Blessed days, real heroes and the cycle home

FROM THE ARCHIVE: TRIBUTE TO BRENDAN Ó hEithir:This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Breandán Ó hEithir, one of the most influential GAA writers of the last century. In this article, from The Irish Timesof Saturday, September 3rd, 1977, the day before the All-Ireland hurling final between Cork and Wexford, Ó hEithir explained just how much the game meant to him

THE ALL-IRELAND hurling final of 1939 will always be remembered as “the thunder and lightning” final. The elements gave a fitting welcome to that morning’s declaration of war and bangs and crashes, punctuated Mícheál O’Hehir’s commentary, as we sat with heads inclined towards the radio in my Aunt Annie’s kitchen in Inis Mór.

It was doubly difficult to follow the game, for the kitchen was full of old women who had come to hear news of the war and who moaned and prayed and sobbed at each peal and flash. I don’t remember much about it apart from the fact that Kilkenny won by a point, but I can still see the women and smell their sodden shawls. I couldn’t comprehend their grief, for at the age of nine a world war seemed a far more exciting prospect than even an All-Ireland final.

The following year my father took me to Dublin and while shopping in Clerys, he was offered two Cusack Stand tickets for the following day’s final between Limerick and Kilkenny.

It seemed too good to be true and I spent the night worrying that he would lose the tickets and that the two of us would be standing outside Croke Park, listening to the roars of the crowd and pleading in vain with stony-faced officials. But all was well and I had my first look at some of the great ones: the Mackeys, Mick and John, Dick Stokes, Paddy Scanlon, Paddy Clohessy, Jim Langton, Paddy Grace, Jimmy O’Connell and the others who had previously been names on Mícheál O’Hehir’s lips or smudgy photographs on the sports pages.

I got into the swing of Croke Park in no time at all and took issue with a large priest from Kilkenny, who was sitting behind me. He took grave exception to a stroke which felled Jack Gargan and roared “The line! The line!” at the referee and Paddy Clohessy simultaneously. In a manner too adult for my years and for his level of tolerance, I told him that it was an accident and voiced concern for his eyesight. I got a dig of an umbrella from the priest and was warned by my father to keep my eyes on the field and my mouth shut.

But I had the last laugh as my favourites, Limerick, won by a clear two goals. And I often thought of that great Limerick team during that county’s lean years. It is hard to believe that they had to wait 33 years for their next All-Ireland victory.

There was no tradition of either football or hurling on the Aran Islands. My interest in games was awakened at an early age by my father, a Clareman, and nurtured by radio commentaries and by reading "Green Flag" in the Irish Press. Aran was much more remote then than now and the war reduced our only regular service to Galway to two sailings a week: weather and other circumstances – such as the availability and quality of the coal – permitting. But after that first glimpse of an All-Ireland, it was easy to transport oneself to Croke Park with a bit of imagination and the ever-so-important radio commentary.

And it wasn’t until the summer of 1945 that I saw my next big match, and that was the All-Ireland semi-final between Galway and Kilkenny in Birr.

GALWAY CURSE

It is necessary, at this stage, to dwell on my county allegiance and the fortunes of the Galway hurling team. I consider the Galway team of the forties and early fifties to be one of the great ones that never succeeded in winning an All-Ireland. In 1944 in Ennis, this team was beaten by a single point by the greatest Cork team of modern times, which won four All-Irelands in a row. To make matters worse, the winning point was disputed as the referee had previously blown for a free.

Galway had no luck in these matters, as those of you who remember last year’s semi-final against Wexford will recollect. According to local folklore, this bad luck came as a result of a curse laid by a parish priest in south Galway in times gone by. It seems that he rounded on a group of hurlers who were leaving Mass early to travel to a championship match. He prophesied that the Galway hurling team would be forever like Moses on the borders of the promised land; almost there, but never arriving.

