KILLINAN END - Mick Burns enjoyed a remarkable career

Mick Burns was part of remarkably rich bounty of young hurlers to emerge in Tipperary during the 1950s. The year before he joined the Tipp Minor panel in 1954, a team including Liam Devaney and Seán McLoughlin had retained the All-Ireland title without anyone laying a glove on them along the way. Another of their number, Billy Quinn – father of Niall, made waves as early as the following year when he scored three goals in the National League Final. Things were on the up at under-age at a time when the Senior team came up short in Munster. This was the atmosphere in which the young Mick Burns joined a Tipp Minor panel along with three players - Jimmy Doyle, Ray Reidy, and Fethard’s Liam Connolly – who would form part of the 1958 Senior panel which ended the frustration endured since the early years of the decade.

He encountered Billy Quinn, Ray Reidy, and Seán McLoughlin in the 1953 County Minor final when Rahealty beat Éire Óg – this time it was McLoughlin who got three goals. Seán went on to become a goalscorer extraordinaire in Blue & Gold with a career which ran in parallel with that of Mick Burns.

In 1955, Mick won an All-Ireland Minor medal beating Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final and Galway in the final. These were the unusual years when it was decided that the Leinster and Munster winner would meet in the semi-final in the clumsiest possible solution to the Galway ‘problem’. This arrangement saw Limerick’s senior team bow out to Wexford in the semi-final, and three years later had Tipp-Kilkenny meeting again in the semi-final. A team-mate of Mick Burns on that Minor team was the bespectacled Matt O’Gara of Toomevara who also featured on the Senior winning teams of 1961-62. The two young prospects crossed swords a couple of years later in an exciting North Senior final win which was Nenagh’s first since 1915. Winning this one was no mean feat considering that the bones of this Toomevara team won the 1960 County Final. Along the way to that Burns had encountered iconic figures like Tony Reddin and Phil Shanahan so by the time he joined the Tipp Senior panel he had enjoyed a remarkable education in hurling.

You can only stand agog at the career he created in the following years ahead. A hurler can hope for little more than for his County team to be relevant at the business end of competitions as much as possible throughout his career. Mick Burns never experienced less than this. In 1960 he won a League medal when Tipp beat Cork in the final on Leeside. That day he marked Pat Fitzgerald who would cause all hell to break loose a year later when he struck Tom McLoughney in Limerick in the Munster Final. It is a tribute to the quality of Mick Burns that he essentially replaced Jimmy Finn in the Tipp team and was drafted into a seasoned half-back-line alongside Tony Wall and John Doyle. To replace a peerless defender like Finn was a challenge – to do so in an environment where the game was uncompromisingly physical was fair going for a young hurler not built for horsing people out of it.

Mick’s first All-Ireland Senior medal came in 1961 when Tipp scraped past a Dublin team which included their successful 1954 Minor captain Bernie Boothman and his brother Achill, along with two other sets of Dublin brothers, Foleys and Fergusons. It was a remarkable occasion for North Tipperary hurling with no less than ten players seeing service that day – nine starters plus Toomevara’s Jack Hough as a memorable substitute. Traditionally up to that point North Tipp tended to fare less well on county teams. Some sixteen years earlier Tipp won an All-Ireland without a single North Tipp man on the starting fifteen.

Tipp’s goalkeeper than day against Dublin was Donie O’Brien of Kickhams who stood between the posts again twelve months later when Wexford were beaten narrowly in an exciting finish which avenged the 1960 final defeat. Mick Burns played against Donie in New York’s Gaelic Park in 1964 when Tipp beat New York in the National League final in another of the GAA’s occasional experiments down the years. This trick was repeated in 1965 and ’68 – the latter after a wild and controversial win over Kilkenny in the Home Final.

The 1968 trip was remarkable since the team arrived in New York on May 30th but didn’t play the League Final until the middle of June. Initially the games (the final was over two ‘legs’) were postponed because of a flooded pitch. Then, most unforeseeably of all, a further postponement came with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy - then an aspiring Democratic candidate for the Presidential nomination. The Tipp team attended the lying in state at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, not a story you would expect to be able to tell.

It was a remarkable roller-coaster of a career for Mick Burns and five All-Ireland medals is a spectacular haul, as was that travel to the Big Apple when hopping on a plane was not the humdrum venture it has become. In the 1964 All-Ireland Final Tipp laid waste to Kilkenny in a powerful second-half performance. It is a day remembered for the goals of Donie Nealon, ‘Mackey’ McKenna, and Seán McLoughlin. But in defence it was remarked in the Irish Independent the following day that “even Eddie Keher found a man he couldn’t handle in Burns”. As epitaphs go it’s a good one!