Ballymun's Philly McMahon a chip off the old block

Philly McMahon does not want to change your opinion of him. He does not know you and you do not know him. Your opinion of him is none of his business, less again any of his concern. It is helpful to establish these things from the off.

St Patrick’s night, eight o’clock on the button. He walks into the lobby of a north Dublin hotel, just as arranged. Dublin lost to Derry on Sunday and he was sent off for a wild swing of the arm at Mark Lynch. All day the suspicion has lingered that he might not show or that the interview might be pulled as a result. At the very least, he’d obviously be reluctant to get into it.

But again, these are the thoughts and presumptions of an outsider. They have no basis in fact, reality or precedent. As it happens, he walks in, sits down, brings up the red card himself before he’s even ordered a glass of water. He’s lived enough life not to panic at the sight of a tape recorder.

“It was my first (straight) red card for Dublin,” he says. “A lot of people probably think it was my fourth or fifth! But no, first red card. It disappoints me that I have one now. There’s probably a perception that I have more but that’s what it is.

“It doesn’t annoy me because I don’t really care. I don’t care what people say – they don’t know me. Unless it’s my father giving out to me, which I’m used to. I haven’t seen him yet so I’m probably in for it. He’s from Belfast so he’ll probably be giving me loads about hitting a fella from the north!”

McMahon is from Ballymun and he is by Ballymun. He grew up in a block of flats on Sillogue Avenue, a few minutes around the road from where we're sitting. He was there the day they were demolished and still gets a bit misty-eyed when he comes across old photographs of the towers. Everything he is, came from there.

Massive advantage
He is a footballer. When Paddy Christie was putting together an under-10 team, he grabbed young lads from the flats to help stock it. McMahon was one, Davy Byrne was another, plenty more as well. Maniacs, Christie called them. Some ended up in Mountjoy, some overdosed, many struggled on through lives of no expectation. But they all started there, kicking a ball when there was nothing else to do.

“They were great practice walls,” says McMahon. “We had a massive advantage – most clubs, you have to go down to your club to practice. We had the flats. We used to try and kick it as high as we could – the towers were 14 storeys high so we used try and see how high we could get it. I’d say at that age I could get it up to the 10th or 11th floor, which isn’t bad going. I don’t know how accurate I was now. I broke a few windows along the way.”

He is a college graduate, the first of his family. The GAA club Ballymun Kickhams draws mainly from two schools – St Kevin's College in Glasnevin and Trinity Comprehensive in Ballymun. Whereas McMahon left Trinity at 17 without much of a Leaving Cert to carry him out into the world, most of the St Kevin's lads he played with were aiming for courses and degrees and college life in the city.

“A lot of my friends from school would have struggled with schoolwork and then later on they would have struggled with drug abuse. One or two of them passed away, some of them went to prison. I was lucky in that I had the support of the Ballymun Kickhams team and I was looking around me saying, ‘Well, all these lads are talking about Leaving Cert points and I’m not even thinking that way’. I got sick of it after a while and it was like, ‘Why can’t I do what these lads are doing?’

“So I went back and repeated my Leaving Cert. And in the end, I was the first of my family to go to university. When I was 13 or 14, I would have thought the same as the majority of students in schools in Ballymun, that you’d have to be from an upper-class area to go to university. I would have thought that, definitely. You wouldn’t have the belief in yourself.

"Everything I've learned in life has come from the area I'm from. The friends I hung around with, some of them took a different path in life. And the reason I took a different path to them is because of the football club. The sport helped me."

Playing senior
He is tough. In 2011, he fractured his right knee and tore his medial ligament in the first half of the Leinster quarter-final against Laois. An injury that should have ended his season didn't even end his game.

He got it strapped and played on to the end before spending the next two months rehabbing to get back in time to play Donegal in that notorious All Ireland semi-final. “Great game to play in,” he laughs. “Great for me anyway – everything was in front of me and the fella I was meant to be marking spent the whole time in defence.”

He’s the other sort of tough too, sometimes excessively so. He started playing senior for Ballymun when he was 16 so he learned how to handle himself pretty quickly. Every once in a while, he goes too far. By his own admission, last Sunday with Mark Lynch was one of those times.

“It was a bit silly by me in fairness. I got pulled back a bit and I threw my arm back to get the man off my shoulder and it hit him in the face. It was silly. I put my hand up about that, absolutely. I let the lads down. It was fair enough that I got sent off for it. It was disappointing because you’re in Celtic Park and it’s a tight ground and you need to have your full team there and everyone needs to be on their game.

