Conor McManus was barely a week in Australia with the International Rules crowd last November when he got bitten. A fly or a bug or something so small he didn’t even notice. Hardly a nick. Then his foot got sore. He tried soloing the ball the day before the first Test and the pain mainlined through his foot like a needle. That evening McManus couldn’t walk. The team hotel had been a sick bay all week nursing players stricken by stomach illness. “You were half reluctant to say anything,” he says. “There was that many boys down.”
They strapped him up for the game and dosed him with painkillers. McManus kicked 24 points to keep Ireland alive in the series. He kicked another 16 points in the second Test and was named the Irish player of the tournament. A familiar collection of audacious scores, all amounting to another industrial-sized scoring tally blocking out another story of extraordinary sacrifice that fitted neatly in with the rest.
Some sample cases to begin. In 2009 he cut the cast twice on a broken wrist to play in the Ulster championship with Clontibret. He still can’t do press-ups with his hands flat on the floor. “I have to do them on my knuckles.”
In 2014 he wrecked his ankle and knee with an Ulster championship game against Tyrone in sight. With all hope gone he still sat in cryotherapy and oxygen chambers in Wexford and Newry, drank Sean Boylan’s potions and visited a faith healer in Donegal. His mother lit so many candles the house was nearly a fire hazard.
Still no hope. Right? Thursday night before the game he ran his first few yards in weeks. He kicked his first football in the warm-up. He started the game, kicked six points from frees. Monaghan won by a point and not an ounce of stiffness the following week.
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And his hips. Enough about the hips. “The next man that asks me about the hips I’m just going to tell him change the subject. Every interview I ever do now at this stage, and it’s always a headline. You’d swear I’m nearly dying with my hips.”
He made peace with the long-term cost a long time ago. Work with MCR Group involves him in property services and keeps him bouncing around Dublin. The ache he usually feels before training after a long spin is an irritant, nothing more. He still gets letters and messages from players with achy hips, seeking advice. That’s fine. It’s the headlines that kill him.
How it all started, no one has ever given him a proper answer. He never had an injury before he turned 21, but the year he turned 18 McManus reckoned he played 60 matches between club and colleges alone. Then he started in with Monaghan just when Banty McEnaney was inflicting all the modern tortures necessary to make them competitive again.
“You were jumping from not a massive amount of football as an 18-year-old. Maybe that’s part of it. Weights were something I hadn’t really been doing up to then. All of a sudden I was squatting and lunging and doing things I’d never done before. Maybe the technique wasn’t right and I was loading up with big weights. But I’m only surmising.”
He had an operation on his right hip in 2011 and missed the entire league the following year. When his left hip started aching, he knocked back any talk of surgery. He treats the injuries instead with a delicate set of exercises to strengthen the muscles around his hips. “If you look at somebody doing it you’d think anybody can do that, but it’s only when you have the actual problem it becomes so difficult to do. The sweat would be rolling off you trying to do some of these movements.”
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The hips are good right now. So is everything else. A dozen years with Monaghan have passed him through all sorts of terrain and weather: peaks and valleys, calm and storm, from skittish young player flitting between wing-forward and wing-back to an uncontainable scoring force. That side of things never bothered him. “It’s something you’d enjoy, being a player expected to score. I was always, ‘give me the ball, I’ll take this on’. Enjoying it now probably goes back to when I came in the team first. At Clontibret if I had a chance I’d have went for it. But you’re coming into a team of players at the top of their game. You’re thinking I need to give it to them.
“I remember in games thinking, ‘I should be doing more here’. You spent your time looking over your shoulder wondering who was warming up. Are they warming up for me?”
Managers always knew what he could become. His eye was sharp enough early on that McEnaney sent him scouting for players at under-21 games. After Monaghan had plummeted into Division Three in two years, Malachy O’Rourke came in and made McManus vice-captain for 2013. “That in itself was a tip of the cap: you’re 24/25, take this thing by the scruff of the neck and lead. While I left the talking to others, all of a sudden you found yourself fitting into that category of the team rather than being one of the guys looking up. That gave me confidence to think you’re edging towards one of the top men in the team if he’s looking for you to be that player.”
McManus grew into a captain and a prodigy. Ulster titles and promotions followed and he scored in every match he played from his first championship match in 2012 until a black card early on last summer against Wexford. Some years his overall contribution has been nearly half Monaghan’s entire annual scoring total.
Two Ulster medals and a couple of lower league titles while gaining residency among the top few players in the country elevates his career beyond anything seen in Monaghan for nearly a century, but he has always seen more in the game for them all. Losing four All-Ireland quarter-finals has been frustrating. Failing to fully perform in most of them was worse.
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“In 2013 we beat Donegal who were All-Ireland champions. In 2015 we beat Donegal who were beaten in the All-Ireland final the previous year. If you were good enough to beat those teams in Ulster, you felt you could go on and do more in the All-Ireland series. That’s something that hangs over us still. There’s no doubt if it all came to a halt today you’d think we could’ve done more. We could’ve broken that duck and got to a semi-final and who knows where that takes you?”
He allowed his 30th birthday pass last November without too many remarks. Nothing needed to be said. Time and games are becoming precious. He’ll let a few games go like today against Mayo to keep a schedule pointed towards the games when Monaghan need him, the ones played out in the back field at home as a child kicking balls at a set of posts.
Football then was everything, like now. He squeezed under a turnstile for his first All-Ireland final in 1993 and spent part of every day watching videos charting the four successive All-Irelands that came to Ulster back then. His heroes were Mickey Linden and Peter Canavan and encapsulated everything McManus would become. A few years back he saw Linden at an event and drifted across, humbly seeking an audience. Linden lit up when he saw him. They posed for a picture, then Linden asked him to send it on.
“It was surreal. Once I saw him I was like, ‘I’m not leaving without a picture with that man’.”
Linden thinking the very same was the ultimate tribute.