THE last cold sweat I had in this job was the day when I retired Collie Cavanagh a year too early. It was around this time last year I received a text from the Moy man.
Here’s my meek preamble to an explanation of ushering the Tyrone Allstar into premature retirement.
In our end of season county focus series there's a section entitled ‘End of the Line’.
It is where the journalist has the onerous task of telling county players that their time is basically up, or close to it.
As reporters, we hate this section.
The flawed rule of thumb is if a player is anywhere near celebrating their 30th birthday they could find their name and the word ‘retirement’ in the same sentence.
It’s callous, ruthless and probably ageist as well.
I remember looking down from the seventh floor of the Croke Park press tribune last summer and seeing Collie Cavanagh in the middle of the field with his baby in his arms after Tyrone had lost to Kerry an All-Ireland semi-final.
It was as if Cavanagh was surveying the great amphitheatre one last time. I also recall him posting a cryptic tweet that suggested that it could be end of the road for him in the famous red and white jersey.
But there was certainly nothing definitive about his intentions.
So I retired him anyway.
“It was no surprise Colm Cavanagh announced his inter-county retirement after the All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Kerry last month,” I wrote with a degree of gusto.
“The Moy man did well to extend his county career by another year given the injury woes he’s faced in recent times. And he signed off with a typically resilient display against the Kingdom.
“The affable midfielder/defensive sweeper owes his county nothing after 12 years of service where he interpreted the sweeper’s role to perfection…”
Problem was, big Collie hadn’t gone away. Not yet.
He’d planned to give it one last crack with the Red Hands in 2020. So when his text dropped explaining that he hadn’t retired, I texted his manager Mickey Harte and organised a correction to be put in the following day’s edition of the paper.
I also rang Collie a couple of days later and apologised for any embarrassment caused.
Typical of the man, that was the end of the matter.
In an era of tightening player access and general control freakery that has engulfed the inter-county game, for reasons best known to itself, Collie Cavanagh remained the same.
He was cut from a different, more old-fashioned cloth.
If you asked him for an interview before or after a match he rarely refused you. He could handle the journalists’ microphones, no bother, and his chats with the press were always smart and insightful.
He was a shining example of where you didn’t have to bring a big bag of media-trained clichés to the table and bore the reader absolutely senseless; players like Collie Cavanagh contributed hugely to GAA media discourse.
In the early stages of his inter-county career, he was a slow burner of a footballer. He caught the tail end of Tyrone’s golden era, coming on in the county’s 2008 All-Ireland final victory over Kerry as a substitute.
He didn’t possess the Sean Cavanagh shuffle. He didn’t have the cut of a Philip Jordan in full flight, or Mugsy’s swagger or Brian McGuigan’s guile.
Who did?
You could be prejudiced by a player’s gait too.
Collie Cavanagh’s running stride could never be described as smooth but he’d great hands, his shooting improved immeasurably as the years ticked by, there was no better reader of the game and he was, more than anything, the ultimate competitor.
All you needed to do was look at his stats after games. He must have been a manager’s dream.
It was the simply the era he competed in that a huge chunk of Cavanagh’s career was when Tyrone were in decline.
Mickey Harte was blessed with a once-in-a-lifetime group of footballers before austerity kicked in after the ‘Noughties’.
It was Collie Cavanagh’s chief role to provide Tyrone shelter from the storm, which made his contribution to the cause even more significant.
With the wing span of an Albatross, Cavanagh’s positional sense in the defensive sweeper’s role was of the uncoachable variety.
How do you tell a player to sense danger?
Even Tyrone’s harshest critics of their defensive-minded approach, post-2012, observers could still appreciate just how good and important Cavanagh was to the team.
He wasn’t limited to the sweeper’s role either; he was equally adept at playing as an orthodox midfielder.
With a series of injuries taking their toll and talk of Cavanagh’s demise, one of his most memorable displays came at midfield in Tyrone’s make-or-break Super 8s win over Donegal in Ballybofey in 2018.
He caught everything that Sunday afternoon, demoralising his opponents in the process, and also reminded the doubters that when fully fit there was none better in the Tyrone jersey.
A couple of years ago at a media gig in the Belfast Castle, Cavanagh, who was the oldest on the panel at 30, said: “It seems like only yesterday I was running around with Stephen O’Neill, Brian Dooher, Collie Holmes and Conor Gormley, when I was a young lad, and you’re thinking: ‘I’m invincible here.’”
“It’s only when you get older that you realise you have to make the most of now because you don’t know what’s around the corner.”
Without fear of contradiction, Collie Cavanagh’s inter-county career is definitely in his rear-view. He mightn’t have been blessed with the Sean Cavanagh shuffle.
It turns out he didn’t need it. He carved his own path and leaves behind a legacy that will be fondly remembered for generations to come.
Not many sportspeople really and truly fulfil their potential – but Collie Cavanagh certainly did.
That was his greatest achievement of all.
