By John Harrington

It’s a wet, cold evening in Ardboe, Co Tyrone, but the tea and conversation is warm in the O’Donovan Rossa clubhouse.

Three generations of McGuigans have assembled and spent the previous couple of hours being filmed by the TG4 cameras for a piece that will be part of the station’s live coverage of the GAA President’s Awards in Croke Park tonight.

The McGuigans are being honoured with the Family Award for their services to Ardboe and Tyrone football, and their reaction can be best described as quiet pride.

Making a fuss has never been a McGuigan trait, so when others make a fuss about them they’re naturally inclined to play things down.

Frank McGuigan is widely regarded as one of the most naturally gifted footballers to ever play the game, and his four sons Frank Jnr, Brian, Tommy, and Shay all followed in his footsteps to play for Tyrone with distinction too.

His offspring have won five All-Ireland medals between one another, and Shay still has an ambition to add to that haul before hangs up his own boots.

Frank Snr is clearly proud of all they’ve achieved, but he’s the sort of person that likes to prise some humour from most situations, so he muses that bringing his family back home from New York in 1983 might have been his loss and Tyrone’s gain.

“I always think if I had stayed in America what they'd have been in terms of their sports orientation,” says McGuigan.

“I'm thinking of the dollars! Ah, it wouldn't have mattered, they wouldn't have given me anything anyway!”

Frank McGuigan’s decision to move home in 1983 with his wife Geraldine after six years in the USA didn’t just ensure Tyrone GAA would reap a rich harvest from the next generation, it also set his own status as one of the greats of Tyrone football in stone.

His performance in the 1984 Ulster Final against Armagh when he kicked 11 points from play remains one of the great feats of the sport, but don’t expect him to wax lyrically about it.

Because as far as Frank is concerned football is just a game to be played, not the sort of vocation that lifts you above the common man in any way shape or form.

He might have had a special gift, but it’s in his nature to be deadpan about how he nurtured it, and understated about just how good he was.

“When I was growing up there was nothing else only kicking a ball,” he explains.

“All the kids got together in the evenings after school and you just played until dark. There was nothing else, there was no pool or snooker or nothing. It was just strictly football.

“We probably didn't even have a ball. Half of the time you were playing with something you made up. I remember even kicking a fairy-liquid bottle around the shore.

“There were times you'd be kicking a ball around the shore on your own. Kicking it up in the air, running after it, and catching it and things like that.

“There was nobody else about. It was the only way you could kill the time. The only other thing we had was comics. No TV or anything like that there (McGuigan points at a smartphone on the table). I can't use one yet!”

Frank McGuigan played by instinct and maybe sometimes he lived by it too.

He was 22 when he went to New York in 1977 as an All-Stars replacement and decided on the spur of the moment that he wouldn’t come home with the rest of the players.

“I'd probably blame Geraldine for half of that,” chuckles McGuigan. “We were playing in Gaelic Park, we had a game that day and the plane was leaving that night.

“I had met a few friends and Geraldine was there. I decided, you know, big man, 'I'm staying on here'. I got up the next morning, Jesus, not a penny in the pocket, lying in an apartment. If I had a plane home then I would probably have took it!

“I decided to stay for a while anyway, I gradually liked it, and then I got married there.”

McGuigan had captained Tyrone to a Senior Ulster Championship when he was just 19 and was the outstanding talent in the county by some margin, so his decision to stay on in New York would have been regarded as nothing less than a disaster by Tyrone football supporters.

His exile only served to embellish his legend, because reports would regularly drift back across the Atlantic of some outrageous McGuigan feat in Gaelic Park.

Back in those days the best Gaelic Footballers in Ireland usually wound up in the Big Apple for the latter stages of the club championship, yet none ever commanded a bigger billing than McGuigan himself.

“It was pretty good, it was a high enough standard that time,” he recalls. “Especially when it came to the play-offs. Because you had two county teams on the field. Most of the boys who qualified to get to the play-offs weren't playing.

