Mind over the things that matter

Gaelic Games: THEY TELL it like it is in Crossmaglen. Cork were playing Armagh in a league match and Enda McNulty was standing on the sideline, conscientiously going through his stretching drills and not really expecting to play.

Even though he was only 33, McNulty represented to Armagh fans one of the last of the fabled gang that had won the county’s only All-Ireland in 2002. As he stood on the edge of the action, he heard a familiar voice from behind the wire:

“Enda, what are ya at?”

It was Tony McEntee, his friend and former Armagh team mate. They had first played football together at age 11. McNulty turned to look at his friend, who was studying him with evident bewilderment. The crowd followed the play so the conversation was private.

“What the f*** are ya at, Enda?” his friend repeated. “You should be out here with me. Don’t be wasting your time. It is over.”

McNulty smiled at his friend and resumed his exercises. Friends, family, and ex-team-mates: all told him the same thing in recent years. Quit. Give it up. It’s done. He had achieved everything one can in the game: NFL, Ulster championship medals, an All-Star award and that sacred All-Ireland.

Perhaps it pained McNulty’s friends to see what he was putting himself through for the last three years, still a member of the squad but was surplus to playing requirements. He played no league or championship minutes for the past three seasons with the singular exception of the All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Wexford in 2008.

He continued to put himself through the punishing ritual of those drives from Dublin to Armagh and to push himself even though it was becoming apparent that he was now regarded as reserve material. For most of his senior career, McNulty had the corner back position locked down and was regularly detailed to shadow the best forwards in Ireland. This experience was through the looking glass stuff.

He was always a scrupulous analyst of his own performances and believed he was playing as well as he ever had done: that he still had something to offer.

Then, he was in Pittsburgh last winter studying the backroom team of the Steelers football team. McNulty works as a sports psychologist now and American football, with its combination of brute athleticism and sophisticated coaching culture, has always appealed to him.

So he was in the unlikely setting of The Steel City when he got some phone calls from journalists from home asking him how he felt about not being on the Armagh panel for the forthcoming season.

He missed a call from Paddy O’Rourke, the Armagh manager as well. And it was a disappointment, no question. This is the first year since 1996 that he hasn’t been part of the Armagh squad. But he still hasn’t retired. That is the important thing. He still hasn’t listened to the advice of others.

“It kept me unbelievably grounded and humble and hungry,” McNulty says now of his last three seasons in obscurity.

“So while I have found those years unbelievably frustrating and it is hard to sit on the bench, it has also given me that. I feel like I have Armagh football in my DNA at this stage. In the past few years at training, it probably took me eight to ten weeks to get up to speed but then I felt I was playing some of the best football of my career.

“I am more proud of the last three years with Armagh than any other. I do feel in good shape now – I have never felt better because I am not travelling as much as I used to. The only worry I would have about playing at that level now is about timing and judgement and all, but a few games and you wouldn’t be long getting back into it. But I do feel really honoured and privileged to have had my years with Armagh, particularly those last few.

“They were a great lesson. Because it meant I could work with guys in the Leinster team and elsewhere who maybe aren’t playing as much as they would like and I could empathise with them.”

That may be at the core of it. All his life, McNulty has been learning. The past three years have been crowded with potential knowledge through self-examination because so much happens to a sportsperson when they are approaching the closing phase of their career. Ageism; how to leave the sport; how to cope with not playing: all of these are issues that he speaks to other people about and he found there was nothing as insightful as experiencing their effects himself.

Theory only takes you so far.

When the Armagh football team was creating its reputation as the biggest and the baddest and – the accolade only grudgingly afforded to them – the best team in the land, McNulty was always thinking about what lay ahead. For instance, he always wanted to know what happens when teams broke up. He used to ask Nicky English and Gerry McEntee about the teams they played on. He heard that the Cork football team from the early 1990s had an arrangement where they met every Christmas Eve for a few drinks, even if it meant flying in for it. “That was their connection.”

This weekend, he will watch Armagh and Derry sparking away in Clones in one of the Irish haunts in Barcelona. Des Mackin, his old Armagh team-mate, lives in the Spanish city these days. McNulty has been there all week. They plan to watch the match together. It is going to be strange, sipping cocktails among the beautiful people and watching this elemental theatre that they know so well.

Clones: he knows every smell, every bump in the road on the way up to St Tiernachs Park, every inch of grass, the faces of the programme sellers, the faces in the brass band. When people talk about “the Armagh team” now, they mean the marauding bunch that played from roughly 2000-2006. When McNulty thinks about the way they were, he realises two things about them: that they could have been better prepared and that they should have blown off steam a bit more.

“I think we were too focussed,” he admits now. “Others feel differently. But we didn’t socialise enough. Because that team was forged through huge adversity – getting beaten early year after year, through massive intensive training sessions . . . but also through socialising together – 14 or 15 guys hanging around at the bar in the Botanic in college. That’s how it was. So the social element of a team is essential.

