Super Sandie Fitzgibbon set the standard

Before winding back the clock with Sandie Fitzgibbon, I got in touch with two of her old Cork and Glen Rovers teammates, Therese O’Callaghan and Linda Mellerick, to obtain greater insight into the woman who won six All-Ireland senior camogie medals and almost 70 basketball caps for Ireland.

In a telling sign of the respect both women hold for Sandie Fitz, O’Callaghan sent back a lovely email shortly after being contacted, while Mellerick also took time out to put her thoughts down on paper despite being overseas.

Long before Mary O’Connor, Briege Corkery or Rena Buckley arrived on the scene, Fitzgibbon throve in her dual player status, juggling camogie and basketball throughout the eighties and nineties, and for the odd summer, she also brought herself down to Mayfield to kick a bit of soccer with Cork Celtic.

Camogie and basketball regularly overlapped, with Mellerick drawing attention to one particular fortnight in November 1990 where Fitzgibbon was faced with the busiest of schedules.

On the second Saturday of that November, Sandie, who was playing basketball for Blarney at the time, took to the court in Galway city to face local side Corrib in a top-tier clash. Once the basketball was done and dusted, her Glen Rovers teammate Rose Mackey hired a car and drove the pair north, overnighting in Donegal ahead of Glen Rovers’ All-Ireland club semi-final against Swatragh the following day in Derry.

We’ll let Sandie take up the story from here.

“The morning of the camogie match, Rose was driving and now she was driving lively enough. We came up over a hill too fast and before we knew it the border checkpoint was in front of us.

“We got the fright of our lives when we came up over the hill, the guns pointing at us.”

“After explaining ourselves, we were let carry on through.”

The Glen won through to the decider on a scoreline of 1-9 to 0-0, but instead of pointing the car for Cork after a shower and a quick bite to eat, Rose ferried Sandie to Dublin airport where she linked up with the Irish basketball team ahead of a nine-day camp in the States.

“We played six games out there against various colleges, two in Boston, two in New York and two in Philadelphia,” Fitzgibbon recalls.

“We came back on the Thursday before the All-Ireland club final.”

The Glen captured a second All-Ireland club crown that Sunday, St Paul’s of Kilkenny overcome by 4-13 to 2-7. The match report in the following day’s Cork Examiner said ‘Sandie Fitzgibbon was outstanding at centre-back’.

The fairly hectic fortnight clearly had had no impact on her. As Mellerick remembers, “She was incredible. There was never a fuss, just found a solution every time”.

Therese O’Callaghan harked back to a particular few weeks in the eighties when Sandie used to arrive into club training wearing loads of layers as Irish basketball players were preparing for a game in a much hotter climate than Blackpool.

Again, we’ll let the woman herself flesh it out.

“It was 1987 or ‘88. I am useless for dates I’d so much going on. We were training for the pre-Olympics which were being held in Ipoh, Malaysia. When the squad was in Dublin, we’d wear extra gear when training and they’d turn up the heat in the hall. So, when I was back down in Cork training with the Glen, I used to put on a load of extra gear.

“We were well beaten out in Malaysia, but it was still a great experience.”

Still living in Cork City and presently working for Janssen Pharmaceuticals in Little Island, the camogie team of the century half-back routinely trained with the Irish basketball team on a Saturday in Dublin, coming back down on the Sunday to play camogie.

On the basketball front, the point guard won five national leagues (four with Blarney and one with Tralee) and three national cups (two with Blarney and one with Tralee). There was 10 county championships and four All-Ireland club titles with Glen Rovers, having joined the club’s senior team at 12.

“You had to be 14 to get into the ceilí down in the club. Now, I was only 12, but I’d tell the woman at the door that I played senior camogie. Of course, she was having none of it.”

She was the first camogie player to win three All-Ireland minor (then U16) medals. There was also an All-Ireland senior colleges title with North Presentation under the watchful eye of Canon O’Brien, or Fr O’Brien as he was at the time.

Her fondest memory is captaining Cork to All-Ireland senior glory in 1992, at Wexford’s expense. At the end of 1997, having pocketed her sixth senior medal, she stepped away from the inter-county scene. She did it all, won it all.

“My body is paying for it now because I have aches and pains,” she jokes.

“For a good chunk of the year, you would have been going six and seven evenings a week. There were a good few times when you’d have two matches on the one day. I loved it. It started when I was a kid. If I wasn’t training, I’d be out on the street playing something.”