A great servant to the game.
Ciarán McKeever opted to hang up his boots during the week after an illustrious career.
Five Ulster titles, two leagues and an All-Ireland later he has done it all, the 34-year-old didn’t have much else left to achieve.
McKeever may have a bit of a hard man persona when it came to the sport and was certainly not the cleanest player to grace the pitch and it is for that reason that he is the central figure in this anecdote.
Colm Parkinson hosted the GAA Hour live in Westport on Thursday night and shared his encounter to a packed out venue.
“One Monday morning I got a phone call at about half past nine, I’d been out all weekend,” the former Laois player told the crowd.
“You know when you get a phone call off a number you don’t recognise you’re like ‘Who’s this? Will I answer or not?’ you never should answer it, not on a Monday morning in my experience.
“Well, I answered it anyway and it was a Northern voice and it was ‘What’s your problem with me?’
“And I said ‘Who’s this?’ ‘It’s Ciarán McKeever, do you want to meet me?’ and I went ‘No no, not particularly I definitely don’t want to meet you.’
“So basically Ciarán, because he plays on the edge, he had been involved in a couple of different altercations Sean Cavanagh and I’d been tweeting about it saying to watch this fella, he’s always at it etc.
“So Ciarán said he’d nip this sh*t in the bud by giving me a phone call and I have to say it worked a treat, I never tweeted about him again.
“And in fairness, McKeever got in no other rows again so maybe the two of us learned something but I definitely wasn’t meeting him, he’s too big and strong,” Parkinson concluded.
You can listen to the full show below with the anecdote right at the start of the show
