Ciarán Murphy: Seeking the heart of Gaelic football? Then look no further than Garrymore

It has already been a crazy year, and the idea that on a Saturday evening in September, Garrymore would be the centre of the GAA universe would have stretched credulity to breaking point. But it was. Close to 5,000 people showed up to a club ground in south Mayo to see the home team face off against Kobe McDonald’s Crossmolina in a Mayo senior championship quarter-final. Thousands more watched online.They stood five-deep at the fence, and saw Garrymore knock out the up-and-comers with a performance that was all grit, all heart, and very smart. The possibility that this could be Kobe’s last game was the draw, but the Garrymores were the story.They are only a couple of kilometres inside the Mayo border, and my club Milltown is a couple of kilometres in on the Galway side. Milltown is a half-parish with Ballyglass, which is in Mayo, and outside of the club grounds, St Patrick’s church in Ballyglass is the closest thing to a community space in Garrymore’s catchment area.There is no post office, no shop, no pub. The GAA club is Garrymore, and Garrymore is the GAA club. We used to go over there every Easter weekend and play the Exiles Cup, a tournament put on with the intention of honouring and remembering all those from the area who had been forced to emigrate. We suffered our fair share, and so did they.READ MOREIt was a four-team competition, two semi-finals and a final, and the participants were often the hosts, Milltown, a club from Mayo that Garrymore weren’t at that moment at daggers drawn with, and a club from Galway that we didn’t hold any specific grudge against that particular month. With qualification criteria like that, it was often a challenge to fill the weekend dance card. But it lasted 50 years, and it was always an early-season gut-check.Many a Milltown footballer got their senior debut over there, including my brother Paul, who was introduced 30 seconds before a gigantic, game-ending brawl broke out. He swears it had nothing to do with him, and given the sort of thing I saw down there over the years, which did not cause a gigantic brawl, I’m pretty sure he didn’t have that level of chaos in him.We loved it. They had a chip on their shoulder, they never backed down from a challenge, and they loved welcoming big names up the back roads to their place. And when I say back roads, I’m not joking. We were next door, but it felt like there were 10 different ways to get to their pitch, none of them straight. As the roads got narrower, and the grass appeared in the middle, you’d convince yourself you’d made a wrong turn, and only then you’d see the pitch up on a rise in the distance.The Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers lock horns at Lambeau Field on December 22nd, 2013, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Steelers defeated the Packers 38-31. Photograph: Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images Even in the ‘90s the clubhouse was impressive. They had won six Mayo titles in nine years, and had got all the way to an All-Ireland club final in spring 1982. Milltown were Galway champions in 1981, but contrived to lose our Connacht semi-final by two points in a replay, which denied us the chance to play a provincial final against our friends and neighbours. That would have been deeply special.The photographs of those glory years were everywhere in that clubhouse, but there’s also a plaque there to the Magnificent Seven, the sobriquet given to a group of teenagers from the village accused of trespassing for playing football in a field in the village in 1940. They were summoned to the court in Claremorris and appeared without legal representation.There, they were presented with two options – pay a fine of £1, or face a custodial sentence in Sligo. One lad paid (with funds provided by the GAA club) as his father was very ill, but the other seven said they wouldn’t pay, and two days before Christmas, they were taken from their families and brought off to jail.[ Mayo GAA mourns death of chairman Séamus TuohyOpens in new window ]Earlier this week I listened to Billy Fitzpatrick, one of Garrymore’s greatest ever players and a legend of Mayo football, interviewing one of the seven, Paddy Prendergast, for Claremorris Community Radio in 2008.As an hour of social history, it is unparalleled. Farming, emigration, rationing ... and football, always football. The teenagers, some as young as 15, served their few days in prison and returned to Garrymore as heroes, with bonfires blazing. As a GAA club origin story, it takes beating, and the current keepers of that flame needed plenty of fire on Saturday, particularly when McDonald equalised late on for Crossmolina.At that moment, a bracing realisation hit me. The Exiles Cup on a sleepy Easter Sunday afternoon was one thing. A home quarter-final, under lights, with big reputations lined up in opposition, was quite another. This was Lambeau Field in a snowstorm, or Galatasaray’s Ali Sami Yen stadium, or Dunedin’s House of Pain. Resistance was futile. Here was the beauty of home quarter-finals in a county championship writ large.Buoyed by a raucous crowd, they won a 0-14 to 0-12 arm-wrestle; their county man Enda Hession was man of the match, and they still haven’t conceded a goal in the championship so far. In their wildest imaginings, there isn’t one line of that sentence they’d change.It took an hour to get out of the makeshift car park in a neighbouring field. The image I couldn’t shake afterwards was from the very last scene in Field of Dreams, as the camera zooms out and up to show us cars snaking along country lanes in the dark towards a nondescript hill in Iowa, in pursuit of the heart of baseball. If you’re looking for the heart of Gaelic football, I think I know the way ... 10 different ways, in fact.