Kevin Heffernan interview: In the first of a two-part interview, Tom Humphries talks to the former Dublin player and manager, who reinvented the way Gaelic football was played.
A corner house on Turlough Parade with a happy cherry tree in the garden and a carpet of flowers stretching towards the upper circle of Marino. Croke Park's grey stands are a few long pucks away. And behind the house with the cherry tree, broad, majestic Griffith Avenue flexes itself, its surface sun-dappled and shadow-played by the sentinel trees.
Every three quarters of an hour a bus will pass up the avenue chugging townwards. Just rare enough to be novel, just regular enough to be comforting. Otherwise the days are punctuated by cloth-capped cyclists as they come and go and the occasional horse and dray clip-clopping towards Drumcondra.
On Sundays the Wafers from across the road, well Mr and Mrs Wafer, will emerge in their short sleeves for their Sunday expedition. Ceremoniously, they will mount a tandem and set off cruising from the estate. The neighbours will wave them goodbye. On a good day they'll ride as far as Portrane. If there is a breeze maybe no further than Bull Island. On Sunday evening people will come out to hear just where the Wafers have been.
They are a mixum-gatherum sort of tribe in this brimming new place. Bertie Donnelly,the famous cyclist, lives just a street or two away, his front windows filled with the silverware he had won. And Cathal O'Shannon just got shot in the lip by our hero who was toting an airgun at the time. Josephine Fitzgerald, the Abbey actress, and Liam Rapple of the FAI and Tony McNamara, who plays for Drums, are all neighbours.
Turlough Parade has eight small houses which line up four aside as a stout guard of honour on the path to Griffith Avenue. The Parade is a microcosm of Marino's diversity. Eddie Wall from next door will play for Arsenal. Two doors down are the Lawlers. Paddy will play second row for Ireland, famously sitting down once during the playing of God Save the Queen. His brother John will throw the hammer in the Olympic Games.
Overshadowing it all eventually, forging the identity of the entire parish will be the games of hurling and football. First the games will take seed in the fertile underworld of childish imaginations. Later they will change the country.
John Heffernan, a guard, would come around on his bike off Shelmartin Avenue and in the distance see a sliotar or a football flying heedlessly above the blossoms in his perfectly flowered garden - yet when he'd get to his own gate there wouldn't be a soul to be seen.
His colleague, the local guard, one Baby-Face Malone, would cycle home twice a day up Griffith Avenue.
Each time Baby Face loomed he interrupted a full-scale hurling game played from the top of Turlough Parade down towards the church and the school.
At first sight of Baby Face, in a curious ritual of deference and respect, the players would disappear like sprites and hide in the gardens. Baby Face would ride passively by. Play resumed.
Ah, the place teemed. Kids everywhere. They arrived in Marino together. They schooled together. They played together. They made friends easily and they stayed friends forever.
And in the upper circle as the orange sun went missing each evening, at some point, at the distant top of Griffith Avenue, you'd find him out with his friend and mentor Budger Keely. Hurling away. "Left side." "Right side." "Pull." "Pull." "Pull."
"You're Mick Mackey. I'm John Mackey. Pull."
All life. Football and hurling was all of life. On Thursday nights they'd play the boys from the red, austere O'Brien Institute up near the Casino. Thursday after Thursday he'd mark Paddy Lawler who was five stone heavier and as nimble and tender as any rugby second row ever was. Thursday after Thursday he'd be flattened. Things like that he never forgot.
He was Heffo then, a name he wouldn't hear again till he was in his 50s.
You wonder. Is character fate? Or is a man a product of his environment? You look at Kevin Heffernan and you wonder what he might have been were he born in a barrio in Brazil or in a brownstone in Brooklyn or in a houseboat in Shanghai.
The answer is in his own history. The answer is in his face which, as he nears his 74th year, has yet to submit itself to the crinkly softness that an old codger might accept. The answer is that he'd have been the best at whatever there was to be the best at. Character is fate. Everything else is scenery.
