Blessed with a sense of perfect timing

Leinster SHC Final: Tom Humphriescharts the slow but steady rise to national prominence of Kilkenny's richly talented and inspirational captain, Henry Shefflin

The man who is king refuses to carry himself through this world as anything other than a jack. Henry Shefflin walks into the lobby of the hotel and greets, of all people, George O'Connor, who has spun out, all tanned and dapper, from a wedding in the bowels of the place. Henry recalls where he and George last met, chews the fat as passers-by rubberneck - hey, your man with Henry, is that . . .

Then with a diffidence that borders on the apologetic he asks the receptionist for a room in which an oul' interview might be conducted, but before she reaches full fluster he decides the bar will do fine. Will you be mobbed in there, Henry? He gives a whistling sort of laugh laced with derision. Mobbed! What a thought!

You shrug and follow him wondering what life would be like if your own shelf groaned with six All Star awards, four All-Ireland medals, a clean sweep of Hurler of the Year awards both from last year and from 2002 plus the bauble that goes with being the current RTÉ Sports Personality of the Year.

You imagine what life would be like and what you would be like, living here in Kilkenny in Hurling Central, if your dominion had stretched by now to the club championships and your responsibilities had been extended to include the captaincy of the game's most successful franchise. You'd give it a bit of the Charlie Big Potatoes stuff, wouldn't you? Strut the town like a peacock. Get a load of me, peasants!

To hear Henry Shefflin tell it, his rise to a level of celebrity he refuses to recognise has all been a hideous accident anyway - "An ugly head like this, sure I suppose a few people would remember seeing it on a hurling field" - rather a series of accidents of which he has been the beneficiary every time.

He's the greatest hurler operating today and his stats, his influence, his medals and his comparative youth suggest, no insist, that he be reserved a seat and his own table in the pantheon when the time comes. He transcends hurling and its cognoscenti and exists in the national imagination alongside Seán Óg Ó hAilpín as the sport's most visible face.

Are hurlers born or made? Shefflin should be the poster boy for late starters. When referring with some surprise to his own seniority within the current Kilkenny side, prevailing now as one of the survivors from the 1999 under-21 outfit, he laughs about how long he has been hearing about the infant Richie Hogan of Danesfort or how long he has been watching the toddler TJ Reid from his own club. Now the former prodigies are with him in the Kilkenny dressingroom.

Spooky.

He was no prodigy himself. When Ballyhale were big last Henry Shefflin was a child and he was big too. Chubbiness and slowness are the eye-catching attributes he remembers possessing.

Along the way from there to here? Well the stats and the medals suggest a more eye-catching talent than Shefflin remembers, but certainly he never blinded onlookers as the young DJ Carey had. Part of the charm of watching Shefflin is the manner in which he makes the game look easy; he chooses his options like a golfer riding the percentages, making the team work when necessary.

When he thought he wasn't going to make it there were a few things, he says, that kept him going. Firstly the pub! Henry (snr) and Mae Shefflin ran a pub in the heart of Ballyhale village, and for a kid who liked to talk and liked the sound of hurling conversation the pleasure of serving and listening was nourishment.

"The Fennellys would have been in and out there. Paul Phelan. All the Shamrocks team. Big Tommy Walsh, who is Bill Walsh's brother. Another character, Kevin Kennedy the local groundsman. I remember Big Tommy Walsh having a 60th birthday party and Tommy idolised Frank Cummins so Frank Cummins turned up on the night. It was real local stuff. That was the hurling and the talk about it. That was what we grew up with."

Even today, given the blinding wattage of his fame, he isn't perturbed by people being drawn to him for hurling talk like moths to a light. He likes the lore of the whole thing and isn't bothered by chat. Anyway he's glad to be here. It isn't a chore being a great hurler when you've dreamed all your life of it.

In the Shefflin household if you took snapshots of each of the boys at 14, John was perhaps the best. Tommy was good too. Henry was chubby and slow. Paul was a late starter. Tommy would win a minor All-Ireland and an under-21 title with Kilkenny, but hurling with Pat O'Neill, Charlie Carter and DJ Carey made it hard for a young Cat to be identified as pick of the litter. And Ballyhale were strong back then with the boys hanging on always for one more lash.

John was more unfortunate. He won a minor All-Ireland in 1990, the year Tommy won his under- 21 medal. He was man of the match in the replayed final against Cork, marking Brian Corcoran among others and filching three points. He was big and strong and had the touches. Shamrocks were very settled though. Ominously settled. It would have been easier breaking into the local bank.

