By Niall McCoy

A quarter of a century after his first championship match and three years after hanging up the gloves, Paul Hearty found himself lacing up the boots once more and pulling on the Crossmaglen colours.

The occasion? The 2020 county final against Maghery and a chance for the then 42-year-old net-minder to earn an astonishing 20th county title.

In 2018, the affable Hearty had come out of retirement to act as an emergency goalkeeper for a league game against Armagh Harps, and he explained how he had to repeat the feat in more important circumstances last year.

“It was a funny thing. I was coaching Tiernan (McConville) last year and we were up on the Friday night before the final. Friday is always a quick kick around, go through kick-outs and free-kicks. It’s a walkthrough of the strategy for the game really.

“Tiernan kicked well, as did Paul McEntee, and we walked in off the pitch, tea and buns, the usual ritual, and everything was alright.

“Sunday morning, the day of the match, it was a lovely morning and I saw Stephen Kernan driving down past the house.

“I was thinking what the hell is he doing here? He turned and pulled up and I knew that it couldn’t be good. Stephen said ‘I have a bit of a problem.’ Tiernan’s foot went up like a balloon on the Saturday and was in a moon boot.

“I couldn’t understand it because at no point on the Friday did he pull up or hit something wrong or anything. Paul was obviously going to start but Stephen asked me to do him a favour and do sub goalie. I was still in good enough shape so I said ‘no bother, course I will.’ I wanted to help the cause.

“Thankfully I wasn’t required but the result didn’t go our way.”

 

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It was the first time that Hearty had ever been in a losing changing room on county final day with all 19 previous Armagh finals going the way of the Rangers.

Those successes, combined with 11 Ulster titles and six All-Ireland crowns, ensure that he is the most decorated club footballer of all
time.

His old pal Oisin McConville had been matching him stride for stride, but Hearty managed to get a few more medals in the pocket after McConville had stepped away.

They included two of his most cherished as McConville and joint-manager John McEntee bestowed the captaincy on him for the 2015 season and for the first time in his stellar career, he got to raise two championship trophies – county and provincial – as Cross captain.

Throw into the mix an All-Ireland medal with Armagh and six Anglo Celt successes and his is a career that most people could only dream of.

Not bad for a man who didn’t even know what was going on when he ran down to the square in 1986 to see the Crossmaglen team return after their county final win over Pearse Og.What followed was a very rare barren period for the club and it would take a decade before they were next crowned county champions.

Hearty wasn’t winning much at underage level either, but a group of young players in the club were starting to get people excited.

“Timing is critical. Growing up, there was a 10-year space before we won another one (1986 to 1996).

“I remember that one in ’86. I don’t remember the football and I wouldn’t have been at any of the matches, but I remember Jim McConville at the top of a white Moley’s bus with the McKillop Cup, as the cup was then. They went around the town and we all ran down from the park to see what was going on.

“I was in awe of these boys going around, the flags out and the horns beeping and Jim, only a pup at the time, with the cup. It was magical to me. Stars in your eyes sort of thing.

“I was playing underage football from then on and you would have started following the seniors and it was quarter-final defeats, second round defeats.

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“Oisin, Tony McEntee, John McEntee, Anthony Cunningham, Cathal Short, Francie Bellew, they were all a year older than me at underage and were winning everything. From u-10 up I’m not sure they lost. Championship, league wins every season.

“They were an awesome group and I was in the group behind and we were shite. Then the ages changed and the Macs and Bellew were into our team and that made some difference. I had won nothing the whole way up until I was a sub keeper in the 1993 team that won the Minor Championship. That was my first taste of winning in that group.”

 

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That 1996 success sparked one of the most famous winning runs in GAA history with Crossmaglen next losing a championship match in Armagh in 2009. They would finish that 1996 season with county, provincial and All-Ireland honours under the eye of manager Joe Kernan.

The romantic idea is that one moment in a documentary lit the touch paper for their ruthless era of domination.

In the mid-1990s a documentary was released called ‘More Than a Game’ that followed the exploits of Down under Pete McGrath and also the brewing south Armagh rivalry between Cross and Mullaghbawn.

The fly-on-the-wall programme followed Kernan and his counterpart at Mullaghbawn, and the man who would succeed him in the Orchard hot seat, Peter McDonnell as they readied their troops for their forthcoming battle in the 1995 championship.

Mullaghbawn prevailed and the cameras followed their celebrations in the clubhouse that night. A jovial Benny Tierney is heard shouting ‘come on the Rangers’ in a mocking tone and, for some, that provided Cross with the necessary motivation for their unprecedented success.

