Memories re-emerge from the haze

INTERVIEW LIAM HAYES: Keith Duggantalks to the self-analytical former All-Ireland winning midfielder who revisits a different time and confronts some old familiar feelings

THEY WERE darkly fascinating days and the 18-year-old passages in Out Of Our Skinsare like a clear howl heard from a half-forgotten place. When Liam Hayes decided to reprint his acclaimed biography, he was confronted with the old doubts that plagued him during his time as a decorated footballer on one of the most brilliant and aggressive football teams ever to win an All-Ireland. Not for the first time in his life, he felt uncomfortable with himself.

"I look at that book now and think I could do it 10 times better," he smiles, the pale blue eyes glinting at the admission. "Part of me wanted to tear it up."

But how could he? That book, printed years before GAA players began producing more volumes of literature than Charles Dickens, was the closest the public has or may ever come to a glimpse behind the dressingroom door.

Hayes was widely known as a majestic and sometimes brooding midfield presence on Seán Boylan's Meath team from 1981 to 1992.

But he was many other things besides.

As a sports writer with the Sunday Press, he wrote with naked and unapologetic honesty about playing for Meath when that seemed like a black honour - particularly during the raging All-Ireland games they played against Cork in 1987/88. He was a journalist first, then a footballer, going so far as to take his notebook and pen into the dug-out for a league match against Tyrone that he was covering in his cub days with the Meath Chronicle.

In 1995, following the abrupt closure of The Irish Press Group, he began publishing newspapers himself and has floated some 11 titles since. Many Irish people too young to remember his athletic endeavours know him principally for his often provocative GAA column in the Sunday Tribune, with the Kerry football team often singled out for damning analysis.

Others remember the stir that Out Of Our Skinscaused in 1992 - in particular the harrowing and eloquent chapter which deals with the death by suicide of his brother and best friend, Gerard.

People - and in particular GAA people - did not talk of such matters in the Ireland of 1992.

More recently, Hayes' interview on the Late Late Show, in which he spoke about his September diagnosis of cancer, touched many viewers because of the candour and articulacy with which he clarified his emotions. Euphoric, was the key note of the Meath man's self-analysis. He wasn't too comfortable about the idea of talking about his illness. He had been booked on the Late Late Showto talk about Out Of Our Skinsbefore his illness had been diagnosed. "I wasn't the first person to get this thing and so many people have battled quietly and courageously. But I knew too that not mentioning it would have been foolish."

In the days afterwards, the letters and emails began arriving and they still are. Some about his illness. Some about suicide. Mothers. Fathers. Brothers. Notes from men he marked on desolate fields in games that exist now only in the vaults of yellowed-provincial newspaper archives. Well wishes from former team-mates he rarely sees. Letters from Kerry football people he had roasted in print.

"One high-profile player of whom I have been particularly critical," Hayes smiles.

And he found himself re-evaluating this entity known as the GAA; this vast, messy, sometimes ugly and frequently wonderful society within a society. Hayes has always been a private man who seems locked into a peculiarly public life. Not a loner exactly, but nor far away from it either.

In the Meath dressingroom, he had the talent and the force of personality to make him a central figure but this thing he did, this writing, it placed him apart. Hayes was the public conscience of that Meath team. Or Hayes couldn't keep his mouth shut. Take your pick.

He had his friends. Colm O'Rourke was and is, he admits, an idol. Gerry McEntee, also. But he knew the way they all felt. "I wasn't an impostor, exactly. But I was not someone to be trusted one hundred per cent either."

And in his other life with the Irish Press, he felt like an outsider too. He will always remember one particular editorial conference at the office in Burgh Quay. His editor, Michael Keane, was talking and he was sitting around the table with the others, scribbling on pads and he felt acutely aware of the luscious welt around his eye embroidered with stitches, this emblem of his weekend violence and glories.

"It was like having dual lives," he says now. "It is just the way it was. And I was never totally happy in my own skin in the Meath dressingroom. I was there for 20 years and - I know it sounds preposterous - but I never stopped analysing myself."

That struggle still jumps of the pages of Out Of Our Skinsand the central question he tried to ask himself as he was writing it remains just as relevant to him today: who is Liam Hayes?

THE FIRST THINGyou notice about Hayes is his size. Not his height but just the overall physical presence of the man. It was lashing outside and he walked in to the drawing room of Finnstown House wearing a wax jacket and a woollen hat, bristling with energy. At 48, he has retained the athletic frame of his Meath football days. He likes to run a few miles on the road ("I go so slowly that I wear a hat so I won't be recognised") and looks so exuberantly healthy it seems hardly possible he could be battling a grave illness.

