Dr Tom Higgins: Tending to Waterford’s wounds
Do the Waterford hurling supporters flooding into Croke Park tomorrow need to remember the bad days?
Playing Carlow without a spectator present? Playing Mayo in Fraher Field? Losing to Mayo in Fraher Field?
Dr Tom Higgins was there for every dip of the rollercoaster. He was the team medic for three decades, a stretch which began with a visit to his surgery by a man smelling faintly of orange.
“I got here to Dungarvan in January 1978, and that April I had a Waterford player come in with an injury,” says Higgins.
“He told me that the team had no doctor, and that when he got hurt someone had poured a soft drink over his leg. It wasn’t even Fanta. They’d used Jafora, a local orange-flavour soft drink.”
Higgins said he’d help out if the management was agreeable. The late Greg Fives, then a selector, met him and Higgins was on board for his first match, the championship game against Clare in May 1978.
“Seamus Power was the manager for that game,” says Higgins. “I’d never been in an inter-county dressing-room until that day, and one of my memories is of him hitting a hurley off the dressing-room table — literally — as hard as he could.
“Eventually he broke the hurley, and he turned around to the nearest player: ‘Give me your hurley’, but the player wouldn’t give it to him, he could see his own hurley was going to get smashed in the gee-up.
“That was the start of it.”
The Waterford hurlers were luckier than they knew with Higgins. While training as a GP in Derbyshire, a specialist holding a rheumatology clinic nearby gave him a full year’s tuition in the field, which resulted in Higgins developing expertise in injecting joints, Cyriax manipulation of the back, acupuncture, and more.
“I had an inkling that sports medicine was going to become more and more popular and ended up as a GP-rheumatologist. All of that helped with the hurlers.”
After Power stepped down, Joe McGrath took over the Waterford hurlers. “He was CEO of Molex, a multinational based in Cork, and he was a hugely impressive individual. To be honest, he mesmerised the players, more or less.
“We had players like Jim Greene, Tom Casey, John Galvin, Mossy Walsh, Mossy Whelan, and he got them going. He got Jim to lose a stone or two and he played the stuff of his life. He told Tom Casey, ‘that hair is slowing you up’, so he got Tom to cut his hair.
“They were all playing well and we got to a league semi-final his first year, for instance, which was progress, but one significant thing was that Joe was spending a lot of money.”
Higgins could see that McGrath’s willingness to spend the county board’s funds was a live index of his likely term in office.
“There was a challenge match against Galway at one stage up in Oranmore, and the same day Joe had a big meeting in Cork at 5pm, but he’d fly up by helicopter and the county board would pay. Which they duly did, in fairness. For a challenge.”
Higgins can remember the helicopter banking in low over the field, with McGrath stepping out, ready to lead the Déise. “He was larger than life. Donald Trump-like, but without the bad side!”
The turning point for Waterford, says Higgins, were the 1982 and 1983 Munster finals: “I’d say they were the death knell for Waterford hurling, to lose those Munster finals the way we did. Cork scored 5-31 in 1982, for instance.
“After that match, Professor John A Murphy was walking down the road into Thurles, and when some Waterford lads tried to slag him he came back with ‘ye got what was coming to ye today’ or some such. For years we were hearing jokes about getting the 5.31 train out of Thurles. That and the 1983 defeat was the end, really, of all of those good players. They hadn’t the belly for it after that, not surprisingly. And we went down, all the way to the third division.”
Everywhere Higgins looked in those years, he saw evidence that Waterford weren’t off-Broadway. They were off-off-Broadway.
“We played Carlow one time in Muine Bheag, a freezing cold day, and there wasn’t a spectator at it. Not one, not even a Carlow person.
“I was able to drive the car into the ground and park on a bank overlooking the pitch. I watched the match from the car and only got out if someone was hurt — and I didn’t rush out of my seat, by the way, when I did get out.
“A man came into the ground at one stage, walking his dog, the only spectator. He walked around the perimeter of the pitch with the dog and didn’t stop once — he went back out with the dog the way he came in and away.
“To be fair, getting to the Munster final in 1989 was a fair achievement, given the defeats of 1982 and 1983. Before we made that Munster final, though, we had matches against Derry — I remember paying for a drink in the clubhouse after with punts, though we were in the Six Counties.
“We ended up crossing Carlingford Lough to play Down. Casement Park for Antrim. Roscommon. Mayo. And Mayo beat us here. In hurling. Back here in Dungarvan. People forget that. The notion of an All-Ireland final... when you were coming back from Derry or Carlow, it wasn’t even laughable. It never occurred to you. We were in the abyss at that stage.”
Tony Mansfield came in as manager and made a huge difference, he says. “We were great friends. He was very methodical. His approach was, ‘we’re in the third division, so we’ll get into the second division’. When we were promoted, it was, ‘we’re here, we’ll get into the first division’. And we did that in two years. His style was ‘get stuck in’, and we got to the Munster final in 1989.”
To do so they had to get past Cork after a replay. Higgins missed the replay because he’d booked his holidays in Carnac, Brittany. He was waiting to hear the result when he recognised a newly arrived holidaymaker.
“Dr Con Murphy of Cork had just come over. I said, ‘well?’ and he just said, ‘I’ve tickets for the Munster final, you can have them.’
“I jumped around the place, I was so delighted.”
That year’s decider was the first televised Munster final, a game best described as torrid.
