Special rivalry, special memories

FOR SIX consecutive years, 1949 to 1954, Cork and Tipperary met in the Munster SHC, the last five of those in the final.

Each year the attendance figures rose - 34,702 for the 1949 meeting, 52,449 in Limerick for the 1954 epic. Tipp won the first three meetings by an average of two points per game, Cork won the last three by an average of three. On every occasion, the winners went on to claim the All-Ireland title, the only consecutive three-in-a-row wins in GAA history.

On opposite sides in all those games were two men, two hurling legends. From Holycross, stylish centre-back Pat Stakelum, captain of Tipp in 1949; from Cork, wing-forward Willie John Daly, of famed Carrigtwohill. Diarmuid O’Flynn got them together this week...

Pat Stakelum: We have one thing in common that I don’t think a lot of people know about. Four years in a row, 1952-55, they picked an All-Ireland team, and only two fellas were on every team.

Willie John Daly: Yourself and myself.

Diarmuid O’Flynn: Was Ring not on it?

PS: No, he missed one year, for some reason. But the friendships we made through the game of hurling were fantastic. Look at that man there, we hated one another for years, and look at us here now. For those matches in Limerick, the crowds, the excitement, for weeks before the game at all. The poor ould divils, sure they’d get down there by bicycle, by every kind of an ould van or bus, bad lorries, but they’d be there at 10 o’clock in the morning.

WJD: Correct. I can remember one occasion particularly, 1950, when the crowd were in on the pitch.

PS: Killarney? That was hectic. I was in Dublin at the time, we came down the night before, Bannon and Shanahan (Tipp midfielders) and myself, and Killarney was packed. There was no room in the hotel, we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast. That was the day Lynch and Ring kept back the crowd when it looked like they were going to invade the pitch, have the game called off.

DOF: For those six finals, the attendance went up every year.

PS: It did, but they were very close, nothing between us. We could have lost all six, we could have won all six, only a puck of a ball between us.

WJD: It started with the 1949 match, there was nothing in it, hectic, and the weather for the replay in Killarney was beautiful.

PS: We had a crowd with us and they were cross-country runners. They might laugh at this now, but they brought a little churn of water with them, and they doused us at half-time, behind the neck, behind the knees, down the back, and it helped to revitalise us. Ye stayed out on the field, if I remember.

WJD: We did, and it was roasting.

PS: We were coming off the field at the end of normal time and Lynch, God be good to him, he was an ornament to the game, a marvellous hurling man, it had already been a draw the first day, now it was a draw again, and it was decision time. We should play extra-time but if the two teams agreed, we could go to a third replay. Ye had Jim Barry, we had Leahy (the two managers), great men, great ould times. We were chatting about what was going to happen, I was captain of the team. I remember Reddan (Tipp goalie) was limping, “whatever you do, don’t let them see you limping,” Leahy said to him.

Anyway, Lynch was coming across, they’d have known each other, Leahy and himself, I was still only a nipper. “Begod,” says Leahy, “It’s wonderful stuff, what’s going to happen at all, we can’t be separated.”

“I don’t know,” says Jack, “But I know I’ve enough of it anyway.” Leahy gave me a nudge: “We’re playing extra-time!”

WJD (laughing): It’s the little things, isn’t it? Do you remember yourself though, in that drawn match, we were a goal up, and there was a free for Cork, Jack Lynch was taking it. Ringey went over to him, I was alongside them and said, ‘put it over the bar Jack’. He struck it, it was at least five or six feet wide, and you raised your hands in the air, “Come on lads, we have ‘em!”

PS: Yes, it was a vital time in the match.

WJD: It was, the ball broke up field, I went up for it, so did you, and ye’re full-forward, Sonny Maher beat the two of us, passed to Jimmy Kennedy, who struck it. Not a hard ball, but it beat the keeper. It was extra-time then.

PS: We had some great games with Cork in Mallow as well around that time, tournament games. Some of us got suit lengths, we got bicycles, gold watches. One final was a ding-dong affair, a draw the first day. We played the replay, and I don’t want to accuse you of anything, Willie John, but do you see that thumb? They’re not matching any more, sure they’re not? Well, there was a little schemozzle, and you were involved, and I got that. We had no subs, so I had to play out the game.

WJD: I’ll tell you now what happened that day.

PS: Do you remember it?

WJD: I do, well. In that schemozzle, a man from Carrick-on-Suir, he was captain of Tipp,

PS: Tom Wall?

WJD: That was him, a hard man. He tapped me over the eye, there (indicates a scar); the next ball came down, I hit him fairly hard. Ye all came in, but Jack Lynch pulled me to one side. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said to me.

PS: There you are, fair dues to Lynch. But I came home here after that game, and the next day I had to go back to Cork, with my thumb. Jim Hurley (Cork star of the 20s and 30s) picked me up off the train, took me to the North Infirmary, and there was a surgeon Mr Kiely there. He saved my finger. I wasn’t sick at all, but I had to stay there, and who looked after me only Johnny Quirke (Cork star), he took me all over Cork. Do you know what Hurley gave the last years of his life doing? Healing the rifts that were created by the civil war. What the GAA did, the influence it had after those turbulent times, has never been fully appreciated. Sean Ó Siocháin used to make the point, the people who played hurling were a special breed of people, and he was right.

WJD: Willie Rackard wrote a great book, one of the greatest hurling books of them all, I think, and he mentions a meeting between The Rattler (renowned Tipp corner-back Mickey Byrne, from the original Hell’s Kitchen) and Ringey, in Thurles. You know the Rattler now, the way he is. “Well how are you Christy,” he says, “Great to see you in the land of the living.”