Finnstown House was a former haunt of the Irish rugby team and Hayes grinned as he looked at some of the old photographs that adorn the walls. He covered the Irish rugby team for the Press when the game was still amateur and the players were good fun to be around. He guides us to a secluded wing of the house where he himself conducted interviews years before to talk about Out Of Our Skins.

The revised edition sacrificed an account of his childhood in Skryne for a contemporary foreword but the emotional heart of the book remains intact. Although he never explicitly states it, the hectic accomplishment of his football life is inevitably set against the unbearably powerful chapter of stilled promise and sadness devoted to his brother. And more generally, the book is about the universal subject of a sportsman facing up to the fact that his day is almost done.

"I was playing badly and not enjoying it," Hayes says of his last season with Meath. "I had become hugely resentful of the time it took. I wanted it to end. By 30 I was well ready to go. A young midfielder named John McDermott had just joined Skryne that year and was coming up. There was no sign of John becoming the player he became so at training I was killing him that summer. I mean, he was in a bad way. He wanted off the panel. When you are old, you do funny things.

"The most groundless cliche in sport is that there is no 'I' in team. You are an 'I' first and foremost. And at training, you look to kill your opponent - the guy who is trying to take your place. So in my time with Meath I would have seen seven or eight big, strong midfielders come and go down the years. Your first job was to kill them off. Not good for Meath football! Just good for me! I did a damn good job of killing John that summer. I was annihilating him in the air. But you could see that there was something special in him and the year that Out of Our Skins was published was the first year I was dropped.

"John had an engine in him and legs on him that I never had. I was a lazy trainer. He was a beautiful athlete and then he learned the game. He was immaculate. Oh, you would say nice things to him in the dressingroom and to Boylan about him. But then you would look to kill him. It is like birds killing their young. And I enjoyed it. Yeah. So that was my last summer."

It is easy to forget that Meath were a pale force in Gaelic football before the 1980s generation came along. Seán Boylan, the herbalist from Dunboyne and primarily a hurling man, got the job of football manager in 1982 because nobody else wanted it. As Hayes sees it, their metamorphosis from being the players who looked enviously across the border at Dublin glories to the most feared and controversial team in the land occurred through absorbing the lessons they learned from the great Dublin and Kerry teams. Both of those sides, he contends, were frighteningly tough. Meath learned they had to become like that and then discovered that they were good at it.

He reviews his own schooling in the darker arts of Gaelic football with neither pride nor shame: it was what it was.

One incident stands out: a challenge game against Louth. Hayes was hardly out of his teens and he was being marked by an 18-year-old who felt obliged to belt him every chance he got. Hayes eventually responded. "It was a dirty, cowardly belt," he says, grimacing at the memory. "I am not proud of it. Blood and teeth everywhere. Those are the things you look back on. You got away with these things in challenge games, in league games, in blessing-of-the-clubhouse games. Some of the acts were unpardonable.

"I never saw that Louth kid again. I mean, that poor young fella. The thing is, I never minded getting punished but I was never good at fighting. I didn't enjoy the combat and wasn't good in one on ones. I just wasn't fast enough."

He acknowledges his Meath team exploited the grey areas of lawlessness in Gaelic football with absolute zeal. They cultivated an aura of fear that mirrored that of Mike Tyson, the supreme heavyweight boxer of the time. It hardly made sense that Boylan, an obviously spiritual man, could preside over a team that could mix gorgeous football with back-alley instinct. But Hayes is adamant it was an element of that Meath team which existed parallel to Boylan's philosophy on football.

"It was something Seán wrestled with and allowed in his dressingroom to be an alive and dangerous part of his team. He never condoned it. He never spoke about it. He certainly would never apologise for it. He just recognised it for what it was.

"When I look at the All-Ireland final of 1996, I felt Meath and Mayo owed everyone an apology and Seán and the players owed their own people an apology. That was no way to win an All-Ireland. But I blame us. I blame our team. The seeds of that were sown by our team because the Meath players of 1996 would have looked up to us and they saw how we took care of things."

WHEN HAYES REREADhis own interpretations of those games in Out of Our Skins, those years, he was struck by how sombre he must have seemed. He was one of the lucky ones. The dashing midfielder, the All-Ireland winner, man of the match on a golden September! In the book, he never seems to be having much fun. Call it the solemnity of youth because in person, the 48-year-old Hayes is optimistic and sincere and engaging. He can laugh at himself. The business of publishing replaced the adrenaline rush that football gave him.

His entire career at the Presswas overshadowed by a general sense the company was "already on its last legs". It closed on a humdrum day with little ceremony, as if the whole enterprise just quietly stopped breathing. Hayes was one of the last to leave the building. Television crews had gathered outside but few then fully realised this was the end of an institution.

