Brilliant player should know he was ‘some hurler’

Yeah, as if there's any praise left. As if there's been a single thought unarticulated, even just one hosanna unsung since Tuesday afternoon when word filtered through that Henry Shefflin was to do that most un-GAA-playerly thing, call a press conference all by himself. Praise has been a bulldozer ever since, flattening, shaping, overwhelming all before it.

We do this with sportspeople and with almost nobody else, at least not while they’re alive to hear it. Actors, musicians, scientists, whatevers, whoevers – they all have to go off and join the choir invisible before they get their due. By which time, of course, it’s of limited use to them.

But we do it with the Shefflins, the O’Driscolls, the Keanes and the rest because praise is the one thing we can give them that they didn’t take for themselves. They spent their time in boots taking, always taking. This game, this win, this title. Someone else yearned it and they took it. Through talent, force of will, ruthlessness and wit.

And although praise is a constant companion through it all, they’re almost without exception too deep in the maw of it to really notice or care or place any more or less store in it than the bits of criticism that come their way. So when it’s all over, we praise lavishly – more lavishly, it must be said, than is often strictly deserved.

But we do it in the hope that they get it, that they understand in some small way that while they were playing a game, people who have never met them and never will were affected by them. Shefflin deserves to know that he meant something beyond the endless titles and medals and glory he brought to Kilkenny and Ballyhale – although that is what he holds dearest.

He was more than his 10 All-Irelands, 11 All Stars and three Hurler of the Year awards. He was more than his sport, even.

For all of hurling’s wonders, it is a game that just doesn’t exist across vast tracts of our country. Yet people who have never picked up a hurley stopped this week to praise Shefflin. They might not have known the finer pints of technique and craft and endurance and all the things that made him into the greatest of his kind but they knew enough to say enough.

"He was some hurler," said my Monaghan father down the phone on Wednesday when the news came through.

Praise indeed.