King Henry coming down the tracks
IMAGINE, it’s 10 years ago next weekend. Henry Shefflin shakes his head at how time has flown and how the world has changed and how he was there when it happened.
He and Ken McGrath had gone over to New York together that September to play for the Waterford club out there, thinking they were just going to be getting in a few beers and some sightseeing to go with it. Then on the morning McGrath was scheduled to fly home, the phone in their Times Square hotel room rang shortly after they’d woken up. Something about the two towers and two planes. They followed the growing commotion out onto the street and then they saw it for themselves on those celebrated big screens: Armageddon was only downtown. They dashed to Grand Central to get one of the last trains out of the city, out to Queen’s where they had some friends, while naturally enough the last plane out of town had already flown.
“It was surreal, being over there, watching the television, reading the papers, seeing the reaction, people in shock,” Henry says.
“We ended up staying until the following Friday, just hanging out. Everything was shut down. We went to the beach one day and we couldn’t even get onto it because the National Guard had taken it over. It was just amazing being over there when it happened.”
How the world has changed since. How his world has changed since.
Back then he’d only the one All-Ireland and one All Star and felt as culpable as anyone for the defeat to Galway the previous month. Gregory Kennedy had mouthed and poked at him all through and Shefflin had taken the bait, getting irritated, yellow carded, distracted.
After he’d returned from New York and back to the Kilkenny fold, Brian Cody let him know in front of the whole group that if he wanted to be a player he couldn’t let himself be sidetracked like that again. Shefflin nodded. It wouldn’t.
Fast forward to the 2008 All-Ireland final. The tone is set in the first minute when a fired-up Shefflin drives at the Waterford defence, forcing them to foul him out by the Hogan Stand touchline. As he lines up his free Davy Fitzgerald is screaming at him, trying to distract him, just like Kennedy all those years before. It’s as if Davy doesn’t exist and moments later the linesman is reaching down for his white flag.
“I could hear him [Fitzgerald] alright,” recalls Shefflin, “just not what he was saying. I was in the zone as they say and when you’re in it there might as well be no one else there.
“There’s nothing like that freedom of being so right for a game, that no matter what’s thrown at you, whether it’s a lad running down off the stand or getting a kick off the ball, you just block it out, you just do the right thing.
“So when he tried that on, I just said to myself keep your head down, do your puff and just strike the ball as hard as possible over the bar.”
A year on he wasn’t quite there. He would still find the necessary focus and resolve to fire home the penalty that turned that 2009 All-Ireland final but up to that point he had been peripheral. 59 minutes into that game, he had yet to score from play or create a score for anyone else. He had touched the ball just once in the second half.
When he looks back, he concludes he made the same mistake he did in his last game as a county minor when he had a poor shooting day in a defeat to Clare and was sure “there were plenty of people going home that night saying ‘Jesus, he’s not going to make it anyway’”.
He’d overcooked it.
“Going into that 2009 final, I felt there was a big mental toll on me. I was after having a good semi-final [when he’d scored 1-14 against Waterford, 1-6 from play], but for the final I maybe over-analysed the whole thing, I wanted to do too much, I wanted to be perfect or something like that.
“Sometimes you can try to get yourself too right. At a certain point you need to just let yourself go. It’s a balancing act, between seeing the game in your own head and thinking about it too much. If you overdo it, you’re using energy that you need come half-three on the Sunday.”
It’s a constant process, this quest to find that right balance, to play as well as he can. He’s a big believer in routine but feels if you stick to the same things all year every year, you become stale.
Last summer when he was primed to overtake Eddie Keher as the leading scorer in championship history, Keher eulogised Shefflin’s strike rate and work ethic, noting that whenever he’d pop down to Nowlan Park three-quarters of an hour before Kilkenny training, he’d invariably find Shefflin already out there, “practicing, practicing, practicing”.
This year Keher could wander in a good bit later to catch him, simply because Shefflin has been clocking in a good bit later himself.
“I found I was maybe doing a little bit too much last year. I was going out at quarter to seven and not only taking frees but taking shots at goals and if you’re doing that at a high pace, that means you’re already in beads of sweat before half-seven when you really need the energy for high intensity training.
“I’ll still go in early the odd night but mostly I go in later and then stay on later and shoot some frees after training.”
Practice is still central to everything he’s about. For him skill wasn’t something given to him from above but rather something he got from down below in the squash court out the back of the family bar in Ballyhale and all the thousands of hours he spent there as a kid, just beating the ball against that wall. Even after breaking onto the Kilkenny senior team, he found himself returning to that familiar formula.
“I’d copped that I was hitting predominantly off my right side in games and it was something Brian would have brought to my attention as well.
“I was trying to flick and drag balls back onto my right side and hitting a lot of balls over my shoulder, pot shots really, because I wasn’t comfortable off my left. So basically I just went home, got out a ball and a hurl and started hitting it off the gable-end wall, just off my left-hand side. Bang, bang, bang.
