“The thing about the two McGees is that they are two big teddy bears behind the façade. They’re just two big soft boys and they care about a lot of things. They care about their family. They care about playing for Donegal. And they are good lads.”
- Jim McGuinness, Until Victory Always
A TEDDY bear then, Neil?
He just smiles, rocking back in the end chair at his kitchen table as the sun peers through the window to find its best way in.
Are there two Neil McGees?
The snarling, granite-jawed protector of the Donegal square who has greeted forwards with that mean half-smile for 16 years and played more times for his county than anyone in history, against the “shy” man who keeps himself to himself away from the pitch.
Sure aren’t there two versions of every competitor?
In the same passage of his book as above, McGuinness would go on to emphasise how good the two brothers were with the children any time Donegal had an open training session.
He doesn’t disagree with the theory when it’s thrown at him.
It’s a Friday afternoon, the day before the Dublin game. Bags of fresh turf line the edge of the garden that’s just taken host to a bouncy castle for his nieces and nephews.
He’s named at three but doesn’t play in the game. Appearance number 191 goes on hold. Tomorrow in Newry, perhaps.
His back had gone into a spasm in the warm-up before the Armagh game. That’s always been there through his playing days. It strikes randomly, leaving him as stiff as a board, waiting for the kinks to sort themselves out.
But for 35-and-a-half, the body holds up rightly.
‘Is this it?’ you ask.
He looks back as if to say ‘is this what?’
‘The last summer?’
“I dunno. I don’t like… Sometimes you make that decision and then you make things about yourself, you take away a bit of focus from the purpose of things.
“It’s not about whether I’m finishing or that kind of malarkey. When your time comes, it comes, and you just move on.
“I wouldn’t be one for making big statements. There’ll be no Twitter posts or this carry on. You move on, you become a fan then and that’s it.
“I don’t want this interview to be about a big hurrah now, saying this is the last. That’s not how I am.”
Sixteen years in, what do we really know about Neil McGee?
In an inter-county career that goes back as far as the McKenna Cup in 2005, he has stayed largely out of the spotlight.
The day job involves putting up electricity poles for KN Group, which he’s been at a few years since giving up roofing.
It’s out on the road in the van with a flask and sandwiches. He’s been offered inside jobs but doesn’t want them.
It hasn’t done him any harm. Elsewhere in his former manager’s book, McGuinness describes placing his hand on the shoulder of boxer Amir Khan.
“It felt like sheet iron. I actually said ‘Jesus Christ’ when I took hold of him… Neil McGee is the only other person I have ever encountered who is built like that. It is as if they are made of something other than flesh.”
His lifestyle now is a far cry from the young party boy who was working in the local nightclub when he started playing inter-county football. He’d stuff a chicken fillet burger into himself at 4am, home an hour later and then getting up at whatever time to go and play. That continued into his early 20s.
Shy when he’s outside his own circle, McGee was often at the centre of the Gaoth Dobhair and Donegal parties.
He was once asked which movie star he was most like and said Frank the Tank, Will Ferrell’s streaking middle-aged king of the frat party in Old School.
Never one for the books, he didn’t mind college itself, but couldn’t bring himself to do the extras. Still, he won a Sigerson Cup while studying Construction in Sligo IT, and then did Business at Letterkenny IT.
Seldom does interviews but absorbs himself in reading about sport. Not married, no kids, but with a long-term girlfriend from just down the road, and real warmth for his nieces and nephews.
There’s a speak-when-spoken-to reverence about the way he operates.
“I’d just be a quiet person. Very private. I’d probably like to keep it that way.
“In my own environment, in the dressing room, I wouldn’t say I’d be quiet. In public, I’d probably come across as shy.
“People probably think I wouldn’t talk to them, but I’m just quiet. It’s great at the minute, put a hat and a mask on and go about your business.
“A lot of people probably don’t know what I do away from the pitch, if I’m married or have kids.
“That’s just the way I like to go about my business.”
On the pitch, it’s somewhat different.
‘Silent’ is not a word with which opposition forwards would associate Donegal’s number three.
He is no angel between the white lines. That part he won’t deny.
“I make up stories. It puts them more off. I’d never be going down the dirty route, your mother or any of that.
“You’d chat away to boys. Some boys like [Conor] McManus, there’s no point chatting to him. I’d say it’s the same with Murphy.”
