Páidí Ó Sé couldn’t sleep on the night of the 1997 All-Ireland final. He had just led Kerry to their first title in 11 years, ending the longest losing streak in their history, but the day was incomplete. At about 3am, he left his room in the Tara Towers Hotel on Dublin’s southside and went to the Burlington Hotel in search of Mick O’Dwyer. There, they sat and drank tea until dawn.
“It was as enjoyable a couple of hours as I have ever spent in my life,” said Ó Sé to reporters later that morning.
Kerry had not won an All-Ireland since O’Dwyer’s last title in 1986, and though his departure from the role had come with some sourness, he retained a ceremonial status as Kerry football’s secular pope. Ó Sé was looking for benediction.
“Deep down,” Ó Sé wrote in his autobiography, “I felt Dwyer knew I was the man to turn Kerry around.”
“The Páidí-Micko dynamic was funny that time,” says Dara Ó Cinnéide, the former Kerry captain, who played in that All-Ireland, “because Páidí revered Micko. There was that relationship there. You saw it with Pat Spillane again during the week [after O’Dwyer’s death]. It was like he was a father. They were looking for his approval.”
In the Marco Polo phase of his coaching career, O’Dwyer spent 15 seasons in Leinster with Laois, Wicklow, and Kildare (twice). In that time, three of his biggest games were against teams managed by Ó Sé, first with Kerry and then with Westmeath. Less than 12 months after they raised a teacup to Kerry’s All-Ireland, Kerry met Kildare in the 1998 All-Ireland semi-final.
“Each of these Kerrymen will know full well that tomorrow’s game will take a heavy toll on the losing manager,” wrote Eugene McGee in the Irish Independent that weekend. Ó Sé was left holding the tab.
“He gave an interview to Raidió na Gaeltachta when Micko was 75 in 2011 – the year before Páidí himself died,” says Ó Cinnéide, “and he said he didn’t enjoy it. I remember Páidí was nervous at the time. I don’t think we were going that well either. They had massive support and you were hearing things that people in Waterville were supporting Kildare. Whether that’s true or not, I’m sure they were supporting Micko.
“He just felt the narrative was all about the master and the pupil. And then the master wins by a point. We were reigning All-Ireland champions going into that game and came out with nothing. It hurt Páidí, the perception that he had been outsmarted.”
Though they were both superstitious men, Ó Sé would yield to nobody in his devotion to piseogs. In Croke Park he knew that O’Dwyer favoured the dugout that was nearest to the Canal End and Ó Sé made it his business to colonise it; before the minor match even started, Kerry gear was deposited in the dugout.
Remarkably, it made no difference. That day, Ó Sé shivered in O’Dwyer’s long shadow.
“You know, I maintain that, had anyone else been managing that Kildare team in 1998, we’d have beaten them by seven or eight points,” wrote Ó Sé in his autobiography. “As the game got tighter, I struggled on the line. Hesitant with switches, with changes. Dwyer had me.
“Dwyer didn’t give a fiddler’s f**k that it was Kerry. This was one of the best days of his life. Make no mistake about that.”
In their long personal relationship, there were other rooms and corridors. Ó Sé broke on to the Kerry team in 1975, O’Dwyer’s first year in charge, bristling with coltish power. Later in his career, Ó Sé used to gain weight during the winter and suffer for his excesses when training resumed, but O’Dwyer adored him for his passion and his cutting.
“In training sessions, he made Mick O’Dwyer’s job very easy because he was driving everybody else on,” wrote Jack O’Shea, years ago. “We would start off with two laps of the field but the last 200 yards of that would become a sprint and that was down to Páidí. He lifted the tempo, he wanted to be in front and nobody dared pass him out. At team meetings I think O’Dwyer used Ó Sé at times to rise other fellas and to get on to other fellas. Páidí was always outspoken at team meetings, never afraid to say something.
“Páidí had a great rapport with O’Dwyer. O’Dwyer never referred to him as `Páidí‘, it was always `Sé‘. At training, Páidí would always be looking at O’Dwyer to see if he was keeping an eye on him. Even telling a joke in the dressing-room, Páidí would throw a glance across at Micko. They had great eye contact. They didn’t need words; the eye contact sent all the messages. Bomber [Liston] and Micko were fairly close as well, but there was a lot between Micko and Páidí.”
