GAELIC GAMES: TOM HUMPHRIEStalks to the controversial Kerry footballer and finds him between careers but fixed on keeping his finger off that self-destruct button

HE IS weary. And wary. Here comes another request to look back. In anger. In regret. In contrition. Whatever. He has had enough of it, his neck carries a crick from looking back. Looking back. Explaining. Looking back. A repetitive stress disorder.

He’s sick of doing it. He thinks people are sick of hearing it. Paul Galvin looking back.

Still. Paul Galvin doesn’t have ordinary years. Good or bad. Every December reads like a report to a probation board.

Two years ago he was Villain of the Year, the first man to do time for assaulting a notebook. Last year he was Player of the Year, an illustration of how to come back and mend.

This winter he was crowned Recidivist of The Year. He didn’t covet or earn that title, he says.

He finished 2009 as Player of the Year and began 2010 as Man of the Match against Dublin in the league. He was working hard on reshaping himself, not just in terms of temperament but in his entire approach to playing on the pitch. And then like Houdini in reverse, in one bound our hero was in chains again.

Four months of the season gone to suspension and Galvin ended up carrying the heavy part of the can for Kerry’s loss to Down.

To make things worse Cork won big. In the disciplinary rooms in spring and summer Cork had been at the other table, pats of butter going unmelted in their mouths, he felt.

They wound up with Galvin’s head and with the Sam Maguire. Some harvest.

It was a turbulent year, a time spent at the crossroads. Probably the year which at last will define his passage from one role in life to another. At the end of it all it’s a happy thing that somebody decided to make a documentary about it all.

Galvin has been the GAA’s panto villain for so long Galvinised should bring a welcome change to how he is perceived.

Was that the point?

“Yerra, I don’t see it as being a statement of anything,” he says in his customary downbeat way.

“It is what it is. The way the year was and the way it happened. I think it is a fair reflection of me but it isn’t a vehicle.”

But it might change some people’s minds about how they approach him. His satanic smig, the dark eyes and the tattoos are often enough to secure a guilty verdict before the case is even argued. Maybe a little sunlight falling on his character will help.

“I’ve just come to realise that , yeah, people do come to me with preconceived ideas. Everybody else realised that long before I did!

“I’ve made so many mistakes now and learned so much I don’t know if I’m smart or stupid. Yerra, I really don’t know.

“It might give a bit more of an insight. I’ve never been one for that sort of thing, trying to change people’s opinion. If people don’t want to watch it don’t bother and if they do, sure they make what they want of it.”

All of which confirms that whatever paths Paul Galvin’s career follows in the next few years it won’t be as a gushing member of RTÉ’s PR department.

Why do it so, why take the cameras around for the bad days and the good.?

“Curiosity. I thought it might be a bit of fun. And it was. I couldn’t have foreseen the way the year would go on the field.

“You can’t legislate for some of the stuff this year. I behaved myself very well during the year and I stand over that. I don’t feel I deserved to be suspended for four months of the year.

“There wasn’t a lot of stuff I could do about some of the stuff that happened. But the documentary? I just thought it would be a bit of fun.”

Fun. That’s a side of Paul Galvin that people seldom see when they imagine him being chained down in a lair between matches.

He misses Darragh Ó Sé’s raucous good-humoured company intensely, though he is enjoying a stint at the moment as a radio DJ, he is keen to get into fashion, writing music.

These past few days he has been below in Dingle taking in a few gigs for the Other Voices series. The National. Richard Hawley. Jarvis Cocker. James Vincent McMorrow. Cathy Davey.

He drank it in.

BUT FOOTBALL IS inescapable and it draws forked lightning down on him every time he goes out. 2010 was a remarkable year even by the standards to which he has become accustomed.

His life in the classroom as a teacher came under scrutiny. He picked up his paper another day and read to his immense surprise that he was to be the new presenter of a TV programme, Exposé.

What tastes of football he got to offer us were superb, confirming him as one of the few players in the modern game capable of single-handedly taking a match and changing its shape.

As the year finishes, though, he is still looking around trying to establish himself comfortably in a new career and in the Kerry dressingroom where the faces are changing quickly.

