Hurling Hands - Tommy Dunne: 'Fenton's striking for Cork was on a different planet'

Tipperary selector Tommy Dunne prior to the Munster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Final match between Limerick and Tipperary at LIT Gaelic Grounds in Limerick. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

I’m still counting ten digits when I put them on the table, anyway, which is a good starting point.

I don’t have any pains from old injuries either, really. The other day I was out for an hour and a half scraping weeds off what’s supposed to be a lawn in the future, so compared to other lads who’ve featured on these pages, I’m not too bad.

With Tipperary, I got a bad enough injury on the back of my right hand. In 1994 Toomevara lost to Sarsfields in the All-Ireland club, and I was picked for Tipperary in the league the following week. It was only my second year on the panel so I was trying to get established - I was in Waterford RTC, as it was then, and I remember getting the paper that Thursday and looking at the teams printed in a column down the side and seeing my name there. Happy days.

It was against Wexford in the old pitch in Enniscorthy, and it was a tough assignment, you’d want to be in the full of your health. The likes of Ger Cushe and Liam Dunne were playing for Wexford, good hurlers and tough men.

I got a right belt in the hand, the outside bone was broken - and I had exams within a couple of weeks. It didn’t knock me out for too long, though I remember the pain of it well.

In terms of developing, secondary school was very important for me. I went to secondary school in Templemore, while the majority of Toomevara lads would have gone to secondary in Borrisoleigh or Nenagh. And that’s relevant because in Templemore I got to know what hurling in Mid Tipperary was like - playing with lads from Loughmore, Upperchurch, Moyne-Templetuohy, Clonmore, all those places.

I hurled with them as team-mates and figured I could hold my own with them, which was a good barometer. There’s a great hurling tradition in Templemore from the days of Bobby Ryan and Pat McGrath winning the Harty, so when we won a Rice Cup it was a big deal for the school.

In those days the Rice Cup allowed one overage player per team, and I was the overage on that Templemore team. We won a Kinane Cup the year after that and we were competing well: we got to the Munster senior B colleges final, where Scarriff beat us, but we qualified then for the Harty Cup itself the year after. That was a big breakthrough.

I was playing and doing well, so that was a big boost to the confidence, all those colleges games in places like Kilfinane. It showed me I was progressing, that I could play against lads from different counties. It was a huge help, those years in Templemore.

Hurleys? I was fussy, but I was also very lucky as well in that I dealt with someone who took enormous pride in the hurleys he handed out, an absolute genius and a gentleman - Phil Bourke of Upperchurch.

He’s an artist, really, and took huge, huge pride in making quality hurleys.

When my father brought me up there was a ritual to it - you didn’t just go up and pick out a hurley and leave. You might be there two hours chatting with Phil in the workshop.

You didn’t ring ahead, you’d drive up and hope there was a light in the workshop, and even if he was there was no guarantee you’d get a hurley - he might have something for you and he mightn’t, and if he didn’t then you called back when he did.

He had a workshop across the yard from the house, the planks would be stacked to the ceiling of the workshop, and anything made would be up on a flat bench where he’d be shaving them and hooping them and tidying them up - but the real good stuff, as we thought, was kept in a press underneath.

Those weren’t on display at all, so if you saw him going to open the press for your hurley you felt really special. He’d pull out a few hurleys and we’d go through them one by one, to see what suited.

I’d bow to his knowledge. I played with a hurley that he gave me the Friday night before an All-Ireland final. I was up with him, got the hurley and playing against Kilkenny the following Sunday without having hit half a dozen balls with it.

That was the trust I had in him. If he said, ‘that’s a beautiful hurley, hang that for a week and it’ll be right for you,’ I’d believe him. And that Friday I’m sure he probably said to me, ‘take that one and it’ll do you this Sunday’.

Anyone who knows me from coaching will tell you I believe striking the ball is one of the greatest skills of the game. Striking it well and consistently is a huge part of the game, and unless you have a quality stick that fits you and that you trust, then good striking is very hard.

When I was very young - eight or nine - then Phil Kenny, ‘Phibby’, in Borrisoleigh made my hurleys but I only barely remember that, and towards the end my uncle Jimmy, who’s dead now, made hurleys for me.

For the majority of my career though it was Phil Bourke, and the experience . . . the buzz of getting the hurley was unbelievable. The excitement, the joy, those were immense.

For me, skill-wise, John Fenton was someone I couldn’t get away from. That’s one of the positives of the last few months, seeing those old games again, and seeing John Fenton’s striking - that was on a different planet.

I went to Cork-Tipperary in Killarney in 1987 and he missed a free. I remember the horror, the shock because he just didn’t miss them. One of the most beautiful strikers of the ball I’ve ever seen.

The goal he got against Limerick, the one he hit in for Jimmy Barry-Murphy’s goal against Galway - for me those are some of the greatest moments in hurling. There aren’t too many that would surpass those.

- in conversation with Michael Moynihan