DJ just one of the greats, no more and no less

The Ciotóg Side: A chant, over footage of a man driving. The perspective cuts to an expectant hall, the chanting children arrayed at trestle tables. Likely enough, the meal will be chicken and chips. The real fare is a live tradition.

"DJ! DJ! DJ!" So an RTÉ documentary, DJ Carey: The Story (2003), begins. It is the sort of accolade that irked some. One way or another, Carey had a strong effect on people.

There is no forgetting the marquee scores. The rebound in 1993 that only the hurl saw. That goal in the 2002 All-Ireland final: a miracle of touch, his most cruelly beautiful act. You almost expect a David Attenborough voice-over, clarifying how the leopard can kill a gazelle with one lazy cuff of its paw.

The tracings of genius often nestle in forgotten corners. 1995: Kilkenny v Offaly league semi-final. Carey moves out and smoothly gathers a low ball. Turning, he makes to cut inside, on his right, but instead pelts off to his left. Then, without ado, without breaking stride, the angle unprepossessing, he drop-hits the sliotar to the net with surreal force.

Let's italicize: without breaking stride. Very few hurlers in the code's history have owned such technique. Very, very few (though they include John Troy of Lusmagh and Eoin Kelly of Mullinahone).

If you track the accolades and tributes, Paddy Phelan emerges as Noreside's finest hurler. A Donegal man, schoolteaching in Dublin during the 1930s and 1940s, was never out of Croke Park. One memorable night in O'Neill's pub in the Bluestacks, he told The Ciotóg Side that Phelan was far and away the greatest he saw, quoting Virgil to seal the claim.

After retirement, Phelan did not thrive in business and departed, literally, to Coventry, where he died. He was named without fuss at left half back on both the Centenary Year and Millennium selections.

That blood burns ruby-bright in Carey's veins. He is a grandnephew. Richie Hogan, current underage star, is in the same line. More than anything, it is the ability to use the ball, courtesy of tilt-switch wrists, as if the hurl is both a slingshot and a compass.

Carey's status was probably twitched in latter years by his persona. He has no part in the raw Coventry of Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark (1961), its transplanted griefs. For all the affable abstemiousness, the singular gift, there was an earthed connection.

DJ became, with the golf and the polo necks and the Beamer, a kind of un homme moyen sensuel for tigerish times. He sat well with non-GAA Ireland - too well, for some.

Posterity will shear the populist fripperies. The videotape will not rot. DJ Carey deserved the Team of the Millennium. If nothing else, he is more accomplished than Ray Cummins. There are many alive who saw Jim Langton in his pomp, and the palm, there, is offered to Gowran. The most cerebral hurler of the 1950s and 1960s once remarked to this space that Carey is a more complete player than Jimmy Doyle. Eddie Keher happily holds himself the lesser figure.

If you accept this reduction, which may be harsh on Doyle and Keher, it leaves two surnames: Mackey and Ring. Carey had more skill than the Limerick man and likely as much as the Cork man. Where the Kilkenny man differs from both is in his lack of hurling fury. Faced, in an All-Ireland final, with 1999's scenario, neither Mackey nor Ring would have countenanced defeat. Down to it, Henry Shefflin turned cold furious in 2003.

Perhaps to a fault at times, Carey played each delivery on its merits. He spoke of the ball running or not running for him, bidden by a class of Corinthian fatalism. This trait was why he quite often took brilliant goals in contests effectively over. Quoted last Friday, Eamonn Cregan remembered the threat in 1995: "We managed that for the first 60 minutes, but then DJ got two balls in front of him, and they were two goals."

The velveted verdict sheaths a blade. Those scores merely glossed the board, in a championship encounter. Cregan is speaking in code for the unconvinced.

It is true Carey did not land anything like enough points. A remarkable effort against Waterford in 2004 again evinced stunning mastery in an art he neglected, like a compelling watercolourist stubbornly loading his easel with neon.

The fast preoccupation with goals led, in later career, to ill-chosen running when he could have drawn several heart-breaking points a game. Eoin Kelly is currently doing subtle tints as well as unforgettable graffiti.

No need here to rehearse the phenomenal haul of medals and gongs. How Carey streaked colloquial matches with near matchless brilliance is just as memorable. The innate skill was there to become the greatest of them all. He did not. But he still moves into retirement as one of the finest half dozen forwards the game has known thus far. Nobody should say any more and nobody should say any less.

It is not a bad record to take into the after-echo of that chant.

PM O'Sullivan is an academic and hurling writer whose column, The Stubborn Nore, appears on the website www.KilkennyCats.com.