The men who kept the flame of Limerick hurling alive

The Limerick followers are getting ready to invade the ground. 1940 – that was the last time. It’s a long time ago. Croke Park will see scenes of jubilation that have seldom been seen after a hurling final. - Micheál O’Hehir, RTÉ commentary, 1973

“You’re late,” says Eamonn Cregan to Richie Bennis, not surprised. “You said 10 o’clock.”

“I said quarter past 10,” says Richie, squaring up to the jostle. “How could I be here at 10? Mass in Patrickswell is half-nine.”

Flaking away, not a ball in sight.

Malachy Clerkin: The GAA should make more of St Patrick’s Day - and more of its intercounty stars

---

Shefflin trying to devise a way for Galway to halt Limerick juggernaut

---

Munster CEO defends broadcast coverage of province’s hurling championship

---

Sports Review 2023: Murphy’s incredible reflex save showed hurling’s facility for the impossible

---

Sixty years ago they marked each other for the first time, a senior championship match. Bennis was 16, Cregan was a star Limerick minor. A bottle of spirits, moonlighting as water, was passed around the Claughaun players during a break in play, and Bennis was offered a neighbourly swig. After it sandpapered his throat he declined a second sup.

Bernie Hartigan is looking at them, smiling. Long friendships are shaped by degrees of separation. On the currents of everyday life, people drift. But 50 years ago a group of Limerick hurlers shared something that never left them. It became a room in their lives that was both public and private. In that space they pull up a chair and travel through time, landing softly in the same place.

***

Limerick were not serious about winning. Not then. They didn’t know how. When Bernie joined the senior panel in 1962, training commenced two weeks before the championship. When Eamonn was invited in for his first session a couple of years later, just four players turned up.

“Most of the time,” says Richie, “it would be nine or ten. We used to have a cup of tea or a glass of milk and a stale sandwich under the stand after training. The sandwich could be three or four days old.”

In the early 1970s, though, there was a germ of something. Joe McGrath was part of a new wave of GAA coaches who were innovative and tutored. A Down native, McGrath came to work in Limerick and fell in with Cregan’s club, Claughaun. They thought he was terrific and soon proposed him to be the Limerick trainer. In 1969 he was appointed, not just for the hurlers, but for the footballers too. He produced a five year plan, a manifesto for a revolution that bristled with optimism and targets.

McGrath made things different. He was demanding. Stuff that sounds elementary now caused tremors then. For winter training he requested lights for the Gaelic Grounds.

“Before he came along we used to train with two sliotars,” says Richie. “He looked for 12 sliotars and the county board nearly called a convention.”

In 1971 they won the league after 23-year hiatus, but blew an eight-point lead in the Munster final. A year later they beat Cork in the championship for the first time since 1940, but then lost to Clare, against all odds.

McGrath was the trainer, but he had no say in team selection. After beating Cork, only five Limerick players started the next game in the same position. At one stage Rory Kiely, the board chairman and one of the selectors, went onto the field to tell Eamonn Grimes he was coming off; Grimes refused to budge.

“He turned to him and asked who was coming on instead of him,” says Cregan. “Rory told him and Eamonn looked at him, ‘Feck off and find somebody else.’” Fourteen months later, Grimes was their All-Ireland winning captain.

McGrath was exasperated and infuriated. In a long interview with The Limerick Leader, a couple of months after the Clare defeat, he bemoaned how the business of the county team was being conducted. McGrath called for “a greater streamlining of authority”.

“The farcical situation and system which allows for a conclave of selectors to be needed is outdated and should be got rid of,” he continued.

A month later, McGrath received a letter from the county board informing him that his services were no longer required. It emerged that the five man selection committee had asked for him to be removed. The stink went on for months: on the floor of county board meetings, on the pages of the Limerick Leader, among the players.

For his terrific book, Limerick: A Biography in Nine Lives, Arthur James O’Dea excavated a letter from the Limerick hurling club in Chicago, expressing their support for McGrath.

“There was a strike. Present company included,” says Richie, looking across the table at Bernie.

A letter of protest was drafted and players were invited to sign it. Among the signatories were five regulars on the team, all of whom made themselves unavailable for selection: Bernie and his brother Pat Hartigan, Joe Grimes, Eamonn Grimes and Jim Hogan. When the National League resumed with a match against Tipperary, early in 1973, those players sat in the stand. Before the next game, though, the stand-off had been resolved, without McGrath being reinstated.

“Joe was a pure gentleman,” says Richie. “He was before his time. He hadn’t a clue about hurling but he knew how to manage. Only for Joe McGrath coming, we’d have won no All-Ireland. And if he stayed with us, we probably would have won it.

“There was no badness with fellas who were involved [in the strike]. They were genuine fellas. There was no animosity.”

“I remember a comment from Babs Keating that year,” says Bernie. ‘Ye were all fighting for ye’re lives because of the strike.’”

“You’re dead right,” says Richie. “It made us.”

