As we've written before, breaking into the Kerry senior team in the late 1980s was like arriving at a house party when everyone else was either conked out in the sofa or staggering into taxis outside.
That was Maurice Fitzgerald's fate. He made his Kerry debut in 1988, a year after Mikey Sheehy and Ogie Moran retired and it was only Pat Spillane and Jack O'Shea trying to keep the magic alive.
Several players were lost in the Bermuda Triangle of Kerry football, the time period which corresponds with the Charlton years, when Kerry won only one Munster title and didn't even reach the AI final in that year.
Morgan Nix, Timmy Fleming, Genie Farrell and Connie Murphy (who may well be the only Kerry player to win an All-Star but not an All-Ireland) all had the misfortune to play out their careers at that cursed era.
Last year, Mickey Ned O'Sullivan (manager between 1990 and 1992), Sean Kelly (county board chairman back then) and Stephen Stack (the only player to bridge the gap between the 1986 and 1997 All-Ireland wins) helped us get to the bottom of why this was such a lean period for Kerry. Read here.
Read more: Balls Remembers... Kerry: The Lost Years 1987 - 1996
In an excellent profile by Malachy Clerkin (read about here) in today's Irish Times, Maurice Fitzgerald explained how, in spite of his famously laid back demeanour, he became 'completely obsessed' with ensuring he didn't end his career without an All-Ireland medal.
When he first took the jersey, kicking 0-10 in his first Munster Final against Cork, he assumed he'd be playing in September before long. He was in for a nasty surprise.
You go into a Kerry jersey at a young age and you think it’s going to be All-Ireland finals every year. We lost an All-Ireland semi-final to Down in 1991 and I had this feeling that we’d be back the next year. But a few years flew by and we hadn’t done anything. It was only when Darragh and co came into it that I became completely obsessed with it.
By the start of his tenth season, Maurice Fitz had two Munster titles won (1991, 1996) and it was now a matter of urgency that he won an All-Ireland. They made sure 1997 was to be the year and never has one man so dominated the showcase. An adornment to an otherwise very drab final.
