“There’s no cure for it [football]. It’s sort of a disease. But they were the best days of my life.”
- Art McRory
ABOUT 15 years ago, Art McRory had to go in for a knee replacement.
Every time the conversation came around, somebody would curse on his behalf the royalties his body was now paying on football.
He never liked it to be spoken about in that way. Whatever damage had come to his knee and anywhere else, he wore it with the sense that it was all worth it.
From the days that one of the priests in the local Presentation Brothers’ School in Dungannon introduced them to the game with kickabouts at the end of the day, football was all he’d ever known.
His managerial prowess usurped his playing achievements, largely because he had the misfortune to have been born at the wrong time.
McRory’s impressionable teenage mind was filled on the bus to matches with Iggy Jones, the Dungannon man who starred when the county won its first ever senior Ulster title in 1956.
The same year, he led the Clarkes to their tenth Tyrone club championship.
Art McRory made his senior club debut in ’57, the following year. He played for 20 years until he was 37 but never got so much as a sniff of a senior county final. An All-Ireland junior championship was his gathering.
With Tyrone, he played anywhere and everywhere in defence through the ‘60s in a period dominated by Down and Derry.
He kicked the winning point in the All-Ireland junior final against Mayo in ’68, a campaign that he’d started in goals as he recovered from injury and finished as the county’s player of the year.
By the mid-60s he was headed down the coaching path.
A protégé of Jim McKeever’s at St Mary’s, he started working with youngsters when he got a job as a PE teacher in the local school.
The Vocational Schools started up and that led to several All-Irelands across three decades, which got him noticed.
Pat McCartan rang him one evening to ask him to come and take Tyrone minors. They would win an All-Ireland in 1973 and that earned him the U21 job for a spell before, in February 1980, Art McRory was named as Tyrone’s new senior football manager.
The county was in tumult. Jody O’Neill had stepped down after a decade in charge and things hadn’t moved on much from when McRory was playing and there were rarely more than a dozen men at training.
Tyrone county board had just launched an “in-depth investigation” into the state of football in the county when Art took charge.
Four months later, they were in an Ulster final.
It took another four years for them to win one but the trajectory of Tyrone football had been altered radically. They were softened up by Dublin in the ’84 All-Ireland semi-final, locked out of the ground for 45 minutes before the Dubs marched through their warm-up.
Two years later they did enough to get past Galway and reach a first ever All-Ireland final, but their hopes against Kerry were dashed by effectively losing Eugene McKenna to an Achilles injury in the first minute.
Jon Lynch, marking Mikey Sheehy (whose sister married Art’s brother), also pulled up and they couldn’t force an ageing Kingdom side off the edge of the cliff.
He stepped down at the end of 1987 having won two Ulster titles and reached a first All-Ireland final, as well as spending their entire seven years of McRory’s first spell in the top two tiers of the National League.
He had plenty to keep him busy in between times. A greyhound lover, a keen basketballer who helped set up the Mid Ulster Dodgers club and coached All-Ireland winning schools’ teams, it was always Tyrone that put the gas to his flame.
When the Tyrone job came up again after John Donnelly resigned in ’92, McRory rang his captain from the ‘80s and another of his sporting heroes, Eugene McKenna.
It didn’t go off without a hitch. A significant proportion of the players wanted Danny Ball, who had guided them to two All-Ireland U21 titles. The county board were reluctant to give it to him and handed the gig to McRory and McKenna instead.
“He was the one fella I couldn’t say no to,” McKenna recalled before the 1995 All-Ireland final, by which stage things had settled down nicely again.
That summer had given McRory one perhaps his most cherished victory.
He’d always tell the story of a friend of his that was out on the road supplying drink to bars when he called in Dungiven one afternoon before Derry faced a Tyrone side they’d become happily used to beating up on.
So began the craic about a wee dog that would bark when Derry scored a goal and run around in circles when they won.
“What does he do when Tyrone win?”
“Sure he’s only six years of age,” came the reply from the barman.
Two weeks later, thirteen-man Tyrone came from three points down at half-time to end Derry’s summer of ’95.
As well as the tactical reorganisation that was his forte, McRory’s attention to detail shone through.
It was a baking hot day in Clones, in the middle of a heatwave.
McRory wanted to offset it. So he got on to Sean Connolly of the FAI, who told him how they’d coped with the heat in Orlando during the World Cup the previous summer (notwithstanding trying to get John Aldridge on).
Bear in mind this was 30 years ago, when everything was new. But Connolly told him that they’d given the players wet towels in the changing rooms at half-time to cool them down, so that’s what Tyrone did too.
The home he and Helen built with their three children was the hub before and after games.
His wife once told of the ceaseless phonecalls on the landline, one of them at 2.40am one night, when somebody worse for wear demanded to speak to Art.
“He’s asleep,” she told them.
“I need to talk to him.”
“He’s asleep.”
“I saw a boy tonight with a great left foot.”
“Unless it’s amputated, it’ll do until morning,” Helen, who also passed away earlier this year, laughed as she recounted it in 2010.
Art made no excuses about the controversial call to disallow Peter Canavan’s equaliser in the final and for many years steered away from going in as hard on Meath as they’d gone in on Tyrone on the field in ’96.
Pressed after the game, he held his counsel but couldn’t resist one quip when asked about how Brian Dooher was affected by needing patched up after being caught by an early boot from Martin O’Connell.
“It’s fair to say you play better without a bandage on your head than with one,” he said wryly.
That game brought the curtain down on his second term of office but when Danny Ball’s time didn’t go to plan, Tyrone were back knocking on his door again in ’99.
He and McKenna paired up and won Ulster again in 2001 and a first ever National League the following year, but the knives were out after losing to Sligo in a round four qualifier that summer.
Still they’d been given a year’s extension in October 2002 but when McRory informed the board that he’d have to take some time off to deal with an infection, things deteriorated.
It was initially reported that he had resigned but quickly transpired that his hand had been forced. Tyrone released a statement stating he was stepping down for “personal reasons”, but that version was quickly disputed.
That Tyrone had been the ones to knock on his door was thrown up at them by McKenna, who received a public apology from the county chairman after Mickey Harte was appointed for the way things had been handled.
“I’m disappointed nobody found it worthwhile to advise us they were issuing a statement. They certainly knew where Donaghmore Road (where McRory lived) was when they needed someone to take up the mantle three years ago,” McKenna would say the day after McRory’s departure was announced.
Eugene McKenna then wished to take it on himself but was made reapply and then passed over for Harte, who would go on to win three All-Ireland titles in the next five years and manage the county for almost two decades consecutively.
“It broke my heart to give it up because I knew there was an All-Ireland sitting waiting for us. I simply had no option,” McRory said in an interview in 2010 as part of the GAA’s Oral History project.
Yet football gave him far more than it ever took away.
Art McRory gave more to Tyrone football than almost anyone in its history.
