Shortly after leaving St Felim’s National School in Cavan town on Thursday, Paul Brady faced his car towards Dublin. Towards Croke Park. Towards that which, until recently, had been all behind him.
You remember Paul Brady, right? The five-time world handball champion, 11-time US Nationals winner and 10-time All-Ireland senior men’s champ, the king of the court, the ace of the alley.
And then, as happens, he got older, he got injured, he got married, he became a dad. The rhythm of his life changed. He never officially retired and there were no garlands tossed at his feet on the way out the door. Instead he slipped quietly away from the alley.
And whenever his name popped up in conversations in the handball heartlands, they’d speak about him in the past tense, ‘Wasn’t he a great one, all the same’ kind of thing.
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Organically, he became a former handballer.
Only, that isn’t how the story ends.
There was no grand covert master plan to return, it just happened. One day he was at home watching Paw Patrol with Paudie and Lily, the next he was training with James Brady for a crack at the All-Ireland masters doubles. They beat Mayo in the final at the start of March. The experience lit a fuse, he was back.
“I found the competitive element returned very quickly,” says Brady. “Even playing that doubles final, it was like, ‘there’s no losing this, we’ve got to win’.”
Then, last Saturday, at the age of 44 and 11 years after his most recent appearance in the All-Ireland senior singles competition, Brady stepped back inside the arena.
He won his round of 32 game in Monavea, beating Wicklow’s Michael Gregan 21-8, 21-2.
“It felt good to get over that first game, get rid of some of the cobwebs and maybe that initial glare of people coming to watch how it went,” he says.
The Cavan native won again in Ballymore Eustace on Monday, seeing off Kilkenny’s Peter Funchion 21-10, 21-11.
Now he’s back at Croke Park on Saturday for an All-Ireland singles quarter-final against Tyrone’s Conor McElduff.
“This is not a case of just giving it a lash, everything has gone into this over the last few weeks and months. My expectation is that I’ve entered so I want to win it and I need to win it.”
Between 2003-2013 Brady won 10 All-Ireland senior singles titles, including a streak of nine-in-a-row. He last entered the competition in 2013.
Having dominated the four-wall game in Ireland, at that time Brady instead switched his focus to conquering America where he played regularly until Covid, winning a record-equalling 11 US Nationals.
He drew level with Naty Alvarado Senior’s haul in 2019 but the pandemic denied Brady the chance to surpass it the following year. Then, in late 2021, a US Nationals was organised for Nashville and he flew over that December to try become the stand-alone record holder.
The final against Killian Carroll went to a tiebreaker, but with the scores at 4-4 (first to 11), Brady went over on his left ankle and was forced to forfeit.
He spent the next few months hobbling around on a dodgy ankle, never bothering to get it properly looked at or rehabbed. He had packed up playing football with Mullahoran in October after a Cavan SFC quarter-final loss and the injury felt like a sign to park the whole lot.
“Over the years there wasn’t any burning desire or itch inside saying, ‘This isn’t over for me’. It didn’t preoccupy my thoughts, I was quite happy with what I was doing away from it.”
But his relationship with handball has always been complex. His attachment with the game will endure forever, but handball has been both a parachute and a straitjacket for Brady, easy to love but at times hard not to hate. Going back is a leap.
“I was reflecting on that recently. I think the kind of pressure I used to feel actually went away when I stopped playing in Ireland,” says Brady.
“When you were in America it was not as intense, you didn’t feel as much pressure, whereas recently there have been moments when I’m like, ‘I feel pressure here again’. You regress back to it a little bit.
“Andre Agassi had a very good quote in his book [Open], about feeling like a tortured soul. I’ve asked myself a few times in the last couple of weeks, ‘What have I done here? What am I after doing to myself again?’.
“Because I thought it would be like I’d just play away and see how it goes, but then very quickly I was thinking, ‘I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to do that’. I kind of found myself back in that place again, wanting to win.
“You either run or face that head on, traditionally I’ve just faced it head on.”
He won three senior county football titles with Mullahoran but his Cavan senior intercounty career, which began in late 2002 and lasted nine years, was a predominately fruitless one if measured in silverware. Brady was juggling football in Ireland and handball in America for much of that period, too. It was a relentless time.
He has since completed a Masters in sports psychology and in recent years Brady worked with various athletes and teams, including the Longford and Ballyboden St Enda’s footballers.
He was happy with his lot away from competing. And then his namesake James Brady planted a seed about playing masters doubles. That’s all it took, a gentle nudge, one thing leading to another.
This is handball’s centenary year, though for most of that time it has existed in the shadows, uncared for by the GAA centrally, but fostered and kept alive by devotees in pockets across the country.
Earlier this month RTÉ carried a news item about two Afghan-born boys playing handball in an Irish school where at lunch the yard is full of pupils “hitting the ball off every surface visible”.
The school principal, Anne Donnellan, explained plans were under way to construct new handball walls to facilitate the demand from students as there wasn’t a free gable end left to be repurposed.
“The boys are playing off the windows, any surface that takes a ball,” she remarked. “There seems to be a craze at the moment for the handball. The main reason it’s so popular is it’s such a simple game to play.”
Which is only a small, though not insignificant, part of its popularity. The school in question is St Felim’s in Cavan town. Chances are the foremost reason handball is the currency of the schoolyard is because one of the teachers is Mr Paul Brady. Handball is encouraged, promoted, coached.
Brady’s greatest legacy in the game might yet prove to be what comes after him. But that’s for the future to determine. After school on Thursday he travelled to the new Croke Park Handball Centre to train on his own in an alley, rep after rep, shot after shot.
Brady is all in again, there will be no regrets.
“I feel as hungry now as all those years ago, I’m no different,” he says.
“My expectation for 20 odd years was if I went out to play, I was going to win – no ifs, no buts, that’s just what was going to happen. It’s hard to change that expectation. I never deviated from the belief that if I really wanted to, I could still play and I could still win.”
Handball, Croke Park, All-Irelands – all of it was, until recently, behind him. But Paul Brady is back playing what’s in front of him again these days.
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