THE snarling ‘Noughties’. Nobody snarled quite like Ryan ‘Ricey’ McMenamin.
Fiery eyes, tight haircut and that crazy, toothless grin.
Always in an opponent’s ear - talking, stirring, searching for a weakness.
‘Ricey’ was emblematic of Tyrone’s defiance in the last decade.
In those years, the Dromore man was utterly fearless. Invincible even. It didn’t matter who or how big or how good you were, McMenamin would never back down.
Ask the ‘Gooch’, Paul Galvin, John McEntee and Tomas O Se.
“I think he was mouthing off at me one day and I just started laughing,” says former Kerry defender Tomas O Se.
“I remember he was foaming at the mouth. I don’t even know what he was saying. At the best of times I’d have a problem with the accent in the north. But 'Ricey' was a fella you obviously went to war with.”
Despite the long, colourful rap sheet, one thing was irrefutable about Ryan McMenamin: he could play some ball…
IT’S a beautiful sunny morning and the lobby area of the Armagh City Hotel is getting busy for morning coffee. Ryan McMenamin wears his hair much longer than his playing days and there’s a thick beard to match.
Six years after hanging up his Tyrone boots, what does the man himself think of his on-field misdemeanours?
Does he recognise some of the old footage as him? Does he wince? Does he care?
“I don’t know,” McMenamin says, “I’d just be wile competitive. In life, I’m more laid back; I’m too laid back trying to get things done.
“But when I was playing my temper did go. I would have always tried to play with a chip on my shoulder and I think I did. I just thought: ‘I’m going to win here.’
“I probably did stuff I shouldn’t have done but I had to do it if we were going to win the game.
“You do have to be competitive as hell sometimes. You have to be an aggressive defender. You would look at things and think: ‘If I stand off Stevie McDonnell, he will take me for 1-6 or 1-7.’
“He would get the plaudits… The media wants to see the forward on top all the time. They want to write about the forward.”
We discuss the day, February 2009, he tapped Paul Galvin in the privates – and then proceeded to roar at Kerry manager Jack O’Connor at the end of a feisty League encounter in Omagh.
In his deep, almost apologetic tone, McMenamin says: “The Paul Galvin thing, I did regret it… You regret stuff like that. There’s stuff you regret that you kinda went: ‘Jeez, what were you thinking?’ It was heat of the moment stuff too.
“After the Galvin incident I went and counted the times it was mentioned [in the media] and it was something like 19 or 20 days in a row…”
And what about the mouthful he gave O’Connor?
Smiling and his fringe drooping over his face, he adds: “The best of it was Jack O’Connor’s nephew is married to a first cousin of mine and me and Patrick get on the best.
“We have pints together. He was up in Dromore, and I’ve had pints with Jack… That’s why I don’t get too worried about what people think of my character on the field, and they think that is me in life. That’s people’s opinion.”
Undoubtedly, Mickey Harte was put in some awkward situations when fielding media questions about his temperamental, indispensable defender.
Loyalty has always been the bedrock of Harte’s belief system.
Every time, he backed ‘Ricey’ to the hilt.
“I know he was loyal to me a lot of times when I was misbehaving,” 'Ricey' says.
“Whenever a manager is backing you and coming out fighting for you, you’ll always appreciate it. Of course, he would have a word with me behind closed doors.
“I know with Mickey loyalty is a big thing and he probably expects it back from his players. He backed us in a lot of difficult circumstances.
“Mickey and me always got on well. I always had the craic with him. Maybe it’s just my nature; some boys would have said I never shut up at training.”
Although it mightn’t have looked like it most of the time, there was method to McMenamin’s madness. Talking in an opponent’s ear wasn’t an indiscriminate practice.
For instance, when he marked Stevie McDonnell in the 2005 All-Ireland semi-final he didn’t say a word to the Armagh attacker.
“Shane Sweeney marked me in the Ulster final but I knew Mickey Harte wouldn’t have stayed with that for the All-Ireland semi-final,” McDonnell recalls.
“’Ricey’ marked me and given his reputation at the time I expected a lot of abuse and verbals but he never opened his mouth that day.
