All-Ireland SFC Semi-final Cork v Meath: Tom Humphriestalks to the legendary Cork manager about eating and sleeping football and revisiting old, titanic rivalries.
There's a story, apocryphal surely but too good to risk checking out, about Billy Morgan and Nemo Rangers. The club moved premises a few years ago, just up the road and into a magnificent complex which would place Nemo closer to the heart of the surrounding community while also offering a range of facilities and services most GAA clubs could only dream of.
The move necessitated the hiring of staff and the changing of ways. One day Billy Morgan was in booking a room for use by the senior team after a game and the young lady took details of the booking, confirmed availability and finished brightly with the words, "And your name is?"
If she wasn't handed a P45 on the spot she should have had the good grace to go. That the story is told at all is hard evidence of Morgan's stature. That somebody, anybody, could infiltrate the very nerve centre of Cork football without knowing Morgan's face or his central importance to the county history? Well, it's a punchline in itself.
A cursory glance at a career which began with a Munster junior win with Coláiste Chriost Rí in 1961 and highlights a wonderful obsession that is in essence the story of modern Cork football is enough to make you realise you are dealing with a different species when you deal with Billy Morgan.
In a county where football comes second, the football man's existence is a long history of disappointments and rebuffs leavened by the odd burst of joy. Billy felt it there recently when he was leaving Croke Park having watched the Cork hurlers exit the championship. A Cork fan brushed past him, clocked the face and said, "I suppose we're relying on ye now," and rolled his eyes to heaven before beetling on.
Tomorrow in Croke Park Morgan rides out again though, his footballers still standing while the hurlers return to club work and the Cork public scratch heads and wonder what to make of their football team.
Billy feels it, the perplexed indifference, and he shrugs. For a man with such a long and tangled football history of loves and feuds this championship must make the heart skip a beat. For company in the final four Cork have Meath, Dublin and Kerry.
When Morgan settles into his stride and talks about the game and his lifelong entanglement with it his words are like a history of modern football and how it came to happen to Billy Morgan.
Winning an All-Ireland in 1973 with a team that should have dominated. Being swept aside the next year by Dublin: "We were two points down with five minutes to go and I remember thinking if we're not careful here we could lose this."
And then Kerry bursting out in 1975: "They ran us off the pitch."
THE DARK YEARSof subjugation to their neighbours and Mick O'Dwyer coming into the Cork dressingroom every summer to tell them they were the second-best team in Ireland: "There were times I wanted to throw a boot at him."
An involvement with coaching at county level which overlapped with his playing days and was born of a conviction about how things needed to be done: "With the exception of a couple of years, I'd say we were always mismanaged back then."
The three-stripes affair: "That finished us for a while."
The Cork go-for-the-train incident in the 1987 league semi-final. They didn't actually go for the train - just hoped for another match. Billy "walked up to Meaghers. Met one James Keaveney in there and Seán Doherty. Such a slagging. I said to Seán, 'Doc, sure if ye want to take a match like that, go ahead.'"
And the late 1980s of course, dominated by the blood feud between Cork and Meath.
Morgan had lived in New York for four years in the early '80s. When Brian Mullins went home he took Mullins's job in the midtown edition of Rosie O'Grady's. Mullins was part of the Dublin management team in 1986 when Meath broke out of Leinster after years in the darkness.
Meath lost to Kerry in that year's All-Ireland semi-final. That October Morgan took over in Cork. When Meath got to September the following year he had Cork there waiting. The 1987 final would be between Cork and Meath and that's how football would be for a few years.
He'd always wanted to come back and give it another shot. He'd noted so many instances of bad management down the years holding Cork teams back.
The treatment of players galled him. Cork had a lot of underage success back there and he remembers from a string of under-21 teams the right corner back getting promoted to senior each year and his predecessor being dumped after a brief tenure. Players went through entire games glancing at the sideline, waiting for the big hook.
And the set-up. When Cork had drawn with Kerry in 1976 and had them under their thumbs in the replayed Munster final only to lose out to a couple of cruel decisions late on, they had believed that they could do it. The selection committee was changed that winter though and half the team were dropped. Kerry beat them by 15 points the next summer.
When Morgan took over in 1986 he knew what he had and knew what he wanted. Cork had won seven of the previous eight Munster under-21 titles. He had a slew of players who had never lost to Kerry at underage. It was time.
MEATH HAD BEEN KNOCKINGat the door a little longer though, and when the sides met in September 1987 Meath wanted to win it more than Cork did.
Cork had beaten Kerry in Munster for just the second time since 1974. They were quite pleased with themselves and led by five points in the final. Jimmy Kerrigan missed a fine goal chance. Meath just did what Meath always do: they ground it out and won by six points.
"We lost," says Morgan 20 years later. "We might have won but I suppose we felt at the time, look, we were a young team and there was plenty left in us."
1987 was fine. In 1988 the needle crept in. Cork and Meath came together for another All-Ireland final. Cork went up mindful of a few things about Meath. The teams drew.
Billy Morgan remembers there were three incidents in the game which stood out. Dinny Allen caught Mick Lyons high with an elbow. Barry Coffey went to shoulder Colm O'Rourke and caught him on the ear. And then a third incident: a contest between Niall Cahalane and Brian Stafford left the latter needing five stitches in his face.
Meath equalised at the death with a soft free. Cork came away incensed but not nearly as incensed as Meath were. The gauntlet was thrown down. No Meath team has ever declined to pick up a gauntlet.
