Finding reality behind a true hurling legend

JOHN HARRINGTON was an impressionable child the first time he saw John Doyle.

“My father pointed him out to me at a Munster championship game, Tipp versus Cork, and seeing him walk through the crowd, the cheering and the back-slaps — the man had a presence about him, and that always resonated with me.”

That resonance has culminated in Harrington’s biography of the great Tipperary hurler, who died recently. At first glance the career of a player who came to prominence in the 1940s doesn’t look an obvious starting point.