“EVERY man has within himself the entire human condition.” - Michel De Montaigne There are days when it nags at him that the dice rolled his way, that he lived while so many others fell. Charlie Redmond loves life, he adores his three adult daughters, but there are times he finds himself impaled on a spear of survivor’s guilt and he wonders if it might have been better had the doctors not worked a medical miracle. They informed him later that only one in 1,400 who have walked his perilous road live to tell the tale. “Why me,” the old Dublin soldier finds himself asking in those moments when his heart is heaviest, “surely any number of others better deserved a second chance. “It was the same when Grainne died (Charlie has previously spoken with heart-wrenching eloquence about how a brain tumour stole his wife in 2016), I wished we could have swapped places, that she lived and it was me in the casket.” On the day he really should have left this world, Redmond had no idea that he was churning headlong into a mortal tempest. Just back from a Spanish golf holiday, the pain on his right side was little more than an irritant, insufficient to stop him nipping down to Ashbourne GC for a quick nine holes. By bedtime the discomfort had worsened, but it wasn’t until it woke him with a jolt that he realised the seas were rising dangerously around the low lying island of his life. “The pain was right across my abdomen and I knew I was in big trouble.” His daughter broke the speed limit on their dash to Connolly Memorial Hospital. Ciara’s urgency saved Charlie’s life. Ten minutes after arriving at A&E he collapsed. “I had an aneurism. And they didn’t really know what to do. They didn’t have the expertise or equipment there to sort me out. “They needed to transfer me, but they were unsure of whether I would survive the journey across from Connolly Memorial to Beaumont. After about three hours they decided I had to go, they had to take the chance.” From his years working as a paramedic, Charlie knew the layout at Beaumont as intimately as the dimensions of Croke Park. He knew if he was wheeled in through the curtains and took the first door on the left, he might never see the outside world again. They took the first left and he whispered a single four letter verdict to himself: “F**k” By this stage he was in unspeakable agony and begging the medics to knock him out. “I was in too much pain to worry that I might die. I just wanted relief. The pain was horrendous, beyond bearing.” The scrum of doctors - “there were eight, 10, maybe 15 of them” - working out a plan was such that it reminded Charlie of a pre-match huddle before an All-Ireland final. For a little under five hours in theatre, they battled to save his life. It was a very rare and almost always lethal bleed, in the pancreatic region. From the superior mesenteric artery, which arises from the aorta and supplies blood to the organs of the midgut. There were weeks of slow recovery in hospital, two major subsequent surgeries. That statistic that is tatooed to his mind: One in 1,400. “It has changed me. I know how close I was. Ciara wasn’t meant to be in the house that night, she was meant to be working. Had I tried to drive myself, I might not have made it. It makes you realise the things that matter and the things that don’t. “I’m not afraid of death at all now. There’s a slight bit of guilt that I made it through. Just like there was guilt that Grainne got cancer and I didn’t. I’d much rather I’d got it and she was here and I was gone. I’d have changed places with her in a heartbeat and I know she knows that. “So yeah, sometimes I think it might have been better if I hadn’t made it through.” But not for the first time in a life less ordinary, Charlie Redmond was given his marching orders, but declined to leave the field of play. He can’t believe 30 years have passed since the game for which he is most vividly remembered. The 1995 All-Ireland final. The day Paddy Russell sent him off, but Charlie played on. Three decades in the blink of an eye. A line from Joseph O’Connor’s novel, Shadowplay gets to the nub of the ticking clock’s pitiless and remorseless drumbeat: “Whatever happened? Where did it all go? That mad blazing time when we swirled the stars in the sky.” He’s laughing now, the sharpshooter with the famous free taking routine - three licks of the gloves, seven steps back, two to the left - who, long before Con or Fenton or James or Dermo or the Brogans, swirled the stars in the sky above Hill 16. A three-time Allstar, icon of the fallow years, a man born to adventure in summer’s tropical forests, the city’s helmsman-in-chief, a vital figure in keeping hope ablaze. King of the Hill. “I had a gang of lads from Galway come up to me recently. Mid-twenties. Not even born in 1995 and there they were asking me how I stayed on the field. People forget there were no red cards back then. I hadn’t a clue I’d been given the line.” He’d been a sub on the 1983 All-Ireland winning team - “The 12 Apostles” - but after so many near misses, beating Tyrone in 1995 made him feel whole. “Playing as long as I did for Dublin - 16 years up to 1997 - without winning an All-Ireland on the field of play, it would have embarrassed me. “Great, great players like Eamonn Heery, Ciaran Whelan and Niall Guiden missed out. But it doesn’t happen too often in the powerhouse counties that