Sean’s long walk to freedom

Sean’s long walk to freedom

Feature
Daniel Carey
danielcarey@mayonews.ie

“I’LL walk from Pearse Stadium barefooted if Galway beat Mayo”. So confident was Seán Rice of a green and red victory in the Connacht semi-final of 1967 that he committed that bold promise to print. The journalist appeared on the front page of the Connaught Telegraph with his jacket on his shoulder, his pants rolled up and his bare feet visible. A few days later, Mayo won their first Connacht title in 12 years, Galway’s dream of four All-Ireland titles in a row had been quashed, and Rice was spared one hell of a long walk.
“Mayo always gave Galway a great game in the Connacht Championship in the 1960s,” the current Mayo News columnist recalls. “In fact, the whole of Ireland looked forward to those games. But Mayo were always pipped by a point or two. Galway knew that once they had Mayo beaten, they were through and they’d win the All-Ireland.”
There was certainly no shortage of talent in that Mayo side. This was the era of Ray Prendergast, Mick Ruane, John Morley, Johnny Carey, Joe Corcoran, PJ Loftus and Joe Langan. Rice is of the opinion that it was ‘a team comparable to any in Ireland if they only got a chance’. Still, even if Mayo hadn’t been far off the pace, surely forecasting the defeat of the team which had dominated Gaelic football for the past three seasons was foolhardy? Not if you read the signs, the man himself insists.
“Having already won three in a row and coming back from America in the early summer of ‘67, it was easy enough to predict. Even though Mayo had won nothing in 12 years, if you were watching it closely, you’d have said ‘Galway can’t win this one’. So I felt pretty confident when I was doing the preview that Mayo were going to win, but we got a bit of a brainwave in the office.”
That brainwave prompted a discussion with editor John McHale and resulted in the picture of Rice in his bare feet. His promise provoked plenty of pre-match comment and the man himself started having second thoughts and wondered if he had gone daft. It was a long way from the City of the Tribes by foot.
“I was pretty confident, but I didn’t go into the press box that day – I stayed down among the crowd! But as it happened, I was right. Galway were a tired team, and it wasn’t very difficult to be correct.”
The win gave Mayo a place in the Connacht final, and they easily accounted for Leitrim in Tuam Stadium. However, Mayo’s first visit to Croke Park since 1955 saw them collapse against Meath in the All-Ireland semi-final. Defeat by Galway in ‘a terrible match’ in Castlebar in 1968 prompted a stinging rebuke from Rice, who announced in the Connaught Telegraph that he would ‘refuse to report until Mayo footballers grow up and become men’. It prompted an outcry.
“There was murder!” Rice says with the laugh of a man who lived to tell the tale. “I remember a priest and a doctor and someone else saying I was absolutely right, but in the county in general, I was ostracised. Actually, I took a lot of the blame off the shoulders of the Mayo team. All the focus went on me!”
Perhaps, he smiles, the criticism did something to spur the team on, though when Mayo regained the Nestor Cup in 1969, there was no queue at his door to hand out plaudits! That side narrowly lost the All-Ireland semi-final to Kerry, but came back to win what was then a record tenth National League title in 1970. Forty years after making that famous vow to walk barefoot, Seán Rice isn’t planning a repeat for 2007. He expects a tight game and anyway, the N60 and N17 aren’t very pedestrian-friendly these days.