Ask around. He still has the aura. He is still an icon. He still makes the rules. These are some of the rules.
You don't interview Heff.
"I'm a poor subject," he says.
"You're a good subject but you're a lousy interview," you'll say.
"Either way," he says, "it's not too good for you."
You know this already. He once had an interview you extracted from him pulled from a county board publication. Too much of him in there. Too much quotes stuff squeezed between inverted commas.
Innocent. You rang the county board and asked why they'd just pulled the piece at his request.
"He's Kevin Heffernan," said the county board.
"Fair enough," you said.
Had the county board been a teenager they would have added "like, duh!". You don't interview him. You voyage around him scavenging what you can.
You don't plamás him. He hates fellas that are full of soup. You don't mention going to his house. He chooses the territory. You don't set the agenda. He steers the conversation.
You don't ask direct questions.
You don't ask stupid questions.
You don't ask personal questions.
You don't ask what this was like or what that was like. You don't presume anything.
"It shouldn't take too much of your time," you say.
He smiles over his coffee.
"You've no need to be telling me that," he says.
He'll ignore you. He'll dodge you. Unless you're a forward who scores 1-3 a game.
Then he'll be fascinated by you.
He'll divert you, defer you, diss you.
"Just give us a few days to psyche myself up," he'll say.
"For what?" you'll ask.
"For telling you to eff off," he'll say.
Or: "My memory is gone. I don't know if I'd be any use to you." Or "Only fellas like you are interested in all that old stuff. Would you not leave it be?"
Understand this though. It's worth it. Never will he say it. Never will he think it. Never will he even entertain the saying of it or thinking of it in his presence but this is the most influential man in Irish sport in the last century.
He reinvented the way Gaelic football was played. Twice. Thirty years ago he leaned over and breathed life into the rotting body of the GAA in Dublin. Players carrying O'Neill's bags or hurls to training would get laughed at in the streets in Dublin at that time. Gahmen! Bogballers! Mulchies! Heffernan remembered a different world, imagined a different future.
He produced something new and sensational.
Study the equation: No Heffo = No Dubs = No Seventies = No GAA in the City = Slow Death for the GAA = This Country being a Minor Colony of SkySportsSuperSundayLand. You'll argue. He'll argue.
Come up with somebody though. Come up with your guy. Come up with somebody as influential and as important. Come up with an icon.
We'll make it fair.
That person doesn't have to have played to a level equivalent to that which got Heffernan on to the GAA's Team of the Millennium. Your person doesn't have to have 19 senior county medals or to have led another life as head of Labour Relations in the ESB, chairman of the Labour Court and of Bord na gCon. Your guy doesn't have to have been the one who figured out how Irish guys could play Compromise Rules effectively. He doesn't have to have been on all those committees steering the game at national level and local level. He doesn't have to have been a Trinity pink at a time when Gaelic footballers being such a thing was unheard of. He doesn't have to have been winning county titles with teams of know-nothing young fellas when he was 73 years of age. He doesn't have to be recognisable by just that abbreviation of his name.
Heffo.
Even now, hobbled and hands tied behind the back, even now it's not a fair fight.
Let him fetch a cup of coffee, a pack of 20. Listen.
He stands alone.
He still makes the rules. Always did.
They loved him. They followed him. They worshipped him.
Some of them feared him.
He ruled by fear they'll say, and you'll wonder what weapon he possessed apart from the power to make you not part of the team.
"That was enough for most fellas," he says, "it was meant to be that way." It was meant to be and it was. Players he touched, players he picked, players he dropped. None of them are neutral about Kevin Heffernan. None of them walked away with a shrug. None of them ever said it was only football.
The Heffernan Rules. Some stories: long ago, back in 1957, Dublin lost a Leinster championship game to Louth and Kevin Heffernan came off the field sick with shame. It was the only time in a long history of playing that he felt he had been part of a side that just let themselves down.
He was going to be captain of the team the following year. So he made a decision. He'd quit hurling. Concentrate on football. Something else. He'd go to Wicklow and persuade Joe Timmons that he was to come back and play for his county. Then he'd get John Timmons back.