“It’s the one thing I say to kids all the time. Practice, practice, practice — off both sides. And to this day I still do it.”
His secret is he doesn’t find a grind. The club pitch especially is a sort of refuge. Sometimes he’ll go down there with his nephew who’ll hit a few balls back to him. Often he’ll go down there just by himself.
“It’s where I’ve spent a lot of my life really, down in those wide, open spaces. I find there’s a great freedom attached to it. In Kilkenny training there’s probably someone watching you.
“Down there I’m on my own. You can be so busy at home and so busy at work it’s a chance to get away from it all and get the head right. You puck a few balls in, you’re walking in for the ball, and you have time to yourself and in your head you’re visualising what you’d like to do the next day, maybe catching a high ball or something, just getting yourself ready for the challenge ahead.”
He’s been down there a good bit this last month. You’ve probably heard, there’s a bit of a challenge ahead tomorrow. Yet it can hardly be greater than the challenge he’s overcome over the last 12 months.
He knows that he was right to chance it but he’s not sure if Brian Cody was right to chance him.
To be fair the lead in to last year’s All-Ireland was like no other, not even for the pair of them.
From the moment Shefflin came back down to earth going for that ball against Cork in the semi-final, he knew that his cruciate was gone. He’d done the right cruciate in the 2007 final against Limerick. This time he could even hear the pop.
He watched the first couple of minutes of the second-half before it was decided that himself and the injured Brian Hogan should head right away to the nearest ice chamber.
One of the Croke Park stewards was parked just outside and kindly volunteered to be their chauffeur, so a few minutes later John the steward found himself driving down to Wexford with two multi-All Ireland winners in the back “in our smelly gear, fed up and hungry”.
Shefflin’s form was even worse on the Tuesday. He’d been to Waterford to see the surgeon Tadhg O’Sullivan and the scan confirmed his worst fears.
“I broke down in front of Tadhg and the nurse. I was devastated.”
That evening he went to see the other Tadhg, the team doctor, Tadhg Crowley, and somewhere in the conversation the name of Ger Hartmann came up. The next day he hobbled into Hartmann’s clinic in Limerick on his crutches. Hartmann radiates such positivity it could power the country and he told Shefflin there was still a chance. The muscles around his knee were strong. The three other ligaments around the knee were strong. Build them up some more and they could compensate for the one that had obviously been ruptured.
“I’ll be honest,” says Shefflin, “that’s all I needed, someone to tell me I had a chance.”
Work were great, giving him all the time and space that he needed, even though his boss, Pat Creed, was a Tipp man. It was hugely intense stuff, between all the commuting to and from Limerick and the workouts they’d have down there, with Hartmann and his assistant Ger Keane often putting Shefflin and John Tennyson alongside him through their paces for four hours at a time.
Yet 10 days out from the final Shefflin was wielding a hurley instead of crutches at the best attended training session in GAA history. On the Monday he measured up well against Tommy Walsh in training. He felt drained that night but then he rested and eased up for the rest of the week. Going into the game he felt good, and in the warm-up too. Even in those opening 10 minutes he felt fine, getting on the ball more often than he had in all of the 2009 final. He wasn’t holding back in any way, figuring that if it went, it went. Unfortunately, it did. The risk hadn’t come off but the risk had been worth it, for him anyway.
“I look back on it now and it was a great experience. I wouldn’t change it for anything. Maybe Brian Cody would, with the distraction it became.
“The focus should have been on the match when instead a lot of it was on the injuries we had, especially my own. For the rest of the lads, I’m sure they were listening to a lot of it outside training — ‘Is Henry going to play?’ and all that stuff — and maybe that wasn’t the best thing.”
He’s not using that as an excuse. Asked why Kilkenny’s five-in-a-row bid came up just short and he offers a simple and gracious explanation.
“I just don’t think we were good enough on the day. I think we hurled very well but Tipp just hurled better again. They might have been better than us the year previous as well. So that whole circus, maybe it didn’t help but whether it made any difference, only God knows.”
It meant starting back all over again, without ever knowing for sure he’d get back. On top of that his wife Deirdre was expecting their third child in March. Her brother Adrian had played minor for the county though so she had an idea what she was getting into when she met Henry. She was as much for this comeback as Henry himself was.
“I would have had negative thoughts,” says Shefflin, “fearing it wasn’t going to work out, that I could be finished. But Deirdre said ‘No, it’s not the end of you, you’re going to come back, you’ve done it before.’ That kind of stuff is what you need to hear, so I decided ‘Look, I’ll give it the best lash I can.’ If it didn’t work out, so be it, I couldn’t do anymore.”
He was on the crutches and out of work for over three months. The knee was so swollen he had to wait a month before it could be operated on but even in that window he’d do some basic exercises. Just kicking out the leg would trigger this ferocious pain yet 10 days after he’d undergone the knife he was back in the gym.
Shefflin hadn’t long been promoted to the position of the Bank of Ireland’s national sales manager for Mercedes Finance and Toyota Finance but trekking around the country was hardly on, so understanding his predicament as much as his worth they kindly gave him his own automatic car which helped him travel down the road to the Hotel Kilkenny and its gym.
