THERE are many stories about Mark Vaughan doing the rounds in Dublin. Most of them are lies, some of them are true. This one's true. Mark got into an altercation with a Monaghan player during a challenge game and told him that since he was British, why didn't he skip back to the mainland. All before, naturally enough, Mark was given a quick geography lesson and told to go back to school.

Then there's the one about him two years ago on the team bus on the way back from a bruising league game in Tralee, when he was congratulated by his teammates for physically standing up to Seamus Moynihan. Vaughan's famous response was, "Which one was Moynihan?" Again, it's true.

My personal favourite is just before his full championship debut for Dublin against Wexford in 2005. Mark had done some research on the upcoming opposition and sidled up to Ciaran Whelan in training the week of the game to ask him were Waterford any good and that he had heard Paul Flynn was playing well. The look on Whelan's face must have been priceless. Wrong county, wrong province, wrong code; what was this young fella on?

But that's Mark. Cheeky yet innocent. All talk and all action. Man of the world yet just a wide-eyed open kid. The man possibly most likely to lose the rag in Croker today, yet the player most likely to drill a last-minute free over the bar from 50 yards, ice running through his veins.

That's a lot of contradictions, I know. I've had the pleasure of playing with him, albeit while I was descending the stairs of my career and Mark was taking the elevator the other way.

And yet I still can't figure him out and I think I'll die trying.

He's infuriated me and countless teammates. He's thrilled us and saved us. Sometimes I've envied him. Often I've felt for him.

Ultimately I like him. But, God, at times does he try his best for you not tof The first time I had any dealings with Mark was when he was wing forward on the under16s I was coaching out in the club in Kilmacud. You'll hear people now say even then he was earmarked for glory but that's just not true. He was energetic alright, but he was wiry and raw and all that made him stand out was his shock of red hair and natural pace.

He was only back playing football about a year at the time. He didn't come from the St Laurence's Kilmacud nursery or attend any of the traditional GAA feeder secondary schools.

He came from a rugby school, the famous Blackrock College, and his father, Cliff, was a rugby man, playing for Terenure, even if Mark didn't really take to that game himself. Soccer was Mark's game. No sooner had he joined our club as an under-14 when he was gone again, unable to make either an impression or that under-14 team. The only reason he rejoined the Crokes was to keep in touch with friends who had left the soccer to concentrate on GAA.

Gaelic was almost social; soccer was his passion.

When Blackrock reached the Leinster schools' under-17 final, they were trailing 2-1 deep into injury time when Mark won a penalty which he took and scored. Then he took it upon himself to go into goal for the penalty shoot-out and save two penalties before converting the winning spot-kick himself.

It was about another year after that before he started to make such an impression in Gaelic. By then he'd had the privilege of some intensive coaching by Mick Jones and Pat Duggan and had gradually transformed into a strapping, bustling forward with an eye for goal. By now too the black boots and red hair had been replaced by the white boots and bleached hair, with a blue dyed streak running down the top of his head. He still looked like a soccer player playing Gaelic but his potential by now was undeniable.

Within two years he was the main man of the senior team, so important the club famously appealed a suspension of his to the DRA and High Court. Personally, I felt uncomfortable about the lengths the club went to for him to play that year; I mean, he had been sent off in his previous championship game. And I know that if I was the player who in effect had held up that championship for three months, I'd be mortified. But Mark? Not a bother to him. He might have held up that championship but he ended up dominating that championship.

That's where I envy him. I was one of those countless players who had an all too brief spin in the revolving door that was Dublin football in the pre-backdoor late '90s, and maybe it was so brief because I was too analytical a footballer. I'd say to myself, "Christ, Mick, you haven't done anything for 10 minutes here." If I missed a free in championship, I might say, "I'll be waiting now another 10 months for that free." I was always looking over my shoulder. Mark doesn't give a fiddler's. If he shoots three wides in the first five minutes, it won't bother him. He'll just go again.

Going into the replay against Meath, you had commentators all effectively saying that Mossie Quinn, for all his difficulties, should be kept on the frees because Vaughan was too volatile. Mark would have been made aware of that, and then he went and missed his first free that day. A lot of people would have folded at that point. He just went and kicked a sideline ball Maurice Fitzgerald would have been proud of, and then another seven points.

In the 2005 county final, Enda McNulty blew him out of it in the opening 20 minutes, but then Mark got a point and then a goal, after which he pointed to the scoreboard and then to Enda before pulling down his eyelids to shed mock tears for him. On the Dublin club scene there's a line of defenders in the county only praying for a cut at him. But Mark doesn't play league games and anyway, he's big and strong enough to be safe enough with whatever they do throw at him.

He's also familiar with the other kind of Dublin club scene. His bleached head can be regularly spotted in night spots such as Club 92 and Copper Face Jacks despite picking up a fractured cheekbone when minding his own business in that establishment the night of last year's All Ireland semi-final defeat. In the past his "refuelling" definitely affected his performances but these have been curtailed.

