Engaging memoir of Gaelic football icon McKeever

Cavanman's Diary

It was high summer, 1958, Cavan had just been knocked out of the Ulster Championship by Derry and the county was reeling. Cavan had been the leaders in Ulster, the alpha footballing county, but others were daring to take them on and beat them.

In 1953, Armagh did it. In 1956, Tyrone hammered Cavan in the Ulster final; the following year, Derry beat them by a point. By ’58 and another loss, football people in Cavan were starting to grow bewildered altogether.

“Not since the early years of the century has Cavan been so long out of the Ulster Senior Football Final,” noted the Anglo-Celt reporter, sharpening his blade.

“The Breffnimen, with 43 senior titles tucked away in the locker, appear to have lost the flair for the big football occasion, and while the standard of football has been steadily slipping back all over the country, Cavan has kept pace with the downward trend.

“Emigration has played a big part in the decline of the game as has the lure of more modern and less strenuous counter attractions. Cavan's troubles, however, while the county has lost a good deal through emigration, are mainly domestic, and one can't but remark that the handling of the teams in late years has been exceptionally inexpert.

“The present team, following its National League campaign which was carried out with a great deal of apathy, was left aside to rust over a much longer than necessary period in the Spring. Then in a rush of recent games - five in as many weeks - the edge was brushed off the team before it fielded out for its most important encounter with Derry.”

Key to that win for Derry was the performance of iconic midfielder Jim McKeever.

“Throughout the opening quarter,” the report read, “Derry's brilliant midfielder Jim McKeever was soundly policed and out-played by Hugh Barney O'Donoghue but when the Derrymen began to have successes in the firing line, there was no more prominent backer up than McKeever, who kept shooting long raking balls right into the Cavan square.”

McKeever would finish that season as the first-ever Footballer of the Year, despite Derry losing the All-Ireland final to Dublin, having toppled Kerry along the way.

Last week, I got my hands on ‘Only The Sky Above Me’: A memoir and tribute, which is part posthumous memoir and part biography of McKeever, the reason being that although McKeever generally resisted urging to write a book, the bones of one was found by his daughter among his papers after his passing in his 93rd year in 2023.

A committee, led by Seamus McRory, completed the book and did a terrific job in putting together a marvellous record of and tribute to a life less ordinary.

Born in Ballymaguigan in rural south Derry, not far from the Antrim border, McKeever lived a remarkable life. An outstanding footballer known particularly for his high fielding, he was also a basketballer and gymnast of renown. One tale recounted him bringing the cows in to be milked during his youth; nothing unusual about that, only that McKeever was walking on his hands while doing it!

Having attended St Malachy’s in Belfast – losing the 1948 MacRory Cup final to a St Pat’s, Cavan side led by future All-Ireland medallists Jim McCabe and Tom Hardy, McKeever was one of the first Irish students to study at Loughborough College in Leicestershire.

There he was at the cutting edge in sports science and, on his return, he ended up as head of PE in St Mary’s College in Belfast, where his coaching and approach to preparation would have a transformative effect on Ulster football, with many of his students going on to enjoy great careers as players and coaches in their own right.

McKeever’s legacy is well covered in this book. For four years in the 1960s, he penned an informative column for the Sunday Independent; he didn’t hold back in expressing his opinion on the issues of the day and was clearly a deep thinker on the game.

One passage describes how far ahead of his time McKeever was. When he would spend time at home during the summer, he kept up his fitness levels by running in the fields, sometimes twice a day.

“On one occasion, Ballymaguigan were playing at home and as Jim made his way out on to the field, one of the older locals was overheard saying to his friend beside him, ‘That’s young McKeever out there. Is he alright?’

“’What makes you say ask that,’ says his mate.

“’Well,’ he says, ‘I was watching him running around the fields the other evening like a man out of his mind.’”

The story reminded me of one our own Catherina McKiernan has told. One local who spotted the shy teenager running the roads in Cornafean is said to have commented that it was an unusual sight as “the McKiernans are good people”!

There is lots more of particular interest to Cavan followers in this memoir. Continuing with the Cornafean link, of the young McKeever’s heroes was Big Tom O’Reilly, he writes.

“Half a generation later, I was grateful to his younger brother, John Joe, for helping me to feel comfortable when joining a pre-match lunch in Dublin with Ulster players in my first Railway Cup game.”

Elsewhere, there is the transcript of a 2009 address in which he talks about how junior and schools success for Down and Armagh, minor wins for Tyrone and Armagh, a league title for Derry and an Antrim Ulster title in 1946 were “green shoots” for the ‘other’ Ulster counties outside of Cavan in the late 1940s.

“There were grounds for hope as the ‘50s began, in spite of the almost total dominance of Cavan, a fact made palatable by the recognition that the Cavan team of that era was one of the all-time great teams.”

It’s no surprise that McKeever felt this way about Cavan. He recalls that he played right corner-forward on the first Ulster side he made at senior level; Hughie McKearney of Monaghan was left half-forward and the other six positions from midfield up were all Cavanmen, “each one a mega star”.

In his columns, however, McKeever was fair but didn’t hold back. In one, reprinted in the book and originally published in 1964, he reckoned that the standard had declined in Ulster, “with the result that more inferior teams have got through to the All-Ireland series and, unfortunately, without the knowledge of their own inadequacies.”

That piece was written shortly after Cavan had been well-beaten in the All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry, which he described as “a nightmarish match in which nothing succeeded after the first point and in which the team became more and more disorganised as the game progressed until there was little point in trying at the end.

“This can happen to any team occasionally, though I think even Cavan men would admit that they have often had a much better side than this year’s team.”

In 1990, McKeever was interviewed by RTÉ’s Mick Dunne and the transcript is published here. At one point, he is asked “if you had your career all over again, and it stretched from about ’48 to the early ‘60s, would you have changed anything?”

His answer is instructive.

“Probably I would have taken it a bit more seriously. If I could do it all again, I think we would have won an All-Ireland because now, looking back, I think I know what is needed.”

Not many would have the confidence and standing in the game to speak those words; but there weren’t many like Jim McKeever, as this thoroughly enjoyable publication proves.