Old timer has youth on his side

Leinster Club SFC final: Tom Humphriesmeets St Vincent's manager Mickey Whelan, who is enjoying a renaissance after a turbulent stint with Dublin.

The phone rings.

"Hello? "

"Hello?"

"Yeah, Mickey?"

"You called me?"

"No. You called me".

"Did I? Shite!"

Mickey Whelan has a brand new mobile phone. It's kitted with all the bells and whistles. You advise him he needs to recruit the expertise of a teenager or someone even younger to decipher the phone's codes and he grins and shakes his head.

The phone's secrets won't elude him for long. Mickey Whelan is that rare animal, an elderly canine eager to learn new tricks.

He's 69 years old next birthday and now is the winter of his contentment. Tomorrow he leads his beloved St Vincent's into a Leinster club final, an unlikely seasonal adventure for the club who have been imprisoned in shadow since losing the All-Ireland club final in 1985, a welcome renaissance for the man written into the margins after his turbulent stint as county manager in the mid-1990s.

The remarkable thing about Mickey Whelan is not his endurance, nor his enthusiasm, though both those qualities make him virtually unique, but his willingness to change. In this, his latest stint tilting at the windmills on behalf of St Vincent's, he virtually cleared the decks and went with kids. At Mickey's age kids should be a benign mystery, someone else's concern, but there he is night after night in Marino extracting the potential like a man tramping grapes in the vineyard.

The unfortunate series of events which exiled St Vincent's from the top table was supposed to end last year, on the club's 75th anniversary. St Vincent's reached the county final where they met UCD in a rekindling of a bitter rivalry which dates back to the 1970s. The students won. Vincent's left with regrets and questions. The fallout seemed to consume a lot of energy. Even in Mickey Whelan energy is a finite resource.

"I was shattered last year. It rankled with me, the whole UCD thing, and it rankled with me more because we should have beaten them. And I knew that generally when you get a chance like that it doesn't happen again for a while. And I was conscious that people in the club might think I was hogging the senior team."

So he got set to walk away. If he would be allowed.

Kevin Heffernan has long been a mentor and a friend to Mickey. He recalls as a 19-year-old growing up in Cabra West and, having made it fresh onto the Dublin panel, being invited to a function for the county team. Mickey's father Frank was of the view that there was nothing good to be found outside the home after 11 at night. Mickey's involvement in the function would be brief.

So Kevin Heffernan, by then a veteran, called to the Whelan household and collected the young lad, giving assurances as to his well being. Frank Whelan was dubious but sent his son off with the words: "You're bringing him out of here, you're responsible for bringing him back, whatever hour it is." Mickey remembers walking down Cabra with the older man and noticing Heffernan jutting his jaw in that familiar way. Whatever Heffernan was thinking, his hand has never been far from Mickey Whelan's shoulder since then.

When Mickey wanted to quit managing the senior team last year he came home one evening and found the house empty. Irene, his beloved wife, or the Minster for War as he calls her jokingly, was gone to the theatre with Mickey's two daughters. Odd, thought Mickey and shrugged.

Next thing there was a knock on the door. Heffernan! "Kevin, I'm telling you now don't even ask the question," said Mickey as he drew the door open. "Don't ask me Kevin. It's there and ready for someone else." Heffernan, who has a hearing deficiency when it come to the word "no", wasn't disturbed.

"Well are you going to let me in? Sure we'll sit down and have a chat." So they spoke about the run to the final against UCD, the colours up on the flagpoles around Marino, the buzz of life the adventure had brought back to a club starting to turn in on itself.

An hour later Mickey Whelan sensed that Heffernan was ready to ask the question.

He pre-empted. "Listen, I don't want to say no to you."

But Heffernan was only beginning. They talked on.

"He pulled out all the strokes, knew exactly what to say to me after all these years of friendship. In the end he said: 'Do me a favour, one more year.'

" 'Aw Kevin,' I said to him. Anyway I ended up saying I'd do it."

