Benny Tierney nearly dropped the phone when he received the text last month. When he looked at it again, he calmed down after processing the wording and convincing himself that it had to be a joke. How could Peter Canavan have got a hole-in-one after having only recently taken up golf?
Tierney confirmed his worst fears. Canavan had nailed it on a par three. Tierney likes to consider himself a serious golfer so he knew the grief that was coming. That much was evident from the last line of Canavan’s text: ‘This game is handy’. Ouch.
“It took me 20 years to get a hole-in-one before I managed it last year,” says Tierney. “Canavan is crap at golf but he has already equalled everything I had done in two decades. He’s not suited to golf because he has no patience. I used to always say to him, ‘Playing golf with you is the great leveller because you’re useless. People call you God. Well, if you’re God, put it in the hole’. And then he gets a hole-in-one.”
Tierney has known Canavan for 20 years and his mindset has never been any different. When they both ran a GAA coaching camp in Marbella over the last six years, Canavan’s attitude as a player governed his coaching philosophy. The kids who were looking for fun drifted towards Tierney. The serious kids gravitated to Canavan. Even though many of them were too young to remember his playing career, he was still always able to captivate them.
Tierney and Canavan spend one day at the Galway Races each year and Tierney doesn’t know how Canavan manages it. Every second racegoer there seems to want to talk to him. “There are some people in this life that just have that something special about them,” says former Tyrone player Enda McGinley, who played alongside and under Canavan. “They have that leadership or charisma that when they walk into a room, they just command massive respect. Someone you could listen to all day. Peter was like that as a player and a manager. Everything he says carries huge authority and his talents as a player add to the aura about him as a person. He is as competitive as anyone else I know.”
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After Canavan was appointed Fermanagh manager last November, his lack of inter-county coaching and managerial experience was an issue of consideration. When Matt Cooper put that question to him on Today FM’s ‘Last Word’ show, Canavan said that he had been coaching teams for “17 years”. That claim had often been backed up by Owen Mulligan and the football education he received from Canavan’s coaching at Holy Trinity in Cookstown.
“He was always custom-built for inter-county management,” says Tierney. “He has an unbelievable drive to be the best. The fact that he is quiet and elusive will only enhance that aura in the dressingroom.
“There is nobody on this earth who is going to tell Peter Canavan what to do. His wife Finola possibly has some say but I wouldn’t necessarily agree that she would have the last word either. She has with me most times because I’m scared of her. He will get what he wants and that is the single-mindedness of Canavan.”
He didn’t win a Tyrone county title during his three years in charge of Errigal Ciaran but that wasn’t a slight on his modern and forward thinking style of management. If anything, Canavan made the same mistake that some ultra-ambitious players have made in the early stages of their coaching careers — they unrealistically expect the same commitment at club level that they gave themselves at county level.
“I have been played under a lot of managers and Peter was one of the best,” says McGinley. “He was unbelievably professional. That was something I was used to with Tyrone but you realise that the club boys have a different mentality. Peter learned that there is a difference between what you can demand of a club player and a county player.
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“I would say that was very frustrating for him. He would have felt we could have achieved more. Given his reputation and how highly boys in our club think of him, that brought its own pressure. Maybe the team didn’t fully cope with that and we underperformed on the bigger days. But that was no fault of Peter’s.”
Canavan’s status immediately injected confidence back into Fermanagh and into a squad which was ripped apart after last year’s disharmony and mass exodus of players. Restoring morale was an immediate priority for Canavan but he could relate to Fermanagh’s predicament because his early career was defined by a fractious rift when his club was torn apart for almost a decade over a parish league match.
Canavan individually met with every player at the start of the year but any lingering issues from last season were discussed just once. At a team meeting in the Manor House hotel, players merely said what they felt. That was the start and end of it.
Canavan got on with driving the team forward. He normally watches games from the stand but he has been hands-on with the coaching alongside Ciaran Donnelly. He was one of the game’s greatest forwards but he does as much coaching with the defence and midfielders.
The set-up is extremely professional and well-structured. When they played Kilkenny in the league, the players were fitted with GPS tracking systems and heart monitors. Fermanagh won by 46 points but Canavan wanted to see how hard players were prepared to work. “It sent out a very strong message of what Peter expects from us,” says one Fermanagh player. “His attitude is just brilliant.”
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Canavan keeps his distance from the players but they describe him as “witty”. His measured and calculated mind has always been reflected in his persona but there has always been a discreetly hid fun side to him. “There was no better man for finding out dirt on lads and being centrally involved in every bit of slagging going on,” says McGinley. “Yet he was like the Teflon Don (mob boss), you just could not find out anything to pin on him. He is shrewd. He has his hands in numerous pots but he keeps everything close to his chest.”
Canavan has a stake in a couple of horses trained by Jim Bolger, and Tierney laughs when he says that “they certainly don’t run like he played”. Yet Canavan’s iron-will and fireproof belief would never allow him to doubt his own odds, especially in football. He has the cuteness too to know how to time a run and disguise the handicap; the team and formation he selected for the Division Four league final defeat to Wicklow bore no resemblance to what featured during the campaign.
The biggest prize available is all that ever mattered for Canavan. “He hasn’t said it,” says another Fermanagh player. “But considering how driven a person he is, I’m sure a first Ulster title is his target for Fermanagh.”
When Canavan originally sat down before the five-man interview panel last October, he was asked to outline his goals. Canavan didn’t because Pete McGrath, Down’s former All-Ireland winning manager, was part of the interview panel. When asked a second time, he still refused on the grounds that Fermanagh were meeting Down in the championship.
By this evening, Canavan’s goals could be plain for everyone to see.