Opening (and closing) scene
Ashe Street, Tralee. Lunchtime. Outside the courthouse, Kerry football star Kieran Donaghy is having his photograph taken. Across the street two young women are walking. And talking.
Woman 1: Is he taking a photograph of him again?
Woman 2: Uh-huh.
Woman 1: Will he ever get over himself.
Scene Two
Ulster Bank, Ashe Street. He’s been working here eighteen months now. Life is sweet, business is booming, happy as Larry. He takes us into a back office. “Ye can sit down there.” Two seats facing a desk. “Any chance of a loan Kieran?” He laughs. All six foot five inches of him. You understand immediately why his coaches – both basketball and football – cite his exuberance and positive energy. “A boon to the team,” they say. And a boon for them, too.
This exuberance is in his talk, in his carefree thrown-back laugh and in his wound-up movements. He moves a lot. Fiddling with two biros – crossing and uncrossing them. Sometimes glancingat the computer screen. It’s blank. Sometimes checking his mobile. It buzzes with messages. All the time shifting his feet under the table, tapping to a primal beat. Chatting ten to the dozen. Head cropped close. Dressed in a suit that his body seems to be trying to escape. Twenty five years young. Two All-Ireland medals in the bank. A basketball superleague title slam-dunked. World at his feet. Star.
Scene Three
Kieran is the eldest of three (below him are Sarah and Conor). Tralee is his home-town and home turf. It was always basketball and football (with local club, Austin Stacks). In the blood. His mother, Deirdre, won an All-Ireland schools medal with Balloonagh for basketball. His dad, Oliver, played football in his home county of Tyrone. Then there were grand-uncles who won All-Ireland football medals (hey, this is Kerry). When he was 13 his father left and his mother and grandmother, Mary Fitzgerald, reared the children. Gran and mam are the real stars. “My mum was always very good to me. She was always there with words of wisdom and has been a great inspiration in my life. I am where I am today because of her. She worked her socks off for us.”
Star
Up to the age of seventeen he was average height. Five feet seven or so. “I was the smallest player in the whole tournament when Ireland played in the European championship,” he says. “Then I shot up.” Didn’t stop until he reached six foot five.
He was first called Star by Aidan O’Connor, his coach at Austin Stacks. This is how he remembers it. It was the Junior C County Final. He couldn’t play because he was captaining Ireland in a Four Nations basketball tournament in the UK. When the football game ended in a draw, the replay was set for Monday. That Sunday, Ireland won the tournament. Back in Tralee on Monday he played for Stacks. They won. After that he was Star. Or at least that’s how he remembers it. After that, working in O’Connor’s bar, he would get the calls. “Hey Star, two pints there!”
Scene Four
He has big hands. Of course, you expected that. But not for them to be so fine and cultured. Like a pianist. Except don’t expect a pushover. He is a tough nut. Mouthy, too, sometimes. Has the yellow cards to prove it. But he has a winner’s hunger. And the talent to match. Hand. Vision. Speed. Key elements on the hardwood or on the turf. Basketball and football. Both sports complement each other. That burst of speed, that crafty feint, that spring-heeled leap. But he cannot choose one over the other. Loves both games. Straight down the middle. “You get more in football, especially in Kerry, but when I get on the basketball court I feel right at home.”
Even so, a few years back he had to make a big call. He did some college trials in the US. A few wanted him back. North Park. Loyola in Chicago. “At the time I had got on a good Kerry Under-21 team. We were facing a Munster final against Cork in August. The College semester started the same month so it was one or the other.”
Football won. Kerry lost. Donaghy was gutted. “That was one of the worst disappointments ever. Awful. Plus I had made a big decision to stay. But in hindsight it worked out fine for me. Better than fine, really.”
Basketball
He tells a story from his US college trial in Chicago. Tough part of town. Liquor stores on every corner. Alsatians travelling in pairs. Boarded-up buildings. “What in hell am I doing here?” he thought. But he was with two well-known faces: Tigers boys. So at the gym he bounded up the steel staircase. Two steps at a time. First in. “I was mad for basketball, didn’t know what was going to face me.” Inside it was crazy. Five-on-five game. Forty black players. He was the only white guy. “Stood out a mile.”
Then he was on court. “There this was old guy. He was about forty. But he could shoot.” Donaghy went one-on-one with him. Bang! The old guy scores. One-nil. Three nil. Six-nil. The white boy was being ate. The crowd went wild. Eight-nil. But then it changes. And then Donaghy pulls it. Moves back. Slaps the ball away. His man hits the hardwood. Donaghy races up court. Slams it. Respect.
