An almost two decade long inter-county career will always have many fascinating stories and anecdotes and it's no different for former Kerry star Tomas O'Se.
O'Se has been telling his story in The White Heat: My Autobiography and tonight on Off The Ball, he sat down with Joe and Wooly to reflect on his career.
Looking back on his early inter-county experiences with the Kindgom, he reminisced about the early teething problems on his debut against Cork in 1998 which elicited a negative reaction from supporters and how that helped him in the long run.
"I took an awful hit that year but I came back the following year better and I think it was brilliant that it happened early on. If it was going to happen sometime, you learn from something like that. I always had the attitude that you'd always learn on the bad days and you'd pick up stuff," he said, adding that the early setback "was a nightmare".
Wooly, Tomas and Joe
He also spoke about his idyllic beginnings in West Kerry and the central role football played in that childhood, and the way that unique existence early on benefited the fundamentals of he and his brothers' Gaelic football skill-sets.
And as he empahsised, things have changed from his own youth.
"If you look at the modern game now and they say 'how do you beat the defensive system', one of the ways would be to move the ball as fast as you can up the field and certain teams and certain inter-county players can't even kick the ball 40 yards accurately. I think players nowadays are afraid to kick it 40 yards because they work so hard to get it back," he said, emphasising how his brother and former Kerry team-mate Darragh O'Se was brilliant at those long kicks up the field.
He also had a tale about the way his uncle and Kerry legend Paidi O'Se reacted to Tomas' brother Marc damaging one of his cars by accident, and remembered the late Paidi as "great craic".
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