Galway look to golden great

Keith Duggan talks to Galway manager Conor Hayes ahead of Sunday's final

The management instinct always lurked within him and somewhere in the dusty annals of Galway hurling bureaucracy is proof Conor Hayes gave the politicos plenty of advance notice that he was, at heart, a stubborn operator.

During the forlorn winter of east Galway, 1970, dire circumstances forced something of a revolution among the boys' team in Kiltormer national school. Although Fr Jack Solan's arrival from Clare stirred hurling in the parish, the headmaster of the school had zero interest. The master's indifference created weekly transport problems for Hayes's young team but it was a county board stipulation that only 11 players were permitted for the nine-a-side games that thrust a full-blown crisis upon the Kiltormer boys. Hayes decided there was nothing for it but to go to war with the county board. He was 10 years old.

"So we drafted this letter and we all signed our names at the bottom," Hayes remembers, breaking into the generous, toothy grin that used to appear beneath an elevated MacCarthy Cup in the last great epoch of maroon hurling.

"Our problem was that we had 12 lads and couldn't leave anybody. We had this one lad on the team whose mother, Peggy Campbell, God rest her, used to drive us all over Galway. So when the selectors and myself were picking the team, we would say that there is no way we are ever leaving Campbell behind or we mightn't make the game.

"Other times, we hired Paddy Greaney's minibus and his son also played with us, so Paddy didn't mind if we were a few pennies short. And we had a decent team but we had the unusual situation one time of winning a county schools title without any of the three teachers in the school present to see it. So we petitioned the county board and we would get these headed letters back repeating the rules. It was highly serious stuff. But the county board wouldn't budge," he concludes, leaning his frame into the pastel-coloured hotel lobby chair at the enjoyment of the yarn.

Such distant anecdotes are soothing when you are at the epicentre of arguably the most critical eve-of-breakthrough period in the history of Galway hurling. But if Hayes is feeling the pressure of the new wave of near-hysterical optimism, he carries it lightly. He chose to meet in the Corrib Great Southern on the cusp of the city and walked through the revolving door on one of those wistful last-of-summer mornings, an unknown to the smartly dressed American visitors ferrying expensive suitcases across the lush carpeting of a cool, neutral foyer.

Time has broadened him although he walks with the panther's lightness that natural athletes maintain. And the face remains unmistakable, handsome with the shock of raven hair, now greying, and the slightly collegiate bearing that set Hayes apart even when he was the kid of the famous 1980 All-Ireland-winning team of Silke, Connolly and McInerney.

In retrospect, it seems entirely obvious that the man who strode stealthily through the most intensely successful period of Galway hurling - the lanky corner back of 1980 maturing into the splendid, patrician leader of the 1987/1988 double team - should turn out to be "the one". Out of nothing, hurling evangelicalism has swept through Galway like a forest fire and that Hayes should be at its forefront, even-tempered and nonchalant and not even all that surprised, makes perfect sense now.

In conversation, he half-lamented that he accidentally fell between the high stools of those eras, too young to fully fuse with the stoical, ageing gang that so lit the dark autumn of 1980 and those few crucial years older than the irreverent bunch that excelled seven years on. But he knew how to win All-Irelands. As Phelim Murphy, the last dictator in Europe, craftily observed when Hayes was appointed as manager: "He was our lucky captain."

And he was, the unquestionable leader of a unique hurling team that defined if not quite dominated the 1980s. They were eccentric, from the masterful, classic skills of Joe Cooney to Brendan Lynskey, the frenetic busybody, to Gerry McInerney, the only Irishman to own a tan in the 1980s and the only player in the history of the GAA on whom white boots looked not just acceptable but appropriate. Hayes anchored them, an authoritative full back identifiable by the iconic gold helmet, glinting in Croke Park like some prop thieved from a Charlton Heston epic. That accoutrement dates back to childhood also.

"The gold helmet? My mother brought that back for me from holidays in Cork around 1971. Helmets were rare enough got back then. I had a Cooper one but it was a bit tight and I saw Pat Henderson wearing this kind of helmet and figured it would suit me. That was the only colour in the shop and it never bothered me."

After his retirement Hayes had the headpiece mounted on the wall in the family farmhouse in Kiltormer. "People would ask me what I was going to do with it and I always thought it was as well there as anywhere else."

