Colm Begley can’t remember his first game for Laois, and if you insist on pursuing that line of enquiry, he can’t remember his last either.
It was brought to his attention when he retired that he had played in every division of the league, and he doesn’t mean to sound careless, but he hadn’t noticed that distinction while it was in the making; one season flowed into the next. For 16 years, being a footballer was how he was known to people who didn’t know him.
In his mind, however, there were boundaries. Though he was up to his neck in football, his feet were always touching the bottom of the pool. He never felt stuck, or consumed.
In his day job with the Gaelic Players Association now, Begley comes across players at the end of their careers who are struggling to let go. Being an intercounty player had colonised their identity, and they had surrendered, without a word of protest. It was how they wished to be seen. Then that picture vanishes.
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“I worked with players who had to work on that. They were a GAA player, and that was it, or they were an intercounty player, and that was it. That’s all they were recognised for in their mind – which is wrong. But it’s not easy to get by that.
“I didn’t have to make a conscious decision to work on that. I loved it, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all for me. I don’t really watch football. If there were games on, I’d probably go and do something different. It’s great to have that balance of, ‘That’s it and that’s all’. [While I was playing] if I wanted to leave it, I could leave it.”
The GPA will stage their AGM today, out of sight and largely out of mind. In general, the GAA’s rank and file only pays attention to the GPA in the event of a conflict.
At the beginning of this year the issue was expenses for intercounty players: the GAA were trying to put a cap on the amount of training sessions they would cover, and players believed they were being shortchanged.
On a parallel track, Begley produced a document about contact hours for intercounty panels and presented it to the GAA’s sports science working group.
In essence, he went in search of a sweet spot: How much training is too much? What represents a reasonable norm? Where is the equator?
For decades in the GAA, excess was portrayed as a virtue. Teams who wanted to win, and players who wanted to be successful, were inculcated with the belief that they needed to do more than everybody else. Begley’s document swam against the current.
“Players are investing in this and maybe they’re saying to themselves, ‘Why am I doing it?’ Obviously, there’s pride in the jersey – I know it’s a cliche – but it is there. But players are losing opportunities in their careers, or students can’t work part-time because they’re playing and training.
“We’re trying to improve the balance. I was good to let things go but I remember players that I played with who would hold onto things. A bad game or a bad loss, and three days later they’re still depressed about it. You don’t want that for any player. And that word ‘enjoyment’, I don’t know if that’s been used a lot either. A lot of players are keen to have that.”
Did he have it? Yeah. Not always, naturally, but yeah.
In Begley’s first season on the senior panel, Mick O’Dwyer was the Laois manager, with all of the reflected glamour and souped-up optimism that trailed in his wake.
They lost the 2005 Leinster final to Dublin by a point, kicked from a disputed 45. Begley was just a teenager, plunged into this whirlpool; Bryan Cullen, Jason Sherlock and Mossy Quinn, three of Dublin’s poster-boy forwards, landed in his orbit during the game, and he lapped it up.
By the following year, though, he was in Australia. Begley and Brendan Quigley, another outstanding young Laois player, were scouted by the Brisbane Lions in the AFL and they jumped together.
Within about five months Quigley had returned home; Begley stuck it out. In his second season he was named the Lions’ Rookie of the Year, and even though his third season was ruined by injuries, he expected to be part of the roster for the following season.
“I was kind of told I had another contract coming, but then there was a change of coach. It’s a business and you have to get rid of players to get new ones in. Being de-listed was still a shock. I was really caught off-guard with it.
“One of the guys from the coaching team sat me down and tried to explain it to me, but it was really just blurry noise. I was more thinking about how I was going to tell my family.
“When it happened first you feel like a failure because you had seen something different in your head. You thought, ‘I’ll be here for eight, 10, however many years’. Then you think, ‘That’s it, it’s done’. I didn’t do well enough. Maybe I wasn’t good enough.”
After he was delisted a couple of other clubs showed interest, and he signed for St Kilda. But they went on a long-winning run that year, and Begley couldn’t break into the team. At the end of that season he was released again and this time he came home.
Parnells in Dublin were looking for a games development officer and Begley accepted the role. Two or three other players from outside Dublin landed in Parnells around the same time, and for a few months they shared a house with Stephen Cluxton. Imagine.
“People are always asking me, ‘What’s Cluxton like?’ He’s one of the most loyal guys you’ll meet. Very humble. I think people think he’s a bit strange, but he just wants to live his life and keep to himself.
“He was the kind of guy as well that football wasn’t the be-all and end-all for him. It wasn’t as if he needed it. He enjoyed it, he wanted to be part of it, but he had other passions outside of it.”
And Begley?
He kept going. Thirteen years after his only appearance in a Leinster final, he won a Division Four League final, the curtain-raiser on a spring Saturday double-header in Croke Park, in front of the caring and the committed.
“It’s funny, but that was one of the best memories I have from my Laois career.”
The last game? A 16-point hiding from Westmeath in the 2021 championship. Maybe it is best not to remember everything.
The club season is in full cry now, but intercounty teams have permission to resume training next month. Not everyone will wait for the gun.
Begley’s document on contact hours is still being discussed in Croke Park and he expects an outcome before intercounty training resumes.
Will everyone listen? That’s not the point. This is a good fight.
