Monday, June 07, 2010
AND SO to Waterford on a sunny weekend. We spent most of Saturday afternoon at a GAA club function in the Crystal City, which was conducted half al fresco and half al taverna, if you’ll forgive the pidgin Italian. The al fresco part was the most enjoyable, given the variety of delights on offer.
Indexing minor vintages and then-current fashions is one imperishable delight of any large-scale GAA gathering.
An uncle of this column is fond of saying that you can tell the year a man got married by the crease and width of his trousers (no word yet on telling the year a man committed to a non-legally binding cohabitation).
Hence our fondness for guessing the year someone played minor by his taste in clothes. It was clear last Sunday that some of the minor class of ‘48 and beforehand were in the audience, wrapped as they were in their Sunday best; the minor class of ‘88 and similar vintages, by contrast, were keeping a fingernail’s hold on youth with shorts and club polo shirts (full disclosure: this graduate of the minor class of ‘86 was in adidas polo shirt and Marks and Spencers brown slacks). It’s fair to say we’ve been at some GAA functions in which the sole entertainment was deciphering the decade which produced the sartorial choices on view, but that wasn’t the case last Saturday.
Mount Sion GAA club were busy honouring two deceased members jostling for room in the pantheon – former GAA President Padraig Fanning and legendary hurler John Keane.
Fanning was commemorated with a plaque renaming the club pitch, while Keane is the subject of a new book, The Unconquerable Keane, by David Smith.
The two contemporaries were synonymous with the Waterford club, though for different reasons. Fanning was the administrator who presided over the elimination of Rule 21 back in 1971.
If you thought the discussions in recent years on opening Croke Park were potentially divisive, they had nothing on getting rid of ‘The Ban’. The fact that the Congress in question was in Belfast only added to the drama, and Fanning deserved huge credit for steering the change through.
Fanning was prominent on the Waterford County Board when the county hurlers came through to win their 1959 All-Ireland, and helped to drive the players on by telling them that while Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork had tradition, they would have to make their own. They did.
Keane, by contrast, won his fame as a star hurler.
More than that: a star centre-back. He was one of the men who established the number six jersey as the property of the dominant player on any team, and he served a hard apprenticeship, facing, at twenty, an in-form Mick Mackey in a Waterford-Limerick championship game.
Smith’s book has no shortage of anecdotes from the period, such as the time Mackey and another Waterford star, Christy Moylan, were having it out during a game. Mackey went looking for an orange from the gallery at one stage, and got half-a-dozen pelted onto the field.
The Limerick man picked one up, peeled it, and slung half over to Moylan, his marker, sparking a spontaneous round of applause from the terraces.
Keane was also involved in the Waterford renaissance of 1957-1963. In that period one player, frustrated at being substituted, bounced his hurley off the ground. Keane had a quiet word, advising the player not to hand the advantage to his man by showing his frustration.
Good advice, not dulled by the passing of time.
Padraig Fanning died recently at 92, but Keane passed away at the young age of 58 in 1975.
Knowing he was seriously ill, he had been on a pilgrimage of sorts to meet the men he had faced decades previously when he died on the road to see Jackie Power of Limerick (If he had been a baseball player, of course, Hollywood would have already filmed this).
At his funeral a meal was laid on for the dignitaries in attendance. A Mount Sion member noticed someone left behind in the cemetery and invited him to the meal.
"I came here to bury John Keane, and now all I want to do is go home."
The solitary mourner was Nicky Rackard. The Mount Sion clubman was Padraig Fanning.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
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