'People never fit under any one bill'

THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: DÓNAL ÓG CUSACK

AS DÓNAL Óg Cusack pours his tea, a passage from the introduction to his book suddenly comes roaring down the tracks and headlights blaze out of the tunnel. “I read something a long time ago,” Cusack observes, “about moderation being lukewarm tea, the devil’s own brew. It stuck with me . . .” Too late! The coffee is not exactly piping and the hot water for his tea was surely drawn from the same source and now Dónal Óg Cusack, the busiest agitator since the halcyon days of Big Jim Larkin, is putting the cup to his lips. The man is about to drink moderation – with milk and no sugar. The evening is surely ruined before it even begins.

Official complaints will ensue. Frank Murphy will be on the case. The Cork footballers will vow to drink herbal tea only. Mass meetings on the South Mall, moves to strike and possible trade embargoes with China will follow. Tea and Ireland will never be the same again by the time Cusack is finished. For hasn't this been the popular image of Dónal Óg Cusack? The sometime Cork county goalkeeper, the bullet-proof campaigner from Ring's very parish, the scourge of GAA administration, the puck-out specialist with Prospero's own talent for whipping up storms – in teacups or otherwise? The Cloyne man takes a deep drink and gazes steadfastly out across the hotel room. It has been a few days since the extracts from his autobiography hit the front pages of the newspapers. The Mail on Sunday, which paid for the exclusive rights, surprisingly opted not to highlight Cusack's revolutionary short puck-out strategy, but instead ran with the worst-kept secret in GAA circles.

Dónal Óg Cusack is fine with being described as gay, although by nature he resists categorisation of any sort. “Can you truly categorise anyone?” he asks.“People are so complex, they never fit under any one bill.” To say that he “came out” in his autobiography isn’t exactly correct either because for the past half decade, Cusack has gone about conducting his life exactly as he saw fit. No skulking in corners, no guilt. He intuited his sexual orientation early in life and found that he could accept it without much angst. Call it luck, call it toughness, call it the unconditional love of parents and friends: he liked men; he liked hurling, and that was fine.

FOR SOME, the early years involved long tortuous afternoons locked in the box-room with only The Smiths for company; but for Cusack, there were glorious and electrifying afternoons hurling in his county colours. When he decided to write a memoir that could as easily be shelved in a library under labour relations as under sport, there was no question but that he would approach the subject – himself – with the unblemished honesty and candour with which he has always faced the world.

It is a provocative book – Cusack seems a little dismayed at the suggestion that his thoughts on the Kilkenny hurling team are far more incendiary than his disclosures about his private life, as if he dreads the thought of more controversy – and a million miles away from the John-Boy Walton tone adopted by too many players who pen their life stories. The issue of his sexuality is dealt with chronologically and without sensation. There was never any question of his omitting it and, in fact, there may never have been a book if the subject hadn’t been in limbo, well- known, but only whispered.

“I don’t know if there would have been,” he says slowly. “After 2006, when word went around, I needed to change things, to talk to more of my friends about it. Friendship is a fierce special thing to me – and the guys close to me know the score. With this book, well, it is my autobiography – my understanding of that is that I write about my career and my life. I know, as well, that there are people out there who suffer from being in situations like mine. Some people are living a life in which their every move is influenced by this thing. I know some of them.

“I can see it in ‘em. And if this book gives them one ounce of freedom, then it is worth it. The reality is that if I was going to do this, I was going to relay what was in my brain exactly. I wasn’t going to hide from it nor was I going to make a big deal of it. In 20 years’ time, I want to be able to say: ‘That was what was in my head at the time’. So I didn’t make any tactical moves. The cuter way might have been not to say certain things, but I don’t know if I would have been happy with that.

“The book isn’t plotted around my sexuality at all. People are going to pay money for that book, so I wanted to give a fair reflection of who it is that I am. The way I saw it is that I felt this was a positive thing that I could do with my sports career as well. And in the bigger scheme of things, it won’t matter a damn.” He scans the room as if to confirm that much. And it is true. The bartender laughs, customers munch sandwiches, heads tilting towards the main evening news on the television. Outside, it is one of those turbulent Irish October evenings, headlights and people scurrying home: nothing has changed because of Cusack’s revelation. People have their lives to live.

Tonight, though, Cusack looks tired. Neatly attired and bespectacled, he could pass for a lecturer, rather than the intense, fiery hurling man in the iconic red and white jersey of Cork. He admits that it has been a peculiar week and that there is more hoop-la to come. What was for almost 30 years an aspect of himself that he guarded and valued has become a national topic of conversation, with his blessing. Anyone who has spent any time with Cusack knows that he has a dauntless quality, but he seems drawn now and anxious, seeking an opinion on the book and then listening as intensely as a deep-sea fisherman thinking his way through a weather forecast. He is, undeniably, in strange country for a hurling man.