The image of McManus patting him on the head as he ran out past having scored his first point from play in the 2015 Ulster final suggests that he got inside the Monaghan man’s head plenty.
McGee’s been sent off four times, one of which was rescinded, but there’s only one he regrets, and it isn’t because Alan Fitzgerald bloodied his nose for doing it.
The Donegal full-back was caught on camera bending the Kerry forward’s fingers off the ball, for which he received a couple of sharp digs. Fitzgerald was sent off, McGee wasn’t, but he received a subsequent suspension after an infamously bad-tempered game.
“That’s the one big regret I’d have. We were too pumped up. We were after getting beat in the All-Ireland final by Kerry and Rory [Gallagher] had us going down there pumped to the nines. I overstepped the line.
“I know people might not agree but I’ve a good enough record in terms of discipline. That’s one time I have to put my hand up, I’ve regretted it since.”
* * * * *
THREE Allstars, five Ulster titles, an All-Ireland and 190 games in, few have ever represented Donegal with the distinction Neil McGee has.
He is the best full-back the county has ever produced. So deep is his imprint in the number three shirt that the search for his eventual replacement has floundered completely.
The beginnings were a serious mark of his own self-belief. He was on the Buncrana Cup panel at U16 when the list of names for county minor trials were advertised in the local papers.
Neil McGee wasn’t invited. That didn’t stop him turning up.
“Out of my own stubbornness, I was full sure I should have been up.”
One of the corner-backs didn’t show up. The management looked at young McGee, a midfielder by trade at that stage, with the boots and all on him and threw him in to the breach.
He excelled and would earn his way, starting the championship defeat by Cavan.
Within weeks of the trial, he was playing full-back for Gaoth Dobhair’s senior team. The number three for both Ireland U17s and the All-Ireland winning vocational schools’ team both followed.
McGee’s early senior career was as unforgiving as it was character-building. His debut came just out of minor in the 2005 McKenna Cup, though it was the following year before he really kicked on.
There were two lessons in particular that shaped how he developed as a full-back, handed down by Diarmuid Marsden and Paddy Bradley.
“We played Armagh in ’07 and I was up against Marsden. He wasn’t a big scorer but in terms of his physicality… I would have been up along with him in the contest, but the sheer power of him, I never came across someone as strong. That made me think ‘you’re not strong enough’.
“The following year, we played Derry twice and I marked Paddy Bradley twice. The last league game in Letterkenny, I was doing great for about 20 minutes and next thing, Paddy just blew me away.
“Marked him again in the championship, had a good first half, kept him quiet, but the second half, he ran riot.
“I knew then I was run out of steam after half an hour, so I had to get fitter. You need a couple of hard lessons.”
He’d hand out a few lessons of his own in time.
Bernard Brogan has repeatedly named him as one of the very toughest opponents.
Stephen O’Neill, who gave him a runaround in his second outing for Donegal, would end up on his arse following a famous shuddering collision that has been a favourite of montage-makers since that day in July 2013.
He would earn Allstars in 2011, 2012 and 2014. Detractors will turn to the sweeping shield in front of him. He concedes it gave him licence to be “more aggressive” going for the ball, but otherwise, man-marking was man-marking.
His peak years stand up against any full-back in football history.
In the early years, he didn’t properly apply himself. He’d train the two nights of the week and that was it.
That one of Donegal’s other great defenders, John Joe Doherty, has his name attached to the low of that 2010 defeat in Crossmaglen is something that rankles with McGee, whose own transformation had begun during that reign.
“John Joe had a good chat to me at the end of ’09 and more or less told me to cop myself on. That was the big turning point for me in terms of my inter-county career.
“He said to me ‘you’re a Donegal player, walk with your chest out – it’s nothing to be ashamed of’. We’d have been wile down on ourselves at that time, we’d no confidence at all.
“He’s a great fella, someone I’ve great time for. I thought as a squad of players, we really let him down. We hung him out.
“We always knew better as players in the Donegal squad, no matter who came in, it was ‘we don’t want that’ or ‘Tyrone aren’t doing that’. We always wanted more and we weren’t willing to put in the work for it.”
He wishes too they’d won something for Rory Gallagher, to underline the importance of a man he’d be very friendly with still.