"And we won it the next year," he says of the 1958 All-Ireland.
"You were a player though. Were you at liberty to be going getting fellas and putting them back on the team?" He frowns.
"I wasn't at liberty I suppose. I just did it." Just doing it. Five years later he was a selector when Dublin went through the 1963 Leinster championship scraping over each challenge as they went. The day before the Leinster final against Kildare, Heffernan famously travelled to Kells and intercepted Snitchy Ferguson in his garden. One of Heffernan's "just passing" routines.
The next day Ferguson appeared in the Dublin dressing-room unannounced. Played. Made the difference.
Dublin were on their way to another All-Ireland. Nobody argued.
"I never minded a fella batting an idea back at me," he says. "I didn't mind a fella who wanted to know why or to argue the toss. That was good. We had to understand, though. In the end we'd do it my way.
"Getting in their heads. That's what the game is about. It's an extremely important part to be sure. Get them on the right wavelength, the same wavelength. What we went through together was deeper than just football. We'd be concerned about each other. Concerned about anything which would perturb a player."
And if you were afraid of him, really, that was why. His way worked. He could peer into the heart of a game and pick out instantly what was necessary and what wasn't. If you weren't necessary it was crushing.
The smithy which broke you down was Croke Park. The field and a little room with a corrugated iron roof and wooden floors and not enough space for you ever to have your comfort zone. Once during the Heffernan years the county board, flush with money, attempted to do up the old precinct.
"Do what you want," said Heffernan, "but that stays."
Stories. Have you heard the one about the St Vincent's team that won the Dublin county hurling championship in 1988? One of Heffernan's greatest regrets is packing in that team immediately after the game. He feels - and those who played under him feel - there was a Leinster club title to be had that year. Ach, sin scéal eile.
The team had a nice mix of talent and grit and, typical of Heffernan, had attracted back to hurling players like Tommy Conroy and Eamon Heery whom once he would have steered to football. They bumped through the championship well enough and reached the final against Ballyboden St Enda's, who were then, as now, a beautifully skilled team with a reputation for not much liking physical contact.
Heffernan had one worry. In the full-back line for Ballyboden were two brothers from Limerick, Seán and Pat Herbert. Between them they were the spine and the steel in Ballyboden's team.
For reasons unbeknownst to anyone, including the player himself, Heffernan chose Robert Mulvaney to play at corner forward in the final. Mulvaney was a lovely hurler but he wasn't a corner forward. He was a sweet striker who felt claustrophobic in a tight space. He liked the prairie and the chance to open his shoulders. Sticking him in at corner forward seemed madness.
The game began. Nobody can remember too clearly now which of the Herberts marked Robbie Mulvaney but they can recall how quickly Mulvaney's frustrations with his incarceration at corner forward became evident and how soon the Mulvaney/Herbert relationship became a Punch and Judy sideshow.
Everyone remembers too how quickly the pair of them got sent off. They walked to the line leaving St Vincent's with a couple of fast inside forwards and plenty of space for them to gambol about in.
"Ah," Heffernan says "Yeah. Muller was expendable. I knew he'd be mad. I knew he'd hate it. He'd be whaling away in there at your man. I didn't think they'd both get sent off. That was a bonus."
That was how he worked. Moving players about, explaining to them that when the heat was unbearable, that it was then, in that crucible, the true character showed. When he discarded you as a footballer or hurler he discarded you as so much else.
Jim Brogan spent six years playing under Heffernan in the team of the '70s. Or rather training under him as a sub in the team of the '70s. He regards him as a genius.
"After six years though, and all that time with him, if you were to ask me what did Kevin Heffernan think of me, I'd have to say that I've no idea. Not a clue."
And would he like to know? "I think I'd cut my losses there! I'm coming from a certain perspective here. I was a sub!" He pauses. "I suppose that says it all."
