Tyrone need to link Sam to proud past

Sidelin CutIt was a Co Tyrone man, William Gentles, a private stationed at Fort Robinson in Nebraska, who was officially listed as having slain the most revered of all the Native Americans, Crazy Horse.

This was in 1877, when the US army had all but succeeded in fencing off swathes of the prairie lands from the Plains Indians so that even the most independent of chiefs, like Crazy Horse, had brokenly agreed to live out their days on the army-controlled agencies.

The Oglala Sioux leader was coaxed into Fort Robinson on the promise of holding a meeting with the general in charge there, Luther Bradley, but once inside, he was escorted to a guard house, his first and only time in a confined room.

Pandemonium followed; the Indian panicked and tried to slash his way out with a knife he had secreted under his blanket, hundreds of Agency Indians had gathered outside the jail, a Captain Kennington screamed orders to strike the prisoner down and Crazy Horse was bayoneted, falling backwards with the words, "He has killed me now."

It was hardly Gentles's fault. The presence of Crazy Horse, even in life a mythical figure who routed Custer's Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn a summer earlier, meant that what would have been a routine escort became a highly-charged incident.

Today, a simple plaque marks the point where the Sioux legend fell. Fort Robinson is a state park now and in winter is bleak and sparse country. A couple of years ago I stood at the plaque on a midweek afternoon and it was impossible to have ever imagined such commotion having taken place against a landscape where nothing seemed to move.

Even in this cyber age that corner of Nebraska feels achingly lonely. So how utterly removed from home, from his memory of Tyrone, it must have been for William Gentles, whose name would have gone unrecorded by history but for his posting that day.

A year after Crazy Horse fell, Gentles died of asthma at the age of 48 and possibly because of that, he was conveniently identified as the key man in the messy circumstances. Yet he must have had a spirit of adventure close to that of Crazy Horse, this William Gentles, to have made the crossing from his village in Tyrone to end his days during an American frontier period so loud and colourful and often terrible that it simply cannot be exaggerated.

Of course, Tyrone folk were no strangers to making imaginative and physical leaps across the big pond. Thomas Mellon left the county to make his fortune in the US and his son Andrew was one of the key figures behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Ulysses S Grant, leader of the Union army in the Civil War and the 18th president of the USA, visited the ancestral home of his grandfather John Simpson in Ballygawley in 1878. The homestead still stands outside Omagh.

Woodrow Wilson, president of the US during the first World War was also acutely aware of his Tyrone lineage; his grandfather had been a printer in Strabane. And it was a Tyrone man, John Dunlap, who officially printed the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Not that we have to point in far-flung directions in order to stumble on auspicious Tyrone men; this newspaper's title has become synonymous with the Myles Na Gopaleen column that first appeared in the 1940s, which were of course the work of Strabane's Flann O'Brien.

There are countless more examples of Tyrone spirit and bravery and industry. And yet has there ever existed such a sense of self in the county as prevails this weekend? Has Tyrone ever felt so special, so alive? For all its famous and charismatic forefathers, nothing will complete Tyrone's sense of self as much as an All-Ireland senior football title.

That mad and beautiful fact is a reflection on the championship as much as the county. In the past five years, the All-Ireland football championship has become a beast, an epic, congested sporting contest spanning five months and consistently drawing crowds matching anything in Europe.

What makes it so wonderful is that it has no sense of its own scale, no respect for boundaries or population. It simply should not be enticing the numbers it does week in, week out.

I think there is a great symmetry in the fact that the bigger and bolder it gets, the more parochial it becomes. Armagh against Tyrone is as local as a row over a girl outside a chipper.

The initial scepticism about a pairing that was openly labelled the "Final from Hell" earlier this summer has ebbed and the country at large has slowly become intrigued when neighbouring counties famed for their squabbles in the hothouse of Clones get the big stage all to themselves.

This will be the third time in as many decades that Tyrone will attempt to solder a link between itself and the Sam Maguire. Although 1995 will be remembered for the doomed virtuoso attempts of Peter Canavan, it is Tyrone's 1986 final against Kerry that captured the imagination.

That game and Tyrone's presence in it mattered to all of the Ulster counties and, one imagines to virtually all of Connacht as well. Daring to take on Kerry back then was like walking a tightrope without a safety net. Reality seemed suspended during that first half when Tyrone - a team that was lean and, given the drizzle that fell continuously over Ireland from 1981-87, inexplicably tanned - ran at a great, if aged, Kerry team with a pure and cavalier spirit. (Incidentally, Crazy Horse was perhaps the only great Native American never photographed, as he believed the camera flash imprisoned the soul. He believed the spirit was incarnate and that he would return in other guises. It seems abundantly clear now that the dude ultimately came back as Plunkett Donaghy).

Such was the steep Southern tilt of the All-Ireland football championship then - it was as if a magnetic force prevented the cup from venturing any further north than Dublin - that Tyrone's valiant push challenged the accepted order.

And, of course, the accepted order prevailed and Tyrone's disintegration during the second half made the possibility of an Ulster breakthrough more remote than ever.

Now, of course, Ulster has busted out for good. Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right. The particulars of tomorrow's final could not be more loaded or potentially sweet for Tyrone. A victory means that not only do they at last pass through the gates of GAA heaven, they get to deny their neighbours on the way through.

Smiling through gritted teeth as Armagh enjoyed the unsurpassable elation of a first All-Ireland was one thing. Having to share the same field and ground on the day they may capture their second would be a new low entirely. So the scene is set for a county with many famous sons to take its place among football's elite.

Lore has it that after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the Sioux observed that the fight lasted "about as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner".

Tomorrow, it may take a little longer.