“I remember we played one final and there actually county footballers in the subs, there was that many of them who had flew over from Kerry and the rest.

“The Final over there would have been after the All-Ireland here, so you had the Kerry-men, Dublin men and men from any team that was involved in the final coming over. I remember even Kevin Moran even arriving for a final one year, and him with Manchester United at the time.”

He enjoyed his time in New York but his Tyrone ties were never fully sundered. He was flown home twice to help the team in ’82 and ’83, and was then persuaded to move home for good.

The following July he kicked those 11 points from play in the Ulster Final. Five off the right foot, five off the left, and one fisted over the bar for good measure.

Time has done nothing to diminish the feat. The YouTube video of those points and the patented McGuigan dummy-solo that created the space for so many of them is still required viewing.

You get the feeling though McGuigan isn’t the sort to log on and relive the memory of that day.

“Anything like that there, it was what other people were saying, you weren't thinking you were good or anything like that,” he says.

“People would clap you on the back and say 'you're some footballer', but I never took anything like that on board. Some of them weren't great judges!

“I just took those things as they came. I never looked into it, I basically just thought it was a thing you done. There was nothing else. You just had to do this. I honestly never thought about football in my whole life. I just went out and done it.

“I loved playing football and all that went with it. But, as I say, I never really understood the reverence the whole of Ireland had for it.

“When Brian and the boys came through and won the All-Irelands, then you'd see what might have been.”

Frank and Geraldine never pushed their sons towards Gaelic Football, they ran towards it willingly.

The local school’s football field was located directly behind the house, and it was a rare day that passed without the McGuigans playing there with their neighbours.

Frank Jnr was clearly born with an entrepreneurial spirit to match his knack for football, because he came up with the novel idea of playing for money.

Everyone would put two pounds into a kitty, teams were picked, and the winner would take the lot.

The fact that Frank Jnr, Brian, Tommy, and Shay McGuigan would all grow up and go on to play for Tyrone too says a lot about their mental strength as well as their natural flair for football.

Their father was such an iconic figure in Tyrone and beyond that they had to deal with the pressure of trying to emerge from his shadow.

There’s always been a fascination in the GAA with genealogy and comparing one generation with the previous, but McGuigan hated the way his sons weren’t simply judged on their own merits.

“It was more embarrassing,” he says. “Because every time you'd hear anything it was 'son of Frank, son of Frank'. I hated that. I still detest it.”

Frank Junior, Brian, Tommy, and Shay would go on to make their own names and in time the ‘son of’ addendum would fade away.

But in their formative years as Gaelic Footballers it was something they had to grow used to.

“When I was on the Tyrone minors, especially if you had a bad game, people would be saying, 'that man's only starting because of who he is',” says Tommy McGuigan.

“You're thinking, 'As if Martin Coyle or Liam Donnelly honestly gives a hoot what Daddy is thinking’. You would have heard those things, but you wouldn't pay too much attention.”

One way to step out of someone’s shadow is to achieve something they never did, and that’s the path the McGuigan boys followed.

For all of Frank Senior’s ability, he never won an All-Ireland. When he looks back now, he concedes one of the reasons he didn’t was those Tyrone teams of the ‘70s and ‘80s simply did think it was a realistic proposition.

The Tyrone panel that Frank Jnr and Brian were a part of in 2003 was a very different animal though.

“That had to do with Mickey Harte, the mentality of the thing,” says Brian McGuigan.

“Because teams were going down and they were in bonus territory after Ulster. But Mickey wasn't happy with that. Like, anytime we played Kerry or Dublin in that time, teams you would have always looked up to, there was no fear at all.

“I think you can go back as far as '98 when as minors we played Kerry in Croke Park and it finished a draw. Then it went to a replay in Parnell Park and we beat them after extra-time.

“I think that was the stage we thought we had something special that year. That we could actually win an All-Ireland.

