Bennis road the way up to Limerick

Limerick v Waterford: Tom Humphriestalks to a manager whose passion for hurling and joy in living have worked a transformation in his county's fortunes.

Hey! Limerick back at the big dance, a county swatched in green and white jiving through hurling's syncopated summer. Every wallflower's conversation has a backbeat set by the happy speculations of the delivered faithful. If? Yeah! Perhaps? Yeah! Could we? Yeah! The bebop of it is a seductive deviation from the metronomic rhythm of rows, defections and managerial sackings that have soundtracked Limerick for so long.

And there's a bonus for the eyes as well! The beaming features of Richie Bennis and his uncomplicated passion for an uncomplicated and passionate game.

What a chastening and instructive moment that was for all of us! Seeing Richie throw his arm around Babs Keating after the second game of Limerick's three-song lurch with Tipp. With one gesture Babs was unwired and defused and we were all reminded that summer, or what passes for it, is for celebrating, for living and for hurling.

Limerick, so long the peripheral, one-note triangle players in the symphony of summer, have become something more hypnotic and central in this crowded season. Bennis has found a way of making his team express themselves in harmony and high fidelity under his lively baton.

They said it couldn't be done! For so many years Limerick have been riven by what we might call artistic differences, distracted by solo projects acted out in saloon bars and struggling to complete that difficult second album after those heady under-21 years.

Bennis appreciates this time more than most. For a start he is above ground and living it and breathing it. Three years ago illness pulled hard and late on him and a belt of septicaemia left him close to death. He was sick for 12 months - well, recovering for 12 months after a 10-week hospitalisation, most of which he scarcely remembers.

"You could chalk it down now," he laughs, "as something which has given me a different outlook on life. It takes a long time and I'll never be back to full fitness, but I'm grand. That doesn't worry me. I'm here!"

He's here. One of the symptoms of the condition which ambushed him is a feeling of impending doom. For someone who has come through septicaemia, a job managing the Limerick hurlers, a team whose doom always seems to be pending, scarcely looks like a healthy choice. But Limerick hurling infected Bennis's blood before anything else did and to this day nothing sets his pulse racing quite like it.

They nearly had the full 15 growing up in Patrickswell. Seven boys and six girls. They grew up in the lodge of a large mansion, a circumstance which seems to metaphorically reflect Limerick's standing in Munster. A lodge between the rolling estates of Tipperary and Cork.

The Bennis family lodge was fronted by a large, green space. They never had to cut that grass; the seven Bennis boys, a clatter of sisters and any neighbours with a mind and a heart for it played all their early hurling there. Sometimes, says Richie, with imaginary sticks and imaginary sliotars.

The Patrickswell club was then scarcely alive. Its records, he says, "could have been kept on the back of a fag packet". There was nothing at underage till under-16, and then just one match a year. Richie, the second-last of the boys, started playing for the club when he was 13, a local match against St Patrick's, and won nothing till he was a Limerick minor.

Imagination was a necessary tool then. All hurling is local and so too is hurling inspiration. He looked at Ger Casey, his lovely style suggesting the possibilities of the game. And later Tony O'Brien playing for Munster. They'd see him every St Patrick's Day on television and be proud to be loosely associated with a star from Patrickswell.

When he was 10 years old he saw his first Munster final, joining the great caravan of movement which cycled to the Gaelic Grounds to see Limerick play Clare. That year, as this, Waterford were good and rated and Limerick had beaten them in the semi-final. Clare though had Jimmy Smyth and had put paid to Cork and Tipperary, and on that Sunday in 1955 the people of Patrickswell travelled without much hope. Dermot Kelly cut loose for Limerick though. Mick Mackey trained the team.

It was the ideal baptism for a hurling fundamentalist, a man who would grow to have the breadth of imagination required to visualise Limerick as All-Ireland champions.

The following summer is, strangely, one he remembers more of. Strange but not entirely surprising in a man whose team has learned the precise value of every minute of 70.

They travelled to Thurles by train in 1956 to watch the boys play Cork. The Bennises were in thrall to their neighbour and distant cousin Donal Broderick, who had the task of marshalling Christy Ring that day.

"That was a big attraction for us. Donal played great until the last five minutes, when Christy went mad."

Limerick were 2-5 to 1-2 ahead but Ring scored 3-1 between the clearing of the fat lady's throat and her first notes.

"Heartbreak, but you wouldn't keep a good man quiet all day."

Ring scored 6-13 in that Munster campaign and Limerick's yearnings were put away. The next time they would play in a Munster final Richie would be down there on the field.

He was grown and working in the building game in 1971 and the consummation of Limerick's promise seemed imminent. He had been hurling with the county for half a decade and was a freetaker by then. Back in 1966 when Patrickswell, with six Bennis brothers playing (the seventh, Seán, married into the other side of the parish and hurled for Ballybrown), won their second successive and second ever Limerick title they went on to play Mount Sion in a Munster final. Jimmy Shields was having a rough day with the frees and Richie stood over a dead ball for the first time and just kept taking them thereafter.

In the league final of 1971, against Tipp, Bennis had scored a free with the last puck of the game to win the thing, and in Killarney later in the summer Limerick were confident their day had come. They had beaten Waterford and Cork on the road to Killarney and an 80-minute Munster final. They led by six points and could smell the good times when they went in for the half-time tea.

