With the death last Sunday at the age of 53 of Dr Tony O'Neill Irish sport, and Irish football in particular, has lost one of its most gifted administrators.
A former General Secretary of the Football Association of Ireland, the Dubliner was also involved with the sport's European governing body, UEFA. His first love, however, was the UCD football club with which he became involved more than 30 years ago as a student.
By then the young Tony O'Neill was something of a veteran in the ways of the game's red tape. While still attending the Sisters of Charity Milltown Convent primary school in Dublin, he made his first stab at setting up a club amongst his fellow altar boys in his local church on Bird Avenue. He secured access to a pitch and managed to raise enough sponsorship from local retailers to purchase a set of jerseys.
It was an early indication of his remarkable organisational abilities.
At 12 he repeated the trick, establishing a team at his secondary school, De la Salle, Churchtown. It was, then, hardly a surprise to his friends or family when, upon arriving at UCD in 1964, initially as an arts student (he switched to medicine a year later) he threw himself into the task of transforming the college's football club.
Over the next 30 years he was the key figure in the club's rise from the obscurity of the Leinster League to the premier division of the National League and in 1984 he coached the team which became the first university side in Europe to win a major domestic trophy.
He completed his studies in 1971 having specialised in pharmacology and spent the next three years in the drugs unit at Jervis Street Hospital.
He was then offered a position at the sports injuries clinic at O'Neill Sports Medicine in Capel Street and he worked with the firm until moving to the FAI more than a decade later.
During his time at the FAI in Merrion Square, he started the process of modernising the structures of the association. By the time he left in 1990 to take up the post of Director of Sport back at UCD, considerable improvements had been made in the way in which the organisation was run. While he was no longer involved on a full-time basis with the association, his influence was continually felt over the past nine years because of his involvement with numerous committees.
Back at Belfield his impact had been even more profound. In less than a decade he helped to completely transform the college's sports facilities and administration.
The scholarship scheme he had helped to pioneer at the football club, which has over the past 20 years benefited more than 200 young people, was expanded to take in a broad range of sports and this summer alone more than 70 bursaries were awarded.
In recent years he persuaded the college authorities to greatly enhance their financial commitment to sport and a number of full-time administrators for individual sports had been recruited. Once again he was breaking new ground which others will, over the coming years, attempt to follow.
He was an intensely private individual; his father, Seamus, who died in 1991, amused by low key exploits nicknamed him "Secret Sam". Despite his many commitments, even those closest to him at the football club only gained the first hint of his illness during the summer, and a matter of days before his death there remained considerable uncertainty regarding its gravity.
In the end the news of his passing came as a shock to all but close family and friends.
He is survived by his mother Jo, sister Marjorie and brother Seamas.
Dr Tony O'Neill: born 1946; died October, 1999