A delightful reminder of the extraordinary characters who transformed hurling
In 2017 The Art of Hurling is such a book worth worming out.
After previously studying some of the most important managers in the history of Gaelic football, Daire Whelan has turned his focus to the small ball.
The result is a treat, a delightful reminder of not just what an extraordinary game hurling is but what extraordinary characters have coached the old game over the last 40 years.
From Babs and Justin to Loughnane and Griffin, right up to Anthony Daly and Eamon O’Shea, their voice, genius and, quirks are captured here, in all their glory.
At some point in time they were all men ahead of their time, or at least men for their time. Later time would pass some of them by but that doesn’t lessen their contribution to the game. Whelan’s book salutes that contribution and how their wisdom and insights can still apply now.
The book’s opening interviewee, Diarmuid Healy, is a case in point.
Long before terms like guided discovery and developing decision-makers were en vogue in coaching parlance, Healy was adhering to those principles in his work with the Offaly hurlers back in the early ‘80s.
Rather than telling them what to do, he’d ask them what they should do.
“You have to get them thinking for themselves. You have to be asking them, ‘What would you do in this situation? Why didn’t that happen there?’”
Long before there was any sport psychologist working with inter-county teams, he was reading The Psychology of Winning by Denis Waitley after he saw a man walking by at lunch with it in his hand. Before anyone spoke about the athlete-centred approach, Healy created an environment where players could approach him about anything that could be affecting their performance.
One time an out-of-form player confided to him that he was having difficulties with his wife, being away from her nearly every night. Healy gave him a month off training. “He came back then and everything was grand.”
A notable feature of the book is that Brian Cody declined to be interviewed, something Whelan both notes and accepts on account of his continued involvement at the elite level of the game, but the book isn’t any lesser for his absence because of the other huge personalities who opened up to Whelan.
As always, Ger Loughnane makes great company and copy. While he might not be quite as new-school as Healy, he echoes his point about developing players who can think for themselves and how recent Clare management teams have failed on that count.
“That’s one of the huge deficiencies in Davy Fitz’s training,” he says. “When he was manager of Clare, I was at a [All-Ireland] quarter-final behind the dugout when Conor Cleary hit a crazy ball in to the Clare forwards when there was nobody there. And what did he do? He went over to apologise to Davy in the dugout. What the hell?! Everything had to be controlled from the side as if he had the remote control.”
He throws out more grenades. That Clare’s 2013 All-Ireland win, while wonderful and inspirational was “false” and ultimately hurt the development of the team, contending that they still resemble “an U21 team”. The 2013 final against Cork was “a lovely open game and all that, but it was like a camogie match in terms of physicality”.
The recent talent identification system in Clare he dismisses as “crazy shit” where “you couldn’t be taller than 5’4 or you couldn’t play”.
He also rails against a general “softness” among the general and hurling population these days, a recurring theme and bugbear of quite a number of the interviewees. At times the book reads like it could have had an alternative subtitle: Grumpy Old Men. Babs and Justin lament the rise of player power, not surprisingly as they were both victims of it.
Eamonn Cregan bemoans the scourge of hand-passing and how “a lot of the managers today are goalkeepers or defenders — they have a defensive attitude”. Even the gregarious Anthony Daly vents his frustration with the roll lift. “If I could put my hands on the fella who coached them that…” he says through gritted teeth.
But again, even in their crankiness, they provide terrific quotes, probably the best coming courtesy of Terence ‘Sambo’ McNaughton.
“It’s all about social media now, how many fuckiing friends you have on Facebook. You’ve got 500 friends on Facebook? And four of them turn up at your funeral?”
And yet, in spite of that, the humanity and basic decency of the various personalities shines through.
Hurling is a game that lends itself to obsessiveness and most of the cast here have been commonly acknowledged as hurling obsessives but still they’ve managed to retain a wider perspective.
It’s lovely to hear Justin McCarthy poetically describe his fascination with nature and the seasons and taking his grandchildren for a walk through the fields.
“See those swallows?” he’ll point to them. “They’ll be going off shortly to South Africa, they have a long journey ahead of them.”
He even has a pet fox that he invites into his house and onto his chair and feeds.
“Happy are those who see the beauty of the world around them,” McCarthy tells Whelan. “They will never grow old.”
By that count John Allen, who will freely admit to being the least obsessive of the personalities here — “I would have always tried keeping in my life a sense of ‘This is only sport’” — will never grow old, as he travels around the musical heartlands of America, from the jazz of New Orleans to the blues of the Mississippi delta to the rock’ n’ roll of Memphis and country of Nashville.
And of course, you can seek and find beauty all around you down on the hurling field too.
“Listen to the goal,” Eamon O’Shea would tell the Tipperary forwards, just as Robin Williams would urge his Dead Poets Society to press their ears to the walls of Welton Academy.
“Listen to what it sounds like when the sliotar hits the back of the net. Listen closely — what does that sound like?”
Why, happiness, as McCarthy might say.
