The phone call home that ended the Galway famine
Pete Finnerty had had enough.
Drained and frustrated by Galway’s loss of two All-Ireland senior finals, a pair at minor level and a lost league decider, the 22-year-old All-Star decided on a leave of absence from his job as a Garda in Limerick, a break from hurling and a stint in the US.
Johnny Glynn has been able to balance work in the US with a central role on Micheál Donoghue’s Galway team these last few years, but long-distance travel was a less streamlined and straightforward business in 1987.
Finnerty’s departure appeared to be definitive.
Cyril Farrell and the Galway County Board did their best to keep him, but the Mullagh man wasn’t for turning. He played what he insisted would be his last game of the year in early March — a man-of-the-match turn against Wexford — and then he was gone, with his girlfriend, off to New York.
Gerry McInerney was six months ahead of him. Having been joined at the hip with the late Tony Keady on the Galway half-back line, the pair were now perfectly contented to be just another two Irishmen working on the construction sites in the Big Apple.
Six months later they were All-Ireland winners.
The U-turn was made in a bar on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx. Finnerty doesn’t remember which one, but the impetus for the change of heart was Galway’s league final defeat of Clare in Thurles and one very expensive transatlantic call.
The thing about the league final was that the way we used to do it was that somebody would phone home and you’d get Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh on the radio and we’d all share the bill then,” Finnerty recalled.
“It was incredibly expensive to ring home. The match was on at three o’clock (Irish time) but we were in the pub at 10 o’clock (Eastern Standard Time), so it was very easy to change our mind at five o’clock in the evening!
“But, yeah, it was the first real bit of silverware that we won. We were saying to ourselves that when you’re so far away, ‘we could give something to them, we’re still worth more than just sitting here’. That was more or less what changed our minds about going back.”
It’s a decision that he’s pored over once or twice since.
What if they hadn’t come home? Would Galway have won that All-Ireland? There were decent players there to fill the gaps, Pat Higgins and Tony Helebert among them, but would the team have prospered as they did without two of their half-back-line’s Holy Trinity?
You might have got away with one not there or a forward missing, but if we hadn’t returned I don’t think we’d have won it. That’s not being arrogant, because I’d never be that way, but if we lost our two wing-backs for Sunday, it would be very hard to replace them too.
The rest, as we know, was history.
Galway wouldn’t just win their All-Ireland in 1987. They would back it up a year later with Finnerty, McInerney, and Keady again forming one of the most feared trios to ever stand shoulder to shoulder across a GAA field.
It wasn’t plain sailing once they docked. A U2 concert in Croke Park earlier in the summer had left the pitch in an unplayable state, causing the Leinster final to be put back and, with it, Galway’s semi-final against Tipperary.
Finnerty and McInerney, due to fly back to the US the morning after the original date, had no option but to stay on as a result. The wait was worth it. Not just for the defeat of Tipp but for the first glimpse of McInerney’s famous white footwear.
“We were both probably cutting it a bit fine, but we both worked in construction and we did train hard on our own. We weren’t just coming back totally rusty, we had a lot of work done and Mac had an impeccable tan on him... and the white boots!
I begged him. I begged him not to wear those boots. We went to a baseball game and he saw these cleats, as they call them in America, and he wanted to get them, so he got them and he brought them home and he put them on. Lord!
The overwhelming emotion when Kilkenny were accounted for in the final four weeks later was one of relief. As was the case in 1980, and again in 2017, Galway had breasted the tape on the finishing line after so many close-run things. It was the desire to put Tipp back in their box that lit the fire in their bellies in ’88. Babs Keating had taken exception to what he labelled as Galway’s physical and dirty play and Cyril Farrell duly engaged in a war of words.
There is no such beef between this generation of Galway hurlers and Limerick, but, whatever the outcome on Sunday, there has already been steps taken to prevent a repeat of the 29-year drought that followed that great ’80s side.
Finnerty recalls an U21 All-Ireland final in 1991 when Galway defeated Offaly by double scores and how it was the small Leinster county that would claim a pair of senior titles and not their tormentors that day.
“Offaly had to stick with the hurlers they had, the Pilkingtons, the Whelahans, the Troys. They had no choice. There was no conveyor belt coming. Galway probably won two or three more U21s (in the ’90s) and if you didn’t have a good game you were nearly replaced by another U21. We never settled with teams and were too quick to get rid of managers and things like that. There is a better structure in place now to protect the manager and the players, but I can’t see us being another 30 years without winning one.”
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