Salute the beloved monument that was Lar Foley

LockerRoom Tom HumphriesNews of the death of Lar Foley swung like a wrecking ball into a gentle Sunday morning.

Just this day last week Lar was made a patron of the Friends of Dublin Hurling. We awaited his arrival in the Gresham that day and when he walked in he lit the place up with his enthusiasm.

One minute we were men in a room telling Lar Foley stories.The next minute he'd arrived and we were his audience gathered around him as he told yarns, took us each down a few pegs, rubbed his hands together in that way of his and punctuated everything he was telling you with a sharp punch to your upper arm.

And yesterday there was a minute of silence for Lar in Croke Park.

You couldn't begin to catalogue the stories that men will tell about Lar this week. They belong in a book or in the living folklore of the GAA. You could spend this week in the bar in St Vincent's clubhouse and another seven days out in Lar's beloved north county and you could just listen to people talking about the man. You'll not hear the same Lar Foley story told twice.

Old games. Old rows. Old half-time speeches. Quotes from the lines that ran off his wonderfully salty tongue. Last week I heard him collar an alarmed county board official.

"D'ya know what, If you were a duck I wouldn't shoot ya." Why not Lar? "I wouldn't like my dog to pick ya up."

It seemed to me that everywhere we walked as kids we had the giant footprints of Lar Foley ahead of us. In St Joseph's of Fairview, in St Vincent's, and for those who were lucky enough and good enough, in Croke Park. People took the same path but nobody ever filled the space like Lar did.

He won minor county titles with St Vincent's in '55 and '56, All-Ireland minor medals with Dublin the same years and a Leinster schools title with "Joey's" in '56. He played in senior hurling and football All-Irelands and was winning championships with the club into the seventies.

And he was elder brother, of course, to Des Foley who won a minor All-Ireland medal in 1958 on the day Lar won his first senior All-Ireland. Des, whose reputation began as a Railway Cup player while he was still a schoolboy, enjoyed a reputation which was burnished faithfully by Lar who would claim no special sporting abilities for himself but in a row might ask you earnestly if you'd ever seen Desser play and if you hadn't, to go home and ask someone who had.

On the pitch he protected Des like a lion protects his young; off the field he deprecated himself constantly to explaining his brother's skills. When Des's heart gave up a few years ago it shook a lot of the zest out of Lar for quite some time. His return to his usual ebullient self was slow but welcome.

For everyone who ever came under his influence on a pitch or in a dressingroom he left some part of his great passion in their heart. Personally, I was lucky. He trained the very first St Vincent's team I ever played on and we were all mesmerised by him from the moment he presented himself to us on the field beside the O'Brien Institute, his fingers thick as telephone directories. He'd wrap his hand around a football so that it looked like a baseball and hurl it towards our chests. "Watch for the O'Neill's sign, boys."

We were kids and not too talented either but he stuck with us, loading us and driving us in his station wagon around the back lanes of Dublin, hauling us after him on one especially memorable trip to Coventry. Sometimes himself, Tom Walsh and Mark Wilson looked like men trying to mind mice at a crossroads but they coached us patiently and we went from being awkward boys to being gawky teens and finally gawky, awkward men.

My regret is that I never had him as an adult mentor, never saw the true, almost frightening, passion he brought to a senior dressingroom. I know men who say that it was easier to stick your head into the spot where the hurls were flying than it was to face Lar in the dressingroom afterwards if he thought you'd chickened out.

He once arrived into Croke Park with a bag of new hurleys for a big game. "Forty-five sticks in there lads. At the end of the day I just want to be left with kindling."

He had a highly pragmatic view of the games he played. You gave as good as you got and if you couldn't give it then if your team-mates were worth a lick they'd give it on your behalf.

A county final in the early eighties against O'Toole's and Lar enraged on the sideline and beyond it, persuaded to sit down only by the thought ingeniously suggested to him that O'Toole's had planned to wind him up and get him disciplined. Lar planted himself on the bench and stayed there defiantly.

There were a couple of infamous days. An afternoon in Portlaoise which he never quite lived down. And the All-Ireland hurling final of 1961, an immense regret of his. Typically, he was acting on behalf of others. Des Ferguson took a knock while lifting a ball. Lar went to deal with the transgressor, Tom Ryan. Lar and Tom Ryan got sent off. Dublin lost by a point. It was a harsh sending off and cost Dublin the game. Lar had been performing brilliantly, outshone only perhaps by his brother at midfield.

Hurling remained his great love, though. With the St Vincent's seniors and with Dublin his coaching was passionate and often improvised. Lads still talk about the evenings out in the north county when they'd hurl on a pitch Lar had mowed and work out in a gym he had created himself in his barn.

He nearly made the breakthrough, reaching two Leinster finals in the early nineties, losing by just two points to Kilkenny on the second occasion.

He loved it, the life, the company of GAA people, the argument and the sentiment, the possibilities. Meeting him last week was an all-too-rare treat. He was in fine form though. Being a Patron of the Friends of Dublin Hurling seemed a fitting task for him. He was a one-man Mount Rushmore to the game in Dublin and his presence as patriarch was just right.

When I was leaving the Gresham he administered the customary friendly thump to the arm and said with a big grin, "Hey, don't you write bad things about me when I'm gone." "No true stories then, Lar?" I said. He was delighted.

Truth is he was the toughest and the greatest, a beloved monument of a man. No one ever filled his footprints and nobody will ever repair the hole in the landscape that his parting leaves. Those easy Gaelic words were never more fitting: ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís.