With Kilmacud Crokes preparing for Tuesday's final, Tom Humphriestalks to two of the club's most important members – the Magee brothers

GLENALBYN ON a pet spring evening is the usual bustle and jam of mentors and teams and of parents depositing or collecting the members of those teams. To stand there waiting in the wan sunlight for the brothers to materialise is to wonder anew at the miracle of the southside that is Kilmacud Crokes.

The accents. The air. The motors cars. This is deep southside. Forget rugby which should rule supreme. Forget soccer which fellas play just to get fit. Standing here you can reach out and find exotica, like floodlit tennis, a swimming pool, some hoops, a little bowling. Whatever urban distraction you want, your sport du jour, it’s here.

Yet, here right in the centre of it all is Kilmacud Crokes, a bona fide GAA club standing for enduring tradition, community and values. In these hard times they recently set about establishing a club directory of who does what or sells what or consults about what. So they can rely on each other through the lean times just as they grew through the better days. A bona fide club, then, which stands too for the brothers, Jonny and Darren Magee.

DULY THE BROTHERS arrive, one before the other. The latecomer is summoned by means of a gruff phone call. They pose for the pictures outside the clubhouse. Rory Ward, a member of the club’s 1995 All-Ireland winning side, scoots past in a van beeping and giving the thumbs up. The brothers nod and grin.

If there is a tough part of Stillorgan, well, this is it. These two big men. When they broke through as stars wags around Parnell Park used to refer to them as the grand pianos. Large, splendid and hard to move.

And they have been splendid ambassadors for a club where polish and articulation would be qualities taken for granted.

Famously, Jonny entered a notorious Dublin senior dressingroom in his late teens. It was 1997 and he was a raw young fella walking into a situation where he found a cabal of senior players attempting to tear Mickey Whelan apart.

Eamon Heery was impressed by what he saw and took young Magee under his wing. One night, Heery was to be found singing the younger man’s praises when he was pulled up by a St Vincent’s clubmate. “That’s the first time you’ve ever said something positive about Crokes.” Heery considered the intervention: “Ah, he’s not really Crokes.”

You know exactly what was meant. In a club once renowned for it’s softness, the Magees have always been as cuddly as granite. Jonny came on to that Dublin team, becoming the first Crokes player to nail down a starting championship place and, more importantly, became the first Crokes player to be almost universally loved and respected on Hill 16.

It was his physical strength and fearlessness that distinguished him. Before Jonny, there was a perception shared by terrace sages and dressingroom whisperers that Kilmacud Crokes players were aloof and hard to assimilate. They would rather win for Crokes than for their county. And they lacked cojones. No carraigs. For their part, Crokes men felt continually slighted and marginalised in Dublin setups.

Jonny, though, took an exuberant, robust joy in playing for Dublin. He cared not a whit about opposition bruisers or Dublin club politics. He became the first Crokes man to be granted the honorary title of Legend by the Hill.

“There was nobody established from Crokes when I went in to Dublin first, but I never really cared. I wasn’t afraid to get to know the lads if I thought I needed to know them . . . Eamon Heery took me under his wing. He was a hard footballer and, as a young fella going into the Dublin set-up, he was great to me in fairness.”

Darren, three years younger, was a hurler as much as a footballer when they were growing up. The boys were reared sharing a room in a modest house in Beaufield just across the road from Glenalbyn and vied with other for achievements.

Jonny had four years as an under-21 player in the club. Darren won more medals and was part of a more golden generation.

For Crokes, it has been all good. This year, Jonny, edging towards retirement now he is the wrong side of 30, and Darren, still at his peak at 27 years old, have been the heart and soul of Crokes’ drive to an All-Ireland final.

Darren is talking about his own generation of Crokes players. “Actually, over there, that’s the minor team that I was on that won the county minor hurling,” says Darren, pointing to his right in the club bar to a picture from late last century. “And, yeah that’s it,” he points to his right, “that’s the football team that won out.”

Jonny rolls his eyes theatrically.

“Just pointing those out for Jonny’s benefit” says Darren. “There’s not a picture of him in the clubhouse anywhere.”

“I’m hoping,” says Jonny, “if we win this bloody thing there might be one picture! Four senior championships and there’s not a picture of me and Cossie (Ray Cosgrove ) anywhere!”