He has been Cork’s first-choice goalkeeper for 10 years, inheriting the position left vacant by Ger Cunningham, his childhood hero who became, in turn, a mentor and an invaluable friend, often perplexed by the younger man’s take on life. In the book, he writes that Ger’s wife Deirdre just figured out for herself that Cusack was probably gay – as did Mary O’Sullivan, wife of Diarmaid, his Cork team-mate and boyhood friend. “Ger had a slight heart attack,” adds Cusack. “But that’s another story. I always thought more fellas knew,” Cusack says now.

“Dr Con [Murphy] and fellas like that. Con was my doctor, like. But I suppose fellas don’t think that way. Like, the question that Con asked me – and it might not come across like that in the book was – what about the girls, like? Con would have seen me with plenty of girls when I was a young fella. And what he was saying was that, feck it, if I was 50-50 to stay where I am. The thing about Con is, number one, he cares for humans. The man has his faults, we all do, but he cares. Besides being his job, it is his nature. So his thinking was: ‘Let’s put a plan in place and find what the best thing is for this man’s happiness’.

He officially informed his team-mates early in 2006: rumours were beginning to gather while the team, then All-Ireland champions for the second consecutive year, was holidaying in South Africa. His sister Treasa phoned him in a panic. Cusack went through a few days of turmoil that was settled by a defiant show of support from his team-mates. Ben O’Connor, the lightning forward from Newtownshandrum, told Joe Deane: “If there are 30 of us out here, there is surely one fella among us who is gay, and if Ogie is gay, I don’t give a f***, it won’t change one bit what I think about him.” Cusack flew home earlier than intended, concerned about his family.

THERE IS A MOVING and humorous episode in the family living room when he is talking to Dónal, his father, and he can see the confusion etched across his face because his son did not correspond with the version of gay men depicted on the comedies and dramas on BBC. “They all have square jaws. But you don’t and you’re into hurling.” And then the practical, paternal and wholeheartedly Irish solution: “Right, you know the way we need to deal with this? We need to get you fixed.”

It is a funny line but it represents the crossing that Dónal Óg Cusack has made from an old to new country. He was born in one of Ireland’s dreamier villages: Cloyne, with its beautiful round tower, its abbey, its haphazard streets and foliage and a heritage so luminous that it can afford to relegate the Bishop of Berkeley into a poor second place behind Christy Ring, the most fabled Irish sportsman of the last century. His father, Dónal senior, grew up in a small terrace house with 10 other children. His mother, Bonnie Costine, grew up next door in a house with 14 children. Cusack’s grandmother was Ring’s first cousin. Ring lived his childhood out two doors down from where Cusack grew up. Ring died when Dónal Cusack was two years old. Cusack lives and breathes that mythology and he is an out and out romantic about the power of hurling (this is a man who has a coin hidden in a tree on Raglan Road for luck), but he never closed his eyes to the fact that it wasn’t a cure-all. The Cloyne that he writes about is a place like any other, where some people drink too much and fight and relationships bust up and friends find life intolerable.

Early on, he alludes to Ger Lewis, a lethal goal poacher on the Cork local hurling scene who was known as “Smurf” because he wore an outlandish hat on the field, a singular character who Cusack idolised growing up. In recent times, Smurf confided in him and sometimes spoke of ending his own life – told him it would be a Thursday. And then one Thursday last spring, he did just that. Cusack remembers people and conversations and pain just as vividly as he does the transcendent afternoons in Thurles or Croke Park when the air is crackling with static tension. Late in the book, he takes the reader on a tour of the graveyard in Cloyne, another peculiar and moving chapter.

“The last thing I wanted to do was to write something along the lines of Cloyne is a lovely place, this land of milk and honey. Because that is the ultimate disservice I could do in terms of the place. Not to mention patronising the whole exercise. Fellas do take drugs. Fellas beat up their girls. All that happens. But on the other side, it is beautiful as well. People are good, like. I care for those people. Those names. It’s just how I feel about them now. I feel for Smurf, now, just thinking about him there. Smurfy! Twas ironic, though. When the boys put the money on the horse – Smirfy’s Systems was running in the 5.10 at Wolverhampton, so they backed him in Lewis’s honour and he won. It was a Thursday. He said that a couple of times to me . . .” His voice tails off and he rubs his eyes.

Last night, he trained: today he flew, a busy day at work: he looks after the electrical system in De Puys, the big Johnson and Johnson plant in Ringaskiddy. Often, he hightails it from there into training in Páirc Uí Chaoimh: on winter nights, as he drives, all of Cork city is spread out below him in one shimmering electrical grid. It seems apt that Cusack should work with such a precise and volatile phenomenon as electricity. He seems forensically organised, but he shrugs this off, saying that raising children must involve a degree of organisation that would leave him floundering. He cannot fully explain how or why he found himself at the epicentre of so many rows and debates, other than to say they were matters that needed to be taken on. He shakes his head at the memory of the bitter radio row he had on the Marion Finucane show with Gerald McCarthy, the Cork manager against whose reappointment the entire playing panel went on strike. “I didn’t feel good after that,” he says. “Even though people came up to me in town afterwards. Just didn’t feel good.”