“Because you would have always seen Kerry as the benchmark, a county that had won so much, especially coming from Tyrone who had never done it before.

“I think that gave us the belief to go on and make that extra step at senior level.”

Brian would go on to win three All-Ireland titles as a gifted, play-making centre-forward, and by the time he was done no-one was referring to him as Frank’s son. If anything, Frank became Brian’s father.

Along the way he was part of a Tyrone team that will be remembered as one of the truly great sides.

Not only did they win the Sam Maguire Cup three times, they won it by playing a brand of high-octane football that changed how the game was played nation-wide.

“The three All-Irelands all have different meanings,” says Brian McGuigan.

“'03 was the first so that's always special and I don't think that could be bettered. But '05 mean a lot because of what happened Cormac (McAnallen). We wanted to win one for him. And then '08 was different again.

“Even people inside in Tyrone were saying we weren't going to win one without Peter Canavan. So to do one without him, and nothing against Peter, but to do it without him was satisfying because of what people were saying.

“They all have different meanings, but they were all special.”

Perhaps the 2008 All-Ireland Final success is the most memorable one from a McGuigan family point of view.

Tommy capped a brilliant individual season by scoring the crucial goal in the All-Ireland Final against Kerry, and Brian achieved something remarkable by even making it onto the field.

His career had looked over in 2007 when an off-the-ball strike in a club match nearly blinded him in one eye, but he somehow found the strength of will to fight his way back from that low and experience the high of winning a third All-Ireland medal.

“A lot of people would have thought that maybe I wouldn't come back,” he admits.

“To be involved at any stage at all was massive. When I got that injury I never thought I'd play again so to be there at the final whistle was great.

“I broke a leg in '06 which was serious enough and then the first game I came back from it I got the eye injury. A bad run of luck.

“I was meant to be away with Tyrone that weekend but I wanted to play a game just to get back into the feel of the thing so I played a reserve game with the club. I probably shouldn't have been playing.

“He didn't mean to do the damage that he done, but he probably wanted to make his mark on me.

“When I went to see the surgeon he said there was a good chance I'd lose the eye. It took five or six operations.

“I had to lie face down for two weeks. Looking back now it was tough but if the surgeon tells you you have to do it, you have to do it. I would have lost the eye if I didn't.

“I've got used to it now. It was a big loss in terms of the last five or six years of my playing career because I probably would have depended a lot on my vision.

“I don't have any peripheral vision on that side now but I kind of adapted to it too, you get used to it.”

Brian retired from playing club football with Ardboe last year and will instead manage the team this year.

Tommy reckons this is his last year as a club footballer, but Shay McGuigan continues to fly the flag high for the family.

A Tyrone panelist until work commitments forced him to withdraw in late 2015, he’s had to deal with the expectation that comes from having famous footballing brothers as well as a famous footballing father.

“Knowing those three had been on the Tyrone senior team and had success winning All-Ireland medals and stuff, it put pressure on me,” he admits.

“I won an All-Ireland minor medal but I always wanted to get an All-Ireland senior medal. I made it to the senior team but I couldn't commit with work. But, you know, I'm not saying I'm finished.

“I'm only 25 so I still think I can get back in the next couple of years. I can't commit at the moment with work, but we'll see what happens. That's what I'm still aiming for, anyway. To win an All-Ireland.”

If he does, then Frank Senior, for all his talent, would be the only one of them not to have a Celtic Cross.

That’s not the sort of thought that’s likely to trouble him. Ask him would have relished the opportunity to hone his ability in a crucible like the current Tyrone set-up and he gives a typical Frank McGuigan answer.

“I probably still would have done my own thing. Life is too short for all that. If I even remotely thought I might win an All-Ireland I'd probably change my attitude.

“But I never thought of All-Irelands, it was never on my agenda, because it was never drilled into you to win an All-Ireland.

“I thought it was just a pile of boys coming together to play a bit of football and went for a bit of craic afterwards. That's all Gaelic Football really was to me all my life.”

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