John Keenan, third from left, punches the ball towards goal in the 1965 All-Ireland final against Kerry
By Arthur Sullivan
Show me your medals, you ask.
And so, on a dark night in January, John Keenan leads you from the fire in the kitchen into the sitting room, and directs you to a framed, wooden case on the wall.
Inside that small case are 30 medals of various shades and shape. Arranged in a neat formation of six rows, five medals to each row, there are Railway Cup medals, Galway Senior Football Championship medals, Connacht Senior Championship medals, minor medals, league medals and more.
But the eye is naturally drawn to the three Celtic Cross medals at the top. More than once over the course of the evening, John Keenan has said he doesn't want to be "blowing", that is, talking up his achievements, even though he is being questioned on them.
When asked, he takes the three medals in his hand and turns them around: '1964', '1965' and '1966' are the years on the back.
Any All-Ireland senior medal is an arresting thing to see with your own eyes, but it's the third medal that really stops you in your tracks. At the base of the medal, it says '1966', and at the top, simply, '1916'.
For the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, the GAA commissioned special '1916' All-Ireland medals which the footballers of Galway and the hurlers of Cork had the unique honour of receiving in 1966.
This year, the GAA will repeat that simple but powerful acknowledgement of history. On the back of the All-Ireland football and hurling medals handed out this coming winter, above '2016' will be marked '1916'.
When John Keenan won that special medal 50 years ago, he was just 24 years old. His hair was red - really red - and that shock of auburn hair, combined with his exploits as an outstanding forward for Galway and Connacht, made him one of the most recognisable footballers in 1960s Ireland.
If he was to walk down any main street in Ireland today, bar in his native county of Galway, it's unlikely that anybody under the age of 65 would recognise him. Yet, listening to him recount the visceral reality of his elite level football career, one is reminded of a clip used to great effect in the film 'I Believe in Miracles', a documentary released last year about the Nottingham Forest side that won the European Cup in 1979 and 1980.
The clip is taken from the BBC's World Cup coverage from 2014. Martin O'Neill, the current Ireland soccer manager, was a member of that Nottingham Forest team and in the clip, the then 62-year-old, bespectacled, sits alongside the considerably younger and more recently retired footballers Fabio Cannavaro and Patrick Vieira.
The presenter makes what he probably intended as a light-hearted remark to O'Neill about how he imagines him in his long distant playing days wearing glasses in a defensive wall, but O'Neill cuts off the banter instantly.
"I actually didn't wear glasses when I played," he shoots back. "What you're seeing now, is an older gentleman. But I did actually play the game at one time. Fabio (Cannavaro) wasn't terribly sure that I did.
The medal collection of John Keenan
"I had to remind him. And, despite the fact that there are two World Cup winners here, when it comes to the European Cup, I've won two of them...I'd just like to know how many you two have won?," he asks of the former players beside him.
The silence that followed gave the answer and O'Neill had made his point. There may be some older gentlemen who are no longer the widely recognised sportsmen of their youth, but though it's easily forgotten, there was a time when they were kings.
John Keenan's kingdom was Dunmore and Galway in an Ireland that no longer exists. Football for him began properly in the late 1940s, when as a young boy, he started to follow the fortunes of the great Mayo team that won All-Ireland titles in 1950 and 1951.
Nowadays, so much is made of county identity within the GAA, it's hard to imagine a young lad from Galway following Mayo but in that era it was different and Keenan, whose farm on the outskirts of Dunmore is just a few miles from the Mayo border, was enthralled by that team. "They were my heroes, they were the tops. Galway weren't good then, only Seán Purcell," he remembers.
Despite the lack of footballs - homemade balls made of paper and sponge often had to suffice in the early days - Keenan, encouraged by his older brother Martin, started to play himself.
"My brother would be playing against other villages in local games. Every Sunday, there'd be a game. He said to me one Sunday, 'will you come up John? Come up now next Sunday, there's a good fella up there and we'll see are you as good as him.'
"I just started kicking around. There were no footballs at that time. We'd make a ball with paper, with a paper bag. You'd roll up the paper and kick that around.
"There there was the pigskin. My father would kills two pigs a year at that time. When the bladder was taken out, you'd season the bladder and then blow up the bladder and that did then as a ball for us.
"The first real ball we got, it was after a fair day in Dunmore and my brother Martin landed in with a blue ball. I thought to myself, 'Oh God, we're made up now.' I was 10 or 12 I suppose."
Keenan stood out from the beginning. His red hair marked him out as distinctive to begin with, but his natural football ability - honed by an increasing devotion to the game - was obvious from a young age.
Having starred in local kickabouts, many of them played on a small field in front of the Keenan farm on the road to Tuam, John graduated to organised underage football with the Carrantryla Slashers U16 team in the mid 1950s.
