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“All the stories and everyone seems to gravitate towards that one,” says Marc Ó Sé. Actually, he says it twice in the course of an interview. The first time is for a part of his new book, ‘Ó Sé, A Kerry Family, A Football Dynasty,’ where he’s talking about a drinking story in 2009 that famously led to Tomás Ó Sé and Colm Cooper being dropped. And intertwined with that is the second part, the brothers’ relationship with Jack O’Connor. In fairness, Ó Sé doesn’t hold back with the detail of incidents that annoyed him and it makes for fascinating and funny reading, shedding plenty of new light on some old stories. Also mixed in with football talk is the detail of the Ó Sé’s West Kerry upbringing, surrounded by family, music, the Irish language and stories, with Páidí Ó Sé’s pub the hub for it all. Other standouts include a row with older brother Tómas over a newspaper column that suggested Marc or Aidan O'Mahony should be dropped after an indifferent Kerry display - and why Ó Sé felt he didn’t get “a fair crack of the whip” from Eamonn Fitzmaurice in his final year with the county. What riled Ó Sé up most of all is a comment in O’Connor’s book ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ where he suggested the Ó Sé’s could be hard to handle. “I took exception to that, yeah, there’s no doubt about that,” he says. “Whether he meant it differently or not, I don’t know. I felt, give me a job and I’ll do it. I’ll get on with it. I did find that bit tough to take. “Maybe he wasn’t going back into management. I never asked Jack about that. Only Jack knows that. I was writing the book chronologically and that came up. “If I saw Jack of course I’d chat away to him. There’s no ill feeling on my part, definitely now. He’s come back in. He’s done a great job as manager. “It’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. Kerry football moves on and it’s a long time ago now. It just comes up because I’m writing about it in the book. It was a story then and that’s the way it was. “The book has many other stories that I delve into and that was just one of them. I just wanted to be as honest as I could.” ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ was written between O’Connor’s first and second coming, and the launch date, before a Munster Final with Cork in 2007 was “poor timing” according to Ó Sé and “created a circus” around the game. One thing that is very clear from the book is that if you tangle with one brother, you tangle with them all. If anyone who follows football hadn’t worked that out already, it’s up in lights here. And if you tangled with their late uncle Páidí, it was the same. As the sub-heading on the book says, ‘A Football Dynasty.’ A prime example was Jack O’Connor’s decision to take Tomás Ó Sé off at half-time in the 2006 All-Ireland Final win over Mayo. In the book Marc O Sé calls it, “A power move that lacked class and betrayed what he (O’Connor) thought of Tomás and us.” He outlines why he believes the switch was made. And he also says that his older brother wasn’t playing great but contends that he “had a lot of credit in the bank,” should have been given time “to right the wrongs” and if it was a game against Tyrone, Cork or Dublin, he wouldn’t have been substituted. Ó Sé is also quick to point out the positives: “It seems to be Jack and the few yarns that people gravitate towards, but what people don’t realise is that Jack was an excellent coach and as manager brought great people in around him. “Every manager I had, they all had their positives and no different than Jack, dealing with himself, the likes of Alan O’Sullivan, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, Diarmuid Murphy, the people be brought on. “All of these were excellent coaches in their own way and learning from these guys was huge - the experience from that. “Everyone seems to kind of gravitate towards the bits where Jack wrote his own book but there were a lot of positives too.” Ó Sé outlines what now seems a hilarious story of the Kerry players being summoned to a meeting after their fortunate All-Ireland qualifier victory over Sligo in Killarney in 2009. He had been whipped at half time after David Kelly hit 1-1. In the book Ó Sé says he hated “jinky” type players like Kelly and that they gave him “a headache.” “I’d honestly much prefer to mark someone like David Clifford - who’ll go down as one of the true greats of the game - rather than a guy like Kelly,” he continues. It still came as a shock when O’Connor announced it at the break, especially as selector Eamonn Fitzmaurice had told Ó Sé he was being switched off Kelly, something he was already “pissed off” about. Ó Sé “fuming silently” got changed, went to the pavilion to watch the second half, jumped in his car at the final whistle and headed off. The phone rang a couple of days later. Jack O’Connor’s name popped up. “I was fairly shook after a couple of days on the beer,” he recounts. “ ‘Marc, you were drinking,’ it was a statement rather than a question. “I said, ‘Jesus, no Jack, I wasn’t.’ I was shaking inside in the car with porter coming out of me.’” Ó Sé says O’Connor’s right hand man Ger O’Keeffe was “doing a bit of detective work in Tralee.” “He was deadly. He was like the T1000 in Terminator - wouldn’t give up the chase at all. He kept asking fellas, were the Ó Sé’s drinking with you and we surmised he nearly had a photofit and ‘Wanted’ posters made up. ‘Have you seen this man ordering a stout?’ Ó Sé says, “It was wrong of me to go for the few jars,” adding in the book that, “It’s not great then having to lie,” but he also wondered, “Why was this crusade going on?” He says it was funny in a way, but not funny and the players were “completely stressed” and thought they’d be dropped. “I genuinely felt that would be it for me for the rest of the year. I better hold tough. I better hold my ground.” In the book he doesn’t name any more names, but it seems there were plenty more Kerry players out for the few days, when he says he “took the show off the road,” tantalisingly adding, “others might have knocked another bit out of it.” “I think they wanted to blame someone for the performances, which were poor,” he surmises. Player Mike Quirke chaired a meeting to deal with the issue. “Though these showdowns can be tense or even paintful, they’re very entertaining too,” says Ó Sé of past experiences where he was a peripheral figure. ‘Marc were you drinking,’ was the question/statement that came at him. ‘No, I was inside in Páidí’s and I had a bowl of soup and a sandwich.’ “The euphemism became the punchline in jokes from the boys afterwards, and ‘soup and a sandwich’ became shorthand amongst us for a couple of pints. ‘Did you have a few bowls of soup over the weekend?’ ‘My God, you look like you overdid the soup and sandwiches last night.’ “Mike Quirke had a thankless job and Darragh, who evidently thought attack was the best form of defence asked him, ‘What the f**k are you doing chairing the meeting?’ We settled in. Darragh Ó Sé also had some advice for Tadhg Kennelly ‘Jesus Christ, will you pipe down? You’re only home a wet week and you’re talking like you know what’s going on.’ “The funny thing was, that pair were great friends and there was plenty of mutual respect.” Ó Sé recounts Darragh Ó Sé’s parting shot: ‘Have a look at Gooch. And have a look at Tomás. I can tell you every single person inside here would not have three, four or five All-Ireland medals, only for those men. “Pause. ‘Meeting over,’ he said. You could hear a pin drop and then everyone left. That was Darragh. He was a leader. Now we need to come down off the moral high ground and do it on the pitch.” Looking back Ó Sé says, “Maybe deal with it privately, but look it’s done now. Maybe afterwards would they have done things differently? “I’m not sure. When we won it made things that bit easier and kind of glossed over it,” but there was no Hollywood make-up between Ó Sé and O’Connor after the All-Ireland was won. “It was no fun at the time I can assure you,” he says. “Usually we were all committed to the cause all the time in fact. That was rare enough. It was a one off really.”