It’s too simple an explanation – Cross were always destined for big things with the talent coming through. Tierney, for his part, says it’s disrespectful to those players to suggest that is why they got over the line while Oisin McConville laughed when he heard it and thought ‘typical Tierney.’

Hearty, however, said that it was still a tool used by Kernan, one of many that saw them achieve their dreams.

“I played with Cross first in 1995 during the infamous documentary ‘More Than a Game’ when we were battling with Mullaghbawn.

“It flicks between us and Mullaghbawn on the club scene and then Down’s run in 1994. They covered a bit of them. I watched it recently because I hadn’t watched it in 20 odd years.

“I suppose I did (buy into the rivalry). Benny saying that, it was definitely something used in training to spur us on. We were so close yet so far, so anything helped.”

 

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Timing is critical, as Hearty alluded to earlier. Good timing and bad. For Hearty as the winter evenings of 1996 drew in, it was the bad that showed up on the face of the clock.

He had been between the sticks for their successful Armagh campaign that culminated in a comfortable final win over Clan na Gael, but he would be left watching on as the Rangers annexed their first Ulster and All-Ireland titles.

“In 1995 I was brought into the panel and I started after the first league game and was there until Mullaghbawn beat us.

“In 1996 I played up until the county final and then a week before we played Burren in Ulster I broke my leg in a car accident.

“I missed Ulster but I would have been fit for the All-Ireland semi-final but there’s no changing a winning team and that included Jarlath McConville. Jarlath was doing rightly in goals. I was ripping surely, just bad timing. I was number one and had a good few games under the belt. It was our first foray into the Ulster Club and we went to London that year too. It was all new, everything was different.

“We were in Portlaoise ahead of the All-Ireland semi-final against Laune Rangers and I felt I had a shout and I was very, very disappointed to miss out. It was very hard to turn down what Jarlath had done though and it would have been very tough on him to miss out. He did so well in Ulster.

“It was just me being mad looking to play and you want to be playing. I’m sure Miceal Moley and Kieran Donnelly would say the same, Ollie McEntee, lads who thought they might have got a shot but Joe didn’t change his team too much back then.”

 

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The successes would keep coming though and Hearty would get his day in the sun. Those victories cherished all the more as they were achieved side-by-side by the continued occupation of part of their club grounds by the British Army.

While Cross’s golden period coincided with a less volatile situation, especially after the signing of The Good Friday Agreement in 1994, the presence of foreign forces still brought disruption.

“At the time I lived in Lismore, the other side of stand. There was no perimeter wall at the time so we came up through the hedge to come to training,” Hearty said of his first seasons with the senior team.

“The Brits would have been there all the time, patrolling through the park.

“Manys a training session was stopped for helicopters to land on the pitch. Games were stopped for the same. It was just pure intimidation. It was there every day.

“Usually you had a few soldiers coming on and saying ‘get off the Gaelic Athletic Association pitch please, there is a helicopter coming.’ You’d start kicking balls at them, people would be taking the piss, and next thing a big helicopter would come and land on the 50-yard line. It would leave big imprints and wheels on the pitch.

“It was madness and it happened several times to us. After 1994 that sort of stuff stopped but in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s it would happened a lot, especially around the time they were reinforcing the barracks. They were landing in the field all the time and the pitch was in shite.”

Football provided a release, and Hearty applied himself enough to make the Armagh minors before coming into the Orchard squad proper in the winter of 2000 having been in and out temporarily a few times previous.

“My first game for Armagh was 2000 when three National League games were played before Christmas.

“Armagh had gone to the All-Ireland semi-final earlier that year against Kerry and a few boys were given a rest. A lot of fellas got a start down in Cork at Páirc Uí Rinn and I was one of them.

“I always remember Colin Corkery nut-megged me. He had an awful right foot on him. That was my first introduction to intercounty football so thanks for that Colin.”

Hearty held onto the number one spot for championship and he started in the last game for the two Brians, McAlinden and Canavan.

That was the ill-fated 2001 All-Ireland Qualifier against eventual champions Galway when the team bus got caught in traffic and made it onto the pitch and no more. The writing was on the wall for the management following the one-point loss and Kernan becoming the next manager seemed all but certain even as the full-time whistle blew.

“It was a no-brainer to bring Joe in,” Hearty continued.

“He did something that had never been done in Armagh by winning three All-Ireland Clubs. He was obviously there before under Paddy Moriarty so he knew his way around a county set-up.

“After ’01 it was there for Joe to come in and stamp his authority on it. The two Brians probably brought us as far as they could and for a lot of people that was as far as the team could go too. Many thought that was the end of the road.

“Joe came in and got everyone back on board and had his own vision. He did things that had never been done before and that was always his style as a manager, he was never afraid to try different things or take different people on board. He took ideas from other sports.