Henry could turn the tales of his grey ordinariness at underage into a cabaret act. A big 14-year-old not making the under-16 team in Ballyhale, where every able-bodied boy of eligible age was being pushed into service. In a small rural parish it was an embarrassment of sorts.

One night the boys went out with 16 players and H Shefflin was the lad on the line. He was keen though. By then he had been infected with the game. He's never quite shaken that off.

At the back of the pub was a squash court. Henry and his younger brother Paul would disappear out there with their hurls and bang the ball against the walls "until one of us got hurt and started crying and had to go in".

Later his pals were David Kennedy, Kevin's son, and David Walsh and Vincent Kiely and Shane Aylward. They called David Kennedy 'Brunch'. A complexion thing. None of the other four are hurling now. They gave up.

"We used to live around each other, the five of us played together and hung around. I'm the only one playing now. Time is pushing on. Brunch was deadly, the quickest man I knew. He was built like a matchstick. He's not like that now (!) but he had great skills. His brother Michael was very good at underage too."

Little things kept young Henry going though. Paul Phelan scoring the goal to give Ballyhale the county title in 1990. They won another 12 months later before famine set in. His dad was a county selector back then and Henry would sometimes go to county training with him: "I remember that Pat Delaney was a selector too and I used poc around with his son Paudge. That was a big thing too."

He recalls his time in St Kieran's: "Ask the boys, I struggled there."

He tells of the day they pinned the names of the under-16 panel on the wall: "My name was last! They started with the goalies and corner backs. Last on the list. Just scraped in!"

Always though at the bottom of the deck the right card turned up and he kept his chips in the game.

He won an All-Ireland with St Kieran's. Happenstance. He got on the team at the start of the year and dived into the first ball against St Peter's of Wexford. His man pulled hard, caught Shefflin with a true stroke right across the ankle and broke a bone in his foot.

That was it. Some pins went in. St Kieran's got on with the business they are best at. Shefflin had the pins out three weeks before the All-Ireland final. St Kieran's were playing St Colman's, Fermoy. Timmy McCarthy was the Cork star.

"Lucky enough, Kieran's wanted a big lad with a big arse in around full forward. I had that at that stage. I got on the team for the final."

He got the breaks. Indeed, the breaks confettied his shoulders like manna dropping from heaven. So much so that you conclude some things are meant to be; breaks are nothing more than fate. Whatever way the wind was blowing, Shefflin always survived the relentless winnowing process of underage hurling in Kilkenny.

When he was 17 he broke through on to the Kilkenny minors. Well that sentence needs revising. When he was 17 he sneaked on to the Kilkenny minors as a sub goalie. But he scored a clatter in a club match at home and his neighbour wrote it up in the paper and, ta-da! He was promoted.

He looks back on 1997, the year Ballyhale won the minor and intermediate championships in Kilkenny, as being instrumental in driving the plot. The following year Ballyhale had a selector, Paddy Harney, among the county intermediate team's mentors: "So there had to be a couple of us from Ballyhale on it anyway."

Noel Skehan was the manager. Shefflin's brother Tommy was on. So was Padraig Farrell, full back and captain. Shefflin himself was 19, had played Fitzgibbon for WIT, but hadn't had a trial for the county under-21s.

If he was disillusioned with that snub, he deflects the memory of it gracefully. "When you're 19 I suppose you always think that you're better than you are. Maybe I thought I should have got a trial. I don't know."

Noel Skehan likes to remind him of the pivotal events of that summer. Shefflin was hanging on to the county intermediate panel by his fingernails.

The decision had been made to drop him. One Wednesday night they were going to play a match in town against James Stephens. Shefflin, having some intimation of his fate, devoured a bar of chocolate in the car on the way to the game. The Kilkenny intermediates had only 16 men that night. Shefflin was on the sideline again, minding the water-bottles.

A warm summer night, a kid with a good future behind him. A club in Chicago had been on the phone looking for him to go over for the summer. He was thinking seriously about it. Then somebody had the good grace to get injured.

Shefflin came on, played alright, if he says so himself, got a couple of scores, put up a little bit of a show. He ended up getting on the intermediate team and taking the frees.

The under-21s noticed.

He was conscripted to the under- 21s and started hitting the frees for them. The summer unfolded beautifully. He lost an intermediate final and he played an All-Ireland under-21 semi-final against Galway, a dead-ball duel with Eugene Cloonan.

"I was in at full forward shoving me arse in lads' way. Brian (Cody) was there watching. He got the manager's job soon after that. That was a big break to get the phone call."