TUESDAY’S TEAM will contain the results of a drive strategically undertaken after the 1995 club All-Ireland win, a push to expand the club’s youth base. Players like the O’Carrolls and the O’Rorkes are products of that work, as are the trio of Niall Corkery, Mark Davoren and Mark Vaughan, each of whom passed through Holly Park primary school and Blackrock College secondary school, going against the grain to become good GAA players.

The Magees, though, just walked in from across the road, encouraged by their teacher in St Lawrence’s, Mick Garry.

The first thing Jonny remembers is the same thing Darren remembers. Saturday mornings in Crokes. Mick Garry schooling them. Everyone waving their hurleys and shouting, “We are hurlers! Mighty, mighty hurlers!”

“That’s how we learned the bread and butter,” says Darren.

This year, Jonny is the team captain and gets launched from the bench in those crucial final stages of which there have been several when Crokes need some beef and football smarts. Jonny rising from the bench for one of his cameo roles always draws the cheers of the populace. Rightly so.

The job he has done for Crokes this year has been considerable.

In times of trouble they find him with the ball, Jonny catches it. He lays it off. As for Darren? Darren has been playing some of the best football of his career, his trademark athleticism and fielding providing an engine room for a side not short on pace or confidence.

What you see on the pitch is a fraction of what goes down, of course. Darren coaches full time with the Arklow Geraldines Ballymoney club in Wicklow, helping make their football a bit snappier than their club name. It’s a hefty commute to training in Belfield, but he has it comparatively easy.

Jonny lives in Ashbourne, worked nights until recently and was married in early December on the Thursday of the Leinster club final versus Rhode, an occasion it turns out of such heroic abstemiousness and self-restraint that it deserves a trophy in itself.

“I haven’t had my stag yet,” says Jonny in bright tones which suggest the forthcoming stag should it coincide with a Crokes win on Tuesday could have a positive effect on the ailing global economy.

Last summer, Jonny sat down with Paddy Carr and the team’s selectors and they talked softly about hard things. Jonny and Darren are different in one key respect. If Jonny walks past a restaurant menu he puts on five pounds. If Darren walks past a restaurant menu, well, Jonny puts on five pounds.

So last summer when he spoke with the management, Jonny made clear what perhaps they already suspected. He wasn’t one of those wiry Brian Dooher types who would be playing football till the age of 40. He wanted to give the year 110 per cent. So they arranged for Jonny to go away and train three times a week down at the National Stadium with Cathal O’Grady, the former cruiserweight champion. Jonny has a little form as a boxer, succinctly recorded in his three-round demolition of not just Aussie big-mouth Quentin Hann but also of the nose belonging to Aussie big-mouth Quentin Hann.

So Jonny trained hard and lost weight and felt good and then the world changed. His employer required him to work nights doing finishing work on Pier D out at Dublin airport. The training was shot. His eating habits went haywire. Right foods at wrong times, etc. “I’d taken two steps forward, then I went 12 steps back,” he says. “And, of course, in January I missed two weeks with ’flu. For me, missing two weeks is like another fella missing six it takes me that long to recover.”

But recover he has and if he isn’t skimming the ground as lightly as a fairy dancing on a pond lily he is still effective. When the going gets tough on Tuesday and Darren looks up late on he will know what ball to find his brother with and that the percentage chances of that ball being used cleverly are high.

Not that such trust warrants loose compliments. They play off each other constantly in conversation, a humorous, brotherly spikiness which has occasionally gone further.

“Jonny is three years older than you Darren. As a young fella did you look up to him or was he an embarrassment?” Silence.

“Ah he was grand,” says Darren like a man who knows he will never hear the end regarding what he is about to concede. “I supposed I looked up to him.”

“This is killing you isn’t it,” says Jonny. “Look! It’s killing him.”

“In fact,” says Darren, “he wasn’t really an embarrassment until he started working nights and took those 12 steps back”.

THE SIBLING RIVALRY has drawn the best out of them. Jonny captained the Dublin minor footballers. A few years later Darren captained the county minor hurlers. Jonny was plucked to play for the Dubs as a teenager by Mickey Whelan. Darren plucked at about the same age by Tommy Carr.

Sometimes, at training, it gets a bit much the, ahem, closeness. Jonny will shout something at Darren and Darren will bark back. They’ll go that way and then forget about it by tea-time.

Once, out training for Dublin in 2007, Jonny can remember getting a clip off Darren.

“So I hit Darren a shoulder,” he says. “And Darren went down. He kicked back at me from the ground, though. So I hit him in the back. Then I went to hit him again. Jason (Sherlock) came in just in time and rugby tackled me to the ground!”