"Because of the football, I never had the emotional attachment to the place that others had. I was in Mulligan's pub once in my life and that was for a union meeting I was dragged to. But I never once raised a glass in Mulligan's.

"It was a great shame that the Pressclosed because it was so full of history. There was a business there. There were a lot of fine journalists there and we were suddenly like rats thrown from a ship. We needed homes! I had no job and I had to make a decision. And it seemed better to go it alone."

He was broke when he co-founded the Titlein 1996, the weekly sports newspaper modelled on the French sports daily, L'Equipe. Famously, he took the editorial decision to picture the heads of all Mayo and Meath players who played in the violent All-Ireland final replay that September at the base of a bloodied guillotine.

The Titlelater expanded into Ireland On Sunday, which registered an ABC average of 63,000 sales. Eventually, it was sold to a Scottish media franchise for €9 million. Hayes thundered on with the ill-fated Dublin Dailyand then the Gazette Group, which led to his 10 per cent stake being bought out by the majority stakeholder, The Irish Times, after High Court proceedings last June. But Hayes' fascination with publishing is clear.

"It is nerve-wracking and hugely costly. Of the last 15 years, I had no direct income for three of them. So you got through all of the emotions associated with that uncertainty. The opportunities for building newspapers now are less and less and I am at the back of the class when it comes to technology but there are projects that I am interested in. And I find it incredibly energising."

THE AFTERNOON HASbecome chill and Hayes keeps his big coat wrapped around him as he chats. He has been warned about getting flu. He knows, deep down, there is a contradiction in a man who is not comfortable revisiting episodes of his life reissuing a book he wrote two decades ago.

Here is the man who rarely met team-mates after he finished up, who only ever went to one golf outing with the Meath old boys, who found it hard to even watch his county playing in Croke Park, now placing those warring days in sharp focus by putting his book on the shiny shelves again.

The man who admits he has managed, consciously or otherwise, to control and compartmentalise his thoughts and feelings for his late brother is the very one who moves strangers to write to him because he talks so compellingly on television. There is a collection of his brother's journals and diaries lying in the home house in Meath which Hayes has leafed through but has not yet sat down and read. Not in almost 30 years.

"He wrote a lot all his life and especially in the months before his death. I leafed through them and I told myself I would go back to them so I am aware of some of the content but there is a barrier between me wanting to go there. It is funny - you would think purely from a brotherly love point of view or a cold-blooded curiosity point of view, you would want to go and pick them up. Especially because he was my best friend, my brother.

"We lived in the same bedroom and shared everything. And if I had been in his shoes, how would I feel if all my writings were left untouched? I would feel decimated."

And there are other contradictions. The man who butted heads with Seán Boylan to the point he was almost not talking to him when he finished his career (Hayes' last act in a Meath shirt was to strike an 18-year-old Laois prodigy named Hughie Emerson and to walk away with a red card) writes and talks lovingly about his old mentor.

Boylan too is suffering from cancer: they speak regularly on the phone, trading war stories and keeping the spirits up. At some level, Boylan is still the manager and Hayes still the headstrong big man on his team. At some cosmic level, Hayes knows the brotherhood he shared in the Meath dressingroom - odd as it may have been - remains intact but in an unreachable way.

"Retiring off a team is a potentially tragic thing," he says. "Every sportsman goes through it. It is a very lonely, self-absorbed act. Within 12 months, you wonder were you ever part of that team. You very quickly become distant from the whole experience. It is the same with Skryne. When you live outside the village, it becomes something of a fantasy that once existed that you were part of. My mother and my sister still live there and I go down to Skryne but I have lived in Dublin 20 years so you watch from a distance.

"You don't go see the team play often. Once you step outside the dressingroom, it is gone. And very quickly it is as if you were never in there. It is a bit like memories of your childhood. You have snapshots. It is like something that happened to someone else. That could be me, though. I just keep moving on. I don't bring the past with me very often, which is a pity."

But, of course, that is not quite true. What is Out Of Our Skins if not a valedictory to his old team, to his family, to the many thousands he has met so far? He wrote what he could never bring himself to say. This has been a strange few months for Liam Hayes, with his illness bringing so many old names and faces rushing back into his life with only the warmest words of encouragement and defiance, the kind of words he heard for a decade in the dressingroom.

"This book was born in this room, and it has been written in this room," reads the end of the prologue. "I know it will also be read by others sitting on the wooden benches around me and I can't expect everybody to approve of it, or even like it. My only hope and wish is that they recognise this room in all its magnificence."

Almost 20 years on, it is worth revisiting.