Brian McEniff, Brian McIver and now John Joe Doherty had been unable to straighten them out. Where they failed, Jim McGuinness would succeed, and he did so by building from the bottom up with not just one McGee, but two.
* * * * *
MICHAEL Murphy is on the other end of the call as Neil McGee edges down the road towards the Convention Centre in Dublin.
“I think you’re in.”
The Donegal captain had arrived early and quietly enquired about his team-mate’s chances of an Allstar. Donegal were Ulster champions for the first time in 19 years and had a raft of nominations.
Murphy missed out but McGee didn’t. It was a huge night for Gaoth Dobhair as two of their clubmen were recognised among the year’s best fifteen. This was Kevin Cassidy’s second Allstar, nine years after his first.
And then the winter happened.
The book. The fallout. The decision. The moving-on. The TG4 interview. The success. The homecoming.
The McGees and Cassidy had always talked about the party they’d have when they won an All-Ireland. Now here were the two brothers about to lead the celebrations, getting up on stage at their home club, while Cassidy sat across the road at home eating Weetabix.
McGee had left the hotel in Dunfanaghy early that morning to buy a new outfit. Sat up the front of the bus on the way there, avoiding the chaos at the back because he wanted to represent himself well at home.
When the bus arrives, Neil and Eamon bring the cup to their grandmother, sitting on a chair outside her home on the main street.
The pair take their turn to address the crowd. Neil first, then Eamon. And Cass isn’t there.
“It was a problem between Kevin and Jim. It was never a me or Eamon thing,” says McGee, speaking about it for the first time.
“Eamon got dropped earlier [in 2011] and that was a problem between him and Jim – me and Kevin went about our business as normal. You let them sort it out themselves.
“It wasn’t nice how it went, him being a good friend. It was a bit messy the way it was handled.
“I always felt I was on good terms with him. Now, we’re very good friends. Kevin’s probably a bit quiet like myself. We wouldn’t be full of chat but that respect’s always there.
“And then when we do get a few drinks, we’re like two magnets then.”
Never more than when they won an Ulster Club title together with Gaoth Dobhair in 2018. That journey healed whatever fractures still existed.
The morning after they’d won it, McGee woke up and went through the usual routine. Wallet, check. Phone, check. Hop in the shower, clothes on, bite to eat. It’s 10am before he gets the phone charged to discover he and Cassidy have gone viral.
McGee, the green-and-white hooped scarf wrapped around him, and Cassidy down to just his vest, sending out a worse-for-wear video message to All-Ireland semi-final opponents Corofin.
“We’ll kill yiz, yiz wee bastards!” shouts McGee, the divilment hanging out of him.
“Checked the phone and it’s going mad. I didn’t know what happened. Sure it’s a bit of craic. You can’t take yourself too serious.”
In part, it was a success that made up for Cassidy’s absence in 2012.
Nothing would have covered Eamon’s absence, though. To have won the All-Ireland with his brother alongside him clearly means a lot. Not that you’d get the schmaltz out of him over it.
But for the younger sibling, it’s not so that it would have been worth any less had the pair not been beside each other in the full-back line, where the pair of them were arguably Donegal’s outstanding players in the final win over Mayo.
It’s that that it wouldn’t have happened at all.
“In fairness to him, one of the big turning points was Jim taking Eamon back. In terms of how we played and the balance of the team, you knew he could compete with the better forwards.
“That freed up Frank [McGlynn] and Karl [Lacey] to go out to the half-back line.
“He’s not a Colm McFadden or a Murphy but in terms of the overall system, I don’t think we would have won it without him.
“Look at those big games in Croke Park, he was always a standout player.”
The very first night of Jim McGuinness’s time as Donegal manager perhaps sums Neil McGee up best though.
So desperate for things to start well, he refused to go off after pulling his hamstring.
Instead, he went in to full-forward. Sligo had them half-beaten in Ballybofey and then McGee pops up in the dying seconds with a goal to snatch a draw.
They’d go to Tyrone and win the following week, and the thing just took off on a magic carpet that swept them to success they’d only ever dreamt of.
He won’t reach 200 games for Donegal this year, no matter what way it goes, but he’s not saying he won’t reach it next year.
There isn’t a forward in Ireland who wouldn’t be glad to see him go.
Few of them would say nice things about their time spent with him.
What greater compliment could there be?
