Breathing in the good times

Success just happens to some people. That's the way they tell it anyway. Martin Mac sits back. Rubs his fingers along his chin as he considers the question at hand. Kildare. Hmmm.

What a slick, well-oiled footballing machine they are. Huge, lilywhite men from a county about to be bowered in laurels. The sheer wonder of Kildare football isn't the question at hand though. The question is, how did Galway beat Kildare easily in a challenge in Tuam early this summer?

"Well now," says Mac in his own time, "I remember they came down after a long drive and they had six or seven missing and they got straight off the bus and onto the pitch."

"I suppose, Mac, they had a bad crash on the way down too and were a little shaken." "Well you'd never know. We had our full team out, I remember, and we'd warmed up for half an hour and . . ."

And he swats the air as if trapping a fly, lights himself a big hissing grin, "and a few of them were on crutches. I'm not laying it on too thick now am I?"

All-Ireland week and most footballers are wearing the creased faces of the damned. Poor worried souls wandering the scorched earth with the weight of dread fear tugging at their spirits like gravity. They shiver when a phone rings. Won't go into a room unless it is only half lit. Greta Garbos with clacking studs. They want to be alone. Not Mac. For Martin Mac Namara these times are about the incredible, undeniable, lightness of being. If you can't have the craic now, if you can't inhale the good times, sure when will you do it?

He's the happiest of rainmakers, but he knows the flip side. Last summer, Mac turned football into a tragedy and turned himself into a gloomy hermit haunting the half-lit rooms. The melancholy took him by surprise, but when Galway don't beat Mayo in Tuam there is always a price to pay.

He remembers it all unavoidably and indelibly. He brooded over it until he was bone weary of the action replays. Those few, fecklessly expensive moments which squandered Galway's promising summer cost him especially dear.

He got ventilated by the rat-a-tat-tat machine gun of Special Prosecutor Spillane on the Sunday Game that evening and chilled by cold words in cool ink the next morning. He remembers it all in excruciating slow motion. It started off with the first goal. The game just three minutes old and looking for its shape. Mac was trying to psyche Liam McHale out a bit. Who wouldn't?

"Liam McHale is a big man and he wins most of the 50/50 balls out in the middle, so I was trying to avoid him as much as I could with the kick-outs. Damian Mitchell was making runs to take Liam away from the play, but he was holding on, not following Damian. He was just waiting for his ball up the middle. So I had to hit Damian with one or two to make Liam McHale follow him."

So he hit one pass Damian Mitchell's way, right at the start. Ray Silke says that the little short pass trick is something Mac does for Corofin all the time and it works perfectly. Mac wasn't to blame, says Silke, but anyway the ball took too long to reach Damian Mitchell or Damian Mitchell took too long to reach the ball. Mitchell and Gary Fahy looked into each other's eyes for one panicky moment. Liam McHale and John Casey converged on the ball and blasted out an opportunity for Mayo. PJ Loftus scored. A goal and a point ahead and nobody had broken sweat yet. Galway conceded another three points before they dusted themselves down and started playing football. They were level by half time as Mayo succumbed to narcolepsy. The lead was tussled over for a while before Mac went to give Damian Mitchell another ball. He placed it right into David Nestor's arms.

"If I'd tried to find him I couldn't have picked him out better. One of those blind spots maybe. He came back and put it straight over the black spot. That happened just as things were going right for us."

The Irish Independent noted that the rumours about Mac being able to land a kick-out on a sixpence were patently untrue. The Irish Times picked Nestor's score as the game's turning point. Galway lost by four points, the first time Mayo had scalped them in Tuam in 46 years. Mac was in the horrors. Those days were a bit of a purgatory.

First thing he remembers is the half-time hiatus. He's the sort of goalkeeper who doesn't take a bollocking well. "I'd just brood over it and go to pieces." So nothing was said, they left Mac to get on with it, hoping things would get better. "When it was over I was just stunned. The fellas all came up to me, they'd go for a pint in the pub afterwards but I just couldn't go with them."

He found a quiet place, the Cellar Bar in Tuam, where he knew there would be nobody inside talking football. He went down and had a couple of pints. Gay Mitchell and Pat Comer found him and came down to cheer him up. He was still dazed and confused.

"I remember meeting Tomas Tierney on the street. Tomas played for Galway and I watched him lots of times and I couldn't even remember his name when I met him. I don't know what came over me. Totally disgusted with myself. I never took football that seriously, I was always in it for the pint and a bit of craic. No failure would have bothered me. It surprised me."

He started a new job the following week, driving a truck. He turned up in the yard on the Wednesday morning and asked the gaffer what sort of route he would be driving. The question drew a fanged smile.

"Up around Mayo mainly."

And that's how he did his penance. He remembers calling into John Maughan's pub in Westport and Maughan telling him what he knew. A pat on the back is 18 inches away from a kick in the arse.

Spool the reel forward a year and Mac is less fazed by success than by failure. The year has been one long, bright and shining redemption. He has been riding the magic carpet all the way. His saves brought Corofin an All-Ireland club title and then kept Derry at bay for that brief period in the semi-final last month when the going got rough.

Mac has a little fantasy that, one day, if his team concedes a penalty when they are well ahead, he might just walk out of the goal and watch the kick with the rest of the lads. Or maybe when presented with a kick-out as the last kick of the game, he might turn and plant it in his net just to make a name for himself. He'd have to do one or the other to deprive himself of an All Star award this year. It will be a fitting crown to his greatest season.

