KILLINAN END - Greats of our time
The Hurling Immortals was Raymond Smith’s great work on the ancient game published for the GAA’s Centenary Year of 1984. It was a collection of material that had emerged since he first published Decades of Glory in 1966 and included some of the updates in other works after that. The Centenary edition featured a colour picture of Kevin Hennessy of Cork on a solo-run chased by Pat Fitzelle during that year’s Munster Final. Smith wrote in the book that “the last fifteen minutes stirred to the marrow a new generation of hurling followers who were not around when Ring was at the height of his powers during the Tipperary-Cork tussles of the 1949-61 era.” Never was a truer word said.
Growing up in North Tipperary you had the privilege of what they might call cultural transmission when it came to hurling. You didn’t have to have seen Martin Kennedy play to be convinced he was the best full-forward who ever pulled on a jersey. You knew to watch the demeanour of Len Gaynor on big days in Nenagh because Kilruane hurled as if to represent that gritty determined image. Then there were almost set lessons. When you wondered about Newport playing Noel O’Gorman at full forward in the North Intermediate Final nearly twenty years after he played full-back for Tipperary, you were smilingly assured of what hurling people mean when they talk about ‘wrists’. Only if Ned Óg himself donned the Purple and Gold once more could the team from the Mulcair’s banks have become a more attractive proposition. Quality was lasting and appreciated.
Roscrea was Roscrea – you did not question this eternal truth about those magic reds of the 1970s. Borrisoleigh could not be passed on the way to Thurles without a plethora of great names being bandied about. But that 1984 Munster Final, as Raymond Smith noted, put flesh on all of this. Suddenly you had conclusive proof that there wasn’t a better hurler in Ireland than Noel O’Dwyer who could hold back time in Semple Stadium on that warm July afternoon. Everything you were told was true.
That 1984 publication came soon after the deaths of two hurling icons Ring (1979) and Mick Mackey (1982), and not long after the early death of Nicky Rackard (1976) too. Looking for new angles to refresh material Raymond Smith based much of this work around the deeds and eras of those players. A feature of the book to which the mind drifted in the week that was in it was pictures of old hurlers at the funeral of Christy Ring in Cloyne – Tommy Doyle and the Rattler Byrne of Thurles, Jackie Power of Ahane, Snitchie Ferguson of Dublin, Tony Reddin, and most poignantly of all perhaps, Mick Mackey, who died three years later.
As a young man this was emotional – you wondered what these old players were thinking as they said farewell to an eternal foe. A picture of Ring himself walking the side-line during the 1978 Munster Final was described as his “last day” at the venue. There is always a last day for us all in every endeavour. This week watching the pictures of Nicky English, Joe Hayes, John Crowley, and others at the funeral of Teddy McCarthy brought those images from Raymond Smith’s literary eulogy to the great names of the past flooding back. Teddy was, as a Cork Senior player, just a couple of years removed from that 1984 Munster Final. If that game whetted the appetite for Tipp-Cork clashes the following years brought nourishment aplenty.
In 2009 when the GAA celebrated its 125 years there was a programme about Munster hurling. For Kevin Hennessy of Midleton, more than All-Irelands and any awards, his greatest memory was the Cork-Tipp games. Teddy McCarthy was in the eye of this storm of 1987-1992. The teams played seven times – Tipp won 3, Cork won 2 and 2 were drawn. The memories linger. Kevin Hennessy falling in possession at the Town End in 1991 before being harassed away from goal and still managing to turn and lift the net off its moorings with a killer shot to put Cork ten points up in the second-half of a Munster Final Replay – and it still was not enough. Aidan Ryan and Pat Fox nearly emptying the Killinan End with the excitement of their goals, and Nicky English doing a ‘George Best’ (to quote Smith again) at the same goal in 1987 when he divested of his hurley by a Cork defender.
Teddy McCarthy himself quickly became an integral part of those years. The high leaps had to be seen to be believed. A salmon leap, perfectly executed and devastating in its accuracy and timing. Babs Keating recalled the preparation for the 1987 Munster Final replay in Killarney which involved coaching Paul Delaney to deal specifically with McCarthy’s high fielding. Now Roscrea’s Delaney was a fantastic young hurler destined to have a fine Tipp career – wristy, tough, and with plenty of that corner-back bitterness that you want. That year in Killarney he was wing-back, centre-back, anywhere needed. The fact that Teddy McCarthy was part of his detail was praise for the Sarsfields man indeed.
The similar age of Teddy McCarthy and Christy Ring at their demise in their late 50s brought home for us how young Ring was when he died suddenly. Teddy McCarthy’s death marks a first major crack in the glorious façade of personality that those 1987-92 Tipp-Cork teams had. Like those figures in Raymond Smith’s books time will ebb away at all of those who stood graveside too. Such is the way. Not immortals, but certainly Hurling Immortals.