“The famed trip to La Manga set the whole thing in motion. Joe’s professionalism was noticed then. All the boys would have seen that. Every player was looked after and every need was met.

“Dieticians, strength and conditioning under John McCluskey, all these things upped the ante and the players bought into it. That ended in the ultimate glory.”

 

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That ultimate glory, just like with Cross back in 1997, saw Hearty watching on from the sidelines as fate found a way once again. Mixed emotions, regret fighting with euphoria, were present but he was delighted for the man he was battling with for the goalkeeper jersey – well, a less colourful one than the sort Benny Tierney was known to wear.

“At the start of the year Joe said he’d play us game about in the league and whoever came out on top would be the goalkeeper.

“The first game was against Louth in Carrickcruppen and I was to play the following week against Wicklow in Aughrim.

“We were training in Davitt Park in Lurgan and we were just doing shots at goal at the end of the session. I went to dive for a ball, turned and landed on my left shoulder and I knew as soon as I landed it was bad.

“I dislocated the shoulder and that was it for eight weeks. I was fit to back for London in the second last game, I played over there, but that was the last I played that year unfortunately.

“I knew early on that I wasn’t going to start in the championship because I hadn’t played all year, so it was probably a little bit different to what happened with Cross.

“It was similar though in that I knew that Joe wasn’t going to change a winning team. It’s a weird emotion there because unless Benny gets injured you’re not going to play and you don’t want anyone getting injured. Benny had a good year and had done very well.

“It still was bittersweet because I was playing the year before and I was thinking ‘this it, this is me now.’

“You would have far rather played of course but you had to be a sub, work hard and push Benny in every training session and at every game. I felt I did that, and I felt that with me breathing down his neck it made him a better ‘keeper and that’s what you want.”

 

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When Tierney stepped aside after that All-Ireland win against Kerry, Hearty was the undoubted number one. Over the rest of his career he would lose it temporarily to Ciaran McKinney and Philly McEvoy, but he was a mainstay of the side from ’03 right up until he called it a day in 2012.

That second All-Ireland crown never arrived, but many brilliant days in orange and white did – and the man himself said that Armagh fans should not forget just how much was achieved in the years after 2002.

“I was fortunate to be involved with great teams.

“That was a golden period for Armagh, and I was so lucky to play in the county’s most successful period.

“There was the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when they got to an All-Ireland final and nicked a few Ulster titles but we played in the most successful period and I am very grateful for that.

“We won seven Ulsters. We won a National League in 2005 having never won one before.

“We would have loved to tag on a second All-Ireland, but we still can’t be that disappointed with our lot. Teams go out and they don’t get half of what we got so it’s important we are grateful.

“Maybe that’s alright coming from me who was doing well with the club compared to other guys starved of club success, but to do what we did with Armagh with your Kerrys, your Tyrones, your Galways, you definitely have done a lot right.

“To be in the top three every year, I don’t think you can do much more than that. The days we were beaten we simply weren’t good enough. We were unfortunate on occasion but it was us who couldn’t get over the line.”

One of those days was the 2006 All-Ireland quarter-final with the Kingdom in what would be the last time Armagh played championship football at Croke Park under Kernan.

It was going so well for them in the first half as they led by four points as the interval approached, but they were swamped by a Kieran Donaghy-inspired Kerry after the break.

Donaghy’s battle with Bellew was the talking point going into the match, and the Kerryman took control of it in the 39th minute as he fielded the ball above the defender, side-stepped him with ease and rattled the ball past Hearty. He followed it up by roaring in the goalkeeper’s face.

In his autobiography, Donaghy explains why he reacted like he did, claiming that Hearty gave him verbals all day and said “go on Donaghy, you big soft basketball cry baby.” Anyone reading this who knows Hearty personally is probably laughing as they imagine hearing it in his big booming voice. It fits.

In the five years since the book has been released, a lot has changed and Donaghy is now part of Kieran McGeeney’s Armagh coaching team.

The pair haven’t crossed paths yet, but it’s water under the bridge according to the man affectionaly known by many as ‘big Hearts.’

“I haven’t seen that man since that infamous occasion. He’s probably in Armagh now more than I ever was, but if I do see him I’ll definitely let him buy me a pint.”

That may come as early as this Sunday. Crossmaglen are back in the county final and are expected to take care of new kids on the block Clann Eireann in comfortable fashion. Donaghy may be there watching some of the talent he will be working with for the 2022 season. If they do bump into each other, Hearty will be hoping that it’s in the crowd rather than walking past as a sub goalie. Those emergency loans are surely over for a man who has given so much to both his club and county.