AS he hugged the edge of the arc like a pedigree pup running its line at Crufts, Darren McCurry was making history.
On Sunday afternoon, he overtook Peter Canavan as Tyrone’s all-time leading scorer in championship football.
Spreadsheet king and now three-time Irish News guru Eunan Lindsay tweeted the news as he and his kinsmen wallowed in the result.
McCurry’s tally of five goals and 207 points pushes his four clear of Canavan’s 9-191.
The caveats are not what you think they are.
There’s just one two-pointer in McCurry’s tally.
McCurry has played 62 championship games to Canavan’s 50.
But of the Edendork man’s appearances, 17 have been off the bench.
So you’re talking 45 starts to Canavan’s 42.
Seven of God’s eight substitute appearances came at the end of his career.And that is where McCurry really earns his stripes.
Because it has not been an easy ride.
His relationship with Mickey Harte was difficult.
McCurry didn’t trust Harte to pick him.
Harte didn’t trust McCurry to deliver.
He’d get a game here and there, then out of the team, in for 20 minutes, score a couple, still not starting next time.
Imagine what his numbers would look like if the first half and more of his inter-county career hadn’t been so fractured.
“If Mickey had been there the following year (2021), I would have left. It was a constant battle. I felt no matter what I did I was always going to be the boy taken off,” he said in the months after Tyrone’s All-Ireland success four years ago.
He had a great season that year under Brian Dooher and Feargal Logan, capped by his 1-4 and man of the match display in the final.
Opting out of the panel for a year at the end of 2017, he was so sure that it was the right decision that he’d made it thinking Tyrone would win an All-Ireland without him.
When they faced Dublin in the All-Ireland final, he stood six feet from me in the bar of the Croke Park hotel before the match.It was a sin to see it.
Mickey Harte was dealing in realities too. The game had changed. Any half-inkling that a forward didn’t want to track would be preyed upon.
McCurry admitted himself in 2020 that it took him a while to come to terms with his defensive duties.
“I didn’t want to defend, I didn’t think it was my job to defend, and I wasn’t good at it. That maybe had a lot to do with why I wasn’t starting.”But wasn’t that some indictment of the game itself?
That you could just dog a quality forward to death. Run him into the ground. Empty his bandwidth.
And then when he gets possession, the tank is empty and he has three sweepers to contend with.
There was a certain irony when in trying to get back and help out, he was one of the guilty parties that breached the 3v3 rule in Galway during the league.
Shane Walsh’s resulting last-minute two-pointer robbed Tyrone of victory and contributed to their relegation.
But the 13 minutes McCurry played that day changed the course of his season.
He only touched the ball twice.
It was the way he buzzed around looking for work.
He’d come on just as Canavan kicked a point.
Moments later, Tyrone were awarded a free right on the edge of the arc, perfect for the left-footer with the breeze behind him.
McCurry looks around, searching for Bradley, who was on the frees. You kicking it? A nod in each direction. Let him at it.
Bradley hits the post.
With his first touch, McCurry slips into the arc and fires a shot right up into the sky. It stays for an age, coming down between the posts.
From that moment to this, he’s been unmarkable.
His pass for Darragh Canavan’s goal against Dublin displayed the lesser spotted animal of his passing ability.
McCurry is among the roughly 3% of the population who are left-footed and right-handed.
A study by University Limerick student Karol Dillon, on which The Irish News will report in-depth in the coming days, has looked at the genetic advantages for a Gaelic footballer born that way.
It’s truly fascinating.
McCurry showed up in the research as one of the very best proponents off both sides.
There was something fitting that in breaking Canavan’s scoring record, he did it off Barry McCambridge.
That was a mark of respect from Armagh.
Other teams have given McCurry their second-choice defender, with Darragh Canavan picked up by the first-choice. Armagh reversed that.
McCambridge has been unbelievable the last year. But he had no answer to McCurry. He kicked nine scores (0-10) from ten shots. Four of them were from play.
His sole miss was a two-point effort off the outside of the left that whistled just wide.
There’s this perception of McCurry out there that all the Dazzler stuff means he’s unserious.
Far from it. This is a man who lost his mother suddenly at the age of 13.
Nothing would make you grow up faster.
He hated school but quickly learned the value of working hard.
All he wanted to do was get out on site and start into the family trade of plumbing.
His father didn’t want him to but Darren begged him. They’ve built a serious operation now.
McCurry is on the tools a bit less and in the car a bit more these days, hopping from job to job overseeing, but that doesn’t mean his mornings aren’t still early and his nights aren’t late.
For most of his adult life, he’s had a 5.45am alarm and closed the front door behind him at 10pm.
He practices football religiously.
In 2016, his late wide in a one-point loss to Mayo generated criticism. That year, he’d gone down a line of reshaping his body, buying into the gym properly for the first time.
It was the only time of his career when skills didn’t come first.
Even in the off-season, he’d be at the pitch in Edendork two or three times a week with a bag of footballs.
You could tell his confidence was sky high when Kieran McGeeney kicked the flag over on Saturday evening.
The only reason Darren McCurry walked anywhere near the 21 was to double-check with David Gough that he could take the free back out to the edge of the arc. That was the only place it was ever getting kicked from.
His vein of form is such that the only place it was landing was right above the black spot.
It took him a few months to earn Malachy O’Rourke’s trust. But now that he has it, he’ll be hard to stop.
Peter Canavan will remain unsurpassed as Tyrone’s greatest ever footballer.
There will be others that spring to mind more readily for the group ranked beneath than Darren McCurry.
He is in that conversation.
That he’s in it having been completely under-utilised until 2021 is some testament.
Surpassing Peter Canavan’s scoring record does not make Darren McCurry the greatest footballer ever to play for Tyrone.
But surpassing it given the difficulties he’s had in his career is an astonishing individual achievement.