ASKED in the summer if his 21st appearance at Roland-Garros would be his last, French tennis player Richard Gasquet pondered aloud.
“I have no answer to that really. It’s month by month. It’s very hard to say or to know when you have to stop, so I don’t really know.”
He had been a professional for 22 years, 18 of them on the tour.
In that time, he’d won 16 titles, climbed to number seven in the world, but never achieved Grand Slam success.
That is how most careers go.
As it turned out, it was his last. He’d come up through the ranks desperately trying to find ways to beat Rafa Nadal. And even when he announced his retirement, the ghost of the Spaniard lay waiting.
Hours later, Nadal announced he was quitting, generating a hail of plaudit and praise.
It felt vaguely familiar on Monday when, just hours after Chrissy McKaigue announced his Derry career was over, Brian Fenton unexpectedly pulled out his own plug.
No-one will assess McKaigue’s career more honestly than he will himself.
One line jumped out of his interview with RTÉ’s Damian Lawlor, where he discussed the one-to-one man marking jobs that had become his forte.
“If I am being honest, in the last wee while I wasn’t winning as many of those battles as I once had.”
It took McKaigue time to grow into that skin.
In a different team, he might have become a very different player.
When the former St Patrick’s Maghera MacRory captain was breaking through, his height and athleticism marked him out to the extent that Sydney came calling.
He’d already made his championship debut for Derry as a half-time replacement for Liam Hinphey in the 2008 qualifier defeat by Monaghan.
A county with a proud tradition of tough man markers, by the time McKaigue returned in late 2011 there was a significant void. Kevin McCloy and Kevin McGuckin had retired and there was no obvious solution.
McKaigue spent his first three summers in the number three jersey. Tough summers. Short summers.
The most release he ever got was to six for a few years before being returned to the full-back line.
At club level, six was his natural fit. Ask 100 people to name the defining day of his career and at least 99 of them will tell you it was in a Slaughtneil jersey, kicking 0-4 off Diarmuid Connolly in an All-Ireland club semi-final.
Slaughtneil assistant manager John Joe Kearney told after the game how McKaigue had been worried about the man-marking job to the point of almost being disruptive in their Friday night meeting.
“I knew by the vibes of him that he was worried. I had a word with him, a one-to-one last night and told him for the first time in three years I had been involved with a team and experienced a bit of negativity from you as regards what you had to do,” Kearney said at the time.
“I said, ‘Why should you worry about Diarmuid Connolly? Let Diarmuid Connolly worry about you. You get an opening, you go for it. Put him on the back foot.’
“He obviously listened to my advice, because he had a great game today. To be playing an amateur sport, he plays it as a professional. That’s how he thinks, that’s how he behaves.”
Full-back didn’t place constraints on him so much as he placed them on himself. In his head, the most effective thing he could do was to shut down the opposition’s best forward. Above anything else, that was what he aimed to do in the successful later years.
You wouldn’t have thought when he breaking through that he would find his greatest joy, fulfil his potential even, in such a role. But it was just about winning.
“I’m at ease if I have zero possessions in a game, standing in the corner and we win,” he told the GAA Social podcast last year.
It would be easy to say he brought the professional traits home from Australia but the truth is he took them out there with him.
Gaelic football has been McKaigue’s entire life.
His day job is as Slaughtneil’s full-time Games Promotion Officer, having previously headed up school coaching projects in St Mary’s Limavady and Gaelcholaiste Dhoire.
He was jointly managing Desertmartin as far back as 2020 and has spent the last two summers coaching Ardboe alongside Gavin Devlin. They thought so much of him there as a coach.
And yet on the inside they will tell you that it has been a series of small personality adjustments that have helped bring out the performances that made him instrumental in Derry’s success over the last few years.
The hurt of losing big games weighed heavily on him but to place it in context, he spent most of a decade deeply frustrated with the direction Derry football was headed.
Getting out with so many others as they dropped to Division Four would have been the easiest thing in the world. McKaigue was one of those that stuck it out in those few years and were still there to see the fruits of it.
He played 49 of Derry’s 51 championship games, missing a qualifier with Louth and being rested for a group stage trip to Clare last summer. He was never a sub beyond 2009 and was only ever taken off once - this year when they were chasing the game against Donegal.
A deeply intense individual, it wasn’t that he eased off his own responsibility, but his mindset shifted.
He began to understand the importance of his role as a captain and the squad’s elder statesman in bringing others with him.
McKaigue was always a talker in the changing room but in more recent years, he’s developed closer one-to-one relationships with his team-mates.
Learned to talk to the younger players rather than talking at them.
Mellowed, even if only a fraction.
None of it changed what football meant to him.
Means to him.
This is a comma rather than a full stop. All things being equal, he’ll be Derry manager some day. Go on and lay your money on it.
When Darragh Foley quit Carlow after 15 years as their top-scoring forward, he referenced having no medals to show.
Had Chrissy McKaigue done like Fenton and walked away at 31, his treasure would have been no more than Division Two and Four league medals.
He admitted twice considering it right on the eve of their breakthrough - after losing to Donegal in 2021 and the league hammering by Galway in 2022.
Instead, at 35 he goes with two Ulster titles, an Allstar and league medals from all four divisions, a feat that nobody else in Gaelic football has achieved.
He might not have taken that in 2008 and part of him will be disappointed in 2024 that it doesn’t contain an All-Ireland but for most of the time in between, it’s so much more than he could ever have imagined winning.
Chrissy McKaigue’s championship stats
Debut 2008 v Monaghan
Games played 49/51
Starts 47
Mins played 3468/3670
Games missed Louth 2016; Clare 2023
Taken off Once v Donegal 2024
Scored 0-9