Every day he’d make use of that car, because every day he’d go to the gym. There was no Tuesday or Thursday morning when he slouched off, knowing no one else would notice.
“When I was off work I saw the rehab as my work basically. Some other people aren’t that lucky, to get that time off from their employers, so I was going to respect that [privilege].
“The gym kept me sane really while I was off work. I just saw it as a job basically, to do my best to get myself right.”
At different times over the course of our conversation he offers different reasons for wanting to get it right.
At one point he says it wasn’t necessarily about getting back to play for Kilkenny or play in All Ireland finals. “I was just thinking to get my leg right so I could run outside with the children and stuff like that and maybe go down to the field and train with the lads in the club.”
Later on then the ferocious competitor in him reveals itself. “I just wanted to get back and I wanted to get back bad. Because I didn’t want it to end. You didn’t want to get back to being half-right or half your old self or even three-quarters of yourself. You wanted to get right back to where you were.”
He started out just lifting ankle weights, then walking up and down the pool. A month after the operation he progressed onto the stationary bike.
“I always remember the bad days. The first day back on the bike, I felt fine, keeping to what the lads had given me, so the next day I said ‘We’ll up the resistance here’ and pressed the button a few times, no bother. I woke up the next morning and my knee was just gigantic. It was basically telling me ‘No, don’t like that.’ That’s you set back for another week then.”
By New Year’s he was back at work, fitting in a bit of training and some leg weights in the morning. By the end of that month then he tried running for the first time, down in his father’s backfield, just across from where he lives himself.
That was another pretty humbling day. It wasn’t so much a run as a fast walk, just five minutes in all, up along the perimeter of the field.
He recalls another wet greasy evening back down there in his wellingtons when he fell right over, like some novice skater, causing the knee to swell again. But within a few days it had gone down again and he was back out there again.
About the only day he wasn’t out there was the day Deirdre gave birth to their third child, little Siún. Even the day after that magical day, Daddy was back down in Grandad’s field.
At times it was lonely, surely. On Wednesdays alright he’d pop down to Kilkenny College where the rest of the group were working out and he’d join them for a gym session there, revelling in their company and banter. But outside of going to a few of the home league games, he was mostly by himself, training on his own.
All along he had a date in his mind. He didn’t let anyone in on it to avoid heaping unnecessary pressure on himself, but all along everything was geared around June 12, Wexford Park. Championship.
“That was always in my mind, to be honest. I knew myself I could get a bit of training under my belt and a couple of games with the club before that, I’d be right for that then.”
Hearing team trainer Michael Dempsey and Brian Cody himself comment on how well he was going gave him a fierce boost. The first night back with the club at full contact was another milestone. They were having a game amongst themselves and Shefflin went to catch a high ball, not seeing one of the lads coming up right behind him. They collided and crashed to the ground but no sooner was Shefflin down when he hopped right back up again.
A club game against Dunnamaggin in the freer environs of midfield was another step forward. The biggest moment was the Wexford game. He played reasonably well, drilling over every free he was presented with, but probably the most telling play of all came in the final quarter when he suddenly accelerated from the pack and without breaking his stride, took the grounded sliothar into his hand and slotted it over the bar.
“I’d trained hard leading up to that match but you were still conscious of the fact of just wanting to get through the game, you were still holding back a small bit. No matter what anyone says to you, coming back from a serious injury like that, you need a serious game or two under your belt to get the confidence up. But once I got over that game, that was it.”
He’s been as good as ever since. Some things have changed, naturally. He wouldn’t have had to ice his knees before; now he does, routinely. But as Dublin and Waterford can vouch, everything else is still there from the player who entered that All-Ireland semi-final with Cork 13 months ago.
He really wants to perform in this one tomorrow. Not so he can equal Christy Ring’s eight All Irelands, or seal a 10th All Star or anything as artificial or extrinsic like that. Over the last few years Tipp and Kilkenny have offered up some of the greatest games the old game has ever known, games everyone tells him have been great to play in. But he can’t say that. He sat out the last hour of the epic 2009 league final after been carded by the ref. He hardly touched the ball in the first hour of that year’s All-Ireland. Then he famously had to sit out the last hour of last year’s final.
Tomorrow he doesn’t want to be carried or be carried off by anyone.
“It’s already been a very special summer for me. I think it’s part of the Irish psyche, loving to prove the doubters wrong. I even had doubts myself, would I get back playing again, or back to anything like I used.
“I feel I’ve got back to a good level, I’ve enjoyed going into training. Even the lead up to this All-Ireland, even talking to yourself, I’m enjoying it all because I couldn’t do that last year. This summer I’m staying away from the physio bed and I’m just getting out and enjoying my hurling. What will define this summer as a great one for me is whether or not we win the All-Ireland. It would be foolish to say otherwise. It would make a special summer just great.”
Win or lose, he’s never been more of a champion.
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