And what makes it all so surprising was the excellence he brought to his game in 2009 and the fact that he seemed to be moving to another level in 2010. Until himself and Eoin Cadogan stood up from a little rassling in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and got shown matching red cards. He knew then he was in for a quick trip through Kafka Land.

“When I saw that red card in February I remember just standing there in Páirc Uí Rinn shaking my head. I mean I’m a man, 30 years old, I’ve been taken down, flung over and had to wrestle with a fella in front of the stand.

“Do people really think that was my agenda? To go up to Páirc Uí Rinn, to get sent off for wrestling with a young guy who is making his debut. Do people really think that was my agenda?”

The details of that night are still a matter of contention and in places on the Kerry side of the border resentment still simmers.

Kerry are insistent that Eoin Cadogan’s tooth was damaged in a prior collision with Kieran Donaghy, that the mouth was looked at some minutes earlier by a member of the Cork backroom team and that following the sending off of both Cadogan and Galvin the Kerryman carried the can.

Galvin concedes, for his part, that when tussling on the ground with Cadogan in Páirc Uí Rinn that he stuck his finger in the player’s mouth, as he would do again later in the summer.

The act, he says, is one he developed almost by reflex.

He was suspended for striking though. Neither he nor Eoin Cadogan struck each other, he says. A couple of days later he saw it floated in the paper by two different reports that Cadogan’s tooth had been Paul Galvin’s work. He got a bad feeling.

IF HE FEELS hard done by about Páirc Uí Rinn he feels stupid about the incident which was cited on The Sunday Game later in the summer, the business that finished his season. This time his finger went clearly into Cadogan’s mouth.

“Stupid!” he says “In the course of a game I would hit and get hit legitimately by a lot of fellas carrying three or four more stone than me. That’s fine. It hurts but that’s the game and I enjoy that side of it, though I’ve been trying to develop into a different sort of player.

“When they want to put the fists up, though, I’m in trouble.

I need to get them off me or I’ll be killed. So I do that with the finger. I don’t know when I started doing it but it’s a reflex. It works but it’s a reflex and I’ll have to stop.

“When I do it a fella’s instinct is to back off and it gets me out of there. I don’t know what to say about that. I play hard but I’m not one to go around looking for fights. Sometimes I find myself in situations where I have to fight or get out.”

But how after the sort of journey Paul Galvin has been on can he keep getting into those scrapes. Refusal to learn? Entrapment? Getting wound up?

“The reality is I don’t get a whole lot of winding up outside of one or two teams. That’s the reality of it.”

SO THERE SHOULD be a way of preparing the head for those one or two teams.

“There’s should be,” he sighs, “it’s just a case of discovering it! I’ve worked hard on it. It comes down to preparation before the game. Being aware and being prepared.

“I was in no way prepared for what was coming in Páirc Uí Rinn last year. You couldn’t be. A bit more mental preparation beforehand. That was hard to take. But I’m so slow now to get into this whole thing yet again. People are sick of it.”

After that the usual rigmarole. The trip to Dublin. Soul destroying. Same old same old. He presented himself this time as a case in logic. They’d all seen him in the dock here before.

“I said that if I did something wrong and punched this fella in front of the stand in Páirc Uí Rinn would I come here and defend it? Would Jack O’Connor come and sit beside me? I don’t know what happened. I didn’t strike Eoin Cadogan, He didn’t strike me.” But what is the point?”

The point. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps all these things are experienced by us in a different way to the chronology in which they seem to happen. Maybe there are no points and definitive moments. Anyway he was back in the summer. Cadogan again. Cork again. Stupid, he says. Stupid again.

He has strong opinions on the incident and on the Sunday Game and the whole process but his energies have to be channelled into himself. What has changed in Paul Galvin? “Here we go again,” he says, “and I know people are sick of hearing it. I don’t know what has changed. I don’t know. I’ll tell you this I’m tired.

“Something would want to change. I’m torn about it. I do feel that I wasn’t too far out of line last year, especially in Páirc Uí Rinn. but I do recognise that the mouth thing looks bad and is bad. I don’t know . . .

“I think I had worked out the way to play on the edge without going over it. I play the game differently now. I don’t play with that all-out aggression anymore. I had to change. If you are looking for a change that’s the change. It was there.”