He operated that way, kept players guessing, interested, obsessed. Player after player remembers the torture of waiting till Saturday came. The Dubs would train on a Tuesday and a Thursday. Often, crumpled on the Parnell Park pitch on a Thursday night Heffernan would appear to wrap up the exertions for the week.
"Well done lads. We've got through a lot this week. See you on Saturday, we'll do something different."
And all too regularly they fell for it. On too many Saturdays they arrived in Parnell Park expecting to play a little football and Heffernan would stride out on to the pitch and there would be no sign of a football anywhere.
What appeared to be going on wasn't always what was going on.
Vincent Conroy, who played on many Heffernan teams, remembers a day in the summer of 1983. Conroy had been the full back in the Dublin squad the previous year but had drifted and was now on Hill 16 watching Dublin draw with Meath. Dublin were poor.
Very poor.
"I would have been smiling to myself. Gerry Hargan was in at full back and Colm O'Rourke was giving him a hard time. You'd want Dublin to win but part of you would want Heff to think that he needed you back."
The following week Conroy hurled for Dublin against Offaly in a Leinster championship game and then, sure enough, got a call on the Monday to go down to join the football squad. They played Whitehall Colmcille's in a challenge game the following evening and Conroy was full back, Hargan corner back. Aha.
Conroy walked into an injury though and came off with a dead leg. It cost him a week and Heffernan put Gerry Hargan back in against O'Rourke for the replay.
"Gerry developed into one of the best full backs around. Heffernan had this technique. He always had big fellas around on the panel, a few mullockers maybe, and they'd always be there at training. The idea was to throw them up against Mullins, Ronayne and Caffrey at training. They'd always be looking to sew it into the lads.
"That summer Heff used me a good few times to stand in on top of Gerry. I had a few inches on him. The trick was to take the attention away from what Heffernan wanted Gerry to do. Myself and Hargan assumed he was coaching PJ Buckley on how to take free kicks. These sessions would go on and on. Myself and Gerry would be moaning about having to help Buckley out night after night. Heff would stand out the field with him and point. Turned out it was nothing to do with PJ Buckley. It was to do with Hargan and learning to play on a bigger player."
He was hard on some players. Warmly indulgent of others. Whatever it took. He knew the combinations that got him into the deepest parts of their heads.
"The thing you had to be afraid of with Heffernan," says Dave Billings, "was the arm around the shoulder. In 30 seconds he could convince you that you weren't right for a game. You'd be killing yourself in training and then you'd be almost grateful he was dropping you."
Bobby Doyle recalls a Leinster championship game against Laois where he enjoyed a fine first half. At half-time Heffernan made a point of asking was Doyle on the field. When was he going to do something.
Spitting fire, Doyle went out and destroyed Laois for the second half. Coming off the field, still furious, he made a beeline for Heffernan intending to ask if he'd noticed that.
He found Heffernan smiling.
"Well Bobby. That worked!" And then there was Mick Holden.
"How could you not love a rogue like Holden!" Heffernan exclaims when you raise the name with him. "He got away with things because he played the way he did."
They remember the dishevelment of Holden as he would arrive. Legendary, he had 22 sets of lights to come through between Dún Laoghaire and Parnell Park. This wasn't counting a stop at McDonalds in O'Connell Street where he would buy two quarter-pounders with cheese. One for the remainder of the journey. One to eat before training.
The Nissan hut in Parnell Park would smell of Holden's fag, brandished in one hand and his burger clasped in the other. The air would be thick with Holden's stories from the night before. And 29 other players would be glancing nervously towards the door, waiting for Heffernan. They knew Holden was a hurler on his holidays in football.
They knew he could walk away happily at any time.
Heffernan cut him enough slack to keep him interested. He did his job and was never found wanting.
Talking to those who played and worked with him you get a sense of deference which is there when Heffernan speaks of his father. Only twice in the course of his son's epic career did John Heffernan come to see him play. Dragged both times.