Heffernan ghosted off into the night. Irene walked in a while later. First question: "Was Kevin here?" Nothing happens by accident.

THAT MICKEY WHELANshould get to write his own happy postscript to a lifetime of love and commitment seems particularly fitting. He was in danger of being remembered solely for an incendiary period as manager of the Dublin footballers in the two seasons after the All-Ireland win of 1995.

It ended badly and in circumstances that were unprecedentedly vicious and wounding. Whatever one's view of Mickey Whelan's style and demeanour during those two seasons, nothing could justify the treatment which led to his departure.

"Yeah," he says, having seen the question coming down the tracks. "That hurt me. It really hurt me. I was bringing in young fellas like Paddy Christie, Ian Robertson, I had Ciarán Whelan in at 19. The press were being fed, probably by John O'Leary. John didn't see eye to eye with me. I didn't see eye to eye with John. The pressure on me was filtering through and was mounting on the young players, they were going out ashen-faced to games. I thought it would improve in the second year but it didn't. "

So when the abuse hit a crescendo one November day in Parnell Park after a league match with Offaly, Mickey pulled the plug. No one had Mickey Whelan to kick around anymore. He says the business didn't knock his confidence but some of the brashness went out of him like air from a pummelled man's lungs and one suspects the bruising he took back then makes him value this winter journey all the more.

He still defends his tenure and in hindsight, the Leinster first round game with Meath in 1997 was probably the day upon which his reputation hinged. Meath cut loose in the first half while Dublin were paralysed by nerves. Dublin looked down the barrel at a nine-point deficit at one stage but got up and played the sort of football Mickey Whelan believes in for the rest of the game. Paul Bealin crashed a late penalty off the woodwork. Had he scored Dublin would have been Leinster champions and Whelan's transitional administration would have been deemed a success.

"My family were great. Irene is a brick, just a great and gentle person who helped me get through it all. I still believed in what I could do but it was the only time in my life that I wasn't overtly successful. The stuff in the media portrayed me as a gobshite. I mightn't be the brightest guy but I'm not a gobshite. That hurt me."

It's hard to gauge how deep the hurt went but he tells a story which gives you a good idea. "Irene lifted me up. It was that, family and close friends who brought me through it. Heffo came to me when it was all over and he said to me: 'Mickey, we all know what you can do'. I looked at him and I said, 'Kevin, your f***ing silence was deafening when In was in trouble. One interview, one article to the newspapers saying that I was bringing the team the right way would have made a huge difference'.

"I knew I hurt him. I knew he wanted to leave me to it. I lashed out at him unfairly but that's how deeply it hurt me."

A prominent journalist asked Mickey a few years ago if he thought he had been hard done by in the media back then. Mickey turned the thing around and asked the journalist the same question back.

The journalist replied, 'yes'.

"That's the answer. I do think I was hard done by. They saw different things than what I saw. Once that starts you are fighting a losing battle. It gets to the players. You have half of them not working for you. I should have dropped three or four big names right at the start. We played some very good football. We had one game when 13 of our players scored. But listen, life is not meant to be fair. If it was it would be predictable.

"People have jobs to do. They read things differently. I try not to erode myself by feeling aggrieved with somebody else. It was a tough time."

More than a decade on from his departure he still mulls over bits and pieces of the drama and if he is reconciled to the verdict of history little revisions still mean a lot.

A couple of years ago he was playing golf in Clontarf when he was stopped by Jason Sherlock. Jason had spent the summer of 1995 as a one-man version of the Beatles. Jayomania was unprecedented and has yet to be repeated. His diminished profile in the two seasons which followed was a complicated matter and reflected as much the ambivalence of hard-core GAA people to his celebrity as it did Whelan's view of the player . Yet the fates of Whelan and Sherlock have seemed to lean on each other.

"Anyway, Jason Sherlock, nice man that he is, came to me and said he wanted to talk to me. He said he had been thinking about me."

