'The winning ensured we had that time with each other' - Juliet Murphy on life, legend and loss

Irish Examiner

5 days ago

The bible and a basket of breakfast pastries sit side by side. Tears and treats.
The same as Eamonn Ryan used to mark homework for Juliet Murphy before sending her back up the road from Ballingeary, I had my own spot of homework to do ahead of Wednesday morning's class in the Montenotte Hotel.
The bible, as Juliet calls it when she sees the book tucked under my arm, is Relentless. Relentless is the phenomenally well-told story of Cork ladies football, as penned by Mary White. Relentless got a second reading this week.
We searched through the yellowed pages for anecdotes and old quotes that would hopefully enhance Wednesday's conversation. Faded tales that might relocate Juliet to 20 years ago and Cork's breakthrough All-Ireland.
After all, that is why we are here. To reminisce on their relentlessness. To rake through the time of their lives and the mark left. Success and its shaping. The people they were and the people they became. Club cliques to one still tight circle. The moments and memories spawned by the medals.
For all the pages folded at the edge and for all the paragraphs marked with a biro, we begin with a picture. I hand over the bible, direct her attention to the image at the top of the right-hand page, and ask what comes to mind.
The moment, caught expertly by retired Examiner snapper Denis Minihane, is a joyous embrace in the Hogan Stand tunnel between Murphy, with the Brendan Martin Cup in her left hand, and Eamonn Ryan. Manager and captain. Master and pupil. Friend clasping friend. History-makers.
LETTING IT ALL OUT: Cork manager Eamonn Ryan hugging team captain Juliet Murphy after defeating Galway for their breakthrough TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Senior Football Final triumph at Croke Park. Picture Denis Minihane.
There's silence in this corner of the hotel lobby. The tears present themselves. A steady queue of tears present themselves.
I apologise. My last intention was to upset her.
'I know, I know,' she replies.
Eamonn is never far away from her thoughts. This particular picture, though, she'd not come across anytime recently. The emotion stirred creeps up on her the same way their Cork team did the summit of ladies football.
'I remember that hug. We were out of picture, or so I thought. I was struggling off the pitch at that time, so it was the relief that we did it, that gorgeous feeling of achieving something that we thought for so long was beyond us. And then to share that with somebody who was making us feel so good about ourselves.
'A group that weren't even cohesive, a group that weren't just not talking about achieving, but not even challenging, not competing, not enjoying their game at that level, to then move into the realm where you want to go training, you can't wait for it.
'I often think that team was capable of winning an All-Ireland, maybe two, but nobody could have got out of us what Eamonn did and no other coach could have impacted our lives as much as he did. That hug for me represents just gratitude to him.'
Gratitude for everyone else in red. No gratitude spared for herself. Not for a number of years.
For a number of years, there were two of her. There was the self-assured matchday athlete. There was the Juliet Murphy who stepped onto the field knowing the role she had to fulfil and knowing she had the requisite tools to execute. And then there was the everyday individual riddled with self-doubt.
Two strangers. Two opposites living in co-existence.
Before she came to prominence in red, Murphy was prominent enough on local hardwood floors to earn selection in green. An Irish basketball teammate of hers from down the road in West Cork, Paula O'Neill, died tragically in 2001 following a car accident. The deceased was just 21, so too was the friend mourning the loss of a 'gas woman and brilliant basketballer'.
'She died a few days later in hospital. Those few days, I can remember it all so vividly. It was just so tragic. It was a trauma,' Juliet recalls. 'I didn't really know anyone locally that knew Paula, I had no other friends that knew her because it was the basketball scene. I just struggled with it. I probably had struggled bits and pieces with my confidence before that.'
That confidence became transient. Her inner self-critic shouted louder and for longer. Doubt became a fierce opponent and even fiercer motivator. Juliet convinced herself that to succeed she needed to do more than everyone else in every aspect of life.
'I trained extra hard. Looking back now, I over-trained. But then it drove me on as well. There is that fine line, isn't there, of having the confidence to say, I am ready, and saying, no, I need to do more. And I always felt that if I could run longer than whoever I was marking at midfield, I would be giving myself every advantage.
'With Cork and the opponents you were meeting, there was always that sense of 'would you be good enough, would you be fit enough, would you be strong enough?' The challenge became greater every year because we were there to be knocked off.'
The paradox was her internal silence amid the matchday chaos. The chatter and the noise checked out and disappeared. She was in her happiest room. Even an in-possession mistake was given a free pass until long after the final whistle.
Her on-field persona was no front. She wasn't acting. No mask was being worn. Inside the whitewash, instinct took over and game intelligence won through. A tower of composure in the centre of the field.
LUCKY 13: Cork players, from left, Juliet Murphy, Elanie Harte, Briege Corkery, Bríd Stack and manager Eamonn Ryan celebrate with the Brendan Martin cup after the 2103 TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Football Senior Championship Final against Monaghan. Pic: Ray McManus / SPORTSFILE
