NO matter should it take him until 10 o’clock at night to get his hands on it, Pat McGuckin’s days don’t begin until he’s read The Irish News.
On March 15, he picked up his copy, flipped it to the back and opened up to see the familiar smiling face of Paddy Park staring back at him.
The captain of Queen’s 1971 Sigerson Cup winning team was recounting the tale of how their modest men, led by the irrepressible Sean O’Neill, claimed an historic success.
“It knocked me for six. It all came flooding back and the hurt was a hundred times harder than that experienced 50 years ago,” says McGuckin.
The Ballinderry full-back had found himself positioned as Rainey Endowed’s full-back when rugby came naturally to him upon entering the mixed Magherafelt school.
He followed his brothers Mick and Adrian down that path. Mick had played in a Schools Cup final in 1965 and Adrian had gone one better two years later.
Pat’s turn came on St Patrick’s Day, 1970.
Six months earlier, he’d been in Croke Park with Derry, losing an All-Ireland minor football final by two points to Cork.
With regular Rainey captain Des Chada injured, McGuckin led the school out on a “hurricane-blowing day” in Ravenhill.
He lost this final too, beaten 11-3 by RBAI.
McGuckin was the team’s kicker. When there was half a chance of a drop-goal, he’d sit back in the pocket. ‘Wee’ Niall Hurley, a Lavey man, played scrum-half and would lay them on a plate.
The Ballinderry man, who for years came up from full-back to take his club’s free-kicks in Gaelic football, was subsequently top scorer for the Ulster Schools select against the other provinces.
By the time the McGuckin brothers left school, rugby was a love that would remain.
He headed for Belfast in September 1970 but, despite approaches from the club, he spurned the university team. Instead, he joined the GAA team and instead signed up with Rainey Old Boys in Magherafelt for his “rugby fix” at weekends.
And then one Friday evening a few short months later, he landed home and was met by Mick with the news that he’d been caught playing a foreign game.
“With still only being 18 at the time, I’m not so sure whether I was acutely aware of the ‘thou shalt not play foreign games’ rule 27 which existed at the time.
“I certainly did not expect there would be anybody so obsessed with it that they would spy on my playing rugby for a junior club in Magherafelt.
“But anyway, I arrived home from Belfast one Friday evening about November time and I vividly remember my brother Mick greeting me with the news that the club had received a letter indicating I had received a six-month suspension.
“No word of when I was caught, no method of appeal, nothing. My big concern was missing some games for Ballinderry at the start of the ’71 season.”
He would continue training and playing in challenge games with Queen’s, recalling a game against Adrian when they visited Manchester and played De La Salle college, where the elder sibling was studying.
“He scored 2-3 against us.”
Sigerson Cup was coming around the corner when the decision was taken by Queen’s that there was simply too much riding on it to take the risk.
McGuckin was a Fresher, who modestly offers that, unlikely as it was, he might not even have made the team.
“Here I was training away. Eventually a team mentor approached me one day and declared it ‘would be a bit dicey’ to bring me to Galway and me suspended. I was obviously disappointed and didn’t travel with the lads.
“I remember the Sunday evening I heard the news that they had won, and remember vividly coming to the chaplaincy that Monday evening.
“I was full of joy for the boys, especially for the Fresher lads who were now great pals. But there was a lump in my throat because of what I’d missed out on.”
By then, he was crossing off the days until his ban would be lifted.
April 11, 1971 was the date with the circle around it.
In the greatest of ironies, the GAA’s Annual Congress was holding a vote on The Ban’s future on the same date, in none other than Whitla Hall at Queen’s University.
“It was only then that I became aware of the big story at the time, that there was to be a motion debated at the GAA Congress on April 11, to possibly remove the famous Rule 27.
“The ban was removed on the very same date as my six-month suspension expired, and at a venue in Queen’s, where only one month earlier I’d missed out on a Sigerson Cup medal.
“How ironic was that?”
His ban expired the day the whole premise was broken up.
Opposition sports had come to present less of a threat to the GAA than its own inflexibility in not allowing young men to play rugby, soccer or whatever else they chose.
An Ulster Club winner with Ballinderry in 1981, in time he’d see his son Kevin win two and an All-Ireland.
This is a man who would drive to the ends of the earth to watch his club, and then leave the ground before a ball was kicked to walk laps of whatever town he found himself in, unable to bear the anxiety of it.
The lifting of The Ban came a month too late for Pat McGuckin. His face isn’t the picture of the Queen’s team of ’71, his name not in the programmes.
He’d play for Rainey Old Boys for so many years that he ended up on the Fifths team, comprised of veterans out for a day’s craic.
His first love was Gaelic football but the flame for rugby never went out, and that afternoon in Whitla Hall was its permission to burn on.