The proof of that is in Galvinised in the sequences where the camera just follows Galvin in a couple of big games. Three or four years ago it would have been like filming the dodgems as he went looking for the big challenges and the big hits. He has changed.

“It brings too much conflict. I do it a bit but I’m getting older. I was reckless with my body when I was younger, I loved taking on big guys. I liked doing it but there is only so much of that your body can take. They are big men. I’m twelve and three-quarter stone at championship weight. I loved hopping off them, but I can’t do it anymore. I would spend the week afterwards literally feeling like my body had been in a car crash.

“I’ve said it before, I hit Ciarán Whelan a couple of years ago and I got whiplash! I’m 30 now. There is more self-preservation to it. I pick my times. You can’t be gung ho because you waste energy that you can use for better play.

“What I did in the summer was stupid. So that is even tougher to take. It’s been the same weekend for three years in a row now. Suspended! Next year I’m staying at home. Barring the door. You won’t see me. I’ll be like Howard Hughes, locked in a room drinking my own urine and growing my toenails. That’ll be the next documentary!”

Meanwhile the days keep coming and have to be lived through until such time as football consumes him again. His heart and soul is in the GAA but he is not typical of the GAA, which in itself should be a good thing.

He’s looking at opportunities in fashion and media . He’s DJing on Kerry radio. He’d like to get a break in his career which allowed him train virtually full time.

“I feel right now there are a lot of things out there I can do. But finding something that suits football is the problem.”

He’s back full time in the gym right now, on a rehab programme till Christmas. No leg weights until the New Year but upper body getting tended.

Through Niall Quinn he was in Sunderland a while back getting a hip operation. They drained a cyst and cleaned up the grizzle bit of cartilage which had been causing him groin trouble for a few years.. Should have got it done two or three years ago, he reflects.

He enjoyed watching Sunderland train and learned a lot from the speed and intensity of their routines.

“The sharpness and speed of everything that was done. Would be great for a GAA player’s fitness. Would bring you on very quickly. They can train so hard and then have the time to recover for the following day and train hard the next day. They get their fitness levels up quicker and they recover quicker. It’s not easy to match when you are trying to work.

“I need to get to a physical level and a mental level and a playing level that I have never been to. That’s how I am looking at it. That means concentrating a lot on training and recovery. Minding yourself and getting treatment. It’s hard to find the balance of work. Working hard every day of the week is going to effect you. I saw it at Sunderland, the intensity and the recovery time. I would love to try to replicate that somehow. Not sure if that is possible.”

THE SAD THING is he has to internalise the journey because a lot of the wonder and joy has worn away. He doesn’t think that he’ll ever love it and enjoy it like he did a few years back. Sometimes these days he confesses that he hates it.

His epitaph will be short and sweet he reckons and hinge on three words. Self. Destruct. Button.

“A lot of times I reckon it’s not worth it,” he says “ I really wonder about that. Another All-Ireland? What is there to do, what is there to prove? What am I trying to prove now and to who? I’m not coming up with the answers. It’s not clear to me. It used to be.

“I’m sick of trying to fight the world. Only so many battles you can take on till you realise you aren’t going to win the war. I used to need that edge. Having to prove myself. I’m like that deep down, I suppose. I think right now, though, that’s gone out of me.”

When Galvinised is shown he will, he says, be half way down some metaphorical Route 66 uncontactable and doing no U turn if it all goes pear-shaped.

“Every year you have to be finding something. I just feel, though, that my best is there, in me still if I can just keep it between the ditches.”

For the GAA to lose one of its last great box office draws well it could only be disaster. For it to end in a blazing sunset on a mythical Route 66? Could only be Galvin.

Galvinised airs on RTÉ 1 at 9.35pm on December 28th.

“I need to get them off me or I’ll be killed. So I do that with the finger. I don’t know when I started doing it but it’s a reflex. It works but it’s a reflex and I’ll have to stop. When I do it a fella’s instinct is to back off and it gets me out of there.”

“When I saw that red card in February I remember just standing there shaking my head. I mean I’m a man, 30 years old, I’ve been taken down, flung over and had to wrestle with a fella in front of the stand. Do people really think that was my agenda?”

I’ll rest my eyes till the fevers outta me

I’ll rest my eyes to the rivers in the sea

– BloodBuzz Ohio, The National