Gerry Quinn: Brian Lohan’s got the defence right. Clare had lost that
Gerry Quinn at home in Cratloe, Co Clare this week. Picture: Eamon Ward
Just as it’s been probably a while since you last heard the name, you won’t find mention or sight of hurling on any of his social media profiles; it’s all about what he did next, who he is now.
His WhatsApp pic is of him and his good friend John Burke on a snow-covered mountain; although he wasn’t there when Burke became the first Clareman to reach the summit of Everest, he was by his side when they conquered Mt Blanc and Kilimanjaro.
On Instagram he informs you that he’s now a dad of three, married to Marie and a ‘keen entrepreneur’. And for good reason. As you’ll see on Linkedin, he’s now the managing director of his own hospitality business that features a hotel, bar, and upmarket fish shop, all in Doolin on the coast of his native Clare.
He owns two holiday rental agencies and now runs the Abbeycourt Hotel in Nenagh as well with a few business partners. Around the time his playing career with Clare was finishing up, he went back to college at 31, studying and working alongside teenagers, clearing and cleaning plates, but he kept working away and kept working his way up to where he is now. So, yeah, the future has worked out well for Gerry Quinn while playing for Clare seems and feels so far in the distant past.
Naturally though it still crops up, as does his name in the public memory, especially in a week such as this when it’s Kilkenny that Clare next go to war with.
Twenty years ago when the counties met in an All-Ireland final, a lot of the build-up centred around his availability after he controversially sustained a hand injury in the closing minutes of a semi-final win over Waterford.
Two years later then it was Quinn who was perceived to be the excessive aggressor in an incident that left Henry Shefflin temporarily blinded.
Funnily, a further two years on when the counties last met in an All-Ireland semi-final, Quinn was the one who had to leave the field shortly after half-time with a broken hand, having been on the receiving end of a Kilkenny player pulling liberally in his orbit.
For Tony Griffin it was a changing point in the game — “Gerry Quinn has the greatest delivery of any defender I’ve ever played with and against Kilkenny [that day] had played some wonderful hurling,” he’d write in his autobiography — but hardly anyone ever recalls let alone complains about that. Sometimes, especially if you were to google his name alongside hurling, it’s as if a decade-long career and a high-calibre player has been reduced to those two moments in 2002 and 2004, especially as the other party in each of them was one of the greatest hurlers of this millennium.
That wouldn’t be right though. That’s not how it was. Regrets, yes, he had quite a few, some that he as well as you will mention. But when he thinks of that time when he was a young man it is mostly tinted with a fondness. It wasn’t all bad and neither was he. In fact for large chunks of it, both were the finest.
***
He was only a year out of minor when Loughnane called him in. Around the time of the two quarter-finals against Galway in ’99. It was hardy stuff, what went on in that crucible that was Cusack Park, but then so was he, coming from a farm on the foot of the Burren.
“The way Loughnane set up our training games, there were no sidelines. No sideline cuts. It was like indoor soccer where the fences were your walls so if you got the ball near the fence you had to get away from it fairly fast otherwise you could be creamed. And you were unlikely to get a free for it if you did. I remember one of my first nights I flicked the ball over a fella’s head and the next thing Conor Clancy gave me a full slap across the hole!
“But Loughnane liked me. I was raw but I was athletic and super-competitive and he’d have seen the hurling could be developed. He took me under his wing, mentored me. Our club [Corofin] would be a real dual club, the home of the county’s only [football] All-Star, Seamus Clancy, and I’d have played four years U21 with the county. But Loughnane advised me to focus on just the one sport. Sure with where Clare hurling was at that point it was a no-brainer.”
By 2000 Quinn was starting in what would be Loughnane’s last championship game; although his deployment as a corner forward-third midfielder like everything else that afternoon in Páirc Uí Chaoimh didn’t come off, Loughnane’s faith was justified. The following year when Clare again faced off against Tipp in a do-or-die encounter, Loughnane’s successor, Cyril Lyons, similarly thought so highly of Quinn as to have the holy halfback line trinity of Doyle, McMahon and Daly voluntarily altered for the first time in seven years and entrust Quinn with the number seven jersey.
It worked. In 2002 the new triumvirate of Hoey, McMahon, and Quinn was so supreme that towards the end of the All-Ireland semi-final, Ken McGrath, who had scored seven points from play in the Munster final, cut such a desperately frustrated figure that he, in his words, “lost the plot” and “let fly and pulled behind me, full force”.
Next thing when he turned around he found Quinn on the ground, clutching his right hand.
Both parties differ as to what triggered the incident. McGrath in his book claims that Quinn, “an abrasive enough player, fast, aggressive”, had put the handle of his hurley into McGrath’s back.
That’s not Quinn’s recollection. “I don’t remember being particularly aggressive,” he says now. “He was a great player but wasn’t having a good game and I wasn’t especially worried about him at that stage.”
What’s indisputable is that Quinn was left with a compound fracture with the bone coming out of his hand and had to have his hand taped to his hurley to play in the All-Ireland (“In hindsight I wasn’t ready for it,” he says). And McGrath was plagued with guilt afterwards, for the act and not coming forward afterwards for fear of suspension.