"He saw me in the 1958 All-Ireland and in a Railway Cup game. I think in the end he took a pride in not being interested. I'd come home and he'd want to know what happened for when he got asked in the station, but he went his own way. Sometimes he would be on duty outside Croke Park when we would be playing. He'd make a point of not going in."
An Offaly man, John Heffernan, fished, ran gun dogs, went shooting, footed and drew turf from the featherbed and worked his allotment. Those were his interests and passions. His allotment was a little plot of land uphill in Beaumont where he grew vegetables.
He built a little cart and put the axle and wheels of a motorcar underneath and pneumatic tyres on to the sides.
His eldest son remembers the crushing weight of the thing, the long pull up the hill on Beaumont Road. It seems quirky to have built such a contraption but when, if you sit and listen to Kevin Heffernan discussing the benefits of tacking lumps of wood to the hurleys of young players to improve their strength and swing, you get the same sense of fiercely intelligent difference.
His mother May was more supportive. He remembers coming home from hurling one day as a child with his head bruised and bleeding quite spectacularly. He was tended to unquestioningly. The next day the Christian Brother quizzed him. "What did you mother say about the state you were in?" "Nothing, Brother." "Did she say to give it up?" "No, Brother." "Well maybe it would be as well to." "Yes, Brother."
And loyalty. He learned that early. One Sunday morning in a St Vincent's jersey he found himself playing Faughs in Croke Park. Half-eleven matches in Croker on a Sunday were the norm then. Suddenly (but not unexpectedly) a row broke out.
Heffernan was about to wade in when his maternal grandfather, a small stocky horseman from Kilkenny, appeared at his shoulder, sleeves rolled.
"Grandfather? Where did you come from! Would you get off the stage outta that."
They were the times and the people who shaped him. He wonders at and cherishes their innocence. Growing older. Meeting Mary. Heading to Skerries and Red Island to a dance after a big match. Sometimes as far as Lawlor's in Naas. Never drinking. Always thinking, football and hurling.
The fellas, he calls them, the lads who played under him and who changed the face of the 1970s.
He has affection and respect for them all, what they did and what they became. He hopes they can look back on those days as fondly as he can look back on his own pomp as a player.
He knows that some resented the tactics he used, that some use words like fear and ruthlessness in describing his ways, but he has no arguments.
Nothing can be changed.
"There was a closeness, a sense of us achieving something together. It was a time of total honesty in the discussions we had, in the way we played on the field. It got to a stage where I could look at a player running out on to the field for training and tell by the way he was carrying himself if there was something bothering him. They were men, mature, intelligent men. They had had choices. We can't go back and change any of it."
He hopes they understand what drove it. Football. The love of place. The sense of identity. The pursuit of Kerry. The belief that "any All-Ireland you beat Kerry in is a double All-Ireland".
They know a part of him. A bit more than we know. The Mount Rushmore face. The nicotined hand, the draw on the fag as his brain processes the answer to any question. The reputation for doing whatever had to be done.
And the fellas, those he played with, those he managed, they categorise themselves two ways. Those who got close. Those who voyaged around him.
Jackie Gilroy met Heffernan in 1963 when he was a young fella just busting through on to the St Vincent's panel. Heffernan was the captain and his influence of Gilroy's life began then.
"He used to have this expression. A small thing. We were playing Seán McDermotts. He took me aside. I was feeling under pressure. He said to me: 'remember, Giller, we just want to be one point ahead at the end.' I had to think about it but he gave the example. Him and his life. He gave everything he possibly could to whatever he was doing. To be one point ahead at the end."
Gilroy was about 20 or 21. Heffernan was a god.
"He can be a little bit intimidating. I know what people mean. He can be that way till he decides you are on his team or in his group. Then you are there forever. He was the leader, just naturally the leader. Then he'll do anything for you. Anything."
Years later in the '70s Gilroy was chairman of St Vincent's and as chairman he had one ambition. For the club to win an All-Ireland championship.
In the '50s they had played legendary hurling and football games against Glen Rovers and Tuam Stars but had never officially been All-Ireland champions.