If Cody calling was the last of the good breaks, going to WIT was the best of them. He talks fondly of that time and the memory of it underpins a lot of his philosophy of hurling. They hurled almost on a full-time basis, not just training but taking entire days away from lectures to poc around together at the Waterford Crystal factory - Shefflin and Andy Maloney and Eamon Corcoran and the legend who was Enda Everard.

They lost a Fitzgibbon final, then dominated the competition the next year up in Templemore. Cody was there to see the further flowering of Shefflin's talent. He knew by then what he had on his hands.

That summer brought Shefflin's maiden season as a county senior hurler. His best game would be in the All-Ireland final defeat to Cork. He was 20 by then. He had arrived.

Cody ("I suppose he might be a friend in the off-season, otherwise he's the manager") gave him some good advice early on, told him not to worry, just to let himself play the same as if he were playing down in Ballyhale. That's something he thinks of still. Just going out and letting himself go with it.

"Brian never really got on to us. I was able to do my own bit. He kept a watchful eye on me after the first season. Things can get a bit haywire when your first senior season finishes but I enjoyed it. I had experienced nothing like it. County start. Doing different things. Having a dietician."

All this time later he is the one who never gets flung off course by the revolving door Cody keeps spinning quickly. James McGarry's demotion to the bench means Shefflin is the only playing survivor from the side which played Offaly in his first Leinster final, in 1999.

Leinster finals have been an integral part of the summer since, an annual feast day missed only three years ago when Michael Jacob scored a late goal to see Wexford through.

The subject of defeats animates him more than his achievements do. Brian Cody will often remind him of how he got distracted so easily by Gregory Kennedy back in the 2001 semi-final. In turn, the image of Cody falling to his knees as Jacob scored that goal three years later is burned into the race memory of Kilkenny people.

Shefflin and Cody share an abhorrence of defeat. They come to it from different places though. Shefflin despises the experience for what it robs him of: "Coming back into that dressingroom and nobody joking or laughing. When I finish up hurling that's what I'll take out of it: the friendships I made, the crack and the laughs, the bit of banter. I hate that losing dressingroom. The shower, everyone silent. Lads' heads down. Dry yourself. Bus. Home. It hurts. It has to hurt. Brian is a tough man. You see it hurts him differently."

Are you afraid of him? "Afraid of him! I respect him. Wouldn't say I am afraid of him. I don't think I am. Wary, yeah! You can have respect for somebody when you understand what they are thinking. You respect what they are saying to you."

Do you fight? "To be fair I have never had a row with him. If he's reffing a match and Delaney or Tommy Walsh or, worse, Hickey is pulling the head off me and Brian wouldn't even think of blowing a whistle I let a few curses at him under my breath but he has good man- managing skills. It can be tough looking after 30 fellas."

Would you say you're one of his favourites? "Ah I don't know about that!" Would the others, say you are?

"Yeah. They probably would! I've been around longer than most."

He recalls the last time Wexford beat them, that game in 2004.

"I remember things like Jimmy Coogan going in with a ball. He was clear through and I stayed back. I didn't bother making the run; I decided he was going to score.

"There was hurt there when you looked back. You go through the block wall on good days. We did that against Galway the next time out. Players didn't notice Brian on the sideline. We wanted to just play well ourselves."

So he heads to another Leinster final. The annual feast day. Kilkenny have taken some time off in the run-in to devote themselves to club business.

Training proceeds as usual, the games at the end not as hard and unrelenting he reckons as folklore has them. They prefer to measure the quality by the speed with which the ball moves rather than the velocity with which they hit each other.

He rejects all suggestions the Leinster championship is dead despite Kilkenny's dominance. Dublin, he says, will win a title soon. This year's under-21 championship offers further evidence of a changing landscape in the province. He is happy with the challenges it offers. Meanwhile it's just hurling. A way of life rather than a foothold on celebrities rungs.

A couple of weekends ago the Féile was in Kilkenny. Joe Cooney rang him one evening. Joe and Henry were in Malawi a couple of years ago for a charity thing. The camogie girls from Sarsfields were in the Féile semi-final in Ballyhale. Henry watched them beat Toomevara that evening. His sister meanwhile was putting up two young lads from Na Fianna in Dublin. He went and played a little bit of a game with the boys from Glasnevin. Played club then. On the Tuesday evening Ballyhale were due to train. The heavens provided biblical floods and a text came. 'Training cancelled. See ye later in the week, boys.'

And part of him was disappointed at that small bad break in a lifetime of blessings.