John Egan was more than a footballer to GAA supporters

John Fogarty

In recent weeks, some of the sympathy expressed on the passing of Jim Stynes and Fabrice Muamba’s cardiac problem bordered on fawning.

The majority of us wouldn’t have followed Stynes’ career closely nor would have been all that au fait with Muamba’s progression. Yet if you were go by the outpouring in certain quarters on Twitter and the like, it was as if we knew them intimately.

We didn’t.

But John Egan? We all knew John Egan the footballer. If we weren’t fortunate enough to have seen the Sneem legend play in the flesh we got to see him in all his glory in The Golden Years. If we weren’t lucky to have experienced either we were told about him. Again. And again. And again.

This writer fell into the middle bracket, cherishing that prized VHS even if Dublin were often portrayed as the vanquished baddies. Mikey Sheehy may have been my favourite but John Egan wasn’t too far behind. He was hardly a supporting actor either.

You could admire Sheehy, you could admire Egan but you could like them too. They were purists, unselfish in every sense but so ruthless as well.

Egan’s penchant for goals was phenomenal. He was in every sense the big game player, finding the net in the 1975 and ’78 finals to help turn Dublin over. But as his fellow players have said about him, nobody bought more into the team ethic than him.

In David Walsh’s fabulous Magill piece in 1989 on the Dublin team of the ’70s and ’80s, he revealed how Kevin Heffernan’s defence regarded Egan above any of their stellar forwards on the Kerry team.

As Gay O’Driscoll, who usually took up the marking duties on Egan, told him: “John Egan was the classic forward. Everything he did was for the team. Never wasted a ball.

“I would have marked Sheehy or [Pat] Spillane any day before Egan. We often recall his point in the 1977 semi-final. As, he came through I shadowed him, waiting for the moment to use my shoulder.

“When I hit him I made perfect contact. He had to go down. He did but he just bounced back up in the same movement, feinted left, moved to the right and put over an exceptional point. What could anybody have done?”

Indeed. There were such occasions when Egan seemed unmarkable such was his elusive talent.

O’Driscoll was rough with Egan, but it was the only way he could attempt to get any sort of a handle on him. His testimony to the man is as fitting a tribute to Egan as can be made.

As Kerry mourns his passing, more will come in the following days. Each richly deserved. Each heart-felt.

Because people didn’t know of John Egan the footballer; they knew him.

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/HAbV_s-vQ2g/post.aspx

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