“It was later that year at the Allstar banquet I asked him over a pint why he didn’t say anything during the game, and his response was: ‘Some players respond to it in the wrong way and there are other players where there’s no point wasting your energy and time.’
“I suppose it was a compliment to me because if he had started the verbals with me I probably would have performed better.
“I realised the threat he posed breaking forward from defence and we knew his game was trying to get inside the head of his opponent as well, but that never really bothered me. I think there was a mutual respect on the field and we let each other get on with it.”
“I knew Stevie too well,” laughs McMenamin.
“I thought Stevie was expecting me to be at him all the time and Armagh will be expecting it too. So, I said I’d do something different. I’ll not even speak to him. And then it ended up he started speaking to me. I remember I scored a point in 2005 and I smiled and winked at Stevie. We laughed about it later...”
IT’S roughly 16 or 17 years ago Adrian O’Neill asked ‘Ricey’ to lend a hand coaching Dromore’s U8s and U10s teams. ‘Ricey’ agreed.
“Once I started I liked the coaching. It kind of grew from there. It was about watching boys getting better. You’d see them at the start of the year and maybe their soloing or their tackling wasn’t great, but over the course of the year they’d improve so much. I ended up playing with a lot of them that I coached. It’s nice to see them coming through and playing senior football.
“But if you’d asked me did I have a plan to coach after my playing days I would have said no.”
Niall Sludden was one of the youngsters McMenamin coached at the club.
“He was a fantastic role model for me around that time,” says Sludden.
“It was great to look at someone like that and then getting an opportunity to play with him at senior (club) level, I thought: ‘This is where I want to be, following his example'.”
Sludden also revealed McMenamin’s interest in poetry. He would recite poems to the U8s and U10s on the team bus.
But, if you’re expecting an Oscar Wilde hardback book hanging out of McMenamin’s pocket, you’ll be disappointed.
When you put this alleged interest in poetry to him, there is some breathless laughter from the former Tyrone defender.
“We used to mess about with the boys,” he says.
“They’d come on the bus, roaring as young boys do and I said: ‘Right boys, it’s time for a bit of poetry.’ I’d make up a poem off the top of my head.’ And then I’d say: ‘Next man up.’
“So it kind of stuck with that group and we’d do a bit of poetry. It just became a thing. It was messing about. The boys would be shaking their heads, thinking: ‘What’s this man on about?’ It was more or less to settle them down but Niall has obviously taken it to heart. He made more of it than me!”
SINCE retiring from the inter-county scene in 2012, McMenamin kept his hand in with the coaching and dabbled in the media.
He made a couple of appearances on The Sunday Game and wrote a newspaper column for roughly a year – “probably a year too long”, he laughs – but it never really suited him.
“I found it hard to maybe criticise players. When an ex-player said stuff I always felt it wasn’t really fair.”
At the end of last year, Ricey’s phone rang. He hadn’t the number saved.
It was Rory Gallagher. He knew Gallagher but they were “never bosom buddies”.
He wanted Ricey to join him in Fermanagh.
He went away and thought about it before meeting up with Gallagher and saying yes.
The Ernemen gained promotion out of Division Three and upset the odds in the Ulster Championship, not once but twice, by beating Armagh and Monaghan and the county find themselves in their first Ulster final in 10 years.
“I’d say we’re the least expected combination in the whole of the country,” smiles McMenamin.
“It’s opened up different horizons to me. I’ve got to meet different people. Hopefully I’ve made a few friends on the Fermanagh squad.
“It has definitely broadened my horizons. It’s probably the biggest coaching job I’ve taken on… In fairness, I’ve managed my wife’s [Maura] team – the MacCartan’s – and they would reckon that’s the biggest job.
And it is, let me tell you…
“But, no matter what anybody says it’s nice to think people see you of that calibre.”
During his own playing days and encounters with Fermanagh, McMenamin felt they were always “hard working” who were “liable to upset anybody on their day”.
“There are definitely characters in the squad. Probably my respect for them has gone up ten-fold or more.
