Re-run: I left a dressing room partying, when I came back you could hear a pin drop

It’s been over 30 years since the Donegal senior team reached their finest hour – clinching their first All-Ireland senior title on the third Sunday of September in a packed Croke Park.

Team captain Anthony Molloy would announce in his speech that ‘Sam is for the Hills’ as the Tír Conaill men overcame a highly favourite Dublin side on a score of 0-18 points to 0-14.

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Manager Brian McEniff described the event that night to RTÉ’s Ger Canning as ‘a lifelong dream finally coming true’. But for half-forward Joyce McMullin it was a day of mixed emotions. One of joy, sadness, and confusion.

Usually, All-Ireland winning dressing rooms are one of celebrations, but this one was anything but. It was a sombre mood, as if the team had been beaten out the gate by the Dubs and sent home with their tails between their legs.

Rumours often circulate on All-Ireland final day. Such as ‘who’s in? who’s out?’ or ‘who’s starting? who’s injured?’. They are kept sealed by the management teams until the ball is ultimately thrown in. But the rumours that circulated Croke Park in 1992 stemmed beyond the tactics of a football match. One that had to be concealed by manager McEniff until after the final whistle.

As the team prepared for the first ever All-Ireland final, word got hold to McEniff that day, roughly two hours before throw-in, that McMullin’s brother Gerard, who had been diagnosed with leukaemia the previous May, had died. This was not the regular news dumped on team managers before finals.

McEniff had a decision to make, inform McMullin before the match and pull him out of the starting squad? Or keep the news to himself until after the match?

“The entire panel went out before the final to watch the minor game,” McEniff says. “I couldn’t do that, so I sat there alone in the dressing room, and while I was there a Donegal delegate from the Ulster Council rushed into the room to tell me Joyce’s brother was dead and that he must be told straight away.

“I had to make a decision quickly. I knew if Gerard was alive, he would want Joyce to play. So, that was the choice I came upon and there was nothing I could do after that. I had to control my emotions and keep Joyce isolated from outside voices. With regards to the team, I was the only one who knew.

“I do remember that when the players left to watch the minor game I was as cool as a cucumber, but when they returned a few lads noticed how agitated I was. I just brushed it off as nerves.”
It was a decision that McEniff stood by, and the rest is history. The match would prove to be McEniff’s greatest challenge that day, one he described as ‘surreal’ and said that no person should ever experience. He had to inform one of his star players about the passing of his brother.

While the Donegal half-forward was giving interviews to local reporters outside the dressing room, McEniff gathered the newly crowned All-Ireland winning panel, who had upset the odds to beat Dublin - to inform them of the tragic news.

“I left a dressing room of men partying as you usually would, to do an interview with the local radio, and when I came back 10 minutes later, the room was dead silent. You could hear a pin drop. I knew something had to be wrong but didn’t know what,” says McMullin.

“It was then I was taken into the shower area by Bishop Hegarty, Dr Austin O’Kennedy, and the manager, and they just told me straight out that Gerard had died that afternoon.

“I just couldn’t believe it was true. I’ll never forget one of the selectors Seamus Bonner who was from my town, and good friends with Gerard in the corner of the dressing room in tears.

“What I couldn’t put together was that I was talking to my family outside for a brief period and they said nothing to me about it. I was just a shadow of myself. I couldn’t think clearly. One of the players, Donal Reid, gave me a scapular and I still have it with the tracksuit top it's in.”

Organised by the county board, McMullin’s plan was to move across to the other side of Croke Park where a taxi was waiting to take him home to Donegal. However, while those plans were being made inside the dressing room, outside, word broke that a brother of one of the players had passed away which reached the attention of the crowd, including McMullin’s sister Maureen.

“My sister Maureen put two and two together,” McMullin says. “She charged her way through the crowd and convinced the security to let her into the dressing room. She ran in and just yelled ‘Gerard is not dead.'

Joyce McMullin with his brother Gerard and baby Brian Brogan

“I mean how do you control your emotions after that from such a high to the lowest of the lows? I’m usually one that can stand a party, but that night I was so shattered. I think I went to bed early believe it or not. Looking back now, it was just a horrible moment that is confined to history. And not just for me, I remember it really affected a lot of the players that day too.”

Thirty years on, McEniff recalls the incident as 20 minutes of ‘madness’ in which ‘you had to be there’ to believe it.

“We had arranged for the celebrations to be brought down that night,” he says. “I still remember when Joyce’s sister informed us that the rumours were false, I ran like hell out of the dressing room to the press box, still with my boots on. I demanded the use of a phone. They must’ve thought I was mad. I rang the McMullin household. 

“It was the first call I made home to Donegal after the match, and I still remember the phone number to this day. Once Joyce’s mother told me there was a party of celebration in the house, I knew everything was okay.”

McMullin says that it was a rumour in which he never found out where it came from, nor does he care, and that it is “not the moment I think about when I remember back to that day.”

McEniff adds: “I was delighted with the decision I made that day to not tell Joyce. He already had an extremely difficult job of marking Paul Curran who in my mind was on for Player of the Year that season.

“And if you go back now and watch that game, Joyce was superb at stopping him. Joyce was extremely strong which a lot of people underestimated him for because of his height, but Curran truly realised it that day.”

Looking back 30 years now to the fact that Donegal would not reach another final until 2012, and with the benefit of hindsight, McMullin realises how lucky he was to play in that historic ’92 final.

“I can only praise and thank Brian for his decision making that day,” he says. “If he broke the news to me early, I don’t know what I would’ve done? Gone home? Sat on the bench? I really don’t know. My dream was to play in an All-Ireland final, thank God I got to do that.”

Gerard McMullin passed away from cancer in October 1993 while both McEniff and McMullin would retire from the inter-county scene the following year. Besides the rumours that circulated in GAA Headquarters that day, September 20 1992 is still one that both player and manager look back and proudly declare as the finest hour of their sporting lives.

This article originally ran in October 2022