Heroic Harte's resilience never more needed

SIDELINE CUT:No strangers to tragedy, Tyrone and Mickey Harte are again called upon to cope with dreadful, heartbreaking circumstances, writes KEITH DUGGAN

OH, TYRONE: Gaelic Games has a habit of producing wonderful teams whose spirit long outlasts the thrill of their accomplishments in September All-Irelands. But has any Irish sports team or manager ever brought such joy to its people while carrying not just the weight of great expectation but a staggering litany of heartbreak? Has any sporting figure been required to find the perfect words on impossibly sad and inexplicable days as frequently as Mickey Harte has over the past 13 years?

Even on this unfathomably dark and cruel week for his family, he has somehow found it within himself to find words that served, first and foremost, to console others.

Resilience and grace under pressure have always been at the heart of the immortal Tyrone football days which Harte has presided over since 1997. From the emotional afternoon in September 1998, (nobody who stood around a grinning Cormac McAnallen near the wire at the old Canal End tunnel listening to the kid – for that is what he was then – rhapsodise about what the day meant will forget it) to the amber-lit September Sunday in 2008 when Tyrone won their third senior All-Ireland of the decade, those teams with the Red Hand crest seemed to play in irrepressible bursts of inspiration and instinct that no other team could hope to equal.

Lest it be forgotten, the 1997/98 Tyrone minors played through the confusion and grief of the death of their team-mate Paul McGirr after an accidental collision in the Ulster championship. Lest it be forgotten, they somehow managed to win the Ulster title anyway and between drawing the All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry and turning up for the replay in Parnell Park against Kerry (on the afternoon that Princess Diana was buried in London), their young midfielder Kevin Hughes lost his sister in a car accident.

Lest it be forgotten, Mickey Harte’s first All-Ireland final – after that harrowing summer – ended with his trying to console a young team who had emptied themselves and still lost to a wonderful Laois team. Lest it be forgotten, he was so exhausted by the emotion of that summer that he might have stopped then but for the intervention and persuasion of a number of people, including his young daughter.

And, lest it be forgotten, when they did win that first All-Ireland a year later, it was Laois they beat and Laois boys who formed a guard of honour to salute them from the field. And lest it be forgotten too, they had to return to an Omagh that was still obliterated by that terrible August bombing. Those young footballers were the first reason that anyone in the town or county had cause to cheer about life since that day. They have been cheering since.

It was the beginning of a magnificent football era, a period in the history of Tyrone which transcended sport. And Mickey Harte has been on the sideline for all of the best days and worst days.

Mickey Harte is no easy man to categorise: impeccably polite and absolutely determined, reasoned but fearless about speaking his mind, a pioneer, deeply religious and utterly open to learning about sport and about life from diverse sources. And stubborn too! Harte has become such a respected manager that his playing days are often overlooked. Lest it be forgotten, he played on a fine Tyrone minor team in 1972 but opted out to study the following year and missed out on a rare year of Ulster minor and senior success. (The minors won that year’s All-Ireland, a title the county would not win again until ’98).

And lest it be forgotten, Harte was the man at the epicentre of the furious row which saw his local club, Glencull, exiled from all GAA activity because of the kind of common row that flares in all parishes all the time. “The problem was the boy who was sent off with me was allowed to represent his club at handball the following day and I couldn’t see how that was fair. I had the unconditional support of the Glencull players so I walked,” he said. This was one evening in 2004 in the Kelly Inn, the famous roadside restaurant near his home. “People might say hello if they met in a shop or a pub,” he remembered. “But just about.”

The row began in 1982 and people on both sides thought they had the moral authority and nobody blinked for almost a decade. Harte and others missed out on a promising football career because of it. One of the chief reasons the feud ended was that they realised in Glencull that they might have something special in their hands in a youngster named Peter Canavan. People began talking and out of that came Errigal Chiaráin and a new era of splendour.

And that experience was important because Mickey Harte said of that period in isolation: “I learned more about life in that period than in any other period of management. It taught me a lot about loyalty and friendship and principle.”

And he took those virtues – those family virtues – with him into management. He didn't know then, of course, just how much he would need them. That evening in Kelly's he laughed when he recalled his first minor trials. Michaela went along with him: 240 kids showed up to volunteer their services for the Red Hand. That was the beginning. When he appeared on the Late Late Showa few weeks after Tyrone's 2008 All-Ireland win, he was accompanied by Michaela who noted that in the 17 years since that first trial, she had not missed a championship game. It was not, she pointed out with a smile, the record of a "fair-weather fan".

It was certainly not that. Who can guess at the countless hours the Harte family have spent talking about football in the same house that thousands of people will, over today and tomorrow, visit in such sombre, heartbreaking circumstances? Who can guess the number of happy football journeys the Hartes have made from their home?

Go back to 2003, to Tyrone’s first glittering senior year. Inside the Tyrone dressingroom in Croke Park, all is happy bedlam. Mickey Harte is there and his son, Mark, who played on that team. Stephen O’Neill, one of the class of ’97 is saying “Paul McGirr will be happy in heaven tonight”. Cormac McAnallen is holding court elsewhere. In the middle of the room, Chris Lawn, a veteran of so many bitterly disappointing days in Tyrone colours, stands not quite able to believe that this is happening; that Tyrone are champions of the whole of Ireland. He holds his hands out at this young crew that Mickey Harte has put together and he marvels “Why not? Why not go on?”

They would go on all right, all of them, through extraordinary days that made them feel like they could travel no higher and then through other terrible days that came out of the blue with unaccountable swiftness.

Their best days are safe and untouchable. And through the worst of them, Mickey Harte and his family and all of the young football players that he has guided down the years have behaved with a grace that has been humbling.

And none of that will be forgotten, not for many, many lifetimes.