‘He would get up from the television if Kilkenny pulled ahead of Tipperary’

Johnny Everard from Templetuohy is one of only two survivors from the Tipperary team that defeated Kilkenny in the 1950 All-Ireland and National League finals. Many members of the Everard clan have since hurled in blue and gold but the family tree has also branched into Kilkenny, meaning they have experienced every aspect of a fabled rivalry

“Look at those yokes there. They’re called footballs. Ye’ve a special knife for them in Kilkenny.”

Then he horses into a laugh, driving down the entrance of Moyne-Templetuohy GAA Club. Enda Everard is up to train the U21 footballers, still a Tipp man, forever a native of Templetuohy. The club’s exceptional facilities, inter-county standard lights and sleek pitches, are a rightful source of pride.

Here, one surname is like ivy on an old building. Michael Everard, paternal uncle, won an All-Ireland minor with Tipperary in 1933 as a wing-back. Forty-nine years later, there came a family rhyme when Brendan Everard, Enda’s eldest brother, hurled wing-back with Tipperary’s champion minors of 1982.

Colm Everard, a first cousin, started corner-back in the 1999 All-Ireland minor final, when Tipperary were defeated by Galway. Conor Bowe, a nephew, his sister Mary’s son, hurled minor in 2017. He is currently part of the county’s U20 panel.

Enda Everard was a talented hurler but did not push himself beyond the club arena. Yet he won a Fitzgibbon Cup with WIT in 1999 and featured at Intermediate with Tipperary in 2001 and 2004.

This man stays wry: “The older lads in the parish say to me I’d never have survived when the father was training the team. They say to me: ‘How many times did you ever complete a lap of the pitch?’ The father was an excellent trainer, supposedly, but strict. No messing.”

A Kilkenny tilt began when two of his closest friends from those college days became two brothers from Ballyhale, Henry and Paul Shefflin. Needless to emphasise, the relationship involved plenty of county-centred slagging. “We’d be picking these ‘best of all time’ teams in The Dome, over pints,” Everard recalls. “There wouldn’t be too many Kilkenny men on my team!

“But there wasn’t much out and out rivalry between Tipperary and Kilkenny back in the mid to late 1990s. To be honest, both counties were in a lull at the time. The real stuff came later.”

Then another serious laugh: “Don’t let anyone tell you Henry hurling with Kilkenny softened those defeats! It didn’t.”

A Tipperary man domiciled in Kilkenny is like a Kerry man domiciled in Cork. Both cases, especially when children are involved, involve adjustments. Between 2002 and 2014, Kilkenny overthrew Tipperary’s longstanding dominance. Tipp natives living in the place felt this alteration more keenly than anyone.

2008 saw Enda Everard marry a Kilkenny woman, Cathriona Meany of Dunbell in Clara. They live with Lily (10), Jane (9), Rory (6) and Emma (5) in The Sycamores, part of the Dicksboro catchment. Conor Everard, an older brother, settled with his family in Kilmanagh. Now a Graigue-Ballycallan clubman, he is a prominent referee.

The home house lies up the top of Templetuohy’s main street. Here is Johnny Everard, the father, 95 in April. He was part of the Tipperary panel that defeated Kilkenny in both 1950’s NHL Final and 1950’s senior final.

The same year, he captained the county’s footballers. A swift and skilful hurler, Everard lined out corner-forward when Tipperary defeated Laois in the 1949 Oireachtas final. Knee injuries restricted his career, finishing it in 1952.

Only one other man survives from the 1950 panel, Jimmy Finn, a 19-year-old debutant at wing-back in the final.

Jimmy handled Jim Langton very well,” Everard notes. “The selectors felt he had the speed and the nimbleness to stick with Langton. Jimmy did exactly that, and we won, by a bare point.

Seventeen in 1941, hailing from a farm in Lisheen, he hurled minor with Tipperary. Due to World War II, there was no competition the following year. Progress in the game had been fostered by Brother Ryan in Thurles CBS. This teacher insisted on his charges in primary school competing against secondary school teams, accelerating development. “Brother Ryan was a tremendous coach,” Everard stresses. “He was from Limerick, I think, and had this immense passion for hurling.”

The talent was there but internal politics intervened. As he details: “Phil Purcell was County Board chairman, and he had a big set against the Moyne-Templetuohy club, because he felt their hurlers were rough. I wasn’t that kind of a hurler, but I got lumped in, and it held me back for a while.

“Truthfully, there were certain elements on our team that wouldn’t spare the hurley on an opponent. That was going way too far. You should never hit another player with a hurley.”

Everard believes John Joe Callanan’s presence as a selector for 1950 aided hurlers from less prominent clubs: “John Joe didn’t care where anyone was from, if they could hurl. He even liked a rogue.”

Paddy Leahy of Boherlahan oversaw Tipperary’s senior hurlers between the 1920s and the 1960s. “Paddy was my grandmother’s first cousin, my mother’s mother,” Everard remarks. “He was a brilliant man but very shy about getting into a photograph.”

This connection presumably means that the Tubberadora line extends to Conor Bowe.

One 94-year-old is many things. Nothing has waned but the power of his legs. A much loved father and grandfather, he acted as club chairman for years. The same figure moulded an outstanding group of young hurlers from the 1962-63 seasons into a potent adult squad.

Moyne-Templetuohy took their sole senior title in 1971, with Everard coach and manager. He makes it plain: “It was a proud day when 12 of those young hurlers from the early 1960s started in that final. There were others in the subs. We really minded those lads because we knew they could do something special.”