In Corofin, his personality gives the team much of its easy-going lightness. He is loved in the town and in the club. Their own rainmaker. In four county finals with the team he has never conceded a goal and there is a consensus that the best save he ever made was probably the most important. Salthill, having been beaten in the All-Ireland final of 1990, played Corofin the next season. Last minute, with the game there for anyone, Norman Costello broke through. Every eye in the place pictured the goal he was about to score, every mouth in the place dropped open when Mac stopped it.

In the bad days after the Mayo game last year, he was aware of the warmth which Corofin wrapped around him. He has a bar in Tuam now, which he took over from his brother Pat a while back. Last year, though, he was just living in a room above the same bar. Again and again Corofin people would make the drive into Tuam and urge him to come out for a drink.

"It was the last thing I wanted, but I knew why they were doing it. When I'd go out to play for the team they'd give me a good old response. A lot of Corofin people came to me and took me out and told me to just forget the whole shaggin' thing. It made me realise I was wrong to be taking it so seriously. It was stupid to let it get in on me like that."

If it's all but impossible to find somebody to say a bad word about Martin McNamara, the real trouble begins when you try to get Mac to say a bad word about somebody else. He is the author of all his own misfortunes, but the good days just fall on his face like soft, welcome rain from the gods. Listening to him tell the story of his goalkeeping education is instructive. He wears self-deprecation and modesty like a big pair of goalkeeper's gloves.

"Tommy Lally with Galway United took me in for some reason. I was up training with them for three months when I was an under-16 and Tommy showed me a few things. I was very raw. Still am probably, but Tommy showed me the bare essentials, so Tommy's not to blame for anything.

"Then I went to Gay Mitchell for a while and of course Pat Comer (Galway's reserve goalkeeper) took me under his wing too." "Glen Comer, the other club keeper with us in Corofin, well Glen is a better keeper than me, he'd be on any county team. I'm not looking for notice when I say that. Anyone will tell you the same. And Pat Comer is a better keeper than me, he's a terrific keeper, but he has problems with his groin, thank God, so he can't kick the ball out well."

So there he is. Martin Mac with nothing but a thin string of lucky saves keeping him between the sticks as two veritable felines scratch their claws on the bench. Just one bad day and he'll be bumped down to the junior Bs in Corofin. You don't believe him?

"A bit of luck is the biggest thing in goalkeeping," he insists, "you need the bit of luck. I remember a move against Derry. I had a bad kick-out to start it and then Derry broke and Tohill got the ball and he should have put it away, but he hit the post, and it came to Joe Cassidy and he took a shot and it just hit me on the ankle. I hadn't a clue where that one was either. Then big Seamus Downey came in and it just ran wide. Steeped."

He paints a picture of himself as a petrified Charlie Chaplin coping comically with the chaos which the game flings at him. His memories of the Derry game don't even include the outstandingly brave save at the toe of Joe Brolly, one of those typically courageous interventions which have become his trademark.

The All-Ireland club final last March was probably his best day, although to hear him tell it he stood rooted like a tree while Erin's Isle players carefully drove the ball at him. Reluctantly, he recites the litany of chances which the Isle spurned in favour of just banging the ball off some extend limb of Mac's.

He didn't even make it up to the Hogan Stand that day. He couldn't stand all the back-slapping and goodfellas craic, so he kept way back as far as he could. He remembers seeing all the old Corofin faces and the whole thing settling into his soul nicely. "I remember a local character called John Joe Forde, seeing him on the stand with a big green wig and a big green scarf on him, and he was crying like a baby. Not many people would show it like that, but that's what it meant. I just stood on the field taking it all in."

From 1994 until this summer he never won a championship match in a Galway jersey. Little wonder then that he's surprised at the place he has arrived at this year. The whole journey surprises him. At moments he stops and takes in the details for processing. He and Tommy Greaney used to play under-age together all the way up in Corofin, and they were handy, but St Michael's always beat them. Then, there they were in Croke Park in March with Ray Silke on the steps lifting the cup. And as if that wasn't enough, an All-Ireland final with Galway drops from the skies the same summer.

Tomorrow he'll hit the pitch on his biggest day and to keep himself psyched he'll have an old battle with the umpires. That's how he passes the time. Waiting for them to make a bad decision and then hopping on them. Just to keep them chatting.

"I have to talk all the time. Chatting to the umpires till they don't want to talk anymore. Talking to the full back line. I try and keep talking. I have a bit of craic with the crowd too, unless they're giving me too much abuse. You know when that happens because I go and stand on the 21-yard line." Meanwhile, lots of people want to know him this week, the phone is hopping, people he hardly knows come demanding tickets, jerseys and footballs are borne into the bar in the arms of children who want them signed. Hawk ers want him to sell wares. He's getting up to go now, heading for training, dodging out of his bar.

Mac passes on up the road and across to his flat. In the drive is the car. The car. Emblazoned in maroon and white with ads for a local company in Corofin along the side panels. He said he'd drive it as a favour until the All-Ireland is done with.

"Am I mad?" he says climbing into the front seat, "am I totally mad?"

He gives a big grin and pulls the collar of his tracksuit up over his head.

A happy man, and no madder than any other goalkeeper in the country.