Then, two Augusts ago, when his mother was hospitalised for a spell, the big 19th-century home was destroyed one night in a fire. Once they got over the blessing of the fact the house was - for the first time in living memory - unoccupied - Hayes began to realise a lifetime of hurling memorabilia had gone. All-Ireland medals. Souvenir jerseys. University programmes. Signed hurls. And the gold helmet melted into oblivion.

"I never realised I was a collector of stuff," Hayes says. "But our house was a bit of a museum really. I think I have just one All-Ireland medal left but that doesn't bother me. It's the unusual stuff you would miss. Photographs. One arrived in the post of me stretched back on a couch in a hotel, draped in a flag after one of the All-Irelands. I can't remember it being taken but it was nice to have. Friends would call in for a cup of tea and some old hurler would come up and I'd go up to the room, pull an old programme out of the drawer, look him up and replace it. That doesn't happen anymore."

The torching of all those hurling mementoes was not a happy omen for Hayes as he set out as an unproven manager in a county desperate for reassurance. He was a novice at the internecine politics of Galway hurling and not a universally popular choice.

And he freely admits standing on the sideline against Kilkenny in Thurles last year, frozen while Brian Cody filled the afternoon sky like Thor, was his most mortifying experience on a hurling field.

"It was. I think that day was an education for Galway hurling really. Because it gave the county a huge shock. The days of just preparing for one game were over. For me, knowing the quality of players we had, to get sacked like that was frightening really.

"And the thing about Kilkenny, they will win games by 20 points if they can. They brought on John Hoyne and Michael Kavanagh near the end last year and you felt like going down to them and saying, 'Jesus, give us a break here, will ya. It's yours, like.' No. Hoyne gets a goal and Kavanagh comes on with a point to prove. They had that drive in them. I felt they wouldn't be beaten last year but maybe they put a lot into our game and it spent a lot of their mental energy. But they tore us apart. We just happened to be there. I never felt it was personal." Crucially, Hayes has chosen not to allow any aspect of managing Galway to spill into the personal. That is partly because he is genuinely secure enough to remain above the taunts and the criticism that followed after that Kilkenny marauding and partly because he knew engagement would be futile. From the beginning, he studied the habits and styles of managers he played under and remains fond of Babs Keating, who took Galway to the All-Ireland final of 1979.

"People thought I wasn't keen on him because he would be on my case at training but I had a lot of admiration for him. Babs was a breath of fresh air - confident and brash and arrogant. His brother had this car dealership and he would land up at training in a different motor every night. This was 1978 or so, half of us didn't even own a car. One of the lads said to him, 'Jesus, Babs, you must be a millionaire.' 'I'm not,' says he. 'I just live like one.' But this was a guy who had won an All-Ireland medal and made us think like that. He led from the front in every way. Like, if you were trying to get into a place for a late drink, Babs would bull his way up to the door and probably get the whole show in."

Keating's blustery showmanship and Cyril Farrell's quieter authority left their imprint on Hayes. In the 1980s Farrell insisted on all club fixtures being shelved for the six weeks before Galway played in All-Ireland semi-finals. This year, Hayes was guaranteed that club fixtures would not interrupt intercounty preparation and the thorny issue of club loyalty has been defused. That alone has been a satisfying development. In the fascinating last minutes of the semi-final game against Kilkenny, Hayes resisted the temptation to bring in substitutes by remembering Anthony Daly's experience against Cork.

"It is easy to say now that the game grabbed the imagination but of course during it, you are just wondering if you are going to hold on. I realised at one point that we were on the way to putting up a score of around 4-16 or so and if we did that and lost, it would have been worse than last year. So with three minutes or so, it was worrying. They were still controlling parts of the field and yeah, we were tempted to go with fresh legs. But I was mindful against Cork, that seemed to be the right thing for Clare to do and it hadn't worked. We had new lads we could have put in but it was a hell of a turbulent situation to put young lads into. In fairness, when Kevin Broderick came in, he adapted to it straight away."

The team journeyed west by bus that night. A county suddenly possessed with the euphoria of old awaited them: it was 1980 all over again and Joe McDonagh was singing The West's Awake. They cracked open a few cans and watching a video of the game in exhausted satisfaction. Immediately, they began voicing the number of mistakes made and the emphasis was on improvement rather than congratulations. It sharpened them and delighted Hayes.

