Mickey Walsh enjoyed a football life less ordinary
A great football man from Cavan Town, Mickey Walsh, passed away on St Patrick's Day aged 94.
There was a minute's silence for the late Mickey prior to Cavan's win over Mayo on Sunday in Castlebar.
The article below, by Paul Fitzpatrick, was published in April 2013, just after Mickey's 90th birthday.
See next week's Anglo-Celt print edition for more.
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It’s 1939 and a 16-year-old lad is playing football beside the woods near his home at the gates of st Pat’s College. A man called Bud McNamara, a recruiting officer of sorts for the Crubany GAA club, approaches on a bicycle and asks the boy, a promising footballer with the recently-defunct Drumalee club, to join his team.
Seventy-four years later and Mickey Walsh, now 90 years of age, smiles at the memory.
“He was the first on the job and Crubany had a fairly good team,” he recalls, “so I said I would go up.”
And so continued an association with Gaelic football which began when he played his first match for Drumalee – the club founded by his uncles at Drumalee Cross, after mass on a Spring Sunday in 1934 — and is now into its eighth decade.
In time, the Crubany club evolved to become the formidable Cavan Harps, a star on the Breffni GAA constellation that shone brightly before burning out in the late ’50s. Alongside the likes of Willie Doonan and his great friend Paddy Boylan, Mickey was a star player in a team of talented, swaggering young Cavan town men, bedecked in green jerseys with the harp on their breast, who won four Senior League titles at a time when football in this county was littered with players from the golden generation of 1933-52.
Mickey played with, and against, the best of them and his memories of those heady days are crystal clear. A centre half-back or midfielder, he was a regular with the Cavan junior team, and also lined out on the county senior side and was close to nailing a place on the panel for the trip to the Polo Grounds in 1947.
His fondness for his team-mates, and Doonan in particular, lingers to this day. Before that ’47 final, he recalls making up the numbers in a challenge match in Butlersbridge between the home team and Cavan Slashers and having a run-in with Doonan, his own Harps clubmate.
The story sums up the Cavan legend, a townie and a wild man, maybe, but a warrior on the field with a huge heart, too. There had been a collection for Doonan around the local shops and businesses for his trip to New York and, later, the lads set out to watch the match in the ’Bridge and were roped in to play.
“It was an oul challenge thing,” remembers Mickey.
“Jaysus, Doonan hit me a kick in the back of the leg. Colm McDyer was refereeing the match, he was a Donegal man who played with Cavan [McDyer lined out at midfield in the Polo Grounds]. I went for Doonan and I said ‘if I get you, I’ll bloody kill you’.
“McDyer says ‘you know that man is going to America?’ I says ‘well not if I can f**ckin’ help it!’
“So after the game we went up to Con Smith’s for a drink and Doonan felt so bad, he was trying to give me half the money. Oh, a big eegit!”
Having lived a football life less ordinary, Mickey has ten lifetimes’ worth of stories and anecdotes.
The past is a different country and, in Mickey’s time, they did things differently. Money wasn’t tight — there was none. When he attended Drumcrave National school, children would go bare-footed in the summer.
The kids in Drumcrave were lucky; the headmaster, Seamus Gilheaney, was county board chairman and had a battered old football. It was manna from Heaven.
Otherwise, an old pig’s bladder would be procured and they would make do. Football was the only pastime and needs must.
“We used to get a pig’s bladder from the market yard when they were killing pigs. Ah, sure jaysus it was a terrible mess. And we would blow it up and play football with it,” recalls Mickey.
On one occasion, he got a football as a present for Christmas from his grandfather Mick McGuirk, a College St man who had captained the Cavan senior football team as far back as 1891. Mickey recounts the story with typically good-natured relish.
“Jaysus, it was a lovely new ball. I went out into Sharkey’s field and got the first kick at it, and it went into a bush — pssssss!”
Disaster! He mimes the noise of the air leaving the ball, and continues.
“So I stuck my finger over the hole. Christ of Almighty, how was I going to go back to the house and tell them that I burst the ball the first day? But I got back to the house and my Uncle Frankie was able to fix the puncture and save the ball...”
On such minor crises did life turn back then. Times were simpler, harder but, says Mickey, “it was great fun”.
Above: Mickey in action for Drumalee.
The Harps teams of the ’40s were like the Busby Babes. When the players would converge to walk out to the old pitch in Tierquin, gangs of boys would follow them, pleading for the chance to just carry their boots. In the days before mass TV coverage, they were local superstars.
The rivalry with Cavan Slashers was intense. The Slashers were the “establishment” team in many ways, drawing from the professional classes where the Harps gathered up players from “the terraces” and the “half-acre”.
It was the culture at the time but the games between the teams were bitterly contested.
“They wouldn’t have any referees from the county, we had to send to Armagh for a ref for those games,” says Mickey.
In 1948, the Harps gave their old rivals “a bloody hiding” in the league final, two goals from Hughie Doonan — a brother of Willie’s — contributing to a 4-4 to 0-2 victory. “It was a foggy day, you could only see one half of the field,” remembers Mickey.
They were, he says, magical days.
When the Cavan senior team were playing in Croke Park, Mickey and some work-mates — Mickey was employed as a block-layer and stonemason with Paddy Elliott — would clean out an old V8 lorry and up to 20 men would travel to Dublin in the back of it, hanging on precariously as they passed through villages and towns en route to the capital.
It cost half a crown for admission to Croker, at a time, remembers Mickey, when men worked for around a shilling an hour.
On the “domestic” front, a horse and cart, or a bicycle, was the means of travel.
“Phil Donohoe in town had a mule and spring yoke and used to bring a lot of us on it. Jaysus, it was a great mule.
“Another time, I brought big Paddy Brady on the bar of a bike down to Drumlane, down the hill in Belturbet with no brakes on the bike and us shouting ‘keep out out of the way, keep out of the way!’ Ah, we took an awful chance. And Paddy was no child.”
Mountnugent, with Mickey’s great friend Mick Higgins, Tony Tighe and Peter Donohoe, were huge rivals, as were Cornafean and Mullahoran, where the players would knock lumps out of their opponents before inviting them in for tea and bread.
“They were that kind of people, when the game was over, that was it,” says Mickey, who turned 90 on February 28 and was honoured with a packed function by the Drumalee club recently.
On one occasion, Mickey played with the Dreadnoughts in a Féis match in Belturbet.
“There were no restrictions in tournaments.
“They collected myself, Paddy Boylan and big Paddy Brady in the town, word was sent on to us.
“We were playing the Fermanagh champions, Lisnaskea, in a Féis game. They beat us, we were the Cavan champions but we weren’t taking it seriously.
“They started celebrating and I turned around and they were carrying their players off shoulder-high. Jaysus, I says to Phil the Gunner, ‘they’re carrying them off’.
“‘Well if I had’ve known that,’ he says, ‘they’d have needed a few stretchers!’”
When the Drumalee club was re-established in 1951, Mickey returned to the fold from the Harps, and would play with distinction until his final match in 1961, when he finished on the losing team against Kingscourt in the Junior Championship semi-final in Breffni Park.
Later, he built a new house on the site his late wife Eileen (neé Hyland) had inherited from her uncle Mick Reilly at Rosculligan, adjacent to Breffni Park.
There, he took up farming, a new departure for a man raised in the town. Like football, he threw himself into it, as he did with his other great sporting passions, greyhound racing and coursing.
Now in his 91st year, Mickey is remarkably well and retains a huge interest in football, following all Cavan’s matches at all levels.
Times have changed, that much is for sure, but as the amazing Mickey Walsh shows, memories last forever.