Issuu

Old Parish Ciarán Murphy

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Do mo shinsir

I have a distinct memory of playing hurling as a kid on my local GAA pitch in Milltown, in north-east Galway. I must have been injured or incapacitated in some way at the time, because I recall pucking around with my dad in the middle of the pitch while my Gaelic football teammates ran a couple of laps around us.

I would have been no more than eleven or twelve, and I remember getting an awful slagging. I’ve asked the fella most likely to have done the slagging about that day. He broadly confirmed my memory of the event, and said something that chimed very precisely with my impression at the time: ‘No one else from Milltown had a hurl, so I’d say you did get a bit of abuse!’

In one sense, there is nothing surprising about this little incident: any deviation from the norm when you were a kid back then meant you copped a bit of flak. And north-east Galway really wasn’t hurling country: that doesn’t begin until you get close to the Dublin–Galway railway line.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the wilder it seems. My father and I were playing one of the two major GAA field sports, on a GAA pitch, in a county that might well have played in the All-Ireland hurling final that year (if the year in question was 1993, when I was eleven), and this was nevertheless deemed to be some kind of subversive act. I certainly didn’t do it again down at the pitch in Milltown, though it was not particularly uncommon for my dad and me to puck around a bit in our backyard during my childhood. Dad had played hurling as a youngfella in Waterford, and we had a couple of hurleys in our shed.

For most of the young people in our village, it was different. If both your parents grew up in or around north Galway or south Mayo, your exposure to hurling was fleeting at best. For most, it was non-existent. I grew up supporting the successful Galway hurling team of the late 1980s, watching every bit of hurling on television that I could. But if you lived in that part of Ireland – as in so many other parts of Ireland – your interaction with the game was always as a spectator, never as a participant. To actually pick up a hurley was a waste of time. It might even have been looked upon as an aﬀectation.

Two books about the history of hurling were published in the 1970s. The first was called Camán: 2000 Years of Hurling in Ireland . The title of the second – Iomáint in

Éirinn Anallód sé sin ó Thosach Ama, Go Bliain 1884 – could have been read as a rebuke to the first. Why read a book that contains a mere 2,000 years of history when you could read one that traces the story of hurling back to ‘the beginning of time’?

There are two Irelands. In the one I grew up in, hurling was not the done thing. In the other Ireland, it is very much the done thing – and no one there will ever be allowed to sell hurling short. It is quite convenient for its many hagiographers and obsessives that, when they say it is the most beautiful sport in the world to watch –‘the greatest game that was ever played by any man’, as Anthony Daly called it at the end of the 2018 All-Ireland final – the bombast is probably justified.

Hurling has elements that make it almost cartoonishly mythic.Take, for example, Joe Canning – by general acclamation one of the five best hurlers of all time. Canning comes from the part of Galway where hurling is the done thing. He played in his first senior All-Ireland final in 2012, and the hurley he played with that day was a hurley he made himself.

It’s like something from a fable – the warrior sharpening his own blade, forging his own sword, in the days before the battle. Canning scored a goal ten minutes into that final that was so good, so thrilling to watch, it seemed likely to bring Croke Park crashing down upon itself. He must have felt like the king of the world in that

moment . . . and then again forty-five seconds later, when he imperiously blocked down a Kilkenny clearance, somehow magicked the ball into his hand, and whipped it back over the bar for a sumptuous point.

Imagine the adrenalin flowing through him at that moment – you can picture it travelling all the way out to the bas of this hurley of his own creation.

And then, with fifteen minutes to go, the hurley was broken irreparably and Canning had to hit a free to force a replay with the last puck of the game, using another hurley altogether. If the hurley that broke really was imbued with magical powers, then Canning was able to corral its replacement into finding the target and forcing the replay.

It’s not just Canning who seems connected to some deep mythic energy. Tipperary’s Ronan Maher regularly finds himself hip-to-hip with Limerick’s Aaron Gillane, another of the game’s deadliest shooters, who uses a hurley Maher himself made. These people are guardians of the game in the truest possible sense.

Or what about Maher’s fellow Tipperary man, Brendan Cummins, who throughout his career as one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time made sure year after year to take part in the Poc Fada. This is a competition held in the Cooley mountains in Louth every year, where hurlers compete to traverse a course five kilometres in length in the smallest number of pucks.

The course follows the journey that Setanta, the boy who would become Cúchulainn, took from his home at Dún Dealgan to King Conchubar’s court at Emain Macha, hitting his sliotar out in front of him for the duration of the journey.