"At that time the dressingrooms were fairly open. At the break some individuals we had never seen prior to that came in clapping us on the back and telling us we were great. They were household names from the '40s. They came in. That happened and it shouldn't have happened.

"We were all on a high having beaten Tipperary in the league final and then playing so well in the first half. We thought we were on the way to an All-Ireland. We were sure of it."

The second half was crazy. It was Jimmy Doyle's last game for Tipp and he was taken off as Tipp went into a five-point lead. Limerick got up off the floor and levelled with five minutes left. Still their day?

"We got a goal that was disallowed. To this day we can't see why it was but that's the way things go. We got a free instead. We drew. They came along then and John Flanagan scored a point in the last minute. I scored 13 points that day and was still beaten.

"It was a fair wet day. It never stopped raining all morning on our way to Killarney.

"I remember every puck of the ball. I was on Len Gaynor. A good man. A nice civil man! He was fair, competitive, a good, honest, competitive hurler. We got carried away, thought we had it won. I'd say we nearly had a better team that year in 1971 than we had two years later when we won. At the end I just lay down in the mud and cried."

He stayed in Killarney for the week, holed up in the Fáilte Hotel at 25 shillings for bed and breakfast. Breakfast wasn't an option.

"I really drowned my sorrows. There was a good crowd of us stayed to do the same."

Next year had to be theirs but the county board did a foolish thing: they agreed to a toss of a coin, which ended in Limerick having to play Clare away from home in the old Ennis ground. Limerick suspected they were walking into an ambush.

Clare beat them by five points: "It was crazy. We thought it was all over then."

A chastened county board got its act together though. The great Jackie Power of Ahane (15 senior county medals to his name) was drafted in to manage the team. Mick Cregan, brother of Eamon, became trainer, They came back to train in February of 1973 and knew straightaway things were different.

"There were 20 sliotars at training. We always had one or two sliotars before that. If the county board was asked for 20 sliotars there'd be an inquiry. That was a year's supply! We did three nights a week in the Gaelic Grounds. Mick Cregan was an Army man. He had us fit, believe you me!

"We had never trained properly as such. There wouldn't have been that many laps. All sharp stuff. Good drills. It wouldn't have been out of place now, the stuff we did. Unknown things."

It was their time. Look after the practice and the luck will take care of itself. They were steeped to beat Clare by two points. They played a Munster final on one of the warmest days they'd ever hurled on. They scored six goals but Tipp scored a clatter of points. Nip and tick, touch and go, toe to toe.

Limerick were a point up, "and one of our players gave away a silly free. He tackled late. The referee gave the free from where the ball landed. Francis Loughnane put it over the bar and I said to myself this is a repayment from the Gaelic Grounds (the 1971 league final). I went into a throw-in then with Len Gaynor and I put down the hurley and caught the ball, went up the wing and gave it to Frankie Nolan. It ended up as a 70. The referee said it was the last puck of the game. I was the man that took it. Over the bar. We went on to win the All-Ireland."

Never a doubt in your head, Richie?

"No. Well not now anyway!"

Did you practise much?

"No. Never. I'd just walk up to it and hit it."

Would you recommend that to a young player?

"Gosh no! No! Never! I got away with it!"

They went on to win that year's All-Ireland, their first in 33 years. That was 1973 - 34 years ago now.

Last year when the train came off the rails Richie Bennis answered the call as interim manager. Eventually after much undignified toing and froing at county board level he took the job permanently.

"I wasn't sure I wanted it. When I got involved in the interim period I thought about it though. I'd never missed a match the whole time so I knew the potential.

"My name would have been put forward . . . A few players came and asked me.

"I talked with the family and they said you've always wanted it, go for it."

This year's league was a mixed bag but contained a turning point: a hammering from Kilkenny. One of those days teams often look back on as being strangely galvanising.

"I suppose I'd call it reverse psychology. Everyone blamed the managers in Limerick down through the years. I didn't mind a bit if I was blamed - it wouldn't cost me a thought - but the players were the ones who were losing out. We weren't going to win matches for them from the sideline. They have to do it themselves. They have to decide it.

"After the Kilkenny match below in Nowlan Park . . . we had a big meeting in the dressingroom. I told them they could blame Richie Bennis all they liked. I'd take the blame, but they still wouldn't end up winning anything. I told them they would have to get their act together, they would have to talk among themselves.

"They met on the Monday night and it grew from there. We didn't ask for any results of the meeting. I don't even know where they met; I never bothered to ask. I don't think we lost a match since. After they met among themselves we met again and told them what we expected. If they gave the commitment they were capable of winning. They never looked back."

This happy week he sees the multitudes returning to the love of Limerick hurling. Often when he talks to the team he mentions Munster rugby, the passion of the team. There is one difference, he reckons. Limerick hurling is a core passion.

"You have a different type of people. For the rugby a lot would be jumping on the bandwagon; it's a social event."

The routine this week has been the same as ever. Doing a few things around the place, as he says, thinking about Sunday with the passion of a fan and the acumen of a manager. Last night they met for a talk. He had no idea what he was going to say. Tomorrow in the dressingroom he doesn't know where he will begin either.

"I prefer to speak off the cuff, for it to come from the heart."

That's the template of Limerick's season so far. Richie Bennis and his shot of passion. One from the heart.