"One of the outstanding achievements in Irish sporting history." That's how the defining moment of the sporting career of Michael "Iron Man" Murphy was described this week by cycling historian Tom Daly, author of The Rás, the story of Ireland's unique bike race.
Daly was recalling Murphy’s winning of the Rás Táilteann, Ireland’s premier cycling contest, in 1958. He competed again in 1959, winning two stages and in 1960, when he came third.
It was to prove an unlikely high point in a career of physical accomplishment. The sportsman also occupied himself as a wrestler, a professional boxer and a circus performer in a colourful life which took him away from his native south Kerry for most of his adult life, to England and Germany.
In recent years the legend of the "Iron Man", as he became known, was been celebrated in film and writing. There has been an RTÉ documentary, A Convict of the Road; a film made for the Killorglin Archive Society called The Marvels of Mick Murphy; a play based on his life by UK-based Irish writer and actor Roddy McDevitt, and, perhaps, a character apparently based on him in Jane Urquhart's novel The Night Stages.
Physical resilience
These accounts have focused on Murphy’s outstanding characteristic; his extraordinary physical resilience. But they also explore his eccentricity. Taking up cycling full-time only six months before the 1958 Rás, Murphy, who was raised on a small farm at Sugrena near Cahersiveen, defeated far more experienced athletes in the race. Moreover, he continued to ride despite breaking his collarbone on one of the stages, in Co Kerry, having to be strapped to his bicycle to continue the next day.
Murphy had had a fascination with physical fitness since his early teens.
Very much part of this was his training in circus arts by a neighbouring farmer and part-time circus performer, Joe Burke, who taught him how to juggle, walk on his hands, and balance a ladder carrying a boy on his chin. These and other skills, including fire-eating and sword-swallowing, Murphy used to use to raise money for his cycling when he gave up farm labouring to concentrate on the sport, appearing as a showman with circuses like Duffy’s and Fossett’s and in Cork city as a busker. To these were added the winnings – up to 30 shillings – which he won for cycling victories in the years before 1958. These winnings were not strictly speaking legal as Irish cycling was an amateur sport at that time.
His sporting obsession and the giving up of his farm labouring soured relations with his parents, however, and he had left home before competing in the Rás, never to return. Thereafter he lived in England in the 1960s, where again he competed as a wrestler, and, in the then well-known Ned Fletcher’s London gymnasium, as a small-time professional boxer.
From 1972 until 1980, Murphy worked on building sites in Germany, where he returned after re-unification in 1990 to work in the country’s east. It was a fall from scaffolding there, which saw him severely injured, which finally brought him back to his native Cahersiveen in the mid-1990s.
There, famously, he lived an ultra-frugal life on his late parents’ two-acre farm, without running water and with corrugated iron rather than glazing for windows. Tellingly, however, he did not forgo electricity, contrary to legend he did little to dispel.
‘Poetic licence’
This pointed to an essential part of his character, well-described by Tom Daly, who, in the research for his book, had become a good friend. Referring to Murphy’s early career in circus, Daly remarks that “he was really an actor, a performer, and he fell back into that role when he returned [to Kerry to retire] . . . He reverted to being a performer, with some poetic licence.” Viewers of
The Marvels of Mike
, that can be seen on YouTube, will note also his gentle demeanour and voice.
Daly, in reference to this theatricality, disputes Murphy's claim in A Convict of the Road that the great fellow-Kerry cyclist Gene Mangan had "begged" Murphy to allow him win a stage of the 1958 Rás, remarking that "Mangan wouldn't have begged anyone for anything."
In The Rás, Daly remarks that his temperament meant he "didn't fit comfortably into the discipline or etiquette of team racing and contributed little to team strategy or the needs of his team-mates."
An individualist to the last, he lived out his last years alone, refusing all assistance, still working out on home-made concrete weights in his self-made gym. Murphy never married, and, predeceased by a brother and sister, both of whom died in their teens, he is survived only by cousins.