Although he went on to win several Galway senior championship medals with Dunmore MacHales, it was with the considerably smaller Carrantryla outfit that he started. The Carrantryla club had developed out of a frustration that some had with the then mighty Dunmore club in the 1940s and 1950s, namely that Dunmore had a tendency to give preference to the 'college boys' -players who studied in St Jarlath's College in Tuam - when they came home, over lads who went to the local school in Dunmore.
That's why Keenan's eyes still light up when he remembers what his Carrantryla Slashers U16 team achieved in 1957. "We won the Galway Championship and we beat Dunmore in the first round!" he recalls of a memory that still dwells among his sweetest. "That was a great game played where the Dunmore pitch is now. And the crowds! There were people from all over the county at the game."
John Keenan, 15, in the 1965 National Football League final
Keenan was picked for the Galway minors in 1959, his last year in the grade. Yet he still felt the undue emphasis towards players from St Jarlath's, the famous football nursery that has won more Hogan Cups than any other school. In 1958, he was rejected for the minors despite impressing in a trial, and even in 1959, he was a sub initially, only getting his chance after teammate Jim Nestor got injured.
Galway went on to win the Connacht minor title but lost to Cavan in the All-Ireland semi-final. "We kicked it away!" says Keenan, animated by the memory of this obscure defeat 57 years ago.
"We were streets ahead of them. Myself and Cyril Dunne (who went on to win three All-Ireland senior medals with Keenan) were playing and we were both freetakers. But in the name of God, they picked another fella to take the frees! He missed a penalty, he missed two 14 yard frees. I couldn't believe it. I was saying that to Cyril Dunne there recently, I said why in the name of God did they do that!"
The following year, 1960, an 18-year-old Keenan trialled for the Galway Juniors. Back then, Junior inter-county was a serious competition, a place where former county men played against future county men - "a great stepping stone," as Keenan remembers it.
Keenan scored three points from centre-half-forward in the trial game and was confident of selection. Still playing with the somewhat unfashionable Carrantryla Slashers team, Keenan wasn't picked.
In 1960, Ireland had just come through a decade defined by emigration and economic stagnation. While the 1960s would eventually bring economic progress and a certain splash of cultural and social glamour, John Keenan felt it was in short supply in his local surrounds as the winter of 1960 approached.
"At that time, life was drab enough," he recalls. "You wanted to see life and see the world. All my friends and neighbours were gone. That juvenile team we had with Carrantryla that won in 1957, within a year all but two of us had gone, they went at 16 or 17."
In October 1960, Keenan, a month shy of his 19th birthday, joined them. He went to Sheffield first but shortly afterwards headed for Birmingham, where a group of friends of his from Roscommon were working. He earned 18 pounds a week, labouring on roofs.
"We had great craic," he remembers with affection. "We'd go to an English dance hall on a Friday night and we'd go to an Irish dancehall on a Saturday night and another one on a Sunday. Three nights we'd be dancing. That was when I took my first drink, over in England. Myself and another fella...oh we used to have great fun. God. I was only 19, I had my 19th birthday over there..."
He was inclined to stay. "It was brilliant. You could have a great life and you were away from this here...the laws here and everything were too strict. The church had too much of a hold of you. There were great dances over there. You had freedom."
However, on the farm back home, John's father, getting older, was eager for his son to come home and work on the farm. John's older brother was not interested in farming, while his younger brother Tommy, who also went on to enjoy a fine career as a footballer with Galway, was too young.
"Our parents were worn out from hard work," John remembers of an era that was very different for Irish farming, when tractors were a rare luxury, rather than the norm.
Yet, when John decided to return to Galway in spring 1961, it was football rather than farming that drew him back. "I made my mind up in England," he remembers. "I said, 'if I'm going home now, I'm going to play with Galway'. That's what I said to the lads in the digs. I said, I'm going home to play with Galway. They all thought I was crazy."
But Keenan, still just 19, was serious about his plans for football. He knew it would be football rather than anything else that would keep him in Ireland, so he was determined to make the most of it. As soon as he returned to Dunmore, he decided to join the Dunmore MacHales club, with the much smaller Carrantryla club now very much on the wane. "They were nearly gone, they were finished. All the lads were either gone or getting older so I said, I'm going playing with Dunmore."
A day or two after returning, John went with his brother for a few pints in the town to mark his return. In Walsh's bar, John was approached by Bertie Coleman, the Dunmore MacHales secretary, and he John signed the necessary forms there and then.
This proved to be a significant turning point in John's life, both sporting and otherwise. With Coleman also a selector with Galway and well aware of Keenan's talent from his time with the Galway minors, he asked him to join up with the Galway senior panel for a match in Navan that very weekend.