This is a fable from over two thousand years ago – and the competition based on it draws some of the biggest names in the game every year. Cummins won the Poc Fada nine times, but he wasn’t the only big name in senior inter-county hurling to compete. Ger Cunningham of Cork, the best goalie of the 1980s, won it seven times. A contemporary of Cummins, Davy Fitzgerald of Clare, won it twice. Pat Hartigan and Tommy Quaid, two more well-known players from Limerick, were winners as well.

But hurling’s unique mystique is not merely a function of its ancientness, its place in Irish myth, or the way its racy-of-the-soil heroes craft their own weapons. It is also a function of the game itself, because at its best modern hurling is quite simply a stunning thing to behold. It requires outrageous hand–eye coordination, which must be executed under conditions unique among the great ball-striking games: while running at full speed, and with someone attempting to tackle you.

As an example of what hurling is like at its best, we might go to the forty-sixth minute of the Cork vs Limerick All-Ireland semi-final of 2024. Limerick’s Cian

Lynch hand-passes the ball to Tom Morrissey, only for him to be set upon by Declan Dalton and Shane Barrett of Cork. They force him to cough up possession, but he somehow manages to regather the ball and hand-pass to Cian Lynch. Tim O’Mahony grabs Lynch, monsters him out of the way, and regains the sliotar for Cork. Shane Barrett gets a hand-pass from him, and through a cluster of bodies he sets Brian Hayes away. Hayes plays a onetwo with Niall O’Leary, but a flick past Mike Casey only results in giving the ball to Dan Morrissey. He hand-passes the ball to Declan Hannon who is running a support line, and Seamus Flanagan, the Limerick full-forward, takes it from him. He delivers a seventy-five-metre pass in towards Aaron Gillane, who beats Ciaran Joyce in the air with his hurley and knocks the ball down to himself. He gets the ball into his hand quick as a flash, then underarms an unorthodox stick-pass to Gearóid Hegarty, who sizes up his man and hits a bullet of a shot at goal. Patrick Collins makes a stunning save, but the rebound comes out towards Gillane. He scuﬀs his shot, and is swallowed up by three Cork defenders. Robert Downey comes out of defence, finds Declan Dalton inside his own 65, and he points down the other end. It’s fifty-two seconds from Dalton’s tackle on Tom Morrissey to Dalton’s point – and that passage of play included seven turnovers, two goal chances, and then a point at the opposite end, all done at an exceptionally high level of skill and intensity.

I remember listening to this game in my car, and the sound emanating from my radio at that moment was nothing short of mass hysteria. It was as if the entire capacity crowd in Croke Park had lost all control of their emotions. I watched the game back two hours later and experienced the same feelings myself, even knowing the final result. It was glorious chaos. You can make all the arguments in the world for any other sport, but I just can’t see how it matches up. Hurling is absolutely in a world of its own when it is played like that.

And yet . . . there was laughter from my peers when I played it on our GAA pitch.

This book is, in part, an exploration of a big, and very old, story: the story of hurling’s place in Irish life. It also tells a much smaller story, one from my own life across a few months in 2024. As of the start of that year, I had never felt the dull thud of a sliotar into my hand in a competitive game. I had never received a whack of a hurley across my thighs or my arms. I had never had my fingers softened up by a wild pull in the air as I went up to catch a ball.

And it seemed to me that if I never experienced those things, I would never be able to gain a deep sense of the culture of the sport, the essence of it. I felt that in my bones, and it bothered me.

I had a few questions I wanted to answer. Why did I feel like less of an Irishman for not having played hurling?

Why wasn’t I given the chance to play it competitively as a kid? And: if I were to take it up now, at forty-one years of age, how bad could I possibly be?

There was one hurley in our utility room in Milltown that I remember with particular vividness from childhood. About 10 per cent of the bas was missing and the name ‘S. Frampton’ was written down the side of it. The S. Frampton in question was Stephen Frampton, who played inter-county hurling for Waterford – my father’s native county, as I’ve mentioned – for eleven years. Frampton’s career ended after he walked out of the panel at the start of 2002. Unfortunately for him, that was the year Waterford bridged a thirty-nine-year gap between Munster championship wins. Precisely how his hurley ended up in our utility room is a mystery, but it must have had something to do with my uncle Deaglán, who was a teacher in De La Salle College, where Frampton went to school, and who was involved in the De La Salle club in the city, rivals of Frampton’s club Ballygunner.

Perhaps some De La Salle man had chopped down on Frampton one summer’s evening in Waterford city.

Perhaps, as Frampton reacted to the assault, he threw his hurley to the sideline, only for it to be picked up by my cousin Raymond or Paddy maybe, and the hurley then passed from their house, to our house, to my hand.

If Frampton’s hurley, at the moment of its creation, dreamed of making the ultimate sacrifice for Waterford hurling – maybe getting smashed in two as its owner made a frantic last-minute dive to hook a Kilkenny forward about to hit the winning goal in an All-Ireland final – then spending the autumn of its years lightly used in a footballmad house in north-east Galway would have seemed like a strange kind of purgatory.