"So who did I go to? Heff. 'It'll take the winter', I said, and I know you hate the winter but we want to win it."
On the 14th March, 1976, in Portlaoise, St Vincent's beat Roscommon Gaels by 17 points to become All-Ireland club champions - 1976, if you remember your football, was an otherwise busy year for Kevin Heffernan.
He was grappling with his own bogey. The Kingdom.
Kerrymen were different. Of course. They were his friends and his enemies. They were his obsession. If he could go back and change things he would. Kerrymen bookended his intercounty career for him. He lost a minor All-Ireland to the green and gold in the '40s and finished his time managing Dublin by losing the All-Irelands of 1984 and 1985 to them.
Ask him for his footballing regrets and they start with the All-Ireland of 1955.
Today you can't imagine the stir which the All-Ireland of that year caused. Heffernan's St Vincent's club were instrumental in creating the first Dublin team to be populated by Dublin players.
Heffernan himself was the genius behind the style of play which distinguished that team too. They were cerebral. They rejected the orthodoxy of catch and kick. They talked football night and day. On summer nights, as many of them as possible would be inserted into Jim Lavin's car, shoehorned in, and they'd drive to Sutton, park the groaning car and walk the head of Howth once or twice, talking football.
They were abstemious and obsessive. John Timmons used to moan that for all their talk he knew the opposition better than they did because the opposition were the only ones he could go for a drink with after a match.
By 1955 they were at the height of their powers when they got to the Leinster final against Meath, the All-Ireland champions.
Meath were a superb team built on the foundation of a fine defence and in particular on the fielding of Paddy "Hands" O'Brien, the full back with two All-Ireland medals already in his back pocket.
That summer Heffernan moved in from left corner forward to centre forward and when asked to do so surveyed the majesty of O'Brien's fielding and decided it wasn't for him. So he continued with the habit of a lifetime and set the rules for O'Brien. Heffernan remembers the day with fondness. A winner's fondness.
"He was a gentlemen was Paddy. He still is. We had a long chat when I met him in Croker last summer. At that time he had a shop at the corner of Griffith Avenue and Mobhi Road, so he was well known around the place. He was unfortunate that day.
"The first ball I got I ran at him. He didn't foul me really but he had a free given against him. So the next ball I ran at him again and he hesitated because he had been blown for the first one. That was fatal. That started the rot."
Dublin humiliated Meath that day. 5-12 to 0-7. The worst beating ever handed to All-Ireland champions.
Heffernan scored two goals in the opening 15 minutes and set up another for Cathal O'Leary before the break. Des Ferguson and Seán Boyle got goals in the second half.
The city buzzed. Dublin needed a replay to beat Mayo in the semi-final but Heffernan's personal experiences in the interim between games summed up the team's fortunes.
In trouble with a bad ankle, he went to a doctor who produced a syringe the size of a bicycle pump and filled his lower leg with Novocaine till it was the size of a balloon.
"Now," said the doctor who was based in Clontarf. "Walk to Howth." "I can't. Too much pain." "Not now," said the doctor giving the frozen leg a happy kick.
And each day he went and each day the pain got worse and each day he got the leg filled with Novocaine and each day he fulfilled the order to walk to Howth. He survived only because there was such a gap between the games. Others weren't so lucky. Dublin lost Norman Allen and Marcus Wilson to injury before the final. They played with Jim McGuinness injured and at half kilter.
Still there was the sense of this being a game that would define the era, a war between opposing philosophies.
The city was delirious. The phenomenon of Hill 16 was born. On the day - a day before mass media hype - the official attendance was 87,102 but the GAA issued a disclaimer pointing out that this was merely the figure at which the counting stopped because two gates had been broken down.
Dublin lost one of the great games in history. Forty-nine years on Heffernan shoulders the blame.
"No defeat as a manager ever hit me like 1955. That was the first time there. It was Kerry. I had great hopes and so on and so on. That formed a large part of what I became as a person. That and the defeat by Louth two years later.
