I was going to write an article about how Owen Mulligan opens up in his new autobiography about his upset at not getting as much as handshake from Mickey Harte when his Tyrone career finished but for me, Declan Bogue revealed a much more pressing issue in his piece on Mugsy in this week's Belfast Telegraph.
As a young boy, engrossed by GAA, Owen set about making him a set of goals. Telephone poles and 20 foot high steel posts weren't all that widely available in the Mulligan household so he found himself in a bit of a pickle.
Using the inventiveness and guile that we would come to see on the football field in years to come, Owen came up with a tremendous solution to his goalposts conundrum. He took two solid oak doors and nailed a crossbar to them.
Bogue writes:
'He had Eugene [his father] maddened another time when he mistook solid oak door frames for potential goalposts, drove nails into the crossbars, dug the holes and erected the most expensive goals in Ulster in the family garden.'
This great tale of ingenuity got me thinking about my own childhood, building goals out of broken pallets and using the netting for holding silage bales together as a goal net to try stop stray sliotars from getting lost the forest of leylandii trees behind my garden.
It took me two days to get make them and then my hurling playing days lasted all of an hour before I remembered it was no sport for a young Cavan man to be trying his hand at.
There are surely countless great tales from people about how they built their own goals and pitches around the house. Let's hear your stories:
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