Shortly after McGrath was deposed the county board approached Cregan’s brother Michael to train the team. An Army officer, and a PE instructor by training, he agreed only on condition that he would operate without interference. For a few years in the early 1970s championship matches lasted 80 minutes, putting a greater accent on fitness than ever before. The tortuous schedule of the sessions is burned in Eamonn’s memory.

“We started with a warm-up,” says Eamonn “Six laps, done to time, 55 seconds per lap. It you went above 55 seconds, you had to recover it in the next lap. Then we played a match for an hour, or an hour and a half. Then we went into the physical training. You did ten press-ups, eight tuck jumps, six squats and sprinted 80 yards. We did that 10 times. You’d be going grand for the first three. Jesus, it was cruel.”

At some point they started having steak after training in the Shannon Arms. They can’t be sure if McGrath negotiated it, or if the practice started in 1973, and they can’t remember rightly who funded it.

“It was the county board,” says Richie.

“No,” says Eamonn, “it was JP [McManus]”

“JP wasn’t there that time,” says Richie

“Hold on a minute now,” says Eamonn. “He was.”

“He had no financial input,” says Richie. “He hadn’t the money that time.”

“I know JP,” says Bernie. “He was a neighbour of mine [growing up]. He said to me, ‘If we win the All-Ireland, I’ll be a rich man’. He had a big bet with someone. That’s what he said.”

Though McManus was only 22 years of age, he was chairman of South Liberties. A year earlier they had won the senior championship for the first time in 82 years, which meant that the captaincy of the Limerick team was in their gift. Grimes was nominated. Pat Hartigan was a South Liberties player too, and so was Joe McKenna – an Offaly native who had declared for Limerick in time for the 1973 championship.

Eamonn says that McManus was in the Limerick dressing room before the All-Ireland final, and walked down the tunnel 20 yards in front of the team. In the bedlam of the winner’s dressing room afterwards, though, access was troublesome. By his own account, McManus spotted a high window and attempted a Steve McQueen manoeuvre.

“I had one fella on the outside giving me a push,” he said years later, “and another fellah inside the dressing room giving me a pull in.”

***

It was 33 years since Limerick had won an All-Ireland, or even contested a final. The long shadow of that team stole the light from generations of players that followed.

“We were fed up listening about Mick Mackey,” says Richie. “We were now, in fairness.”

“Mick Mackey said it himself,” says Eamonn. “He was sick and tired of people saying, ‘Mick Mackey’s team was a great team’. You know, there was pressure on us.”

In the lead-up to the final, hurling was the furthest thing from Richie’s mind. Their newborn, Dickie, was gravely unwell, and for a while they didn’t know if he would pull through. As the game drew closer Dickie’s condition stabilised, but the word flying around Limerick was that Richie wasn’t going to play. He left his decision open until the last minute.

On the Saturday morning, a day before the All-Ireland final, he spoke again with Dr Basheer, the specialist looking after Dickie. He assured him that Dickie was in no danger, and encouraged him to play. On the train to Dublin, though, an unconscionable rumour went through the carriages that Dickie had died. Richie confronted the source, who knew nothing except a story that she had heard from somebody else, in a chain of slippery gossip.

For peace of mind, Dr Basheer had given Richie his home number. As soon as the train reached Dublin, Richie called him. He called him again the following morning before breakfast. One of the selectors tried to talk to Richie about his state of mind, but by then he had resolved to play.

On the Saturday night he couldn’t sleep. A team-mate in the room next door was restless too, and Richie knocked on his door with a prescription: “’I’ll go down to the bar and bring back four pints,’ I said to him. ‘Two for you, and two for me.’

“I had four pints on a tray going down the corridor and who did I see only Tom Boland, the county board secretary, a teetotaller. If he saw me I’d have been deported. Where was I going to go? I backed into an alcove by a door and all of a sudden the door opened behind me. There was an old woman inside in the bed. I just said ‘Sssshhh’. I’d say out of dread she wasn’t able to talk.”

On a wet day in Croke Park Limerick won by seven points. In the second half they were utterly in command. Richie landed ten points, eight from frees; Bernie scored a peach of a point from under the Cusack Stand; Eamonn lorded it at centre back, switched from corner-forward in an inspired piece of strategy. The losing run was snapped.

Before this weekend, the current Limerick team had contested 12 finals, just like the Limerick team of the early 1970s. Between 1970 and 1976 they reached two All-Irelands, five Munster finals and five league finals. The difference was that they won just four of them.

“We had achieved nothing,” says Richie, “and we felt we were good enough to win something. Only for the bunch that was involved we could have thrown in the towel. But we should have won more.”

Eamonn doesn’t go to Limerick’s big matches now, or watch them on telly until he knows the outcome; his nerves won’t stand it. He washes the car until the result filters through. For decades the 70s team had cast the same shadow as Mackey’s crew, the years of losing building up like cholesterol in their veins: 45 tortuous years.

“We’ll never again see the likes of this team,” says Richie.

And they thought the waiting would kill them.