Cavan can always glory in Higgins' legacy

On Gaelic Games:One of the most powerful aspects of the GAA is its ability to combine the legendary and heroic with the local and familiar, which sharpens the sense of loss when great players pass on

IN THREE weeks it will be the sixth anniversary of Cormac McAnallen’s sudden passing. The Tyrone captain’s death caused a wave of shock throughout the country. Aside from the terrible bereavement, there was the intangible loss of what would in all likelihood have been a great career.

Many of us present at the funeral won’t live to see the last of that Tyrone team laid to rest at some – hopefully – distant point in the future, but when the last of them does go, Cormac McAnallen’s name will still be remembered as part of the county’s golden, pioneering generation.

Maybe by then Tyrone will have maintained their current trajectory and be as embedded in football’s hierarchy as Kerry have been for more than 100 years. But maybe not, and the generation from the turn of this century will shine on more brightly than ever.

These gloomy thoughts were prompted by the news of Mick Higgins’s passing 13 days ago. Cavan, the county he captained to its most recent All-Ireland in 1952, never recaptured the glories of that period, and yet the sense of football being a part of the cultural fabric remains although revived only sporadically – one Ulster title in 40 years.

The coupling of Tyrone and Cavan isn’t merely random association. Both won three All-Irelands in six years and challenged Kerry at the top of the game. They also share the doomed romanticism of premature bereavement and unfulfilled promise: 54 years before Cormac McAnallen, Cavan’s PJ Duke, a student at UCD, contracted an illness and died in hospital on May 1st, 1950.

With John Joe O’Reilly, captain of Cavan in the Polo Grounds final of 1947 and centre back on the Team of the Millennium, and Simon Deignan, Duke made up one of the most celebrated half-back lines in football history.

By grim coincidence, O’Reilly (the 1947 Polo Grounds captain commemorated in ballad as the Gallant John Joe), having retired from the game before the county won their fifth All-Ireland in 1952, also died young, at 34, just weeks after that triumph, in the military hospital on the Curragh.

One of the most powerful aspects of the GAA is its ability to combine the legendary and heroic with the local and familiar, which sharpens the sense of loss when great players pass on. They aren’t just celebrities or icons, but part of a living community.

This is particularly evident when someone like Mick Higgins dies. For Cavan people it’s almost the loss of a statesman, the final fallen leader of an era that made the county the most admired and dazzling for 20 years.

It came in waves, with two victories in the 1930s and then three a playing generation later between 1947 and ’52 when he captained the county and led from the front, kicking all but two of Cavan’s scores in the replay win over Meath.

He must have particularly enjoyed that victory. Meath had foiled Cavan’s attempt at three-in-a-row in 1949, a setback that so frustrated Mick Higgins that he privately rated the home league final defeat of the same opposition the following May as the most satisfying of his career.

By any gauge that career was a triumph: a cupboard full of medals including three All-Irelands and an indelible association with the most famous All-Ireland of all.

Mick Higgins emerges as almost a composite of an old fashioned hero: modest and unassuming, but dauntless and generous, criss-crossing the Cavan hinterland and offering his advice and counsel to teams, especially those who hadn’t learned how to win, for no more consideration than the satisfaction of assisting in their success.

Like all of his generation he is most associated with the 1947 final, played in New York, by coincidence the city of his birth. In the Ireland of rationing and post-war austerity the story of that adventure must have seemed like science fiction.

Evidence suggests the GAA was far from convinced of the wisdom of the initiative, largely dreamed up by Canon Michael Hamilton, county chair in Clare, to mark the anniversary of the Famine and re-kindle the GAA’s contact with the US through sending teams, a practice that had naturally been curtailed during the second World War.

In the late Mick Dunne’s meticulous account, The Star Spangled Final, it emerges that a desire not to embarrass the canon, who was esteemed within the organisation, appears to have triggered a canvassing operation that went wrong, leaving the motion to congress in April 1947 gaining approval.

For the association at large the link to the Polo Grounds is also poignant. However it came about, it represented the GAA taking on the world, sending their biggest occasion across the world and securing the attention of the best-known city in the country, which after the war pulsed with optimism for a future it at the time indisputably embodied.

Travel was a logistical headache. Air travel was exotic and viewed with such apprehension that it was decided married men should take some of the shipping berths that were required to supplement the transport of everyone across the Atlantic.

It’s hard to imagine what an experience it must have been for the Cavan and Kerry teams, given the full ticker-tape parade treatment in front of curious crowds at the behest of Mayo-born Mayor Bill O’Dwyer and briefly lionised in the New York papers.

There was a disappointing crowd of just over 35,000 at the Polo Grounds, a baseball venue complete with a pitcher’s mound and relatively tiny playing area.

But despite that and the loss of Micheál O’Hehir’s commentary, including the on-air plea to keep the link to Ireland open for the closing minutes of the match when its booked duration was about to elapse, the Polo Grounds echoes down the decades as both legend and a quirkily assertive venture.

After a nightmare opening saw them trail by eight points, PJ Duke moved onto Kerry’s rampant Batt Garvey while Mick Higgins switched to centrefield and hit the goal that sent Cavan into the lead by half-time. After that there was no turning back.

Time ticks by and Cavan people harbour no illusions about the likelihood of the future reconnecting with their dazzling past. But even if it doesn’t, a relatively small county once ruled the known football world and produced heroes whose renown has outreached mortality.

The passing of Mick Higgins is a great sadness for his county, but what he achieved and represented will continue to be a legacy of cheerful pride.

smoran@irishtimes.com