“There was a lot of grief about the match,” says Higgins. “It was hot and heavy on both sides. Fr Tom Fogarty was involved with Tipperary — he was also a curate in Kilgobinet — and he wasn’t happy, he thought we were a bit rough on Tipp.”
The green shoots really came in 1992. The Waterford minors, including one D. McGrath (De La Salle), made it to an All-Ireland final. The U21s won an All-Ireland. “The U21 management was very good — Tony Mansfield, Peter Power, Joey Carton, and they had good players.
“Gerald’s arrival drove it on again, when he came in.”
Gerald McCarthy arrived from Cork with All-Ireland medals and a track record of success. Another step up.
“He trained them hard, he kept discipline, there was the Nutron diet. The Nutron was a matter of getting lads to focus on what they were eating. It wasn’t scientific at all — it was codswallop, really. Paddy Joe Ryan (Waterford chairman) wasn’t the biggest success in terms of the Nutron diet, he lost a load of weight.”
Waterford still had their struggles. The 1998 championship began with them trailing in the second half to Kerry, for instance.
“Gerald turned around to me and said, ‘we’re dying’, but Dan (Shanahan) hit a goal and we kicked on. We had the Munster final with Clare, then. They were hot favourites the first day and Waterford surprised them. Clare were ready for war the second day and we weren’t as ready. At the throw-in Tony Browne was on the ground and I ran out, but when I looked around there were another three players on the ground. After that, it all settled down, though. Clare were up for it and cleaned us out, really.”
Still, they made it to Croke Park. A week after the Munster final they beat Galway by ten points to make it to an All-Ireland semi-final. A long way from Muine Bheag.
“We had a good team, a new manager, but Gerald was put into the stand for that semi-final. People don’t remember that. It probably took a couple of percentage points off us, and we couldn’t get past Kilkenny. The wind was strong that day and we had it for the second half, I remember saying it at half-time, ‘we have it now’. But it wasn’t to be.”
The losing dressing-room in Croke Park became depressingly familiar. “It’s the death of a dream, pure and simple. They give the same sacrifices as the winners, but the dressing-room after those defeats...
“It’s the silence. Absolute silence. You have to listen to the victor come in and talk, you gather yourself and your stuff. It’s emotional, but lads go home, talk to the family, the wife... and they get ready to go again.
“Gerald brought them from no-hopers to contenders, but losing to Limerick in 2001 was the end. We were 11 up and lost by one.”
Still, they warmed to him. Take the time they played London in a challenge game in Ruislip, and when they flew back into Cork, Gerald insisted on a drink in the ’Barr’s clubhouse.
“Myself and Greg and Kieran O’Connor went in for one, and the lads in the ’Barrs were absolutely killing him with faint praise — ‘well done Gerald, great win... over London’ — and I was saying, ‘Gerald, no wonder you wanted us to come in to protect you’.”
In his last years on the sideline, Higgins saw the team collecting plenty of silverware.
“Justin (McCarthy) came in and was a very decent guy, Paddy Joe (Ryan) got him in. Though he hadn’t coached for a long time at that stage he was fresh, a breath of fresh air, he wasn’t into this huge physical training, it was all skill.
“He was very good with the players. He brought them to the ball alley in Rochestown, dress their hurleys, he was a father figure, really.
“The end was traumatic, obviously. I’d say he would have liked one more year. In fairness to him, he texted me recently with ‘up the Déise’, too.”
In 2002 McCarthy steered them to that first Munster title in almost four decades.
“It was as good as an All-Ireland to us. There were 10,000 people waiting for us in the square in Dungarvan that night. Walking the cup across Youghal Bridge into Waterford, all of that.
“By the time Davy (Fitzgerald) came in I’d almost 30 years done. I decided I’d give up at the end of 2008, but we got such a walloping in that All-Ireland I said I’d give it one more year. It was getting embarrassing at that stage. At one game a fella went down in the corner, so I ran out to him, and then someone went down in the opposite corner a minute later.
“That happened three times in a row, and when I finally got back to the dugout I was banjaxed. I said, ‘that’s it, I can’t go’. I packed it in.” The changes since he began back in 1978 have been immense.
“When we started the same element of care wasn’t there. Back then I remember Pat Curran — Patrick Curran’s father — getting hurt in a match in Lismore, a challenge.
“He was concussed but there was nothing there you could use to take him off, so we had to lift him bodily and bring him into the dressing-room.
“Even concussion... players would be dazed and would come around, there wasn’t a sense of being as careful as nowadays. The knee injuries as well — players kept going with ‘gammy’ knees, while nowadays they’re scoped for little bits of cartilage and so on.
“And the fitness programmes are much better. The players are taller, bigger from weights and nutrition... if you went into a 1978 dressing-room and then into a current dressing-room, they wouldn’t even compare. The players now are all like rugby flankers in size.”
His greatest memory of the three decades comes with a white and blue tinge, not surprisingly.
“I remember commiserating with the Kilkenny lads down in the Anner Hotel after we won the league in 2007. That was sweet. The biggest highlight comes tomorrow, I hope.
“There was a lot of hype before the 2008 final. Waterford was on fire with flags and colour, and I remember John Allen writing that players could be depleted by the build-up, that they needed to go into conclave like the cardinals, almost — to head up to Melleray, maybe, though that mightn’t suit some lads. I hope we’ve learned.”
Incidentally, Higgins never charged the Waterford County Board for his services.
How could they have paid him, anyway?
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