“Will Galway bate Mayo? Not a hope if they have Willie Joe…”
‘Hay Wrap’ by The Saw Doctors
THUMP followed slap when Tyrone and Mayo first locked horns in the Championship in the 1989 All-Ireland semi-final and between the booming hits the teams produced some fine football at 100-miles-an-hour.
There was nothing in it when a ball broke loose in the second half. Mayo’s Willie Joe Padden raced to pick it up as Seanie Meyler (whose son Conor will play in the sixth meeting of these counties) came in from the opposite direction.
A scrambling Padden got there first and then Tyrone knee met Mayo skull with a crunch.
“It was a complete accident” says Willie Joe who, like Meyler (runner of a marathon in his garden shed last year), still looks in great shape.
“You could be playing on Saturday!” a passer-by quipped when we met in Castlebar on Wednesday.
“Oh I dunno,” says the Belmullet and Mayo legend: “I wouldn’t want to chance it!”
Maybe not now but he was born for battle and with blood streaming down his face after the collision with Meyler he was taken to the sideline where Mayo doctor Frank Davey stitched-up his wound. Manager John O’Mahony sent him back out with a makeshift bandage wrapped around his head and he saw Mayo home and into the final.
“I think Tyrone might have underestimated us that year which was no harm,” he says.
In the final against Cork, Mayo and were in control of the game until Greg Maher went off and the westerners lost their shape. Cork had trailed by four but fought back and, as Mayo fell away of the final quarter, the Rebels won by three points.
“We had the winning of that game,” says Willie Joe.
Sure isn’t that the sad story of Mayo football?
‘HIGH or low, it’s Willie Joe’ was the Mayo catchphrase back when Willie Joe was in his pomp from the mid-1980s. A bona fide county legend and two-time Allstar, he carried his county’s hopes on his broad shoulders as a swashbuckling midfielder or at centre half-forward. With a rockstar mullet, he was two-footed and fearless and a brilliant fielder of the ball.
“I had a good spring,” he says.
“I’m only just over 5’11” and I was playing against Jack O’Shea, Dermot Earley, John O’Gara… They were all bigger than me but I could get off the ground.”
He was born between the mountains and the ocean out on the Erris Peninsula and went to primary school in Aughalsheen where his father was part-time farmer/part-time fisherman.
“That was it,” he says.
“We had a small farm and it was part of the year farming and the rest fishing - we were right beside the sea so you could make a few pound here and there.”
He spent one summer as a fisherman. Long days, hard work and, when you pulled in the nets… you never knew.
He’d cast off the lines and head out into the Atlantic at one in the morning and mightn’t be back on dry land until five or six that evening. Then he’d get a few hours’ sleep and go back out again.
“Sometimes you’d get 100 salmon, or 150 and sometimes you might get 20,” he says.
“You’d be putting them into the box and every one meant you’d made a bit more money. I didn’t think it was a life for me so, after a while, I thought: ‘I’ll leave it at that’ and then I joined ESB.”
He may not have been the greatest catcher of salmon but there weren't many better at catching footballs even though he didn’t take up the game until he went to secondary school in Belmullet. At underage level, Belmullet dominated the North Mayo scene from U14 up to U21 and by the time he broke into his club’s senior team ‘The Mullet’ was a force to be reckoned with.
“They put me in full-forward for my first championship game against Claremorris when I was 16,” he recalls
“I didn’t score but I remember I knocked down a ball to one of the other boys who did score and we won the game.
“The following year we got to the senior semi-final and were beaten by Garrymore, who had won five in-a-row. We were the only team who was giving them a game at the time and I was captain of the team that got to the county final in 1981 (only the second time Belmullet reached that stage).”
He was in the Mayo minor panel from the age of 16 too and won a Connacht Championship in 1977, captaining the team against eventual All-Ireland winners Down at the semi-final stage. Later that year he was called into the Mayo senior panel and was a fixture in red and green from then until 1993.
CONNACHT Championship successes were few and far between in his early years. Mayo hadn’t won a single title in the 1970s but they bridged a 12-year gap in 1981 by beating Sligo in the final and so progressed to an All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry hoping to end the county’s then 30-year wait for the Sam Maguire.
There wasn’t much in it up until half-time but Mayo, lacking experience and fitness, collapsed after the break and failed to score in the second half as the Kingdom ran riot.
“It was an embarrassment,” says Willie Joe.
“But at the same time Kerry had been at it since 1974 and all through the ’70s they’d had big games with Dublin. The training they did was way superior to what we were doing. Mick O’Dwyer would tell you they often trained seven nights on-the-trot.
“We might have done two nights and a Saturday. The biggest obstacle for me was the distance I had to go to training - it was 126 miles return for me to Castlebar and doing that two or three times a week in a Ford Escort was tough going!
