Breaking new ground with the unbreakable hurley
PERHAPS the thing to know about Flan Marsh is this: he couldn’t be broken – just like his hurleys.
In another monochrome week where, it seemed, more than a volcanic ash cloud hung over the island, it’s not a bad way to spend a bright Wednesday afternoon; leaning on a fence outside a GAA clubhouse, talking to someone who’s going to hurl on, regardless of economic circumstances. And when he presses a hurley into your hands and insists his new design will work, you tend to believe him.
Game on, Ger.
A 36-year-old man from Broadford in Co Clare, Marsh learned his trade well, started a modest roofing venture, and constructed a business on his good name. Hey, for someone happy to work, there were plenty of new homes that needed roofs, right?
Eventually, the houses stopped sprouting like mushrooms, Marsh was compelled to leave his gang of lads go, and the work evaporated. It’s an old song at this stage.
Marsh, however, kept humming. Instead of backing out the van in the morning, he’d plod out to the shed with a mug of tea in his hand and work on his new project. His wife and three girls always knew where to find him.
“I was doing nothing so I said I’d turn my mind to making hurleys. And there was always a safety aspect that I thought I could get into the hurley. So I came up with the idea of making a shatter-safe hurley.
“A friend of mine got 27 stitches one time, with a flying hurley into the top of the head. And I’ve often seen parts of the hurley hitting them into the back and the head. And that was mostly it.”
Marsh leans on his hurley – a freshly-cut piece of ash that is only betrayed as different by a thin gray stripe that weaves through the trunk of the stick like the letters in a stick of rock. As he’s demonstrating its strength and relative lightness, the aforementioned friend – he who suffered the 27-stitch head wound – pulls into the clubhouse yard.
Danny Chaplin is manager of Broadford – who are currently enjoying an era of unprecedented success – and is this year also a selector in Ger ‘Sparrow’ Loughlin’s Clare backroom team. More importantly of course, he is the falling apple to Marsh’s Isaac Newton. He’s an inspiration.
“I thought he was off his head,” Chaplin deadpans, when asked to recall the day his club-mate emerged from his shed with an early prototype.
“Until recently I actually couldn’t see it. I didn’t even believe that it would prevent a bit of a hurley flying away.
“Until I actually saw fellas pulling there a few weeks ago, we used old hurleys and there was bits flying everywhere. But the new ones are amazing.”
With health and safety a blue-chip business these days, Chaplin realises there’s a gap in the market for the unbreakable hurley. “Kids are taking a big enough risk maybe going out playing hurling. And I know that a lot of parents will be looking at anyway at all they can make it safer. Believe me when two guys clash, the hurleys don’t fly.”
But how would the GAA’s biggest stars – some still pouting in their newly-bought helmets – react to the association insisting they fill their camán with a mystery material. For – spit – health and safety reasons!
“The thing with senior hurlers is that they like their hurleys made in such a place and in such a way. And once they get them then, they’re reluctant to do anything with them,” says Chaplin.
“But if they see the angle to it, as you see there’s no difference, they’ll get on board. It’s a great invention, for want of a better word.”
As anthropologists learn, watched animals eventually start to study their observers. As we talk of the whims and caprices which superstitious senior hurlers carry around in a lucky All Stars ‘98 bag, one joins us.
Meet Brendan Bugler – one of the Banner’s emerging crop of young talent. But today, he’s our crash test dummy. Curiosity pulls one of the builders who are working on constructing the club’s new gymnasium down the scaffold and we all head up to the pitch.
Bugler pulls on a helmet and our other volunteer, Conor Cooney, lunges at him with a traditionally-made hurley. Predictably, it’s axed in two, with one end spiralling into the air like an unleashed peg gun. The players look to us. Good job.
Then the Broadford man takes up Hurley2.0 and absolutely wears it off his inter-county friend. Somewhere in the county Sparrow Loughlin clangs his cutlery onto his lunch plate and senses something, somewhere, is wrong.
CRACK. The hurley snaps. (It reminds me of tent poles I’ve seen halved by falling fat guys, late at night, after the music has long ended at a festival). But the special spine holds it together safely. Good job.
Marsh is expecting the roofing business to stay quiet for anything up to a decade in this country. But he plans to go to Croke Park chiefs with this clever, patent-pending innovation soon.
He might well see another boom then.
* adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
