GAA legend Pat Spillane has declared victory over bitter social media trolls and revealed: “I left the Sunday Game on my own terms.”
The ex-Kerry superstar quit the RTE show in July after 30 years on the box — leaving behind the taunts he endured from cranks as one of the most recognisable faces on TV.
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The eight-time All-Ireland winner told The Irish Sun: “Thirty years on television is a lifetime. It was huge.
“When I played football with Kerry, I played with them for 17 years, I was teaching for 35 years and 30 years on the Sunday Game.
“And all those three decisions I made and I left on my own terms. No one ever said to go.
“It’s important to know when to take the last hurrah and I just felt it’s time to go. I’ve done my stint.
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“Have I come to the end of the road? No, I’ve just reached a turn in the road. I’ve closed one chapter and opened another, who knows where it will go. Believe me I am just going another direction.”
And the 67-year-old said he is happy with his decision to leave.
He said: “I did it all on my own terms. There is one thing in my life, it’s happy memories and no regrets.
“If you can do that in a job, that’s good. A peaceful mind, happy, contented and move onto the next chapter. And that’s me.”
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But gobby Pat — who coined the phrase “puke football” to describe the style of the Tyrone side who overcame the Kingdom in 2003 — admitted social media commentary was starting to “bother” him.
But he said: “It wasn’t the reason why I left the Sunday Game. It was loads of reasons, 30 years, getting tired of travelling, just the fun gone out of it. There was loads of reasons.
“With social media, I remember talking to Billy Keane, John B Keane’s son, about it a couple of months ago and he gave me a piece of advice.
“‘Pat, if someone was giving out about you, would you invite them to your house for dinner? No you wouldn’t. If someone was giving out about you, would you invite them into your head?’
“And I said ‘Billy you’re right’. I was inclined to invite some of these fellas into my head and get the bother of me. Now? Gone. I know there’s a silent majority out there that have supported me.”
Pat revealed that he started to believe he was hated after all the negative comments over the years.
FAN LOVE
But a deluge of cards, letters, flowers and mass cards from all over the country since he retired helped to change his mind.
He said: “It made me feel very heartened and overwhelmed.
“Because the fact that somebody in Achill or somebody in Roscommon or West Cork will sit at the table and spend an hour writing a long letter to say ‘how much I enjoyed you as a player, how much I love the Sunday Game and the great fun you brought us every night you were on it,’ it was lovely. It’s overwhelming.”
Pat added: “The silent majority in this country, we take no notice of them, we take them for granted and they take themselves for granted by staying silent.
“So we become obsessed with the tiny, tiny minority and we forget about the vast majority that love you and support you and the huge crowds that watch the Sunday Game every night.”
Pat said it was “the closest thing to being dead when you weren’t dead” to get such kind words after he announced his retirement.
He told The Irish Sun: “When I’d be working the Sunday Game, it’d be ‘Spillane, he’s there too long, Brolly’s there too long. We’re fed up with the same old faces’.
SMALL MINORITY
“I was presuming it was everyone and it wasn’t, it was just the tiny less than one per cent.
“It’s lovely to be gone from a job and get all the praise and all the thanks and no one telling you ‘you were on too long, you were rubbish the last ten years’.
“No, it’s ‘you should still be there’. It’s a bit like in football, when you retire, you always secretly want the manager to say ‘come back, we need you for another year’.
“In football, the worst thing you can hear is ‘he stayed on too long’. Thankfully I got it right in life with all my life choices and I’m gone on my own terms and I haven’t stayed on too long.”
During his last appearance on the GAA show after the All-Ireland final between Galway and Kerry, Pat shocked fans when he broke down on live TV.
He said: “I cried because the All-Ireland reminded me of my father, he was a selector when Kerry played Galway. I had never cried in public before.
“My father was a Kerry football selector for the 1964 All-Ireland football final.
“He had a bad pain in the chest before, wouldn’t go to the doctor because he had to be in the dugout with Kerry for the match against Galway.
“And on Tuesday night he was dead from a massive heart attack. So it brought back awful memories of it.
“And you sort of say to yourself, ‘what if he looked after himself, if he’d been to the doctor that night, would he have lived to have see his sons play?’
FAMILY GLORY
“Myself, Tom and Mick won 19 All-Ireland senior football medals. He was a football fanatic and never got to see us play for Kerry.
“I think I’ve gotten more emotional as the years went on, maybe I’ve more time to think about family or think about things.
“And thinking about my own life, my future, my father, the past — it brings back great memories and sad memories.”
And Pat said it is only recently he realised that he has lost a lot of people around his own life.
He told us: “I played for the Kerry senior football team and three of our team are dead — John Egan, Paidi O’Se and Tim Kennelly.
“When you are footballers, you sort of feel a bit of an infallibility, ‘we’re fit athletes and we’ll never die’.
“When three of your colleagues are dead you start to think, ‘oh Jesus, it’s time to start thinking about myself and the next life’.
FACING REALITY
He added: “Death is a morbid thing to be talking about but it’s always better to be facing up to all the issues in your life rather than brushing under the carpet and leaving the problems for somebody else.”
Pat is an advocate for My Legacy, which encourages people to get their wills sorted now and leave behind a small donation to their favourite charity.
He said: “The message we are trying to convey is it doesn’t matter if you are wealthy, just to leave a donation of whatever you want, leave that legacy gift.
“There’s 80 charities on My Legacy and by giving a donation, it’s giving a sustainable future for charity.”
He added: “I’ve my will made and the Irish Cancer Society is my choice because I’ve a lot of close friends and colleagues that have died from cancer, so that’s my little way of giving to a good cause.”
- VISIT Mylegacy.ie for more info.
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