you play for that long without winning one on the field of play. “It would have asked questions about my character and ability. It would have been a stain on my character, something I would always have looked back on with shame.” At least, that’s how he felt before Grainne’s illness changed everything. More than eight years have passed - she passed in December 2016, three years after being given 18 months to live - but the shadow of grief endures. “You don’t expect to bury your wife in what should be the prime of her life. While her kids are still growing. “Initially, we didn’t tell our parents and my mother and her father died not knowing. It was bad enough telling her the kids, but telling her mother, an old woman...Jaysus.” Grainne fought heroically, but that infernal, rapacious disease would not be denied. “She was getting chemo every second week. It got to the stage where she couldn’t even get up to the chemo ward on the third floor of Beaumont. She couldn’t even make it up the stairs. “I said to her ‘it’s not worth your while coming in here anymore, is it’? “And she said ‘no, it’s too hard’. At this stage, she had only six weeks, two months left...” He’s 62 now. A natural storyteller, gregarious and generous with his revelations. An open book. We’ve been friends half a lifetime and as we sit in the Boar’s Head on a wintry Wednesday evening the memories flow as readily as the porter. They amount to something consoling and healing. We talk of the recently deceased Paddy Cullen: “A lovely man, full of joy. I always remember he told me not to be so hard on myself, because I was harder on myself than anybody else. Paddy cared about people.” About how a lifelong Celtic and Everton fan is now smitten by rugby: “I’ve fallen in love with it. The Six Nations is magic. There’s an honesty of effort in rugby that I don’t see in soccer, a sense of spectacle that Gaelic football lost over the last few years.” On GAA rule changes: “Jim Gavin has saved Gaelic football. The last few years were unspeakably awful. Unwatchable. The game hijacked by certain coaches. The changes are not perfect. But the immediate improvement is off the charts.” On hurling: “Last year’s All-Ireland final was the greatest spectacle I have ever witnessed in my life. I got very emotional watching it. Something that beautiful, something so quintessentially Irish. Ours. Oh my God, it was magnificent. The finest sporting contest I have ever seen. I just wish Cork had gotten a replay.” On Mayo: “Dublin, Kerry and Mayo kept football from flatlining. In the grim years, if you put any two of those three teams on the field and you got a compelling game. Jim’s Dublin team was in my view the greatest Gaelic football team ever. But Mayo went toe to toe with them time and time again. Draws, replays, epic battles. I know they haven’t won an All-Ireland, but, for me, they are one of the greatest teams of all time.” We talk about Brian Fenton, a midfielder who moved like liquid gold, as accomplished a footballer as Redmond has ever seen. And now, his weapons decomissioned. As Charlie shakes his head sadly, I’m reminded of Gay Talese’s celebrated essay on Joe Di Maggio — “The Silent Season of the Hero” — detailing the Yankee Clipper’s struggle to fill retirement’s unfillable void. “I played until I was almost 35 and when I stopped it left a huge gaping hole. I’d never second guess Brian. But if he had asked me what I thought of him stepping away at 30, still at the peak of his magnificent powers, I’d have screamed at him: ‘You are mad.’ “We only get a few years at this. I remember once sneaking away from a golf gig with the 1966 World Cup winner Alan Ball. Just the two of us over a few pints and he said, retirement never leaves you. It never does. You can’t get those years back.” But imagine, for a moment, he could. I ask Charlie to suspend reality, offer him the chance to smash through the walls of time, to transport himself back to one game, one moment. “What a great question,” he says, and behind his eyes, I can see his mind scrolling across the years when he was a lead man in the fellowship of the frustrated. “It has to be 1994.” The missed All-Ireland final penalty. He had scored one against Kildare, going to the goalkeeper’s right. Knowing Down would have done their homework he practiced all week going to the other side. Then, at the last minute, he reverted to type and Neil Collins saved. “I’d love that kick again. I’d pay a lot of money for another chance. Neil told me afterwards he expected me to do what I did. Why didn’t I go down the middle. Ah...” Sometimes it’s a relief to imagine himself alive. “My daughters are doing great. They are amazing, strong, kind women. My own parents worked two jobs to give us a chance. Family is everything. “Life has been bloody good in so many ways. As I get older, the days in that blue shirt mean more and more.” He can’t drive by Croke Park without looking over and remembering that used to be his playground: “I look at that towering stadium and think, ‘I got the chance to represent my family, my city. I was in there once. A Dublin shirt on my back. I was blessed” Maybe it is the streaks of rain as he walks into a frigid Capel Street night, but, young again, I’d swear I saw the trace of a tear forming in the great man’s eye. Get the latest sports headlines straight to your inbox by signing up for free email alerts.