That was the beginning. He made his senior debut for Galway within weeks of returning from England in a match against Louth, and he was part of a large group of young players from the 1959 and 1960 Galway minor teams that would form the nucleus of the three-in-a-row team. Keenan's '59 side had reached the All-Ireland minor semi-final, while the 1960 side, featuring Noel Tierney, Enda Colleran and Séamus Leydon, won the All-Ireland minor title, beating Cork in the final.
By the end of that summer, the wisdom of Keenan's decision to join the Dunmore MacHales was obvious as they won the Galway Senior Football Championship for only the second time since 1912. Surrounded by several of the players he would go on to win multiple club and county honours with over the next decade such as Leyden, John Donnellan and Pat Donnellan, it was the start of a golden era.
In the following year's county final, Dunmore lost to Tuam Stars. "Purcell was playing and that was their last swansong," remembers Keenan.
Purcell, of course, is Seán Purcell. Centre-half-forward on the Team of the Millennium and star of Galway's 1956 All-Ireland winning team, he is a footballer Keenan remembers with awe and total respect.
Sean Purcell
"Ah he was a great footballer," he says. "Now you have to understand, football now and that time is completely different. There's no comparison. Everyone stayed in their own position back then. You had your position and you had your job. I was a corner forward and sometimes I might go as far as half forward. But you wouldn't dare go near the backline because the backs would soon tell you, get up there and do your own job.
"But Purcell genuinely could play in any area and if he had trained harder, he'd be powerful. But he was powerful as he was and he was a big man. He had all the skills. Left and right, punt pass, he could see a fella over there and he would pick you out."
In one of the few championship games Purcell and Keenan played together, a 1961 Connacht Championship win over Leitrim in Ballinamore, they scored 4-9 between them, Purcell 2-5 and Keenan 2-4. "Purcell was mighty to play with," Keenan remembers. "He'd tell you great things, he would always be looking out for you and he'd never say anything bad or criticise. He'd just say you're doing powerful."
After that 1963 county final defeat, Keenan went on to win five more Galway senior titles with Dunmore MacHales in his career, and his personal record from the final victories of 1963, 1966, 1968, 1969 and finally, 1973, speaks volumes. In the 1963 final against Mountbellew, he scored 0-5. In 1966 against Fr Griffin's, 1-7. Three years later in the 1969 final against Tuam Stars, 0-6. And finally, in the 1973 decider against UCG, Keenan, in the twilight of his career, scored 0-8.
He scored a total of 1-32 in seven county final appearances for Dunmore, and a total of 6-165 in 38 championship games for the club. In his 15-season club career from 1961-1975, he never missed a championship game for Dunmore and he scored in every single one of those games.
Galway lost the 1961 and 1962 Connacht finals to Roscommon, both by a single point, but a young team was making progress. In early 1963, having found himself without energy during the 1962 season, Keenan discovered the reason for his lethargy - his appendix. It perforated at the start of the 1963 season and he was out of action for four months. He returned in time to star in Dunmore's county final win that summer, and came on for the last 10 minutes of Galway's All-Ireland semi-final victory over Kerry - the first of several big wins that Galway team would enjoy over the Kingdom in the years ahead.
Galway lost the All-Ireland final to Dublin, but to many, the potential of the team was obvious and success was clearly near at hand. "I remember Dublin beat us in 1962 in a game in Salthill," said Keenan. "They got four goals against us and we were awful disappointed. I remember we went into a pub and Brendan Nestor, who was a selector too, was asked by some man his age, 'what do you think Brendan, will they do any good?'
"'They'll win the All-Ireland in a year', he says. I said to myself, this man is crazy, after us getting beaten by so much by Dublin. But he was right. We had great footballers, when I think back."
In 1964, the promise was delivered on when Galway won the first All-Ireland of the three-in-a-row, defeating Kerry in the final having beaten Sligo, Mayo and Meath to get that far. This was the Kerry of Mick O'Connell and Mick O'Dwyer, and the Kingdom were strong favourites. Galway were young and unfancied, but their dynamism shone through in a stunning 0-15 to 0-10 win.
In the stands though, tragedy had struck Dunmore and Galway. Mick Donnellan, an All-Ireland winner with Galway in 1925 and father of John, captain of the 1964 team, had died during the game. John Donnellan accepted the Sam Maguire Cup completely unaware that his father had died during the game.
"I remember after the match was over, as I was coming off the field, a man from Gort came over to me and said, 'John, Mick Donnellan is dead'. Oh no. It was tough on the Donnellans. The next day we brought home the cup and Mick Donnellan also came back to Dunmore the same night. There was a big crowd in Dunmore that night because of the funeral, and naturally, we didn't do any celebrating for a while."
The tragedy of September 1964 had obviously dampened Galway's All-Ireland win, but they were back again in 1965, sealing the two-in-a-row with wins over Down in the semi-final and once again, Kerry, in the final. There are very few teams in history who have had such a dominant grip over a Kerry team as that Galway team had, and Keenan, whose wife Gay is a Kerrywoman, enjoys his trips to the Kingdom a result.
