Johnny Watterson on the launch of the former Irish captain's autobiography in his Kerry heartland

When Mick Galwey launched his autobiography, Galwey, in Castleisland this week, his former Munster and Ireland team-mate, Niall O'Donovan, was asked to say a few words of introduction. But no one appeared to be listening. So Galwey jumped up onto the bar and began walking along it, between the pints, crisps and cigarettes.

Having commanded the silence, his turned his attention not to the Lions or the Six Nations, but to former Kerry football goalkeeper Charlie Nelligan. When he got his Leaving Certificate, it was to Nelligan's bakery in Castleisland that Galwey cycled the four miles from his home in Currow every day to his first job.

The former Irish captain's sense of place has always been anchored in Currow, Shannon and Munster. It reverberates within him like a generator each time he speaks or embarks on another European campaign. It is his habit to find the global picture in the local detail, and his communication to Nelligan was one of recognition and comfort and of how completely Gaelic games had shaped some of the most impressionable years of his life.

They say one of Galwey's great strengths is the gift of grasping the moment and finding the right words at the right time, words that can shake the team carcass into a more coherent structure. Maybe his long service has taught him that, but there is also an aura that now surrounds the 36-year-old as if he has become a familiar piece of the furniture, a precious heirloom that no one wants rid of.

He is the big easy, approachable, benign and now otherworldly. He is the last of the great warhorses that once did it all for fun and pride, and the last of those who span the amateur and professional rugby worlds. With his soul mate, "The Claw", gone, he is on his own.

"The elder statesman tag . . . yeah, it makes me feel great. From my point of view it's still good to be playing in my late 30s," he says. "I'm not captain of Munster any more. I'm not the leader of Munster. That doesn't bother me. I decided I didn't want to turn my back on rugby. I wanted to have a year where I fizzled out into the background. That's the way I wanted it. Some people have said I should have walked away at the top. That wasn't the way I wanted to do it.

"Don't get me wrong. It's hard to let go, but I'm content with my change of role. As it turned out, this year I was able to play eight or nine games for Munster, which means I was able to do a job for them. Paul O'Connell and Donncha O'Callaghan were injured. When they were out, I stepped in.

"I had a good chat with Alan Gaffney at the start of the season and he was up front and frank with me. I just wanted to go back to being a player. I was captain for six or seven years and that is intense. Captaining the team was a great honour, but it brings pressure with it and can be stressful in its own way. I wanted one last year to enjoy the fun, enjoy it on an individual basis instead of being a captain. Alan wanted me to do a job and I'm happy doing that job."

The calculated turning down of the volume on his career is consistent with Galwey's proven ability to evolve. Still a small fish among football giants in 1986, the then-teenager remembers travelling to football matches in Nelligan's big Ford Granada.

He was 19 and training with the Kerry team coming up to the first round of the championship. The trouble was, that year the championship match clashed with a rugby seminar in Rockwell College. Even then the flirtation with the oval ball was intense. At the time people thought he was mad to treat the football with such apparent abandon. But he went to Kerry coach Mick O'Dwyer and told him of his dilemma. O'Dwyer told Galwey he wouldn't even be missed, so the Kerry sub took himself to Rockwell to continue the love affair with the full consent of the governor.

That year Kerry, with Jack O'Shea, Bomber Liston, Pat Spillane, Páidí Ó Sé and an injured Galwey on the bench, beat Tyrone in the All-Ireland final. The next season, wedded to rugby, he won a Munster cap, and three years later pulled over his head the first of his 41 Ireland shirts.

"I wouldn't change anything, maybe played a few more times for Ireland," he says. "I was lucky that I won that All-Ireland final with Kerry. But if I had the choice again I'd do the same. I hope now the GAA will reward the players better. They should. I know the amount of effort and sacrifice those guys put in these days. It's wrong that they are not compensated for what they put into those games."

But rugby, too, was amateur when Galwey was making his way, and when professionalism came in seven years ago, it required him to morph again and fit into the clothes of a full-time professional. Before that, Ireland's amateur sheen was dulling in the face of full-time players, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and France.

"Ireland were always good but we didn't have the ground work done (before professionalism). When the players get onto the pitch now, they are prepared and that's the good thing about it. Irish teams now aren't just physically fitter but mentally harder as well. It probably wasn't a level playing field before and it was always disappointing to go out and give your best for an hour and lose at the end. Then the word on the street was that 'you weren't fit enough and you fell apart in the last 20 minutes'.

"In the last few years we've beaten teams because we were fitter than them, stronger than them and mentally tougher than them. That is something we were lacking for years in Irish rugby."

One of the traits that naturally draws people to Galwey is his understated, authentic backbone. He is of the rugby soil, but despite the honorary degree of Doctor in Laws to be conferred on him by Trinity College this month, he is far from the corporate dilettantism end of the sport. Munster still gets him excited. A flash of red and his nostrils flare. If he's not playing, he's watching. That's the way he would like to continue. A coach's badge traded for his captain's armband.

"I want to stay involved with the game of rugby. It has been good to me, given me a lot and it has been run very well in Ireland. I can look back over my six or seven years as a pro and say 'yeah, that's been good'.

"It's an honour for me to get a doctorate from Trinity. The way I think about it is it being like a dedication to all the great players I've played with through the years. I'd say when I was leaving school in Currow, if I'd told them then that Trinity College would be giving me an honorary doctorate for playing rugby, they'd have looked for the men in white coats. I feel humbled by the whole thing."

In Dublin now, and international prop Emmet Byrne is along with the rest of the gathering, gazing up at the dais. The soon to be Dr Michael Joseph Galwey is behind it, working the room with well-chosen words. He looks quite the part - except for a mortarboard and gown. His curriculum vitae are being passed around. Born in Currow; county championship medals in all grades; 41 Irish caps; 1993 Lions tour to New Zealand; 130 caps for Munster, 30 as captain; five AIB League medals; nine Munster senior cup medals.

"What was the launch like in Kerry?" someone asks.

Galwey's knocked-about eyes narrow. He grins.

"Castleisland," he says, "was the All-Ireland we didn't win this year."

Galwey - The Autobiography. Mick Galwey with Charlie Mulqueen. Published by The Irish Rugby Review and on general sale. €20.