Although outwardly cheerful and magnanimous, Hayes has always had a watchful, preparatory streak to his character. At an end-of-season dinner dance in 1988 to celebrate Galway's back-to-back success, He delivered a speech which was like a wintry gust through the warm, boozy atmosphere of satisfaction. He said that if in 1966 it had been suggested Galway football would not win another All-Ireland for 20 years, you would have been laughed out of town. He begged vigilance.

"And I was reprimanded for it that night. People couldn't understand what I was on about. They thought it would go on forever."

Instead, it seems as if the alternative has gone on forever. One by one, Hayes's team left.

The frustration of the 1990s was epitomised by the gallant and often ill-treated Joe Rabbitte. Minor teams blossomed, claimed All-Irelands, fragmented and disappeared in the senior machine. Galway was no longer termed the sleeping giant but rather a county afflicted by some sort of coma. Hayes's old colleagues - PJ Molloy, Noel Lane and even Farrell - returned and found the task impossible. All through that time, Hayes was just another observer.

He had a successful business and his place in Galway hurling lore was assured. Going back in was fraught with dangers and Hayes was way too smart not to know it but curiosity forced him to allow him to put his name in the ring anyway. "That's what I was told to do. The politics of Galway hurling is complicated."

As a choice, he was intriguing. For although Hayes was at the heart of all the great modern Galway successes, he managed to remain detached. Different. He boarded in Garbally - "hurling in a rugby school through a kind of apartheid system" - and nowadays lives just a 10-minute walk from the Spanish Arch, far removed from the hurling strongholds that light the gaping sky of east Galway. He was a university boy, winning Fitzgibbon at UCG under Eamon Cody - Brian's brother - in 1980. He was talented, easygoing and confident, not believing Seán Silke when he told him at training Keating was going to pick him for the 1979 All-Ireland semi-final but not in the least bit fazed when it transpired he was right.

Hayes had "it", he had the stuff of leadership. He didn't take it for granted but didn't hide it either. That quality, that self-knowledge and indifference to big reputations, has become apparent again during this incarnation as Galway hurling leader.

He neither panicked nor apologised after the embarrassment against Kilkenny last year. More remarkably, he survived. This year, he has guided Galway to an All-Ireland final without the county's most prolific scorer and, for five years, its titular saviour, Eugene Cloonan. Hayes does not even blink when the Athenry man's name is mentioned, nibbling on the last of a currant scone as he talks about the absent number 14.

"Well, both the Cloonan boys won't be there," he points out. "With Diarmuid, he simply felt he hadn't the training done. He said to me, look, if I was to face DJ Carey right now, I would get skinned. And I appreciated his honesty. Eugene got injured one night at training, he didn't attend with our medical people for treatment and we never heard from him again. Word was put out that he would come back in if he was asked.

"As far as we were concerned, his place was there until, well, until the championship started really. A lot of stuff was said and written around the Cloonan situation which seemed destined to undermine our situation. The whole thing was regrettable. But it is not an issue with the players. We had to push on."

Although Galway hurling people are mystified by the details of the Cloonan affair, Hayes has stubbornly prevented it from becoming a crisis. A loss in the All-Ireland final may lead to recriminations but as Hayes points out, "We had a forward line that scored 5-10 against Kilkenny. That is the reality. (Ger) Farragher is taking frees and is doing well. Look, we had to go with the guys that are there because we believed in them. And once they saw that, once we got to Croke Park and they saw it was down to them, they smartened up."

As Hayes saw it, he couldn't afford to fixate on one person, however valuable. The vicissitudes of Galway hurling meant he inherited a lot of damaged egos. This season has been about restoration and for just the second time in 11 years, Galway will hurl in September.

He makes no promises when it comes to Cork and grins again when the old chestnut of Galway going zero-for-five against the Rebels in All-Ireland finals is raised. He knows. In his last All-Ireland final, the Galway defence shipped five goals against Tomás Mulcahy and company.

"Yeah, sure people say that. But we are a different team. These boys learned the hard way and it took us a while to come up off our knees. We are dealing with a strong team of All-Ireland champions and that could catch us, regardless of whether they wear Cork jerseys. Yeah, Cork beat us before. But if that holds true, sure we will do the parade and leave it at that. I keep saying that was then, this is now."

And that fact has been like a bucket of cold water in the face of Galway hurling. There is no Lynskey, no Connolly, no Keady or Cooney anymore. That was then. For years they scanned the county hoping for someone to lead them back to that past. And then the crown of gold melted away to reveal the familiar face. Hayes. Of course. The deliverer of many good September Sundays. Galway prays.