The Galway three-in-a-row team. John Keenan is second from the left in the back row
"Oh we had them," he says with pride. "I always have that when we go down. But sure they're grand, the Kerry lads." Not that Keenan ever could afford to get too uppity with his haul of three All-Ireland medals at the family dinner table anyway. His father-in-law, the late Jack Walsh from Asdee, won six All-Ireland medals with Kerry, playing at left-corner-back on the Kerry team that won All-Irelands in 1924 and 1926, and a four-in-a-row from 1929-1932.
Galway completed the three-in-a-row with victory over Meath in the 1966 All-Ireland final, the year Keenan received his special '1916' medal. It was a happy time and Keenan had made spectacularly good on the promise he had made to himself, made when he left England in early 1961, to make a real footballer of himself.
"I was very happy during those years," he says. "I loved it. It was a great life. I loved it. That's what kept me in Ireland. If I hadn't the football, I think I'd be gone again. We were winning. Everyone was getting to know you. I'd be out there in the field and cars and lorries would pass and you'd know well they'd be looking in at you. I had red hair so I was very recognisable," he says with a laugh.
Yet he is somewhat hard on himself when he remembers his own performances in those three successful All-Ireland finals victories of the mid 1960s.
"I was kind of disappointed with my displays in finals," he says. "I did ok. At that time in finals, the way the game was, you could be waiting for a ball for a long time. And they were edgy against Kerry a lot. I'm a bit hard on myself that way. I thought I should have done better. Any ball that came in I would like to have done better. I'd like to play the game now today where you could kind of go all over the place..."
Just 24 when he had won his third All-Ireland medal, Keenan and his teammates were guaranteed legendary status in the county forever more. Galway won further Connacht titles in 1968 and 1970 but with a great team on the slide, it wasn't entirely surprising when in 1970, at the age of 28, Keenan retired from inter-county football, slipping away with little fanfare back to the farm in Dunmore. He had scored 6-81 in 10 championship campaigns for Galway.
What Keenan remembers most clearly about that Galway team was the tightness of the group. "You couldn't get a closer bunch," he recalls. "There were no cliques, like there had been in other teams. Our team was all for one. It was great."
He remembers his teammates fondly, for different reasons. "Noel Tierney was the best full back I ever saw. Sean Meade was very good. John Donnellan was a tough, hard player. He was a very good footballer. A different style entirely from his son Michael, who was a brilliant footballer in his time.
"Mattie McDonagh was a big strong man. A great leader. Tommy my brother was small, but he was a good footballer and he never flinched going for a ball. Then, Enda Colleran was great, lord have mercy on him. He was great for talking and communicating. I left him and the other college lads to do the talking."
Fifty years on from going into battle against players from the likes of Mayo, Leitrim, Roscommon, Down, Kerry and Meath, there is little enmity left for former on-field foes. In time, everything gives way to the simple, warm glow of the memory of athletic excellence.
Just recently, Tom O'Hare, a Down defender from the 1960s who marked Keenan several times, called into him out of the blue at his farm in Dunmore. The pleasure in meeting former sporting adversaries, decades afterwards, is something he treasures.
He remembers once his late father-in-law, when travelling close to Killeshandra in Co Cavan, asking to be taken to the town when he heard that Packie Phair, a former Cavan footballer, had a pub in the town. Phair had won All-Ireland titles with Cavan in 1933 and 1935, and had gone to battle several times with the great Kerry team that Walsh was on.
"Someone told him Packie Phair had the pub in Killeshandra and sure they brought him out to the pub, Packie was called to come and the two boys met up all those years later. It was great for him to meet Packie Phair again. Sure it's great when you see these lads years later. You can laugh about it all."
In 1963, ahead of that year's All-Ireland final against Dublin, the Irish Independent had pen pics of all the players involved. Keenan's pen pic declared two ambitions: the first was to win an All-Ireland medal, and the second was to win a trip to America.
Within a year, he had achieved the first and when Galway won the National League title in 1965 (again, beating Kerry) the prize was a trip to New York. The prize was the same when they won the league again two years later, and it was on this trip that Keenan met his wife Gay, who was working in New York at the time. In many respects, many of the key aspects of his life as it stands today can be traced back to his decision, made in spring 1961, to return to Dunmore and make himself a Galway footballer.
"You have to make a life for yourself, wherever you go," he says. Had John Keenan stayed in Birmingham and ended up in one of the satellite districts of Solihull, Halesown, Rednal or elsewhere, there is no doubt he would have made a life for himself there too.
But then he wouldn't have that '1916' medal, and he wouldn't be remembered as one of the greatest Galway footballers there has ever been.