“We don’t meet up very regularly because people are off doing their own thing. But we have over the last three or four years managed to get away together and that has been great. It is one of the regrets that we have. When we won the All-Ireland and those years we won in Ulster: we never had enough nights where it was just the team on its own. And yeah, I do think we could have done more.

“There is a feeling that we could – maybe should – have won two or three All-Irelands. If you ask anyone what we could have done better, we could have done everything five or six percent better than we did. Even down to our confidence. It is easy to be a Monday morning quarterback and at the time, we felt we were doing what we could. You have to accept that those times as valuable and it has been a brilliant learning curve.”

A certain mythology grew around Armagh in those years. The training purges became something of a feared rumour. Anecdotes went around. There was a defender in an Ulster championship match who gave one of the Armagh forwards what he thought was a pretty shuddering blow. “Don’t be tickling me, young fella,” the forward responded.

It didn’t matter whether this actually happened: just that the word went around that it did. Armagh seemed to get bigger with every passing summer. They didn’t blink and they didn’t miss. It wasn’t an aura they sought to create but after a while, it became an advantage. Sometimes, McNulty would look at an opposing player and see an expression in his eyes that he is still trying to find a definition for.

“It’s not necessarily fear but you would see a lack of belief that they were going to win or maybe a lack of toughness. And you can’t technically describe what that means and there isn’t really any correct terminology to write it down. But I know what it looks like. You notice that in other teams and players and when you see it, you go for the jugular.”

He witnessed a similar transformation with Leinster, with whose players he has been working with for the past four years. The perception of a team with a suspect core has been completely replaced. McNulty is unabashed in his admiration for those players. “Just the physicality of that game . . . I can’t get my head around it.”

Sometimes he would act as a dummy defender for players like Bernard Jackman or Gordon D’Arcy when they were running through set scenarios and even that was enough to give him a taste of the impact they habitually absorb and mete out.

“What I always taken by is the total disregard they have for their bodies. But in general, there has been a culture shift in Leinster over the past four years that is down to their coaching and to their players and I feel really fortunate to have witnessed that.”

In Barcelona during the week, he saw a photograph of LeBron James on the back pages of El Pais. He didn’t even need to read the headline to understand that the Miami superstar had been beaten in the NBA finals. He remembered going to see James play against Orlando last year and was spellbound for the entire game. “I have never seen anyone in any sport perform at the level that he can in his.”

The global mystery of why James can’t translate his abundant talent and athleticism into general domination is both a bar room conversation and one of the most common challenges in sports. Motiv8, the company that McNulty set up with his brother Justin specialises in performance excellence – with teams, athletes and corporate clients on their books. The obstacles they want overcome invariably overlap.

When he was a kid travelling to games with Justin, their father played a cassette for them in his car.

“An old Renault 19,” McNulty laughs now. Mr McNulty gave the boys books to read and nurtured the idea of sport being about mental as well as physical strength. It made sense to them. As McNulty went through school and college, he found himself looking to other sports to learn. He still does.

The LeBron James conundrum fascinates him and as he talks he returns to Irish basketball and cites last January’s Cup final when UCD, with whom he worked, appearing in their first quarter, were full of authority and composure despite being in unknown country against the more experienced Killester. Of course, Irish hoops is light years removed from the NBA but his point is that sometimes the shift that athletes have to make to full realise their potential can be quite subtle.

Be it Leinster or Derval O’Rourke or a Gaelic football team: the individuals are different but the doubts or obstacles they experience are common because they are human.

Make no mistake: Enda McNulty will retire some day soon. The trauma of retirement has become one of the best aspects of the GPA movement. For decades it was not acknowledged that once they quit, too many players experience a kind of emptiness that could be filled through the bar stool hours or not at all.

The GPA now gives induction courses to young players making them consider about what is going to happen when it is over. For rugby players, retirement can be equally traumatic: from the glory of cold nights in Thomond or the RDS and relatively lucrative contracts to starting out in the real world in their mid-30s: it is a ferocious life adjustment.

“Players lives can revolve around the team without their realising. Friendships. Their self-esteem might depend on who they are as a player. Suddenly, all that is taken away. We need to become better at helping people cope.”

McNulty admits that he has enjoyed not having the weekly midweek grind of driving to training in miserable weather and driving back with late night radio for company. “Yeah, I have enjoyed the freedom to do what I want to do. That has been nice.”

But he would swap it in a flash for one more season. He isn’t quite ready to bow out and isn’t too proud to admit that he would respond to a call-up under any circumstances. And if that doesn’t happen, then he can be content that he saw it through to the absolute. So he will watch the Clones ritual in Catalonia and he can say one thing with certainty about his football life.

“I’m proud that I never threw in the towel.”

That was never the Armagh way, not on his watch.