at this thing of WhatsApp groups and, you know, are we just communicating for the sake of it? This year, definitely the older lads in the team were sitting down with lads and just talking to them. No matter what it was about – work, home, family, anything. Just talking to them about something,” Burke said to Malachy Clerkin, a few months after the All-Ireland.
For a captain of a GAA team, none of that stuff is contained in the brief. Burke was guided by his nature.
When Shane O’Neill succeeded Donoghue, Burke fell out of favour, suddenly and steeply. In 2020 he started two championship matches on the bench and was replaced at half-time in the other two; a year later he came on before half-time against Dublin and played no part against Waterford. When Shefflin arrived, though, he resuscitated Burke’s career.
“We wanted him around as much as we could,” says Damien Joyce, who captained Galway years ago and was a selector under Shefflin. “His positivity around the place, particularly with the younger players, we felt would be really important. He’s able to bridge a lot of different players and generations. If you talk to anybody who has been in a dressingroom with him they’ll tell you the same thing – it’s his presence.”
On the team, he was restored to the role of field general and in the summer of 2022, he reached 64 championship appearances, a record for a Galway player.
“His hurling intelligence is way beyond others,” says Canning. “It’s very hard to explain that on paper. He sees things before they happen. Watch his body language. He’s always looking out for others to see if they’re doing their job. If there’s a free he’s organising other lads to make sure we’re set up for the puck-out. He’s micromanaging during the game. People like that are very hard to come by.”
Burke tore his ACL at the beginning of Shefflin’s second season. The speed of his recovery was staggering. He recovered to play for St Thomas’ in October, less than seven months after the surgery; three months later he led them to the All-Ireland title. Burke was man of the match in the final, just as he had been in the 2017 All-Ireland final with Galway and the 2011 Fitzgibbon Cup final with UL.
“It’s something we would have always said in St Thomas’,” says Lally. “Big players will have big games.”
Not finished yet.
