LEAVING HIS MARC

Corner back ace brings Jack O'Connor to book in opus on Kerry's footballing dynasty

- BY KARL O'KANE

“ALL the stories and everyone seems to gravitate towards that one,” says Marc O Sé.

Actually, he says it twice.

The first time is for a part of his new book, ‘O Sé, A Kerry Family, A Football Dynasty, where he's talking about a drinking story in 2009 that famously led to Tomas O Sé and Colm Cooper being dropped.

And intertwined with that is the second part, the brothers’ relationship with Jack O'Connor.

O Sé doesn't hold back over incidents that annoyed him and it makes for fascinating and funny reading, shedding plenty of new light on some old stories.

Also mixed in with football talk is the O Sé's West Kerry upbringing, surrounded by family, music, the Irish language and stories, with Paidí Ó Sé's pub the hub for it all.

Other standouts include a row with older brother Tomas over a newspaper column that suggested he could be dropped after an indifferent display — and why O Sé felt he didn’t get “a fair crack of the whip” from Eamonn Fitzmaurice in his final year with Kerry.

What riled Ó Sé up most of all, and still does, is a comment in O'Connor's book ‘Keys to the Kingdom’ where he suggested the O Sés could be hard to handle.

“Whether he meant it differently, I don't know. I felt, give me a job and I'll do it. Ill get on with it. I did find that bit tough to take.

“I never asked Jack about that. Only Jack knows that. I was writing the book chronologically and that came up.

“If I saw Jack of course Id chat away to him. There’ no ill feeling on my part, definitely now. Hes done a great job as manager.

“Kerry football moves on and it's a long time ago now. It just comes up because I'm writing about it in the book. It was a story then.

“The book has many other stories that I delve into and that was just one of them. I just wanted to be as honest as I could.”