“We were doing well at that point and we were getting on top and a silly error like that can cost you. You have to try and make up for that now because you let your team-mates down.”

If he has regrets to work through or apologies to make, it’s for that reason alone. He was the captain of Jim Gavin’s under-21s back in 2008 so there’s a link there going back a while and Gavin’s displeasure comes with a sting. But McMahon long ago learned that beyond the dressing-room door, folk will think what they will think. Pleasing an outside world that already suspects the worst isn’t high on the list of meaningful uses of his time.

“You could see when we were growing up that when teams played Ballymun, there was a bit of a fear factor there. You could see they were thinking, ‘these might be a bit dirty’. And maybe that grows on you. But you can’t win things just by being a dirty team or a hard team. I think it’s been an element that we’ve had that we’ll always be tough.

"Maybe that's grown within a few fellas over the years. I'm not too sure that playing for a hard team makes you a hard person. Being from an area might. Because sometimes you have to adapt to the area if there are situations happening. For me, I don't know. The way I play football is the way I play it. Maybe environment has had an influence there. Maybe it has, yeah.

Hard man
"Look, for me, a hard person is not a person that gets sent off. And up until the Derry game, my record has been very good. That was my first red card for Dublin. But I don't personally think that a guy who is regularly getting sent off is a hard man. I would say a fella that can take a hit and get up and get on with it is far harder.

“The sport is changing. Sometimes you hit lads and they don’t get up as quick as they used to. It’s evolved. I know that if I hit someone and he gets up and not a bother on him, then I know it’s a battle. But if he stays on the ground – and I know it wasn’t that sort of hit – I’ll just shake my head and go, ‘That’s what the sport is now.’ More and more, you see the second fella rather than the first.”

So what else is he? Well, he is a small business owner. Four years ago, he got a phonecall asking would he give an underage team some fitness training. He did such a good job that eventually the parents of the kids came asking about his availability.

Running classes
"At that stage, I was broke really. I had no money. I wasn't working at all. I had a car that I had taken a loan out on when I was working so I was trying to pay that back at the same time. So this came up and I said, 'Yeah, no problem. But you have to come to me because I've sold my car!'"

He gets up every morning at five o'clock and is running classes at one of his three gyms by six. He employs six staff at gyms in Ballymun, Tallaght and Drimnagh and the business is growing all the time. He combines it with his role as strength and conditioning coach for Shamrock Rovers. All of which means you'll rarely get him on the phone between 9am and noon – Dublin training or Rovers training will usually mean late to bed the night before so mid-mornings are for sleeping.

And he is a role model. You can’t come from where he comes from without it leaving a mark. He gives talks to classrooms full of mini-Phillys because he finds it inconceivable that he wouldn’t.

“I tell them not to let anyone put you down. Go and achieve what you want to achieve. I don’t know what impact it has. I mean, would it even be measurable? I think they listen anyway. I’ve come from Ballymun and I’ve experienced the bad side of the antisocial behaviour in the area and I’ve seen where people can go. I explain that I’ve been involved with friends of mine who’ve gone the wrong way and it had ended badly for them.

“It’s tough. If you grow up in Ballymun and you play football, you will have times when you’re playing and kids from other teams will be saying this and that about you. But what I say to them is that if you hold that thought and you go forward 10 or 15 years, think about what it’s like when you have a rake of lads from Ballymun on the Dublin senior panel that wins the All -Ireland.

"If those kids knew that was what was in your future, would they be saying those same things to you? I don't think they would. So that's what I like to do. Pause that moment in time and go forward 10 years. Those kids that were saying whatever to you, they're up on Hill 16 and you are on the pitch. You're walking around the stadium with the cup and those kids who called you names or whatever are after paying in to watch you. Hopefully they go away with a bit more belief in themselves."

Magic potion
Above all, he is a Dublin footballer, a double All-Ireland winner. Quirks of happenstance meant he actually only played one full game in each of Dublin's All-Ireland winning seasons – the Laois one in 2011 and the final last year. He already feels this spring has been different to 2012. More youth around the place. Hungry, ambitious young lads looking to get in on the act.

“There’s no magic potion. There’s no secret. All we’re trying to do is increase the intensity level on what we had last year. I don’t have the answer to what it takes to win it back-to-back.

“Everything has to go up a level and the standards have gone up. Sometimes . . they might drop for game like they did against Derry. But that happens. We’re not invincible. No team is at intercounty level.”

With that, we’re done. He heads off into the Ballymun night, leather jacket zipped up to the neck, beanie pulled tight over his ears. Time is getting on and he’s up at five.