My father and I left the island on a Friday, cycled to Birr on Saturday and spent the night there. The match was one of the hardest and best that I have ever seen; it was also the most heart-breaking. At one stage Galway led by seven points, but Kilkenny crept back and Jim Langton equalised. Then Galway gave away a free and Langton hit the winning point.

In those years the roads were always full of groups of men cycling to and from matches on a Sunday and it was in one of these groups, somewhere between Portumna and Loughrea as night fell on our sad journey west, that I first heard the story of the curse. In the circumstances it was easy to believe. We swore we would never again follow the Galway hurlers.

WASHED OUT

The following year we cycled again to Birr on the Saturday before the semi-final against Cork. We woke on Sunday to find the rain coming down in heavy, grey sheets. There wasn’t a breath of wind, and it was sultry.

This day is still remembered in Birr because of the ton or so of sandwiches that went stale for lack of custom and had to be thrown away. Towards the end of the game I was glad of the torrent, because it concealed the tears of rage and disappointment that flowed as Galway took a hammering. They could only score three points and were beaten by 13.

And as we cycled back to Galway, with backsides scalded by wet saddles, we talked about the curse and vowed . . . never again.

And again in Birr, the following year, we again went down by a point to Kilkenny, who then went on to beat Cork by a point in the final. I watched that match from Hill 16, holding my brother on my shoulders for the whole of the second half when the swaying crowds frightened him. It was a whale of a second half too and the winning point was struck from in front of us. The scene can be re-run at will, as indeed can a hundred others, as Terry Leahy got one chance and took it with the iron nerve of a professional golfer.

It seemed that Galway’s role was, in the words of the sub-editors in the local paper, to be “glorious in defeat”. It was no compensation at all for the victory, which we are still awaiting. If only someone would lift that curse . . .

County loyalty apart, it was that match in Birr in 1945 that convinced me that I was watching the greatest field-sport of all and although my interest in sport has deepened and broadened since, time has merely reinforced that opinion. Time also revealed the lore of hurling and the fraternity of hurlers, old and young. I remember seeing what must be the shortest hurling match in the history of the GAA in the Sportsground in Galway, in 1947.

Our school team had been beaten by St Jarlath’s, Tuam, in the curtain-raiser and as we rushed out of the dressingroom to watch the West Board hurling final between Liam Mellows and Castlegar we met the hurlers coming in. Some of them looked as if they had come from a faction fight. We were told that the ball never got past midfield but that was not the important fact, as far as I was concerned; what I wanted was the background, and during four years as a student in Galway I got plenty of that.

Daniel Corkery wrote a much-quoted passage in The Hidden Ireland about looking about him during a hurling match in Thurles and thinking that nobody had written about these people as HG Wells had written about the kind of people who would be at a soccer match in England on a Saturday afternoon. It is true to say that although sport plays an enormous part in everyday life in Ireland, it plays very little part in Irish fiction.

It is hard to see why this is so, but having used the effects of a local hurling match in a novel of my own to illustrate a rather obvious point I can tell of the reaction of one critic. This man, who carries his sensitivity like a flag, said that he couldn’t figure why there was all this talk about bloody hurling!

Although I never hurled myself, in any real sense, I have studied the game all my life and have spent countless hours discussing it with players and ex-players in all parts of Ireland where the game is played: a much tinier area than those who think in terms of county boundaries realise.

One of the most memorable of these discussions occurred on the night we joined the Common Market, when I was one of a group that listened to the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, talking hurling. I have never heard anyone to equal his lyrical description of how the texture of sod and grass changes from spring, to summer into autumn.

He was one of the great ones, and I was lucky enough to have seen him in his prime. I notice that he has his own special entry in The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games where his political as well as his sporting achievements are noted. I was also lucky to have been chosen to write the commentary for Louis Marcus’s Christy Ring. When I say that it was one of my most memorable experiences, I am merely stating a fact.

