John Mulhall: One cool Cat lapping up life

Unique is one word to describe John Mulhall. Mercurial is another. One of Kilkenny’s great hurling mysteries explains to John Fogarty how he did it his way...

John Mulhall can’t remember if the training match in Nowlan Park was before the 2010 or 2011 All-Ireland final but the noise has never left him. His ash meeting Brian Cody’s forehead. Or, should that be, Brian Cody’s forehead meeting his ash.

It was an accident, of course. Mulhall was lining out at centre-forward when he struck a ball but on the upswing caught Cody, who was refereeing. He didn’t stick around to check on the welfare of his manager. “It was right at the start of the training match. I would have hit him as hard as I could with the hurl and just ran on after the ball because it was better not to stand next to him at that, I’d say.”

Afterwards, the pair caught each other’s eye in the dressing room.

“I could see him looking over at me. I just started laughing and he started laughing as well. I’ve always had and it will always remain a good relationship with Brian Cody. My relationship with him did differ from others. There was never an element of me being afraid of him or him being afraid of me even!” he chuckles. “I went in and trained.”

Did he cut Cody? “I didn’t draw blood. It would be like drawing blood from a stone, I’d say!”

Whether it’s the tale, Mulhall’s telling of it or both, the freewheeling spirit of the long-haired, jersey-untucked, hurler is encapsulated by the episode. It didn’t work out for him as well as the others on Kilkenny’s U21 class of 2008 – Richie Hogan, TJ Reid, Paul Murphy, Colin Fennelly, Kieran Joyce, Lester Ryan – but it doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

Since last September, the 27-year-old has been teaching business and maths in Greenhills College in Dublin.

In December, he helped them reach the county “D1” final. Hurling is at a novice level there but he enjoys contributing to their development. Before that, he managed to see part of the world, travelling to Australia, New Zealand and South America.

“I’m glad I’ve got the opportunities I have had since (leaving Kilkenny). If I was still there and I had four All-Ireland medals like some of them it wouldn’t make any difference to the one I have. It would be nice to have four but if you played your whole life and had one it’s as much to have one and come on (as a substitute) than 10 and to have started the 10.”

If you were to believe most people, Mulhall’s own off-key, on-stage version of KC & The Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up” at the 2011 All-Ireland homecoming party nailed shut the coffin of his career.

“G’wan The Super Cats” was going down well until the last verse: “Now we’ve taken back our throne/Tipperary póg mo thóin/Liam MacCarthy’s coming f***ing home”.

“That was good craic,” he chuckles. “It was penned by Matthew Ruth and a couple of fellas after the semi-final. I just happened to be there and the rest of it was written the week before by myself and a couple of other lads down in UL. It kind of spiralled out of control then. It could have been anyone who sang it but I got pushed up!”

Footage of the song can be seen on YouTube as can Cody’s body language change completely after Mulhall’s final offering. However, his inter-county destiny wasn’t decided there and then but following a poor league campaign the next year.

“I just wasn’t hurling well in that league. I kept coming on and was getting 10 minutes and I’d hit a ball wide and getting anxious that I need to be scoring to get into the team. The more I tried, the worse I got. I was probably trying to impress him too much and was driving two or three wide instead of laying off handy ball. That’s what I thought I needed to do.

“It didn’t end great but it didn’t end badly either. We finished up on good terms. That’s how it rolls down here. In Kilkenny, you have the height of respect for the man but the likes of other counties such as Galway and Dublin... that stuff doesn’t come into the equation at all. You just get on with your life. There’s no bitterness. Whereas, say in Galway if you’re not as established as a manager, although Anthony Cunningham had achieved a good bit, lads can take grievances. You can’t take grievances against a man who has done it all and won it all.”

Mulhall is a magnet for urban myths. It’s been said he seriously considered pursuing a table-tennis (ping-pong) scholarship in the US years ago but he laughs off that one. As for selling St Martin’s GAA club lotto tickets in the opposition’s dressing rooms on match-days? “I could have when I was younger maybe!”

But he has no issue giving a frank chronicle of his chequered time inside the Cats’ lair. After his 1-16 from play across six Division 1 games in 2010 brought him to national attention, his seven championship appearances between 2010 and ’11 came by way of coming off the bench. “I was lucky enough to break onto it at 20 when they were at their peak. I was there for four years. Well, when I say that I was dropped after we won the league in ’09 because we won the Fitzgibbon with UCC and probably celebrated a bit too hard! Then in 2010, I played all the matches, league and championship. In 2011, I played all of the league as well and played three games of the championship but I didn’t play in the All-Ireland semi-final I’d say because I turned up late for the bus!

“When I was in the panel, it was probably stronger than it is now. Well, the team is still strong. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to say but the panel was stronger in 2010 and ’11, there’s no doubt about that.” He protests he wasn’t the one joker in the pack at the time. “The thing about Kilkenny hurling is everyone is normal. Everyone is one of the lads. I remember going to big matches in ’09, ’10 and ’11 and there would have been lads down the back of the bus – Tommy (Walsh), Martin Comerford, James Ryall, John Tennyson, Richie Power. You’d be going to a match and you’d be imagining the other teams would be nervous whereas we used to do this game which would go around the bus where you’d have to name a thing that can be put onto a tractor. Somebody might say ‘golf ball picker-upper’ and it would keep going and going and we would be in Croke Park at this stage. You wouldn’t even know you were playing in an All-Ireland semi-final.

“That’s the way it was. Lads were so used to going to big games that it wasn’t a way of distracting. Some lads had earphones.

Probably more have them now but back then it was just good fun. Once we went into the dressing room it was completely different.”

A bit like Mulhall. In a completely different way.