"I took some wrong options that day. Went for scores where I thought we needed to score a goal. I regret that very much still. If we had popped the points we might have got the goal. That's one thing I learned. In my memory that afternoon doesn't merge into other games but the hour compacts. I only remember small incidents. I rememberputting a ball over the bar instead of giving it on to Johnny Boyle for instance, early on.
"Then later not taking the points and being closed out. I remember that very well."
Friendships. Identity. Loyalty.
He sips his coffee, fixes you with the stare. Those were the things that mattered.
"I finished with a lot of friendships. I suppose it's part of my sense of identity really. I couldn't envisage Ireland without Gaelic games. And endless years of enjoyment, physical, mental. And for me anyway, almost spiritual."
Only those closest ever got to glimpse the real man. Jackie Gilroy has a funny story wrapped around a serious moment. It was the '90s, late on and Jackie was in hospital. Heffernan was sitting with a cup of coffee in his lap at the end of the bed and they were yarning when a surgeon came by on a late round.
The surgeon looked at the chart. Looked at Jackie. Looked at the familiar figure sitting at the edge of the bed.
"So, how's he doing," growled Heffernan. nodding his head towards his friend.
"He's doing wonderfully," said the surgeon, "he'll be out playing golf with you within a couple of months at this rate."
"You're some surgeon," said Heffernan, "you have a great talent."
"Thank you."
"Because he couldn't play fucking golf before he came in here."
The line shines out from a period of blackness. Gilroy was in James's Street and had just lost his first leg. A very serious and complicated amputation. The first of two Jackie would have to bear.
Every night after visiting hour, when the family and friends would drift off and the nurses would be settling for the night, Heffernan would ghost in.
"He'd drift in with a cup of coffee in his hand. He'd talk just to keep me going. I was down. I was thinking of quitting work. Every night, every single night for 10 weeks he came in, and James's Street isn't around the corner from him. He kept me going. Ten weeks. Every night. You'll get through it, Jackie. You'll be okay. Don't you give up, Jackie."
And when Jackie Gilroy got out of James's Street and got tired of being housebound there was only one place he needed to be, one place where everybody knew his name, where his friends were.
"Two weeks after I got home I wanted to go to the bar in Vincent's. Heff and Vincent Conroy brought me up. Literally. They came down and they carried me up the stairs into the bar. People will give you a million stories about Kevin Heffernan but that's a couple of stories as they happened. He was at his height when I was at my worst. That's him."
Good times and bad times. Heffernan is himself. A law unto himself. An island unto himself.
He has another old friend, Dick O'Sullivan, a Kerryman who runs Punchestown Racecourse, and who remembers a night in Tralee in the mid '60s. Kevin and Mary Heffernan would do a house swap each summer with the man who lived next door to the O'Sullivans. Heffernan would become a familiar figure but the shyness was broken through football.
One night Dick O'Sullivan and his wife, not too long married, were at a dinner dance in Tralee and a small crowd came back to the house afterwards. It was a summer's night in the small hours and the merriment spilled out into the back garden and evolved into a game of football.
After a while the Heffernans' curtains were twitching next door. Mary Heffernan heard voices and suspected there might be trouble. Kevin Heffernan got up, peered up and announced happily that the Kerrymen were playing football. He got dressed and disappeared over the garden wall to play.
The friendship forged that night has, like most of Heffernan's friendships, endured through the years. In the '70s on All-Ireland weekend O'Sullivan would be a house guest of the Heffernans in Raheny. Dick remembers one September when Kerry beat Dublin. His host was silent all Sunday evening. No match talk. No regrets.
They tiptoed around each other.
The next morning they golfed in Clontarf and again the subject of football didn't come up. Until they came to the quarry hole and off in the distance Heffernan hit a duff shot. Looking up, O'Sullivan heard the sky being rent with a howled oath and then saw his friend fling first his club and then his bag of clubs after the ball and into the quarry.