Dublin is a small town and if Vaughan doesn't produce the goods today you can be sure there are people out there who will claim to have spotted him declaring he was the Tony Soprano of Dublin in a nightclub only days before today's game.

But as long as he produces the goods it doesn't matter if he avoids the hermit lifestyle at this stage of his career. You can see it in his chiselled features and his sculpted upper body that he's supremely fit. At his age you can burn the candle at both ends. It might mean he may have fewer years at the top than, say, a Jayo or Brogan, but it's now part of his selfimage and how Vaughan sees himself helps define his football.

The thing is, while he has a wild streak, he doesn't have a nasty streak. He's not a trouble maker. Off the field he hardly has a bad word to say about anyone. Sure, he might talk louder than anyone in the room, but often he leaves himself open for being the one to take the slagging instead of being the one to dish it out. Behind the brashness and bleached head is still that quiet, awkward 15-year-old redhead who struggled to make his club team.

When it comes to football though, there's no inhibitions, no respect. Sometimes the pair of us would stay behind to practise our frees and have a little competition among ourselves.

"Move over, old man, " he'd laugh, or "Jaysus, Mick, your boobs are beginning to sag in their old age!" And then he'd start on the 13-metre line, from the sideline. Boom! Over the bar. The more impossible the angle, the better he got.

No inhibitions, no respect.

Sometimes he was a nightmare to play with. A few years ago, I was playing 13, he was in the corner at 15, and Mark would be having a war of words and elbows with his marker. I'd say to him, "Mark, listen, they're only trying to bring you down to their level. Keep moving.

Run across the pitch instead of going out in a straight line. You have all this pace and power so be clever and use it to the full." And either Mark would say "Well, I want the ball over the top", or he'd just nod and it would go in one ear and out the otherf In Kilmacud he is a hero now, a virtual untouchable where he will never be dropped or taken off. The thinking there seems to be, his raw talent shouldn't be neutered and that his unpredictability is his genius. Perhaps they are right? Perhaps with coaching he could become even better?

There were times he needed sterner management. He was let do what he wanted before the AIB All Ireland club semi-final in 2006. I'd say he trained maybe four times in the eight weeks before that game, he always had a sore back or sore something. It didn't impress the senior players, yet his place was never in jeopardy. Come the game itself and his lack of sharpness was painfully evident and his frustration led to a red card that ultimately cost us that game against Salthill.

What he needed then was a strong hand but then getting the balance right with Mark is always a delicate exercise.

That's where Paul Caffrey deserves a lot of praise, even if it may not be sexy to do so these days. Pillar could have washed his hands of Vaughan and on one occasion, came very close to doing so. Mark was taken off in a league game, and rather than stay around in the dressing room for Pillar's stern postmortem, he was already in the team bus, sulking. He wasn't on the team bus for the next away trip the following weekend. Yet Pillar went back to him. Deep down he knew Vaughan could be the difference between winning and losing.

Mark has bought into the professional ethos of the squad and its 'one for all and all for one' ethic. Occasionally Caffrey has turned a blind eye to his excesses. Other times he's got Mark to apologise to the squad, but in all Caffrey has handled and played his wild card and wild child skilfully.

The players have taken to Mark too. Sometimes they quietly disapprove of his escapades, but they realise he's changed and improved and that ultimately, like Caffrey, that he may be the difference between winning and not winning what they're all after.

The Hill is also warming to him. He's a reluctant hero to them in ways, more Ross O'Carroll-Kelly than Jimmy Keaveney or Vinny Murphy, but they now appreciate what he brings to the party, that football would be a duller place without him and his swagger and white boots and bleached hair.

He thrills people and he annoys people. And that's just his teammates.

But I'm glad I was one of them, and deep down, so do 14 other guys in Croke Park today too.

Mick O'Keeffe is a former Dublin and Kilmacud Crokes player

VAUGHAN ON. . .

HIS IMAGE
"I have nothing against people who say 'Ah he's just a showman.' At the end of the day you have to have something to show to be a showman and I feel I have something to give the game. I'm not out there to show off, I'm more out there to win things.

"Because I have so much confidence, people think I'm showboating. If I'm playing well, I do strut my stuff but I feel that if you can talk the talk, you might as well walk the walk. If I'm playing well, that's just the way I go. There's nothing I love more when a crowd starts jeering at you and you come off the pitch with 1-5."

CHAMPIONSHIP
"I can be a bit lazy in the running department in training but just give me the ball.

"Any championship game, I live for. I'm no good in league games because I don't really have the passion for them. I absolutely die going out in the championship.

Championship is pretty much what it's all about for me."

HIS DISREGARD FOR REPUTATIONS
"To be honest, when I started training with Dublin, I knew about three guys out there. I wouldn't even be able to name many players off inter-county teams.

"I'd be marking some guy and someone would say to me afterwards that he was an All Star from two years ago. I wouldn't even know he was playing for an intercounty team."

All quotes taken from November, 2005