The hurley in question was safe from the threat of instant destruction in our house. The fact that we not only tolerated a hurley with a portion of its bas missing, but kept it around for an entire generation, would suggest as much. We didn’t ask much of the hurleys in our backyard, obviously.

I was the youngest of four boys, and as my brothers moved out of the house I got more used to the idea of hitting a tennis ball oﬀ the gable end, either with a tennis racquet for the two weeks of Wimbledon, or with a hurley. But the vast majority of my free time was spent practising my Gaelic football skills oﬀ the side of our house.

I went oﬀ to college, and started work in Dublin. For years, I didn’t pick up a hurley at all. I saw plenty of hurling in Croke Park in that time – including, in 2005, all

four quarter-finals, both semi-finals and the final, which Galway lost to Cork. As Galway’s stock dipped,Waterford’s continued to rise. I was devastated to see Waterford lose to Limerick in the 2007 All-Ireland semi-final, a game they really should have won. I sat beside my uncle Deaglán for Waterford’s first All-Ireland final appearance in forty-five years in 2008 . . . and saw them lose by twenty-three points to Kilkenny.

Around that time, my friend group moved out towards Stoneybatter. If we were congregating in the Phoenix Park on a summer’s day, a call would inevitably go out to bring whatever sports equipment you had in your house with you, just to be messing around with. Most of the time that was an O’Neills Gaelic football or a soccer ball. Sometimes that would be an American football, or a rugby ball. And at some stage in that part of our lives, hurleys entered the rotation.

Hurling was more fun in this setup than almost any other sport precisely because it was diﬃcult. Kicking a Gaelic football to each other got boring in a hurry, and so too did games of one-touch or two-touch soccer. Trying to kick drop-goals is a laugh, but one rugby ball between three lads, or more, meant you had to wait your turn. But there was satisfaction in going for a puck-around because we were all awful enough to get a sense of achievement in just being able to fulfil the most basic of ‘hit-ball-catchball’ functions. We were not aware of following in the

footsteps of Michael Cusack, whose early outings with the new Dublin Hurling Club in the Phoenix Park in early 1884 were a precursor to the founding of the GAA later that year. And we were not entirely sure of what we were doing with a hurley in our hands. But it was enjoyable.

I had never played a game of hurling in my life. I was an unreliable striker of the ball, prone to the odd fresh-air shot, and magnificently unskilled. I was also, by a distance, the best hurler in the group. Mark Horgan was a Gaelic footballer who hadn’t played Gaelic football in years. Collie McKeown was a soccer player who had played neither Gaelic football nor hurling in his life. But there was something in the challenge of hurling that continued to attract us all to the idea of a puck-around. One of us would move house, a hurley might get lost, and we’d go to the middle aisle in Lidl – or, if we were feeling particularly flaithiúlach, to a sports shop in town – to replace it.

I mustn’t overstate this. We might have pucked around twice or three times a year in the summertime. As Covid lingered, the regularity of our meetings went up a notch or two: it was an excuse to get out of the house and have a few cans of beer together. I found I had gotten to the stage where fresh-air shots were becoming a thing of the past, at least until we’d started our third drink.

Once I was reasonably sure of hitting the ball every time I threw it up, I grew more confident. I could find either of my friends from twenty or thirty metres away,

and their good-natured curses as they failed to catch the ball, or to control it on their hurl, gave me a smug sense of superiority. This was one area of our friendship where I towered above them. And it felt good.

As Christmas 2022 approached, and my brothers and I discussed what we wanted as a gift, I asked my brother Paul for a hurley and a few sliotars. He’s heavily involved with St Mary’s GAA club in Athenry, where he’s been living since 2005, and I knew he’d have a source at least slightly better than the middle aisle of a German-owned supermarket.

That Christmas hurley saw more action than any other hurley I’d ever had. This was in no small part due to the slow-dawning realization on the part of my daft dog Pickles that if she just drops the ball I’m hitting for her (rather than running around with it in her mouth for minutes on end), I’ll hit it for her again, and she can chase after it again. This canine cognitive breakthrough alone meant I hit a lot of balls in 2023.

There’s a GAA pitch right beside my home in Dublin 8. If you spend even twenty minutes on a pitch with a hurley and a couple of sliotars, it would take unbelievable discipline not to hit at least ten shots at a goalpost . . . and I do not have unbelievable discipline. My friends became ever more unreliable as fatherhood impinged on their free time. My hurling life was now quite literally one man and his dog. But I loved the feeling

of getting to a place where I was reasonably sure that every time I swung, I was going to make contact with the ball. This was an exceptionally low bar, but one I was still happy to clear. You could practise hitting oﬀ your left side, your right side – the dog didn’t care.