That was later of course. First he had to imagine and to build a team. Had to suggest to Tommy Loftus, the county chairman, that if he gave him the team he'd give him something more worthwhile back. And he had to make the fellas believe. Early on, he could imagine but he couldn't believe beyond the next game, the next session.
On Saturdays in 1974 putting it all together, he'd drive from home to training with a head full of plans.
Just a couple of minutes in the car. Down the Howth Road, right onto Collins Avenue. Most mornings he would arrive too early. He had his ways of killing time. There used to be an old bookies shop on the far side of Collins Avenue from Parnell Park and sometimes on a Saturday Heffernan would ramble in and study the odds and have a modest bet on a horse or a dog.
One Saturday in 1974 he was picking a horse and his eye fell on the handwritten notice with the prices for the Leinster football championship. Dublin 8 to 1. Offaly, Meath, Kildare ahead of that at meaner prices.
Hmmm.
He mentioned the odds to a pal that evening and the pal gave Heffernan some money to go back to the bookies with. Just have a little taste of that 8 to 1. With Heffernan in charge, well, who knew what might happen? Heffernan duly laid the bet.
It never occurred to either man to ask what would the price be for an All-Ireland title. Dublin played Wexford in the first round of the championship that year. They were the curtain-raiser to the National League final between Kerry and Roscommon. Dublin won unimpressively. Heffernan stayed in Croke Park to watch the main match.
"I remember they looked like men while we had looked like wanton boys. I reckon we went out to 10 to 1 for Leinster after that."
Seeing Roscommon contesting the league final was curious. In September 1973, Dublin had travelled to Castlerea to play Roscommon in a long delayed game from the 1972-73 league. Dublin needed to win by eight points to avoid being relegated from Division One for the first time. Those who reckon Heffernan got especially lucky with the players he had often point out that Tony Hanahoe, Bobby Doyle, Paddy Cullen, Seán Doherty, Paddy Reilly, Pat O'Neill and David Hickey were in the team that lost by 3-7 to 0-11 that day.
The winter that followed was hard and unglamorous. They lost to Limerick 1-8 to 0-6. Had wins against Carlow (1-9 to 0-4) and, glory be, beat Kilkenny 6-16 to 0-4.
They beat Waterford 2-15 to 0-5 and then lost to Clare 4-9 to 2-9. They beat Antrim, lost to Kildare in a league play-off.
"We played some dreadful teams and to tell the truth we were hardly any better than most of them. What we developed was this fitness. If two poor teams are on a pitch and one is much fitter that team will win.
"We started to win a few just by being fit and because we were so fit the tactics we were beginning to develop worked quite easily. The fellas believed."
Things were changing. Things were working.
"We trained up in Finglas in a new school up there. It was the first time a Dublin team had ever trained indoors," says Dave Billings.
"We were told to report to this school. We would be doing circuit training. There were lads arriving up thinking they were going to be doing circuit training."
You see Premiership teams using ladders in training now for footwork. We were doing exactly that with the tyres back then. And he had a beam of wood like Olga Korbut. These were ideas that were revolutionary."
And when spring came and the evenings got brighter, the training got harder.
Players remember two ghosts: Brian Trimble from Scoil Uí Connail and John Furlong from Na Fianna. For the first nine or 10 heavy sessions in Parnell Park , Trimble and Furlong would beat the rest of the squad by half a lap over the course, a two-lap run. They were murdering everyone.
Soon though the team got strong enough and fit enough to stay with the two boys. When that happened, Heffernan dropped Trimble and Furlong. They were footballersbut mainly they were rabbits. They were there for one reason. To show the rest how unfit they were. Once that was done the rabbits disappeared into a hat.
Soon those that stayed behind were facing into the summer that would change all their lives.
"I have a distinct memory," says the man who made it happen, "of walking down O'Connell Street sometime in the summer of 1974. It was a lovely sunny Saturday morning and I remember feeling there was a bit of a buzz. I said to myself it's great to be coming now. The economy was slumped. There was no soccer team going well. The rugby team were struggling. We were arriving. There was a space for us to make a difference."
They had the director, they had the stage.
