“There was always that thing as the youngest, looking up to your big brothers, and then a week later he was gone. Every day after that, it was ‘right, I’m going to continue to make him proud’.”
Kevin Hughes always wanted to make his brother proud. Five years his junior, Kevin looked up to Paul as both a footballer and person.
As young footballers in Tyrone, they had a healthy sibling rivalry, as sporting brothers often do.
Kevin would go on to achieve his ultimate dream, helping Tyrone win their first-ever All-Ireland title in 2003, putting in a man-of-the-match display in the final against Armagh.
But that journey to his finest hour at Croke Park was shaped by immense loss.
In 1997, Paul was killed in a car accident near Ballygawley. He was 22. In 2001, Kevin’s 24-year-old sister Helen died in another car accident on the same stretch of road close to their home.
Such tragedies would be enough to steer one away from football. But speaking on The GAA Social, Kevin spoke of how he used football as an outlet during the darkest times in his life and how he set out to make his brother proud every time he pulled on a Tyrone jersey.
“Growing up, we were typical Irish brothers,” recalled the Killeeshil St Mary’s club-man, who won his second All-Ireland with Tyrone in 2008.
“He was five years older than me. In a football sense, he would’ve been very sore on me. Everyone was the same back then. ‘Ah you could’ve done this, you could’ve done that. This was done well but this could’ve been done better’.
“It was always [about] looking up to him. He had played for Tyrone Vocationals and my older brother John had two years with Tyrone minors. That’s what really whetted the appetite for me, to have that drive and hunger to reach that pinnacle and the stubborness in me to be like ‘ah I done better than you’.”
While Kevin’s time with Paul was cut short, he got to share a loving moment with him shortly before his death, one that had a lasting impact.
“You can talk about fate or whatever, but we drew with Kerry. I came on at half-time and had a pretty decent second half. We drew that game.
“All the Killeeshil lads were all for staying down on the Saturday night. Paul, a friend of mine was telling me, had to get up the road, wanted to get up the road to see me. The bus dropped me off at Quinn’s Corner. I got off the bus in the car park, Paul came over and gave me a big hug.
“He said, ‘I’m proud of you our boy, proud of you’. That was the first time he’d ever said it. There was just that sense of ‘eventually’.
“There was always that thing as the youngest, looking up to your big brothers, and then a week later he was gone. Every day after that, it was ‘right, I’m going to continue to make him proud’.”
Kevin certainly did that. A year after Paul’s death, Kevin won an All-Ireland minor title with Tyrone and also collected two All-Ireland Under-21 winning medals before playing a key role in the Red Hands’ first Sam Maguire triumph in 2003.
Kevin recalled times when he’d “burst into tears” thinking about his brother and sister and how it would hit him like a “ton of bricks” after days of not thinking about it.
But he always knew that Paul and Helen would have wanted him to persevere with football and enjoy his life as much as possible. After all, that’s how they lived theirs.
“You have to get on with it or you’ll become a shell of the person you were and your brother and sister wouldn’t want to see that,” he said.
“Look at the life they lived in a short space of time, look at what Paul done for our football club. Helen as well, with the relationships we had with her and what everyone thought of her.
“You have to live on for them. That’s what I kept telling myself when we’d have a wedding or whatever, ‘I’m going out to enjoy this because who knows what’s around the corner’.”
‘McAnallen death brought Tyrone closer together’
Kevin’s Tyrone career was touched by tragedy, too. In June 1997, his Tyrone team-mate Paul McGirr died after accidentally colliding with a goalkeeper during an Ulster Minor Championship match.
And in 2004, Tyrone and the wider GAA community were rocked by the sudden death of Red Hands captain Cormac McAnallen.
Reflecting on McAnallen’s passing, Kevin said it reminded him of the fragility of human life.
“Cormac McAnallen was at the absolute peak of his fitness. His lifestyle, everything about him. He was a role model to all of us young lads and he’d just become captain of the Tyrone seniors at a young age.
“He was at the peak of his powers in every sense. His career, he’d just started at St Catherine’s teaching for a few years. His football, lifestyle, everything. You think ‘well, if he can be taken, what hope have the rest of us?’
“It was a very different loss and a different form of trying to get over it because we’d gotten over the one with the football and the tragedy of the car accident. As hard as that is, it was a car accident. But this just didn’t seem right with Cormac.
“He was fit as a fiddle, seemed to be on top of his health so it was really hard.”
Asked by 2002 All-Ireland winner Oisin McConville – who played against Hughes for Armagh in the 2003 final – if McAnallen’s death strengthened the bond between the Tyrone players, Hughes said it did and also encouraged the players to use football to lift the spirits of a grief-stricken county.
“It definitely brings the group tighter together, without a doubt.
“In the ’98 minors, the Omagh bombing happened. Now thankfully none of the players had anyone in their immediate family caught up in it but everyone knew someone in it. That was just another one.
“It was that stage, ’97, ’98, you just think ‘is this the way it’s going to be?’ But it definitely brings you closer together.
“It was all based around the tragedy that has happened throughout our playing career. For that whole group, the common denominator was football.
“It kept us going. Outside of the players, the families and communities, it gave all of them a lift as well. We took all that on, to try and keep morale high when there is so much tragedy happening around us at that period of time.”