Sherlock waited on the last green for Mickey Whelan and when the older man holed out, he approached and shook his hand and said: "I just wanted to tell you that I was very young and that I've learned a lot since. If I had it to live over again I would be doing things differently."

Mickey Whelan looked at Sherlock for a minute and said: "Are you trying to tell me that I wasn't a gobshite?"

Sherlock grinned. "I didn't understand everything at the time."

And Mickey Whelan grins and shakes his head now on this cold Saturday morning in St Vincent's.

"That gave me such a lift. He is a great bit of stuff. He didn't have to come to me and say that but he did. It meant a hell of a lot."

IN ALL LIKELIHOODthere would have been much in Sherlock's precocious giftedness and brash appeal which Mickey Whelan would have identified with back then. After 1995 Sherlock was busy resisting the blandishments of soccer, he won an Ireland under-21 cap, a UCD scholarship and was linked for quite a period with a move to Liverpool. Whelan , no hard-core fundamentalist, had seen all that himself.

"I could have gone to Manchester United at 15. But all my uncles were away and I'd see them coming home at Christmas and I hated that. I wouldn't do it. But I knew it was there. Dickie Giles, who was Johnny's father and a great pal of my father's, and the famous scout Billy Behan sat in the house at the kitchen table when I was 13 talking us into it. An uncle of mine said to my da: 'Listen, Frank, he's good, he could make you well off.'

"And my father looked at me and I had a face on and he said: 'What's wrong with you?'

"I said: 'I don't want to go away, da.' So my da shook his head and just said: 'Leave him be.' "

They left him be and the young Whelan had enough about him to know he had to make something of himself. He lived in Cabra but the local club Finbarr's never came near him, so a through a school connection he ended up with Clanna Gael of Ringsend.

St Vincent's were the dominant side in the county and on the county panel and Frank Whelan brought his son to see every Vincent's game he was free for.

Clanna Gael had a lot of country players with them and Whelan found that while he played for his own club, St Vincent's men were his heroes and role models.

When he came back from America in 1974, where he had worked and studied for several years, Clanna Gael were operating their juvenile section on a pitch out in Cabinteely. Kevin Heffernan said to Mickey Whelan: "We'll take your kids into Vincent's but you'd have to do a bit of work in the club."

So Mickey came in and began training the intermediate side. They did well. Next request. "We feel you could contribute something to this team Mickey, if you played on it." He demurred but . .

So they won an intermediate title. And Kevin Heffernan was at the dressingroom door as they came off the field. "Need you for senior training." He demurred again. He had left Clanna Gael as a player.

To appear for the hated St Vincent's senior side would be embarrassing. Heffernan couldn't see it that way. So Mickey won a series of county championships and a club All-Ireland in 1976 with the club he had grown up watching.

This summer, his energy defibrillated the same club's great heart. Life goes on. Mickey Whelan, one of the great valves that keeps the place pumping and alive, is happy again, resisting age by enjoying the youth of his team.

"They keep me young. Their enthusiasm and dedication. They are just great characters and that keeps me going. I wouldn't be around bollixes. There's only room for one bollix in a set-up and I'm it. In the final analysis the most important thing to this club was to win another championship. We could win five leagues and no one would remember it and the team would make no progress in terms of belief. We risked everything for this championship."

And everything since that night when Vincent's beat Brigid's in Parnell Park has been gravy. The pressure lifted that night. St Vincent's were back. Mickey Whelan was back.

"As soon as it was over in Parnell Park that night I went straight to Heffernan. He was upset. He said: 'Mickey, I didn't think I'd see it.' I was emotional too. I went back down the field, watched the boys getting the trophy. I got into the dressingroom, shut the door behind me and I really let a few whelps out there. It had exorcised a lot of stuff, for me, for the club, for other things. The smart thing now would be to cut my losses and get out! I probably will. But maybe there's enough gobshite in me to stay!"

It's Saturday morning. He has a million things to do. Mickey Whelan, no one's fool, rises again and marches on, grinning and content.