Resilient survivor answers his calling

Tom Humphriesprofiles Declan O'Sullivan who leads Kerry's bid to win back-to-back titles tomorrow.

Another September. The journey is as familiar as the road from Cahersiveen to Killarney, but no less exhilarating for that. Tomorrow will be hotel lobbies and Garda escorts and a constant weaving through beery crowds. It will be cavernous dressingrooms and thundering roars and a pitch that is the carpet laid in a cathedral of dreams.

The journey though. Always a starting point. Always an A to the final B. Stand in Dromid at the football pitch and, although you can see buildings from there, the field is most people's idea of what the middle of nowhere looks like. This is A.

Ask Declan O'Sullivan where he comes from in relation to here and he says the family come from over the mountain. Four miles from Dromid. Four miles from Waterville. The more remote outskirts of the middle of nowhere. Go to beyond. And then back further. Then again where his mother's people came from, even Declan concedes that place was desolate.

There should be no time for football here. Survival and breeding should be all that concern successive generations, but somehow the hierarchy of needs has been scaled and conquered and self-actualisation comes, as it often does in Kerry, through the bread of football. Dromid's story is well documented, but in Declan O'Sullivan, Kerry footballer, county captain and footballer of the year-in-waiting, is a spin-off series all of its own.

O'Sullivan embodies the quiet resilience of the place he comes from. He stood out as a child at a time when Dromid was just reinventing itself as a place of football. There was a little knot of postulants who looked always as if they were destined for the cloth of a senior jersey. Declan O'Sullivan, Colm O'Connor, Padraig Sheehan, Aidan Connor. A few lads who would go on to play for South Kerry and the one who would climb the steps of the Hogan. The field was their theatre, their opera house and their cinema. It was their weekends and their daydreams.

He'd hang around, watching and learning. Football started at under-12 level, but they were trying to get boots on him from the time he was eight. Dromid was all about making up the numbers. Still is. Soon they were making the numbers up around him.

Jack O'Connor would tap on the door and bring him to the field for a few kicks.

Dromid expected.

Jack O'Connor's influence was a thread which continued when Declan went in to secondary school in Cahersiveen. At Coláiste na Sceilge he found himself playing on a serious team which reached an All-Ireland colleges semi-final and lost in heartbreak and tears. Declan was one of half a dozen of that band of brothers who repeated for another crack, only to endure a groundhog day of defeat in the next year's semi-final.

The experience was as formative as the rocks and hills of south Kerry.

"It was very intense. We had never experienced anything like that before. We were always looking up to the town teams. Killorglin, Tralee. Killarney. We'd never played in the Munster Colleges before even. It wasn't our place to be challenging the status quo. So it was a great journey for all the players."

The football shaped him. So did the hurt. That team captured the imagination of south Kerry and by the time they broke up it was a matter of preference as to who was the best schoolboy footballer in the land, Declan O'Sullivan or Micheál Meehan.

The defeats hurt, but not as purely as the loss of his close friend, Jer O'Shea. They had been the cutting edge of the Coláiste na Sceilge attack, but if football was a way of life for Declan it had been almost an escape from life's troubles and shadows for Jer. A year or so after school ended, Jer escaped from life himself.

His loss still resonates.

"I'd be very slow to talk about it," says Declan O'Sullivan after a pause. "It hit the whole of south Kerry. Jer wasn't just a friend, he was the life and soul of the party. It was a terrible shock at the time. It is still with us all. The bonds, they continue with Jer and with Jack too. With Jer, even though he has passed on, that bond is still there.

"We move on and bring him with us. I'm sure he is very proud of the lads who he played with. We are proud of him. Back then, for that team, a lot of fellas put their lives on hold. When it finished there was a lot of tears shed and a lot of truth spoken. A lot of bonds that are still there today. It's all very private in a way. Something I don't want to talk too much about."

What distinguishes Declan O'Sullivan as a person and as a footballer are the same thing, a willingness to move forward. On his 21st birthday, literally on his 21st birthday, he played for Dromid when the club won its first county championship. That evening he was presented in Killarney with his first All-Ireland medal. Jack O'Connor has a picture of Declan at home taken at that time.

He is holding a county under-21 medal, a county senior medal, a National League medal, a Munster championship medal and an All-Ireland senior football medal. He dwells on the good times no more than he dwells on the bad times.

"I believe you should leave the past be. Keep moving. If you look back too much you lose your edge. Look to the next day, the next game, the next goal. In years to come when I have retired all the memories, my mother's clippings, all that, they will be nice to have."

They will be nice to have and they will be a roadmap of an incredible journey, much of it made in high visibility, the rest made in quieter places.

Visibility first. Last summer ended with Declan O'Sullivan and his friend and room-mate Colm Cooper standing on the steps of the Hogan Stand and hoisting the familiar canister. That snapshot as it peers sepia-tinted and old from the pages in years to come will tell its own story of a summer which was far tougher than it should have been. Cooper had his own losses and troubles the year that they stalwarted.