'I knew exactly what my role was and I wasn't going to let anyone down,' reflects the eight-time All-Ireland winner and now 45-year-old mom to Moss (6) and Sophia (5).
She also mined confidence from those around her. And given the sheer spread of quality she kept company with, who wouldn't mine confidence from having in your corner Briege Corkery's engine, Nollaig Cleary's left peg, Valerie Mulcahy's penchant to never stop scoring, or the defensive nous of Bríd Stack and Angela Walsh. And that is to literally name but a few.
'You saw your teammates doing brilliant stuff and you went again. I loved that. Not long before he passed away, I was chatting with Eamonn on the phone and I was talking about football being a complete mindfulness. I was like, 'Eamonn, you are just following this white thing all around the field'. Being the psychologist he was, he said sure that's completely it. But it was. Just so absorbed and so in the flow and feeling good about what I could do. It was brilliant.
'I needed football. I needed it to express myself. I needed it to feel good about myself. I knew I had ability. I knew this was something I was good at because I was damn well sure of the things I wasn't good at. I wanted more of this. I wanted more of the thing I had ability in. That made me feel good about myself, which I needed.'
TIME TO REFLECT: Eight-time All-Ireland Senior medallist and three time winning captain Juliet Murphy of Cork during a special LGFA 50th Anniversary celebration event last year in Thurles, Tipperary. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
A sip of Americano, a pastry pulled from the basket, and we go again. She starts talking about luck. There's an eye-roll from this chair.
From 2005 through 2016, Cork played 66 championship games. They won 61 of them. Of the five they lost, only the solitary - the infamous 2010 quarter-final against Tyrone - was knockout. And so luck has no business intruding on this conversation.
She goes again. There was luck, she insists, in the collective coming together of such like-minded individuals. Individuals relentlessly driven to keep pushing their ceiling north.
'The timing and when you come along is so important. And I know you're smiling, thinking 'ah c'mon now Juliet, there is more than timing', but there's a lot of luck involved in the decisions people make to get involved with us, and for people to stay on and keep going with the team for as long as they did.
'We were all getting such enjoyment from it that we wanted to stay on the train for as long as we could.'
Subtly steering the most successful team in modern Gaelic games history was the late Eamonn Ryan. He was, of course, so much more than their manager. It was Eamonn who convinced the three-time All-Ireland winning captain to return to college and become a primary school teacher. It was he who helped lift her Gaeilge to the required level.
The grinds, more often than not, took place in his 'trí na cheile mancave' in Ballingeary, but only after his wife Pat had served Juliet a bowl of homemade soup and a plate of homemade brown bread.
'The odd time Eamonn might be cranky with you, you'd kind of think he is fed up with me today, I am not getting it as quickly as I should,' she says, smiling wistfully. 'But I think he'd nearly do that on purpose to make you cop on and do a little bit more. The psychologist was always at play.
'I've kept the notebooks he wrote from that time. Eamonn had gorgeous writing, so I love looking at them. I know that he helped loads of people in terms of education and career and life choices.'
She remembers him floating blissfully in the sea on various team holidays. She remembers their chat in the corner of a Castletownbere pub the Tuesday after the 2006 triumph.
'It was maybe 15 minutes, maybe longer, before everyone else came across. We had a drink together and a chat about life. It was magic.' When he passed in 2021, Covid denied all those he impacted in life and in sport a proper goodbye. For his players, it was organised that they say goodbye in a familiar setting.
PANDEMIC FAREWELL: Current and former Cork players part of the guard of honour for former Cork manager Eamonn Ryan at the UCC Farm. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
On Eamonn's final journey from Ballingeary to Ballinaltig Cemetery in Watergrasshill, the hearse briefly detoured to take in UCC's training ground, The Farm. The Cork ladies lined either side of the road in. The hearse stopped and they clapped. They clapped for their friend and all he'd done for them.
The tears come again. There's a napkin at the bottom of the pastry basket. She rips off a piece to wipe them away.
'It felt surreal for a long time because there wasn't closure. I watched his funeral on the couch at home, it's not really a proper goodbye, and not surrounded by each other either. But look, that's only one story of how many from those Covid times?'
The memories are so many. The memories are warm. On their way up to a GPA event last Friday week to celebrate the 2005 history-makers, they reminisced on how Briege missed the train to Dublin the day before the 2006 All-Ireland and so took the next train up alone.
On the way home from the same GPA event, they rekindled the singsongs they so cherished during their playing days. Not everyone in their carriage was delighted to hear the Cork ladies once again belting out the hits.
'My medals are in a drawer somewhere, I have never taken them out to look at them. What I have and what we all have is our memories. We are lucky we have so many of those because of the time we were together.
'The winning ensured we had that time with each other, and don't get me wrong, loved to win, hated losing, but you can only take the memories with you.'