MemoirFor a glorious, rollercoaster three years of hope, despair and joy in Kerry, Jack O'Connor was High Priest of our religion and puppetmaster of our emotions. As we prayed and yearned he made us sweat and he made us cheer. The book travels that road to the nadir, the 2006 Munster replay against Cork when, shamefully, some of our Kerry tribe booed our own captain, and then to the zenith as we surged with him to Croke Park triumph.
Reading former Kerry manager Jack O'Connor's memoir of those three years and his previous life, it's difficult not to conclude that he's no bargain, our Jack. Mind you, to his mother he was always John or Johneen because she thought Jack was "common". Must be a Kerry mothers' thing, that; I remember my present wife being told by my own mother that there was no such person as "Joe" in the house - was she by any chance looking for "Joseph"?
Reared on the side of a hill among the wild mountainy men of south Kerry, tough times were Jack's bread and butter. It was hard living and no mistake. He describes his granny doing a precarious balancing act on a kitchen chair plonked on a tractor trailer crammed with assorted neighbours and nine of the family, including young Jack, all being towed by Father at the wheel of the grey Ferguson over rickety rutted bóithríns to Sunday Mass in genteel Waterville; and no electricity, TV or fridge until 1976.
HONESTLY JACK, OVER here in west Kerry we never knew. Those warm summer evenings of our youth, as we swam in Slaughdeen and looked across Dingle Bay - all we knew was that if a haze dimmed the view of the mountains of south Kerry then that was a sign of more good weather. The less we saw of south Kerry the better the weather prospects. No wonder Jack felt like an outsider and no wonder he looked with some disquiet back across at the Gaeltacht crowd in Corcha Dhuibhne as he tried to figure out the fir láidir - Darragh, Tomás and Marc Ó Sé.
Did I enjoy the book? Yes, a great read, but maybe, for his own sake, it should never have been written. In Kerry, giving information away is like giving away a bit of yourself. But Jack takes the reader inside the inner sanctum of our religion. All is exposed. I felt myself screaming: "Wouldn't you be cuter, Jack?".
And it would have been a better book without the unnecessary strain of self-justification running through it. He had nothing to prove. By his achievements he has seen off the Kerry prophets of doom, buried the caustic pundits and steamrolled his critics, and he did it all in some style. His reputation is unimpeachable, forged, fashioned and formed in the cauldron of All-Ireland competition. So it saddened me to feel Jack's deep sense of inferiority come through so strongly and regularly. He was deeply hurt when ignored by Mick O'Dwyer, whose affirmation and approval he craved. A casual, thoughtless comment from Jimmy Deenihan undermined him, and he was bothered by the calculated rant of Billy Morgan, the Cork manager. Sure Jack, why would you give it to say to them? Those battles are over and you won.
Nor is he short of hang-ups and complexes about the townies of Tralee and Killarney and the isolation of Dromid and south Kerry. "In South Kerry we don't have much confidence in ourselves. There's the old insecurity about everything we achieve here," according to O'Connor.
And that outsider theme is all-pervasive, as he explains it, analyses it, indulges it and bathes in it. To the extent that at times he is more the Albert Camus of Cahirciveen than the José Mourinho of the GAA.
Still and all, he is a stubborn hoor who teaches ferocious togetherness to his team. Attention to detail and total commitment to strategy and planning are the mark of the man. He gets results .
THE PERSONAL BITS are the best bits. They are gripping and well written, whereas the stories of the individual matches I could live without.
He pigeonholes his players. Each is typecast as a ball-winner, a playmaker, an artist, a finisher, a creator, or an assassin - and then he sculpts them into his plan. It has to be his way or the highway, and that is no easy road, dealing with the talented individuals at the heart of his panel. There are fascinating psychological insights into the power struggles between himself and the hard men, such as Darragh; the enigmas, such as Mike Frank Russell; the misunderstood, such as Paul Galvin; or the downright nice guys, such as Gooch and Seamus Moynihan, as he melded them into a stylish all-conquering team and drove them down the glory road.
Finally, the message to Jack is that he won and he should enjoy that. We did.
Joe O'Toole is an independent senator from west Kerry, whose memoir, Looking Under Stones, was published by O'Brien Press
Keys to the Kingdom: The Story of the Outsider Who Led Kerry Back to Glory By Jack O'Connor Penguin Ireland, 210pp. €18.99