Christy Ring uses words with great economy and in a very vivid way and he describes hurling actions with scientific accuracy. He spent almost a week explaining the educational sequences in the film to me and I can still remember some of his phrases and descriptions. For him, the great hurler is the “hurler who can inspire his side to victory when their backs are to the wall”. He has no time at all for the stylist who gives an exhibition when “they are going down-hill with the wind behind them”.

Hurling is a tough game and a highly-skilful one, and it is one that calls for heroes. Ring was the outstanding example of the man who could win a game off his own stick when all seemed lost.

All-Irelands are emotional occasions and there can have been none more so than the final of 1954, when Christy Ring won his eighth All-Ireland medal and was shouldered off the pitch by Wexford players. And if I were asked to name the team that gave a new impetus to hurling during my own lifetime, I would immediately nominate that same Wexford team. It was their stature that first amazed us, allied as it was with a rare sportsmanship.

And again, when one thinks of Wexford one thinks of the Rackards (and particularly Nicky), Tim Flood, Ned Wheeler, Nick O’Donnell . . . the whole team now that I come to think of it! And one remembers stories of what went on in “Hell’s Kitchen” (a southern nickname for the Tipperary goal area when John Doyle, Michael Maher and Kieran Carey formed the full back line) when the Cork, Waterford, Clare or Limerick forwards crashed in under a falling ball. And one could go on and on and on.

Eamon de Valera once said that he thought two games in particular suited the Irish temperament: hurling and rugby football. He knew what he was talking about for he played both and there was a lot of wisdom in that remark. Hurling certainly calls for such a variety of skills that a really fine exponent has to be born with it and reared to it. It also gives an outlet for natural wildness and physical courage, married to a Spartan dedication and control. It is poetry and it is madness.

THE TEAMS

Tomorrow’s game has all the necessary elements needed to ensure a great All-Ireland. Both teams are skilful and fit and excel in open play. They have, since the early fifties, built up a great tradition of rivalry which never degenerated into violence and spite; the famous Battle of New Ross quickly became a subject for laughter.

Wexford have the edge as far as heroes go. Cork don’t have a Tony Doran, a man who doesn’t think of personal risk and can carry a team on his broad shoulders. The Quigley brothers are creating their own traditions and the Wexford supporters are the most loyal in the land.

The Cork jersey is, for me at least, the most magical of all. This may be due to memories of Lynch and Ring and Willie John Daly and it may not, but the red and white against the green of Croke Park is All-Ireland day for me. This particular team may be short on outstanding characters, but Ray Cummins and Jimmy Barry-Murphy are big by the Lee and Gerald MacCarthy is as good a ground hurler as one could wish to see.

When All-Ireland day approaches, I always recollect a remark of Brendan Behan’s to an evening paper who rang him for a comment on a proposal to name some park or other after the late President Kennedy. Behan said he didn’t give a damn, or words to that effect, that as far as he was concerned there was only one park . . . Croke Park.

I will think of him tomorrow when the minor match is over, when the Artane Boys are lined up in front of the Cusack Stand, when all eyes are on the two tunnels to pick out the first glimpse of purple and gold and crimson and white . . . and that shattering roar that will follow and the masses of flags.

OUR OWN GAME

This is all very emotional and sentimental, I will be told, for after all it is only a game. That is also true, but for me there is no finer game, nor is there a game more daring or skilful. It is truly our own and there is no need to be solemn about it.

The only thing I would worry about is its future and its seeming failure to take firm root outside its traditional area. But tomorrow will prove it is alive and well, in three counties at least, and while the senior game will attract the greater attention perhaps the minors of Kilkenny and Cork will provide the more spectacular hurling.

The minors (and indeed the Artane Boys) look a lot younger to me these last few years than they did in 1940, but one’s emotion hasn’t changed or dimmed in 37 years: Croke Park is still the only place on earth I want to be on the first Sunday in September. . . but could somebody do something about that curse!