In all his disputes, he follows Roy Keane, one of his heroes, in looking into his conscience and finding it to be clear. He remains immensely fond, for instance, of Frank Murphy, the don of the Cork county board, against whose notorious wits he pitted his own. He shakes his head when asked if he has met Gerald McCarthy since their poisoned exchanges.

“Gerald? No. I wouldn’t mind. I think we could speak. Gerald is a tough man, you know. Does it seem like I gave Gerald a harsh time in the book? The thing is, the worst and most bitter argument in our group was over Gerald. It divided us more than anything. When Gerald was first appointed, we felt his comments about the team were very strange. They seemed ill-informed, to lack understanding of what the team was about. It goes back to: did guys think we were playing a certain style of game just for the craic? The whole thing was a tragedy. But we always believed that when the truth came out, then the majority would support the players and that is what happened.”

He has a complex attitude towards the Kilkenny hurling team, unreservedly acknowledging their greatness, but close to bitter about their refusal to back Cork in the early days of the GPA protests. “The more disorder there is in Cork, the more Kilkenny likes to be thought fondly of as the land of milk, honey and contentment,” he writes. He writes of the murderous look he saw in Henry Shefflin’s eyes after Kilkenny had handed Cork a 27-point drubbing in the league last spring; recalls an All-Stars’ trip when a Kilkenny man with whom he was allocated a room declined to share it: uncomfortable perspectives that others would gloss over.

“I understand I might be getting these fellas wrong. I don’t really know ‘em, like. But that was my take, like. Did 2002 leave a bitter taste? Of course it did. We could not understand why they would not come with us and support us. But look it, they have wiped us out, like. They have won the four in a row.” Cusack smiles at this. Already, the new season is looming large in his mind. He has no intention of quitting but nods at the suggestion that bowing out of the game will be heart-wrenchingly tough. Hurling has kept him moving at 100 miles an hour; the game is his metabolism.

“IT’S ONE OF THE most difficult few years of a player’s life, when the roar of the crowd is gone and that rawness of playing is over. There is a certain rawness created in a game situation that is very hard to match in life. It is a form of escapism from the daily drudgery. And suddenly that is gone. That is something the GPA will address when it is up and running. There is treatment for it. People can be different in a game situation than when they are off the field. I see it all the time, these gentle people that would do anything to win. It is a kind of badness in them – or else they are so skilful they can do anything. But very few people understand what it feels like because only a few go through it.” He is evasive about how he will deal with it, though, lightly declaring: “There is plenty of things out there to preoccupy your mind. And at least you can look back and say you appreciated the journey. That is something? Because I do. I love coming to train with Cork. I mightn’t f***ing look like I do, but it makes me happy.”

On Friday, Cusack leaves for Zambia for a month. He is optimistic that he will be unreachable by mobile phone. Last time he was out there, helping his friend and Galway hurler Alan Kerins with the project he runs, one evening he was having a conversation with his a Cloyne pal, Kevin Hartnett. Hartnett has this saying that Cusack likes: we are all children of the stars. They were having one of those what-is-the-cosmos conversations without even the excuse of alcohol and they called one of the local nuns over so she could put the world to rights. Cusack, earnestly asked for her take on big question of human existence.

Sister Monica listened courteously and then said briskly, “Now, Dónal Óg and Kevin, if I were you two boys, I wouldn’t bother worrying at all about where we came from, I’d worry about where we are.” Cusack laughs as he repeats the line and for the first time all evening, he sounds carefree. “But wasn’t it a great insight?” he asks, falling serious. “You know, it is like that thing Willie John [Ring, Christy’s brother] says to me in the book, about living it.”

Cusack has not shirked that instruction from the Cloyne elder. It is hard to imagine the man ever living the meek, the lukewarm, life. As he shakes hands – a grip like coiled steel – the thought occurs that had he been in Cloyne a century ago, during the War of Independence and the Treaty years, then Cusack, with that urge be at the forefront of confrontation, might have become a figure from our schoolbooks, a fatalistic shadow in uniform. History hides so much.

Dónal Óg Cusack, however, child of the 1980s, a messy decade in Irish society, has chosen to hide nothing. Early on, he had said something that makes sense now as he waves to the receptionist and disappears through revolving glass doors.

“When we are growing up, we are told that this is the way things are. But, sure, the world isn’t the way it is presented at all. I think I knew that from early on.”

Come What May, by Dónal Óg Cusack, is published by Penguin Ireland.