Declan O'Sullivan, captain of Kerry, had been booed and catcalled by his own people when coming off the field in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

It's not a subject which he wants to dwell on, but like all things he will meet it head-on now as he did then. He was dropped after that, or taken out of the firing line as Jack O'Connor would put it, and he concedes it was an intensely difficult time.

"It's not something I want to be remembered for. Not something I wanted to happened. For me and for the family it was disappointing. I don't think it will happen to anyone again. It was a minority. There might have been a few reasons for it.

"Only those people can answer that. I took it personally, though. As you would. I just want to put that behind me and look forward, but for a couple of weeks back then it took a big toll on me."

He rehabilitated himself through football and took strength form the belief which his manager, his team-mates and his friends and family had in him. By All-Ireland final day he was back in the team and he was that afternoon's most influential player, scoring another of the exquisitely taken goals which have become a feature of his visits to Croke Park.

He moved on and laughs about the business now.

"Has anyone ever come and shaken your hand and said 'sorry I was one of the people who booed you that day'?" "No!" he says with a grin. "It would be a brave man that would come to me admitting that!"

He pauses.

"But if I had a penny for everyone who said they were there and that it wasn't them, I'd be rich and there'd be nobody left who could have done it! To be honest, I look back and laugh. It tells you how fickle sport is. It makes you wise-up pretty fast. It's never as bad as it seems on the bad days and you are never as good as they say you are on the good days."

"Best piece of advice you got?" "Jack O'Connor. From his old headmaster Con Dineen. Don't let the bastards get you down!"

He never thought of walking away, but the idea of taking a year out floated across his mind. The problem in hindsight was burn-out. That became clear later. Away from the visibility.

In Kerry, football never ends. September comes and goes. Then football continues in Kerry as a private obsession. Kerry's footballers submit themselves to the crucible of the club championships.

"The likes of Declan," says Jack O'Connor, "would be playing local derbies with fellas absolutely knocking lumps out of them. There are places where being the Kerry captain might open a few doors, but not on the pitch in a derby down here."

So last year in December, on the day after the Kerry players had received their medals at a function in Killarney, Declan O'Sullivan found himself out on a field in Gortmór, playing for Dromid against St Michael's of Foilmore on the worst day that south Kerry had ever known.

You can't picture it really. It is like an Eskimo announcing he finds the weather too chilly. In this place where the wind bends the trees and balds the rock and desolates the land you can't picture what sort of a day it would take, what kind of harbingers of the apocalypse would need to be present, for a championship football match to be abandoned.

But this was one such day. Dromid and Foilmore knocked seven kinds of lumps out of each other for an hour and then it went to extra-time. At one stage Declan took a knock and didn't get back up for a while. Some thought it was the knock.

Others thought it was the cold and the rain which was just pinning him to the earth. The referee panicked and abandoned the game. Dromid won the replay, but Declan's body was sending out messages.

The body was saying that it just wasn't enjoying this anymore. That it had endured a knee operation and a shoulder operation and that the two hamstrings were thinking of quitting. His body was saying that this was the third year in a row when football had gone from January to Christmas week without a break. His body was saying all those things, but Kerry football was saying what Kerry football always says. You have another match next week.

So the next week they played Skellig Rangers in the county semi-final on another of those surfaces better suited to ploughing than football. Things weren't going Dromid's way. There were a few niggling scuffles. It wasn't happening for Declan O Sullivan. Suddenly his body quit complaining and gathered its resources and let out one long joyous whelp of a word. AUSTRALIA!

For once he listened. His body asked reasonably if he really saw himself starting into county training in January. He said no.

So the first quarter of this year he spent in Ranwick outside Sydney. Working a few days when the pocket demanded it, going on long aimless runs around Sydney, watching games from Croke Park in pubs with punters, training a little with Clanna Gael, loving the sun and the taste of life, the feeling of being able to let life unfold around something else other than a fixture list.

A part of him yearned to stay. He had an open-ended ticket and an open mind, but he came home a few days before his sister's wedding and stayed home. Football is duty, but it is love too. The break served its purpose. This spring he was young, gifted and back.

And this summer he is captain again and his excellence exempts him from all controversy, criticism or booing. His football has been sublime and he carries the condensed experiences of his young life into every game.

His goals against Monaghan and Dublin have been lessons in the assassin's sense of cool while his general play has been so sublimely cerebral that there was something depressingly inappropriate about Bryan Cullen's decision to bawl derision into his ear when he missed a chance on the day of the semi-final.

He bears no malice, indeed he understands the pressure that Cullen was under. He moves forward always and anyway on that day the retribution was quietly devastating. No need to say more.

Declan O'Sullivan makes the familiar journey today. A fourth All-Ireland final in succession. Small talk with Mary McAleese. The intoxicating lure of the cathedral. Maybe another speech from the steps afterwards and a hoisting of the canister. The class of the field, always moving forward.