The thought of Jason Sherlock rugby tackling a steaming Jonny Magee to the ground is worth reflecting on. Jonny and Darren are both laughing at the memory. Other tales come flooding back.

“We were clashing one night for Crokes,” says Darren, “and Conor Deegan (the Down full back from the early 1990s) had to come in and stand between us. Nobody else would do it, but Deegan is mad enough!”

There’s no grudges. It happens. It ends. When the family lived across the road their Mam used to tell the boys to get out to the garden to fight. Don’t damage the furniture she would say to her two grand pianos.

“We just get on with it afterwards,” laughs Jonny. “I tell him don’t do it again. And leave it at that.”

They recall another night. Down in Crokes. Training. Needling each other until, eventually, finally, inevitably, POP! And they were off. Clashing, as they put it.

Mick Dillon looked at their dad, James, who was helping out with the team. Mick said, “Are you going to do anything about that James?” James, who is built like a whippet but less temperamental, looked balefully at Mick. “Sure what am I going to do Mick? Look at the size of them! Leave them at it!”

So they did.

They recall it all with laughter and good grace. Their closeness needs no vouchsafing and isn’t as good a story, but you see it between them. Jonny’s daughter Lauren is 12 and is already a fine young footballer, but anybody in Crokes will tell you the huge part of her life that Darren is too. When it came to Jonny’s wedding back in December, there was no other choice for best man but Darren.

Tuesday is a special day for them. Club and family. They come from a huge tribe in Wexford, where their Mam and Dad now live, having abandoned the big smoke three and a half years ago.

Jonny tells a story about the All-Ireland semi-final against Corofin. The boys maternal grandfather John Mowatt was a GAA man to the core and the pleasure he took in seeing his grandsons grow to wear the blue of Dublin was the sort that perhaps only grandfathers ever know. In his day, John was a player and later an administrator and president of the St James, Ramsgrange club. He died a short while before the Corofin game.

“After the Corofin game,” says Jonny, “the mother came out on to the pitch and she just held the two of us there with the tears in her eyes. There wasn’t the need to say a thing.”

IT’S LIKE THAT this wonderful championship. Full of stories like that. Next Tuesday will be like old times for the brothers. The tribe up from Wexford. The usual slagging. And the familiar closeness. “We’d be playing for Dublin and they’d be up, 20 or 25 in the house before a game cooking up big fries while I was on the bananas and cereal (Darren rolls eyes). Great support and great slagging. By the time they’d be going home, of course, we wouldn’t have a scrap of gear left.

“Give us this. Give us that. Ah yeah, slagging the Dubs, but goin’ home with the gear! Ya knew where ya came from though. They always kept us grounded. Even now we go down to Ramsgrange. It’s just brilliant. All the cousins, the big family.”

And the club, the club. The other family. They worked as lounge boys here when they were small. And then behind the bar. In 1995, when the club won the All-Ireland, they were old enough to soak it in.

Jonny remembers Croke Park, that day against Bellaghy. The final whistle and running out on to the field. Padraig McMenamin, one of the great stalwart figures of Kilmacud football, then and now, caught a hold of him and told him to watch the presentation.

“Jonny. Pay some attention. This you when you are older.”

Jonny grinned back.

“Yeah Padraig.”

Fourteen years later they laugh about it, Padraig and himself.

For Darren, Mick Leahy the towering midfielder on that side was a class of deity back then. Leahy, like most of the lads, is still there putting it back in.

Darren will come into the bar after a game and Leahy will shake his successor’s hand and say great game (pause) but! And the advice will follow. Quicker on the turn Darren. Head up and look for the man.

Or if the bar is crowded, stuffed with folk as they hope it will be on Tuesday night, Mick will raise a glass in salute from across the room and he’ll wink. Darren will wave back and wait ’cos he knows what is next. Mick will put his glass down again and raise his hands, palms facing Darren.

“Two hands Darren!” he’ll shout.

And Darren will grin. Jonny will give him a dig in the back. Two hands, ya hear. The club, is the club, is the club. And Jonny and Darren. They too are the club.

“Once, out training for Dublin in 2007, Jonny can remember getting a clip off Darren.

“So I hit Darren a shoulder,” he says. “And Darren went down. He kicked back at me from the ground, though. So I hit him in the back. Then I went to hit him again. Jason (Sherlock) came in just in time and rugby tackled me to the ground!”