You’re looking at a bunch of players that haven’t won anything, and yet they’re still putting in the same work or maybe a bit more than some of the established counties.
“Coming from Tyrone, maybe I looked down my nose at them. But once you come in and you’re in it, you see a totally different world. Pundits are calling for a tier two Championship and you can see how much the players don’t want it.”
One of the abiding images of this year’s Ulster Championship was McMenamin removing his front tooth on the sideline in Omagh to shout instructions onto the field against Monaghan.
He lost his front tooth, aged “13 or 14”, in an accidental collision with Dromore club-mate Collie McCullagh.
“We had a meal beside the pitch after the Monaghan game and there was still traffic,” ‘Ricey’ explains.
“We were all walking down and there were a couple of Monaghan supporters on the bus and they were gesturing [taking the false tooth out] and giving me grief about it.
“Then I realised: social media! The thing near choked me because I was trying to roar – probably at wee Danny Teague – it’s happened before where it has come flying out but there have been no TV cameras.”
THE adrenaline rush of those back-to-back Championship wins has made all the effort worthwhile.
But it doesn’t come close to playing the game.
McMenamin, now 39, has lined out for Dromore reserves a couple of times this season.
He made his Tyrone debut in the 2000 Dr McKenna Cup and played at the top level for 12 years.
His last game was an All-Ireland Qualifier defeat to Kerry in Killarney in 2012.
He knew coming off the pitch that evening he wouldn’t play for Tyrone again.
“We could have won more,” he says.
“I’d a few injuries and probably didn’t look after myself. It’s always about winning. You always felt you could have won more - even with the club there was definitely more in us. But, look, that’s life. I’d love to change it but I can’t.”
Even though he never represented Tyrone at minor or U21 level, McMenamin won three All-Ireland titles, five Ulster crowns, two National Leagues, three Tyrone championships and seven league winners’ medals and a 2005 Allstar.
McMenamin was a special talent and a brilliant reader of the game.
He’d some wonderful days playing for Tyrone – but what he recalls with more fondness is the “craic and camaraderie” of the changing room.
He still laughs at some of the pranks they pulled on each other.
‘Mugsy’ – who else – was always the ring-leader.
“The kit-man always got a hard time. We trained in Clogher and there’s a steep hill where the scoreboard is. Whatever way they drove the kit-man’s car under the scoreboard, they angled in such a way that it was near enough impossible to get it out. It was superb, you know. We got a picture taken beside it. It was hilarious.
“I think that was the time that Mickey had to put the foot down.
“There was one year Mickey called a team meeting and he said: ‘It’s great that we’re getting on so well but these pranks, we’re taking them to a new level.’
“And Mickey was serious, because when the kit-man’s van was going missing, there were problems.”
And there were many priceless moments going up and down the road to training with the two McMahons, Enda McGinley and Mickey McGee.
“The two McMahons would ask you a question and then fall asleep a minute later,” ‘Ricey’ says.
“Big Joe would ask you: ‘Hey, did you see the football at the weekend?’
“You’d be chatting away, answering him and you’d turn around and he’d be sleeping.”
“Those car journeys were unique, actually unique…”
As far as his playing days go, he distinctly remembers the beginning of the end and Roscommon’s Cathal Gregg leaving him for dust in a Round Four Qualifier in Croke Park in 2011.
“We were to play Dublin in the quarter-finals in the next game and I said to myself: ‘There is no way I can start this game.’ Mickey pulled me in and gave me the talk and said: ‘Look, I’m not starting you.’
“I said: ‘Mickey, I’d do the same myself.’
“I’d soldiered with Mickey for so many years. I don’t know if it was hard for him or not, but I wasn’t playing well enough at the time. It is what it is… I knew deep down I wasn’t up to it.
“I had a good time while I was there. As I said to the Fermanagh boys, you don’t realise how good a time it is until you start looking back.”
‘Ricey’, Rory and the Fermanagh boys will be hoping there is one more big performance in them next weekend and that elusive chapter can finally be written.
With the wily and defiant Dromore man in the Ernemen’s corner, anything is possible. Anything...