These twenty- or thirty-minute interludes with Pickles became the highlight of my day. I’d walk out towards the 45-metre line, set my feet and swing at goal. I’d stand out near the sideline, imagine I was Joe Canning and arrow a shot oﬀ towards the far post, begging it to draw slowly back in towards the goal. I’d move closer to the end-line, shorten the grip on the hurley and try to hit a score from an acute angle.

At some stage, maybe anyone would feel compelled to see if hitting balls over the bar from forty metres out, uncontested and from a standing position, with no non-Labradoodle witnesses, was a skill transferable to the chaos and calamity of an actual hurling game. Or maybe I was the only middle-aged madman who entertained such thoughts.

It almost made things worse that I had actually played thirty minutes of hurling – in Croke Park of all places.

A group of GAA journalists used to play the employees of Croke Park in an annual charity Gaelic football game in the Big House. One year some bright spark had the idea that we should play one half of hurling and one half

of football. I rocked up with no hurley, no helmet, and no clue what I was doing. I was lining out at centre-forward for the football team, so that’s where I was put for the hurlers as well. What struck me immediately was how alien the whole thing felt from the moment the sliotar was thrown in. Having been hastily provided with the tools of the trade, I could barely fasten my helmet. I had no idea where to go on the pitch. I had no idea how far I could hit the ball, and I had no idea how to move the ball on if I got it.

Having run to wherever the ball was not for the first twenty minutes, I somehow managed to inveigle a shooting chance from about forty-five metres out, into the Davin Stand end, in the final minutes of the half. It is indicative of just how pedestrian was the pace of this game that I was gloriously unhurried while taking the shot. It went inches wide on the Cusack Stand side. And that was that.

I was working for Oﬀ the Ball on Newstalk at the time, listening to Jamesie O’Connor and Daithí Regan break down games in granular detail. They’d speak of catching the ball with your ‘wrong hand’, or describe a player who had ‘a cack-handed grip’. This jargon was pleasingly unfamiliar – it made me curious to know more. But what could you really know if you’ve never played the game?

Ger Loughnane is on record as saying that if you haven’t started hurling by the age of seven, it’s probably too late.

So at the start of 2024, looking ahead to my forty-second birthday in July of that year, I knew I was behind schedule. But what if I just went for it? What if I decided to join my father’s old club in Waterford, An Sean Phobal (aka Old Parish), moved down from Dublin for six months, and sought ground-floor entry to the world of the Hurling Man?

Spending six months in Waterford would require some arranging. Work was the easiest thing to sort out. We had gotten pretty used to broadcasting our daily Second Captains podcasts remotely during Covid, and if I could spend a day or two a week in Dublin, the other five or six wouldn’t present any major diﬃculty.

Accommodation was also manageable. I’d live with my uncle John to begin with, and then my wife, Gill, would come down and join me once her teaching year had finished.

The GAA transfer was more complex. My football club in Dublin, Templeogue Synge Street, was happy to facilitate me. But there was the Waterford County Board to deal with, and of course I’d have to make sure that Old Parish themselves would be OK with my joining up with them for a summer. My family history with the club dates back to my grandfather’s time, in the 1930s, but it’s not exactly easy to walk into a dressing room full of lads you’ve never met before, tell them that you will be absolutely no use to them whatsoever, and expect them to be enthusiastically

on board with whatever stunt it is that you’re trying to pull.

On the other hand, An Sean Phobal is a tiny club, by any metric. Crucially, for me, it is also a dual-code club. They have only one team in each code, and there was by all accounts nearly complete crossover between the two playing panels. In 2024 they would be competing in the Junior B hurling championship in Waterford, having won the Junior C hurling championship the previous autumn. Their football team was in the Junior A championship. I had little to oﬀer the hurling team, but I had played football my entire life, had managed to stay reasonably fit while doing it with Templeogue Synge Street for the previous seven years, and so might conceivably have something still to give on that front.

I told a friend about this rather strange plan of mine. Instead of focusing on the odd logistics, or the imminent danger that taking up hurling must present to a man of my age, Clare simply said, ‘You know, I think it’s admirable that you’re willing to be this terrible at something when you’re in your forties.’ Far too many of us leave our experimentation behind us after our twenties.

It’s the reason I never played a computer game in my life. And as the years advance, I get more and more set in my ways.You will not see me on a zipline. I will not be jumping out of planes. Triathlons hold no appeal to me. If the primary purpose of this project was for me to feel like a

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Old Parish

About the Author

Old Parish Ciarán Murphy

BOOKS

SANDYCOVE