Don’t get him wrong, Kieran Donaghy still hates to lose.
Donaghy loves winning.
Just ask Ciaran Kilkenny.
Or Jonny Cooper.
Or Philly McMahon.
Or pretty much any opponent ‘Star’ has faced in a career that saw him go from Junior C reject to footballer of the year. Donaghy loves to win, but he realised recently that the game is about more than that. It is about striving to be better, it is about meaning something to a lot of people, it is about pride and it is about camaraderie.
He expressed this very eloquently on Monday’s GAA Hour as he spoke to SportsJOE GAA editor Colm Parkinson following the release of his autobiography ‘What Do You Think of That?’.
“I am chasing but what I realised this year is there is more to it than that. I would never have thought like that before. It was always win at all cost, I would have cut your hand off to win. All it was was about winning the All-Ireland and if we didn’t I would be in the depths of depression for a week, feeling sorry for myself for a month and eventually get my head out of it,” said Donaghy.
“There’s more to it. There is team-mates, there’s friends,” he added, before describing a wonderful scene in a Lixnaw boozer in the year 2056.
“I will be able to sit down with Gally [Paul Galvin] as two old fellas in a pub in Lixnaw, we’ll be able to sit across and look each other in the eye and says, ‘well, you know, we gave it everything anyway. And what we won we won and what we lost we lost but did we do the jersey proud? Yes we did.”
Star really was the star on Friday nighthttps://t.co/EeuypmWVZJ
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) October 24, 2016
The moment the penny dropped for Donaghy came in the wake of August’s All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Dublin, when he got to relive Kerry’s second-quarter comeback on Radio Kerry.
This really is an evocative image.
“One instance gave it to me. We were leaving for Galway, we were doing a pitch in Galway with PST, and we were in the car and Kerry Radio were doing something about the game we had just lost to Dublin, the All-Ireland semi-final.
“And yeah I was low and disappointed we lost. We were going up in the car and they played the five minutes before half-time where we get the run on Dublin and the commentator is literally losing his life.
“We go from five points down to five points up and you can hear the crowd on the radio, they’re going ‘Kerry! Kerry!’ And I was going, ‘it is special to be a part of that. To see it from the other side and give those people in the crowd, that they are getting such joy, and that commentator is getting such joy’.
“And there is a fella sitting out next to a wireless in Dingle and he is 85-years-old and he is absolutely lifting that Kerry are winning and of course at the end he is distraught, like the rest of us. But even that period that you are able to help bring that to somebody’s life and to somebody’s heart at that moment in time – that’s what made me realise this is more than winning.
“Yeah, you’ll win and you’ll lose, but did you give everything for the jersey? Yes. Did you do everything in your power to make your county successful? Yes. That is something I can be proud of because I know I tried my best to do that.”
He’ll surely be back in 2017, won’t he?
The whole interview is worth a listen, but the passage above starts around the 40-minute mark.Listen below or subscribe on iTunes.