He has had a glittering career with Abrakebabra Tigers. Four National trophies in four years (including The League in ’04 and ’08 and the Cup in ’05 and ’07). Throughout, his major man was Chicagoan Rus Bradburd. After a lifetime coaching at the college coalface in the US, Bradburd came to Ireland for the culture and a cushy number. “(Rus) first rang me when I was playing for St Brendan’s, the other club in Tralee,” he says. “He was coming over to coach Tigers. He kept ringing me. I didn’t think that he would play me. That he was full of BS. But Rus was massive for me. Not only in basketball but in life. At that stage I would be in Horan’s (nightclub) every Tuesday and Thursday night. The craic was great and I was one of the boys. It could have gone either way but Rus grounded me. Kind of like a father figure in a way. He got me to go to the gym. He would call to the house to have a chat and we could be talking for two hours.”
Football
It wasn’t that smooth to get blooded into the Kerry squad. So much competition. He needed to get focused. Get meat on his bones, build up some muscle and get his act together. In his autobiography, Keys to the Kingdom, Jack O’Connor recalls the ‘big, loping and likeable kid’, the ‘Jack the Lad around Tralee’ who he got stuck into one evening.
‘Kieran,’ I say to him, ‘you’re f***ing around in this panel for two years, getting bits and pieces. You’re half this and half the other. What are you going to do about it?’
Donaghy laughs. “That was Jack out the door,” he says. “He will put something in your head that will p*** you off a small bit. Then he’ll see how you react to that. My reaction was to knuckle down and work harder. But while it was easy for him to say I was fucking around, at the end of the day I was trying my best to get into a team that had so many good players. A team with William Kirby and Darragh Ó Sé in midfield in 2004.”
But he worked hard. Made the squad. And in 2006 – the man who up to then was best known for his TV cameo on TG4’s Underdogs – came into his own. The year he was moved from midfield to full-forward. The year he left Francie Bellew in the dust. The year he won an All-Ireland medal, a GAA all-Star and was named the GPA Player of the Year. “Up to then I was a solid enough midfielder but playing with Darragh you’ll always be ‘the other fellow’. That’s how you’re known because Darragh is so good that it’s impossible to outshine him. Then I got the number 14 shirt. Jack was under pressure and had to try something else. After that it was bob’s your uncle and I haven’t looked back yet.”
Three-in-a-row?
To relax he plays golf (handicap 15). Takes his mind off basketball and football. “My head is always running through games,” he says. “I need to escape.” He has been with his girlfriend Hilary for the past four years. They met through Austin Stacks. “I would meet her after the games and so on and so forth,” he says. “I would try to chat her up and the craic went on and you know the story. She loves sport. She’d have to, I suppose. In fact she’s mentioned in Rus’s book as the college girl who calmed me down.”
Right now, Kerry are going great. In just seven games manager Pat O’Shea – a former basketball player who was point guard for Tigers – used 29 players. The squad is a mix of hardened winners and promising young guns. The Kingdom cruised into the final, barely moving out of third gear. Each game under the belt hardens them for the big time, the championship. They need the games. Last year after Munster they were rusty. Monaghan could – and should – have beaten them. In the semi-final Dublin chased them down to the wire. By the time of the final they were primed. Cork was a cakewalk.
So this year is their three-in-a-row year. Not that Donaghy’s feeling cocky, at least not in public. He rattles off ten or so teams that “could beat us on any given day”. A fistful of Northern sides. Galway. Mayo. “The Dubs are always serious.” Meath. The old enemy, Cork. “At the end of the day the two-in-a-row or the three-in-a-row doesn’t mean much,” he says. “It really doesn’t. What means something is that you have an All-Ireland medal in your pocket. That’s what it is all about: All-Ireland medals. There are teams in Kerry that have done four-in-a-row. So if we lose the All-Ireland it’s not going to be that we didn’t do the three-in-a-row. It will be that we didn’t win another All-Ireland medal.”
Epilogue
Afterwards comes the photos. Donaghy’s not keen to be shot on the street. Been there, knows the score. If some come to praise, others come to slag. So we shoot a few of him at the bank job. Henry the Hippo as a backdrop. Tapping at the keyboard. Suited for business. The photographer encourages him to smile. “Just think of that all-Ireland medal in your pocket,” he says. Quick as a flash Star fires back: “I have two.”
Will he ever get over himself?
Sure, why should he?