Their friendship, though, flew into turbulence when Ó Sé was dropped for the 1988 Munster final against Cork. Dinny Allen scored the decisive goal in a one-point game and Ó Sé immediately said to O’Dwyer that it would never have happened if he had been playing.
Liam Higgins, one of O’Dwyer’s selectors, was critical of the manager in an explosive interview on Raidió na Gaeltachta, and according to O’Dwyer’s first autobiography with Owen McCrohan, he blamed Ó Sé for putting Higgins up to it. Ó Sé denied the charge.
In any case, they fell out. O’Dwyer said on the Late Late Show in 2012, that they didn’t speak for two years. In an earlier interview Ó Sé claimed that they didn’t speak for five years. Eventually, they came to their senses.
“I was giving myself 25,000 reasons why I should have started [against Cork in 1988],” said Ó Sé in Marooned, the Loosehorse television documentary about his first season as Westmeath manager. “But it took me five years to tell myself that he was right. I was going badly in training, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.”
The last match of O’Dwyer’s second stint as Kildare manager was against Kerry in the 2002 qualifiers: Kerry beat them by double scores, 2-10 to 1-5. O’Dwyer went into the Kerry dressingroom afterwards and complimented them on a “wonderful display of football, as good as I have seen from any Kerry team in a long time”.
In his column in the Irish Examiner two days later, however, O’Dwyer said that three Kerry players were lacking fitness and that they couldn’t be happy with only scoring 1-3 in the second half. “I don’t think anyone in Kerry will be getting carried away by their victory on Saturday night,” he wrote.
“That was the rogue in Micko,” says John O’Keeffe, laughing. Maybe O’Dwyer had changed his mind.
O’Keeffe had been one of O’Dwyer’s greatest players and was part of the Kerry management team that season. One of O’Dwyer’s sons, John, was a selector too. In a myriad of unspoken ways, O’Dwyer’s influence permeated the air.
“When Páidí took over Kerry [in late 1995] we were short of confidence and he consciously went out of his way to avoid the weight of legacy,” says Ó Cinnéide, “He never once drew it down – ‘Dwyer would do this, Dwyer would do that’.
“But in hindsight, he was very similar to what we heard about Dwyer. You know, in his ways. You’d be asked, ‘What was Páidí’s great strength?’ His motivating. Same as Dwyer. John O’Dwyer was a selector with us that year. You’d look at him and you’d see Micko. You’d listen to Páidí and you’d hear Micko.”
The last time they treaded the boards together in Croke Park was in extraordinary circumstances. Ó Sé had broken up with Kerry and landed in Westmeath on the rebound. By then, O’Dwyer had led Laois to their first Leinster title in 57 years – flooring Kildare in the final, as it happens.
Westmeath had never won a Leinster title when they reached the final in 2004. In the other corner was O’Dwyer. “The Micko factor is not going to be as difficult on this occasion for me,” said Ó Sé in Marooned. “The amount of pressure on me with Kerry when we played Kildare, that pressure won’t be on me at all this time.
“Here are we, a team that never won a Leinster championship. Didn’t play in a Leinster final since 1949, playing a team who are Leinster champions. The pressure will be on Micko this time to deliver. Might be no harm.”
Westmeath won after a replay. As the losing manager, O’Dwyer came into the winners’ dressingroom and sang an aria to Ó Sé. “The respect that Micko had for Páidí really oozed out of him,” says Jack Cooney, a Westmeath selector that year.
“It’s very hard to put your finger on it. You got a real sense of that respect from the years they soldiered together. Micko said you could always count on Páidí when you heard the cuckoo. It was all about the championship. Even with us, he was a completely different man come the championship. His speeches got better. He hypnotised you.”
Their friendship endured. Until Ó Sé’s death they never went more than a fortnight without catching up, said O’Dwyer. “He’s one of the people who had a major influence on my whole life,” said Ó Sé. “He knows damn well that I know him inside out. And that he’s the biggest rogue.”
The teams they managed in Leinster are all playing this weekend. In every case, O’Dwyer and Ó Sé fashioned the greatest days in their modern history. This is as good a time as any to remember.