Having managed the greyhound track in Thurles, Johnny Everard became a successful publican in his early sixties. A cherished family memory dates from August 1996.

The footballers of Mayo and Kerry, contesting an All-Ireland semi-final, were on the television in the bar. At half-time, the action cut away to The Curragh. Everyone saw Conor Everard riding Mantovani, a 20/1 outsider, to victory in the Group One Phoenix Stakes.

“He was the second jockey to Jim Bolger,” Enda relates. “So he didn’t get a chance on too many of the really big days.”

Johnny Everard and his wife, Josephine, feel the bitterness of the Tipperary-Kilkenny rivalry from the 1940s onwards is overdone. “I don’t think there was that much to it to round here,” he emphasises. “People didn’t necessarily run into each other that much, outside of match days. Maybe in some places but not really here.”

This observation might say more about them than about a notorious rivalry, which attracted the most durable of diehards on both sides. The Everards are clearly people who never relished, young or old, acrimony and conflict.

Then he smiles:

Anyhow, didn’t I win a Kilkenny minor county final with our neighbours in Johnstown? They beat Thomastown in 1942. For the purposes of that game, I was a Ryan of Barna.

Even so, there are more smiles at mention of a neighbour, Paddy Ryan (Steel): “He would get up from the television if Kilkenny pulled ahead of Tipperary. He would go walking the roads in preference to looking at it. There were recent years when Paddy got through a pile of walking…”

Johnny Everard’s feeling for Templetuohy and Tipperary is a facet all the more impressive for its avoidance of italics. Everything with him is understated and firm. He did not require remarkable longevity for the mantle of dignity, a bearing he wears so lightly as to be, yet again, an example.

As we head away, his credo is emphatic: “If you want to have a good first team, mind your juveniles.”

There is time for a world class pint of Guinness in the family pub. Seán Everard, just back in the door from refereeing a match in Nenagh, runs it with easy aplomb. Customers at the counter clock my club jacket and wonder about Ballyhale Shamrocks’ favourites tag against St Thomas’ in the upcoming All Ireland club final.

There is talk about Paul Maher, a Moyne-Templetuphy clubman, as Tipperary’s latest goalkeeper. Will he be there in the summer?

“Paul puts everything into hurling,” one man says. “That must give him a right go at it.”

For the moment, Johnny Everard remains the only clubman to win a Celtic Cross.

The general torpor of midweek pub life in rural Ireland increased the attractions of eccentricity and difference. Talk swings to a local man, a talented musician but a blue martyr for the drink. “Never married, never went anywhere,” runs one comment. “Maybe that was the problem.”

A younger man, not long back home, recently saw him in another village pub. “I was only a few hours off a plane back from Australia,” he continues.

“Went out for a few settlers. Here was yer man at the bar, lathering into pints, and a clothes peg on his nose, and a moustache of blood on him.

“He was after getting a wicked nosebleed, and they couldn’t stop it with any amount of toilet roll. So he just called for a clothes peg to be brought from the kitchen. Happy out with it, he was…”

Time to head back. “Up The Cats!” shouts the U21 manager, over his shoulder, as he leaves.

Quick retort: “Don’t be smathering your new friend!”

There is the reneged dark of February, a time of fresh prospects. A new season runs before U21 footballers and all the rest. We are driving through Corrig, which is Tipperary and where the Everards still cut turf, and soon through Bawnmore, which is Kilkenny and where the Everards still cut turf. Is the driver leaving home to go home?

Not much disturbs innate good humour, a fierce love of mischief.

“It was difficult, at times, being in Kilkenny over the last ten years,” he says. “But it was right craic too.

The disappointment was mostly because the best of those matches were so close. Tipp could easily have won in 2009 and in 2014. Maybe the 2011 All Ireland final as well, when they didn’t really turn up on the day.

He knows four Dicksboro and Kilkenny supporters are being raised in their house. Rory is just coming to consciousness. As his father, laughing, details: “When sport comes on the television now, he wants it to be left on, especially if it’s hurling.

“They get him out in Dunbell, the grandparents, and tell him: ‘You’re a Kilkenny man! You’re a Kilkenny man!’ Repeat after me… Here’s what he says to me now, when hurling is mentioned: ‘Up The Cats!’ He knows it’s a rise.”

The father elaborates: “Rory will be going to the league match on Sunday in black and amber, and I’ll be going with some bit of blue and gold on me. That’s the way it is. It’s the case for a lot of houses in Kilkenny.”

The ties that bind start early and abide. As we drive through Freshford, I am thinking of how Johnny Everard’s talk grew most animated when he spoke of that Tipperary panel’s trip to New York.

“A friend brought me out for a drive over there,” he reflected. “There were six lanes of cars going one way and six lanes of cars going the other way. It was something else…”

Not that experience so new could trump long established bonds. A childhood friend had emigrated to the city.

A poignant and common scenario was recalled: “He had lost touch with home nearly totally. I felt I should look him up. When I got him on the phone, he said he couldn’t make any of the exhibition matches.

“But I found out where he was working. The day before we travelled back to Ireland, I went down to the shop. I could see him there, on a checkout.”

Johnny Everard hung back until the queue of customers thinned a bit. Then he stepped forward and announced himself.

Only his old friend’s smile outshone his amazement: “Where in the name of all that’s good and holy did you come out of?”