“We were equally good as footballers but in the second half we just ran out of steam against Kerry. It was an eye-opener for sure and you knew that if you wanted to get back there again things had to be different or you’d get kicked in the arse again.”
Players came and went regularly in the Mayo panel. A man might play the League and be gone by Championship time or come in for a season and disappear before the next.
That chastening lesson against Kerry at least showed Mayo the work that needed to be done if they were to convert potential into silverware. Training regimes were improved but for the next three season’s Mayo could not force their way out of Connacht and, after early Championship exits, Willie Joe spent his summers playing football with Chicago.
Galway, Roscommon and, in 1984, Galway again, reigned supreme but the arrival of Liam O’Neill as manager heralded better days and the Galway native scrapped the old ‘20-laps of the field boys’ routine and replaced it with a more scientific approach that included, for the first time, a weights programme.
Offaly All-Ireland winner Sean Lowry (golfer Shane Lowry’s uncle) joined the Mayo panel after he began working at a coastal power station and he spearheaded the attack at full-forward. Mayo were Connacht champions in 1985 but again Croke Park proved a bridge too far and Dublin saw them off after a replay.
John O’Mahony succeeded O’Neill and “brought it to another level”. Mayo cleared the formidable hurdle of Tyrone in that 1989 classic to reach their first All-Ireland decider since 1951 but Cork’s strong finish dashed their hopes and the wait for the Sam Maguire continues.
JACK O’Shea was manager when Willie Joe’s time came to an end in 1993.
“We played Dublin in a League game in Castlebar,” he says.
“I was a sub and I went on for a while and that was it. Jacko said: ‘I might go with the young fellas’. I felt I could have gone on another year but… Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now."
Willie Joe bowed out and Mayo continued to batter at the Croke Park door without success.
September Sundays dawned optimistically in 1996 (Liam McHale was sent off in the replay against Meath), 1997 and 2004 but there was disappointment by dusk.
Then Willie Joe’s son Billy Joe took the field at right half-forward for the 2006 final against Kerry. Young Padden scored but it was another tale of woe for Mayo.
“Billy Joe was a better footballer than me,” says his dad.
“He was well able to hold his own. He had more style than me, he was more of a ball-player and a scorer - I was a catcher and a ball-winner.”
Since then of course the finals of 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2020 have come and gone but hope genuinely does spring eternal in the west and this evening Mayo get another crack at the Red Hands and both counties will fancy their chances of winning.
Given Mayo’s record of four wins out of five in Championship meetings against the Red Hands, has the guard come down slightly?
“Oh God no,” says Willie Joe.
“Our guys would be equally focussed because Tyrone have fabulous, physically-strong players. I think Kerry took their eye off the ball, maybe they were thinking after all the Covid issues Tyrone had: ‘This will be a good warm-up for us now before we beat these Mayo lads?’
“Fair play to Tyrone. I was delighted with the way they went about winning the game - you had to admire them. There’s a slight bit of arrogance with Kerry and after all the All-Irelands they’ve won you can understand that maybe they think they’re the crème-de-la-crème of football. Tyrone were totally focussed on the job they had to do and they went about it.”
Mayo people will tell you that expectations were low going into last year’s All-Ireland final. A new team was emerging but the Mayo faithful felt December was too soon for them. Nine months later, the feeling is that James Horan’s men are ready.
“The team has improved unreal since last December,” says Willie Joe.
“The likes of Oisin Mullen, Ryan O’Donoghue (a clubmate at Belmullet), Tommy Conroy… They are fabulous footballers and they are strong-minded and focussed. To be back where we are after losing so many experienced players and then Cillian O’Connor is no mean feat.
“In the Connacht final against Galway, Mayo were poor in the first half but young O’Donoghue was slogging away and it was the same against Dublin – the amount of work he does is unreal, he is confident and there’d be a bit of devilment in him as well, which is a good thing.”
There’s devilment in the Tyrone ranks too and even more pace and power and goals too with Conor McKenna and Cathal McShane hitting form at just the right time. Willie Joe admits that he has trudged out of Croke Park after All-Ireland finals more than once asking himself: ‘Will we ever win this feckin’ thing?’ Will he be asking the same tonight?
“I honestly think it’s a 50-50 game,” he says and his daughter is coming home from Peru to watch with him this evening.
“Can Mayo get up to the same level they did in the second half against Dublin? Can Tyrone repeat what they did against Kerry?
“There’s no baggage with this Mayo team and I think they’ll have one right shot at it. It could go either way and it’ll be very close but if we get a bit of luck the 70-year wait could be over.”
Will Tyrone bate Mayo? I hope not says Willie Joe…
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