Christy fixed him with that steely glint in the eye: “If you had your way you little bastard, I wouldn’t be in the land of the living!”

PS: There was another story told about the two of them. Christy as you know played on for Cork into his 40s, was still coming up to Thurles year after year.

“Begod Christy,” says the Rattler one year, “We’ll probably have to shoot you!”

“Why not,” says Christy, “Ye tried everything else!”

PS: A lot of people criticise the modern game, say it’s not like the old style, but it has a lot to offer, I think anyway. The people who taught me to love hurling were the Cork and Limerick teams in the 30s in Thurles. Those were absolutely magnificent occasions, when those teams met. Limerick had the Mackeys, Power, Clohessy, Scanlon, Howard; Cork had Con, Willie Murphy, Young, the Buckleys, Quirke, Bobby Ring, Lynch, and Micka, a great character, one of the loveliest men you ever met. Micka got a lot of hard knocks in life, but it was nicer and nicer he got.

WJD: I remember Michael O’Hehir, one of the first men he’d always mention, Micka Brennan, with the cap turned backwards on his head, the black togs, because he’d fierce black legs.

PS: I remember one time he went in on Scanlon, because that time you could charge the goalie, but he got tapped.

WJD: Yeah, that’s true, Scanlon stretched him that day. In my opinion, Jimmy Langton was the best Kilkenny player I ever saw, he was a star. 1947 they beat Cork, he was fantastic, but that was the day they gave Ring a fair going over. He was after scoring that great goal against them the year before, the fella with the two great daughters who played camogie was on him, Downey wasn’t it? Anyway, in 47, Prendergast and Kennedy together, they gave him an awful doing. But I have to tell you now, there was a very bad winter that year, and Kilkenny were supposed to come up to play Cork. They couldn’t come, there was snow, so the game wasn’t played ‘til three weeks after the All-Ireland final. They had a full team, bar the goalkeeper, Jim Donegan.

I was marking Jimmy Kelly, he scored the winning point in 1939, the ball came down between Prendergast and Ringey.

Now I never saw Ringey reacting before this, but boy, he pulled fairly hard, and Prendergast went down like a log.

PS: Fairly hard again!

WJD: Well when he got up, I hit him also, for good measure. I was kept on after that, but I was told later Jimmy Kelly always said I was as big a blackguard as ever he came across!

PS: Fair comment, my regard for Jimmy Kelly has gone up! I’m going to offer a salute to Cork with this little monologue. You’ll enjoy this now, a Corkman told it to me, though you’re not in it, nor am I:

It was all in an April evening, ... (see below)

WJD: I want to say to you now, I’d come down again all the way from Cork, just to hear that again. It was brilliant.

PS: Well you drew that out of me now.

WJD: Didn’t I tell you how good he was?

PS: Not too long ago here, all my medals were stolen from me, everything, and a lot of Nancy’s jewellery also.

Ah, ‘twas a black time, but the friends I had, I leaned on them, and they were very good to me.

Anyway, didn’t the clubs, Durlas Óg and Holycross, get together, and did a beautiful thing; they got replicas of all my medals that were stolen. Wasn’t that a lovely thing?

DOF: Must have been terrible.

PS: It was, they took the medals, and they were never recovered, but there was one thing they couldn’t touch, they couldn’t take the memories.

A hurler’s solo run

It was all in an April evening, I met him on the road,

With his hurley and his hurling kit, it seemed a heavy load.

But his heart was light and his eyes were bright,

And his hair had a golden sheen,

The world was all before him, this lad of young 14.

I stopped the car and took him in, said I’ll drop you at the cross,

He thanked me then and said, that’s fine, I’ll be picked up there by the bus.

And while we drove along, we talked of hurling times,

Of the Mackeys and the Rackards, and Waterford’s Philly Grimes.

We spoke of goal-man Reddan and Tipperary’s Tommy Doyle,

Of thrilling goal-mouth clashes, and tempers on the boil.

Of the thunder-and-lightning Sunday, when Kilkenny pulled it through,

Of Limerick’s Paddy Scanlon, Dick Stokes and Clohessy too.

He said I’d love to see them play, those men of yesterday,

Especially Cork’s great four-in-a-row, they were mighty men, they say.

I said I saw them play in Thurles, Limerick and Croke Park,

The Murphys, Lynch and Barrett, and Quirky from Blackrock.

The Buckleys, Young and Donovan, Campbell and Cottrell too,

Kennefick, Mul and Condon, from that famed old club, The Blues.

There was Hitler from Ballincollig, Micka from the Sars,

Batt Thornhill and a gent called Lotty, who are now beyond the stars.

He listened to my ramblings, the lad of young 14,

And then he asked a question, that rang across the years,

Of summer games, of thrilling crowds, flags waving in the breeze,

The sounds of hurleys clashing, and the sliotar flying high,

Nerve-tingling excitement beneath the clear blue sky.

These are the memories that come to me, the joy it will always bring,

When someone asks the question, do you remember Christy Ring?

And as he went away from me, that evening in the spring,

I wondered what our lives would be, without this hurling thing.

What would there be to talk about, in factory, shop or farm,

What other game could we invent, to keep small boys out of harm.

I watched a swallow gliding by, I heard a young lamb bleat,

A little primrose raised its head, the evening sun to greet.

A foal stood up on gangly legs, its mother’s paps to suck,

I heard the ref’s shrill whistle, and the sound of the hurling puck.

These are the things about Ireland, I hold so very dear,

All enshrined in God’s great plan, all so very clear.

Aye, his step was light, and his eyes were bright,

And his hair had a golden sheen,

And I thank my God I met him then, that lad of young 14.