Documentary shows hurling as you have never seen it before

By Michael Moynihan

The crowds milling around the Irish Film Institute last Tuesday were loud in their appreciation of episode 1 of The Game: The Story of Hurling, which was screened in the Dublin venue to launch the documentary series.

Produced by Crossing The Line Films for RTÉ, with the support of the GAA and the Broadcast Authority of Ireland (BAI), the series explores the history and culture of the game of hurling and has already caught the eye on social media, where a brief trailer released early this week had, by the time of writing, been viewed almost 70,000 times.

The first episode of the documentary series airs at the end of the month and the stunning use of super-slow-motion cameras stems from a conversation some years ago between producer John Murray of Crossing The Line and Colm O’Callaghan, head of specialist factual, RTÉ TV.

O’Callaghan felt hurling was a prime candidate for the kind of high-resolution camerawork used by Murray in his award-winning nature programmes such as The Secret Life of the Shannon — that level of camerawork would capture action missed in traditional coverage, given the amount of activity in any hurling game, the speed with which it takes place, and the number of obscuring rucks of competing players in the modern game.

Murray agreed, and director Gerry Nelson was charged with putting that theory into practice. An experienced hand with a varied CV, Nelson immediately bought into their approach.

“If you’re trying to capture a murmuration of starlings, or sand martens flying, wings practically clawing at the air, then you need to use cameras like the Phantom Flex, which can shoot up to 1,000 frames per second,” said Nelson “I think hurling is a sport where the game should be filmed, then broadcast directly after the final whistle in slow motion, because people miss so much.

“Look at the Limerick game last weekend. Some of the touches were unbelievable, but in real time you don’t get a chance to see it. In the programme Richard Stakelum says you can be at a game and suddenly ask yourself, ‘what did he just do?’ and you never see that moment again. It’s gone.”

It’s a truism in the television business that top-end wildlife programmes need time. So did The Game: Nelson began shooting games last year, at the 2017 National Hurling League final and continued for 15 months.

“We were lucky in that regard that we went to every game we could get to and brought all our cameras along. I knew our lads were good at filming wildlife, but we needed maximum practice — and every game, we brought back something magical. As Brendan Cummins said in his interview, even in a junior league game you’ll see something that will bring you up short.”

Stakelum and Cummins are just two of the interviewees.

Over the course of production the crew sat down with — among others — Henry Shefflin, Joe Canning, Lee Chin, DJ Carey, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, Austin Gleeson, Anna Geary, Eddie Keher, Jimmy Barry-Murphy, Anthony Daly, Donal O’Grady, Joan O’Flynn, Liam Sheedy, Eamon O’Shea, Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, Angela Downey, Ger Loughnane, Brian Cody, and Theo Dorgan.

“We interviewed almost 60 people,” says Nelson. “There isn’t a voiceover, the episodes are driven by the contributors themselves. Those were long interviews, two hours, sometimes three hours.

“And they went for it, they gave themselves over to those interview emotionally. We had tears in those interviews, the connection with the spirit of the game was that deep.

“More than one of them said, ‘we’ve been talking about hurling for the last 20 minutes, or 40 minutes, but we haven’t actually talked about hurling in terms of what happened last week or what’ll happen next week.’

“Eoin Kelly of Tipperary said ‘nobody ever talks to me about hurling — they just ask about Tipp, or the next game, or this player or that player, rather than the game itself’.

“It was amazing to see their passion for the sport — their need to spread the gospel on its behalf, really. Henry Shefflin said to us, ‘I know I have to do this interview’, and the impression I got from him, and from others, that it was almost like it was part of their contract with the game.

“We had guys saying they believed Cuchulainn lived — they know at a certain level that that’s a myth, a story, but it illustrates the connection these guys have to the game and to its background, its history.

“It might sound artsy-fartsy, but you’re talking about a sport where the implement is something grown out of the soil of the country. It’s deep, very deep.”

Galway supporters at the Munster Championship defeat to Waterford at the Gaelic Grounds in 1966.

Away from the games and the names, Nelson and his crew had to ferret out footage and imagery going back to the decades. Some they recovered from archives and saved. Sometimes they had to improvise.

“There wasn’t much of Mick Mackey and Christy Ring in the archives,” said Nelson.

“We had to rely on radio interviews at times to get a sense. We’ve saved some footage from mouldering away in the archives, rescanned it and made high-definition versions. But we found some real gems as well. We got footage of Fr Tommy Maher training Eddie Keher as a teenager, for instance, and film of Christy Ring playing in the 1942 All-Ireland final against Dublin, very rare stuff.”

There are other gems. In the interviews, for instance, Donal O’Grady points out the connective tissue between the legend of Setanta and the traditional compliment paid to a player who “hurled all before him”.

There’s Brian Cody’s depth of feeling when describing a broken hurling (“You’d die!”) and Tommy Walsh’s interest in one of the all-time greats (“I was starting to, I suppose, become nearly obsessed even with Christy Ring”).

All the interview transcripts will be collated and made available as a teaching resource for the future, while the series will also be made available to schools across the country in conjunction with GAA Learning in order to utilise the project to its fullest potential as an educational resource.

As for that camerawork, the three cameras tracking Austin Gleeson of Waterford in super-slow-motion as he slaloms through the Cork defence in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final produce an unforgettable series of images, of Gleeson and despairing defenders alike.

During his interview, Tipperary great Len Gaynor welcomes an improvement in the rules some years ago: “The game deserved that.”

The game deserves this as well.

The Game: The Story of Hurling starts on July 30 (RTÉ One, 9.35pm.) Michael Moynihan was the editorial consultant for the series.