Among the players Seán Boylan brought in to toughen Meath up for the replay was Colm Coyle.
The replay and the aftermath are still notorious. Early in the game Cahalane got retribution for the Stafford incident from Gerry McEntee. Both sides leapt into the melee. When it ended McEntee was sent off but the fighting hadn't acted as a valve. It was an ugly, dour game, which Meath won by a point.
The aftermath was furious and ran for months. Larry Tompkins was struck by a Meath fan when the game ended. Cork players by and large stayed away from the traditional dinner between the sides the next day. At the dinner the then president of the GAA, John Dowling, expressed disquiet at what he had seen the previous day.
An investigation hauled Coyle and O'Rourke and Tompkins forward to answer questions - as if those three alone were responsible for the disfiguration of the All-Ireland final.
At the end of the year two Meath players declined to accept their medals from Dowling at a function in Meath.
"There was a lot of bad blood after that game," says Morgan, a man not known for his willingness to turn the other cheek. "Cork and Meath were the two top dogs in the country. We met four times in big games, including that replay."
Meath stumbled in Leinster in 1989 and Cork took care of a naive young Dublin team on their way to an All-Ireland.
In 1990 they became the last team to retain the title. Again they faced Meath in the final.
You broach the subject of Meath to Billy Morgan with some trepidation. He has a famously long memory for grievance but time and contact have mellowed him considerably.
"It's funny," he says, "you can hate one another and then it's over and done with. I'm sorry we never really had a drink together. They were only up the road after All-Irelands, I suppose, and they would never hang around.
"Funny enough - and I mean this - but in 1990 if Meath had beaten us I was going to go into Seán Boylan and the lads in the Meath dressingroom and just say to them, 'Lads, why don't the whole lot of us go for a drink?' I would have said to Seán, 'Let's all go.' We won though and it might have seemed like triumphalism. So I didn't do it."
Even in 1990 the old animus prevailed and motivated. Morgan recalls Cork played Meath earlier that year in a National League semi-final in Croke Park and Dave Barry arrived into the dressingroom in a bad state. Cork made one of the vows that punctuated the relationship between the team.
"We said never again would Meath beat us physically or beat us on the pitch or scoreboard. In the final Colm O'Neill, the quietest player on the Cork team, was so revved up he hit Mick Lyons and got himself sent off. We said again, we aren't going to lose."
They didn't.
And oddly, the story of those Cork and Meath teams has a curiously touching ending. Real life and all its genuine woes intervened. John Kerins died. Mick McCarthy died.
Morgan remembers the night of John Kerins's removal. The entire Meath team en bloc were there. How moving it was to see those tough, hard men having made the long journey.
The teams drank together that night.
BY THE TIME McCARTHYwent, the friendship between the two groups was cement-cast.
"Meathmen are a funny crowd," says Billy. "A tough crowd but a loyal crowd."
The week before last Billy got a call from Boylan. The great man wanted to send down some remedy that would get James Masters's shoulder healed quicker. Duly it arrived. The odd friendly and encouraging text still comes from none other than the bête noire that was Gerry McEntee.
Billy played with Colm O'Rourke's brother Fergal when he was in college and played in New York with Colm. Tomorrow he sends a team out to face O'Rourke's son Shane.
Billy remembers a night in Bantry after a tournament game when the blues band up on the stage petered out after a verse of Mustang Sally and asked if anyone in the crowd knew it. A familiar face emerged from the crowd and belted out the song - and half an hour later David Beggy was still up there giving it socks.
The strands of friendship spread outward and deep and are maintained every year with golf games and quiet contact between players and families.
CORK FAILED IN 1991in their bid for three in a row. The summer was marked by that Meath team's epic and unsuccessful attempt to win a last All-Ireland for themselves.
Morgan got back to fighting a more familiar battle - on the home front.
One night that winter he was taking a session in the gym below the stand in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. A couple of players came in late and the treasure. They'd been arranging the team holiday. It was mentioned that at the board meeting that night Morgan was to be shafted.
A diary of his activities had been kept secretly for a couple of years: drinking with the players; a player breaking a wash-basin when climbing through the window of a guesthouse in Offaly in the small hours after a challenge match; telling the chairman what to do with himself when he declined to come up with £25 a session for weight training - a small litany of petty grievances against the man who gave Cork its footballing heart.
Morgan was shafted. He recites the details and the names of the guilty today and has forgotten nothing.
The players demurred. Morgan was hurt and wanted to stay away. The players wouldn't hear of it. The board lost its nerve. Frank Murphy and another individual arrived at Billy's door.
"The other fellow was a spineless character. I don't know why I let him into my house. I told him to leave the room. I would only speak to Frank Murphy."
He spoke with Murphy, a man for whom he has good time ("not as bad as he's painted"). He met the players in Bandon. He went back.
Those battles were long ago but facing Meath in Croke Park tomorrow has many resonances. Morgan brings a team who have failed in two successive All-Ireland finals. He knows the ghosts of the past have little relevance to them but they have something to prove to themselves and their public.
His latest tenure ends with this season. Tomorrow he looks down the line at Colm Coyle, the one Meath player from that era he never really got to know. He knows what's in the heart and head that he will be looking at though.
Cork and Meath. Morgan and Coyle. They went a long way into making each other what they are back when they were constantly in each other's rifle sights.