At the subsequent All-Stars where McGrath was a recipient and Quinn was a nominee, they kept a wide berth from each other. All these years later though Quinn would more than enjoy sharing McGrath’s company.
“The Ken thing doesn’t really bother me at all. And I have no issues at all with him. I’d love to meet and have a chat with him some day. Do you know how Ken is? Yeah, I heard about him and [his brother] Eoin going into the coffee business and that it’s going well. That’s good to hear.”
The Henry situation isn’t quite as tidy as that.
Again some details around this incident can be disputed and some aren’t. During an All-Ireland quarter-final replay in Thurles a James McGarry puckout was landing around the Clare half-back line. Quinn ended up catching it and Shefflin ended up being temporarily blinded. The butt of Quinn’s hurley had gone through Shefflin’s face-guard.
“I believe the strike on me was intentional,” Shefflin wrote in his 2015 autobiography. “Did Gerry Quinn mean to hit me in the eye? No, I don’t believe he did. Did he mean to hit me? Absolutely.”
Quinn’s incident report differs considerably. His only intention was to establish his air space before successfully winning the ball.
“If you looked at it fairly, you would say that it was awkward looking. I would have defended with my left arm to hold him off and then this arm went back. But the reason the disciplinary committee subsequently found in my favour was because it was obvious it was not deliberate. Did I meant to defend the space? Absolutely. I would always do that and I’d do so again in the morning. But did I mean to put his my through his helmet? Did I mean to hurt him at all? Absolutely not. I could not see him behind me.”
Quinn would also successfully have his name exonerated by RTÉ. After the Sunday Game panel had more than doubted his intentions, Quinn and his advisors took a libel case which was dropped when the national broadcaster issued a public apology for their depiction of him and the incident.
Matters with Shefflin himself though weren’t quite so roundly resolved. The day following the incident Quinn had made a point of texting Shefflin to set up a call; the pair had been friendly enough with each other from a couple of previous social encounters. But after Shefflin initially appreciated Quinn expressing concern as to his then welfare, he was less enamoured when Quinn late quipped that he and the Clare team “had mighty craic on the beer” following the game. How concerned could he really have been?
For Quinn though the point had been lost. He felt bad for Shefflin and about Shefflin but didn’t feel guilty about it.
“Look, that was a scary injury. I’d have several gashes near my eye but nothing as close as that so of course you’d be concerned for him. But I wasn’t ringing to apologise. I was ringing to say that I hope you’re okay, that it was not a deliberate strike, I did not mean to injure you.”
Shefflin in his book would note that he regarded Quinn as “a fabulous hurler” and that he no longer held any hard feelings against him. But by also stating that he had doubts about the sincerity of Quinn’s communication as well as his intent going for that ball, it didn’t quite feel like that for Quinn.
“To be honest,” says Quinn, “it’s still a bit of a balls to have been involved in that. It’s like every second day it’s on Laochra Gael. So it’s disappointing, it’s unfortunate, but that’s life.”
***
For the most part he enjoyed it, being the boy in the bubble. Nowhere else he’d rather be, at least on the big championship days anyway. And he assumed that was the case with all of them.
“I remember when Tony Griffin opted out the year after he won his All-Star. I couldn’t understand him at the time. To be at that level and then just let it off and opt out of the bubble. But then when I left it myself, I realised that I had probably stayed in there two or three years too long.
"Near the end I just wasn’t in the right space from both a physical and mental perspective. I’d got a bit burned from the politics and a bit burned out from it all. I mean, I had been in there since I was 18. I was going from injury to injury, either pulling hamstrings or playing with stress fractures.”
When Daly had been at the top of the bus, Quinn had been at the top of his game; again, on the big championship days anyway (“A league game on a winter’s day down in Waterford, I’d find it difficult to get up for that, but come championship the nerves or occasion were never an issue”). He believed they were going to win an All-Ireland. Daly’s whole set-up meant they were geared no other way.
But then when Daly left the joy, the innocence, seemed to go with it. When Tony Considine was appointed manager for 2007 he made Quinn his vice-captain. An honour proved to be a millstone.
“That year was nearly the end of me. I would have been at my peak at that point but that was the year you had the whole thing between Tony and Davy and it got really messy. It ended up basically being a battle between the board and Tony with the players caught in the middle. We weren’t even able to get sliotars. We’d to threaten a strike before the All-Ireland quarter-final to get gear. That kind of craic.
“It was very unfair on Tony. He was a good guy who deserved a proper shot at it and he didn’t get it.”
Considine’s replacement was another one of the three wise men from the glory years. Mike Mac. But although Quinn had and has a fond regard for the man, it just wasn’t quite what they had under Daly. Whether he himself was a symptom or cause of their drop of standards, Quinn’s zest and commitment waned. When he showed up late for another training session, McNamara had enough and cut him.
He’d return to play under Sparrow but then left it at that. Other matters had to finally take priority over hurling. Quinn had worked in the bar business after dropping out of a business degree in UL, even ran his own bar in Ennis for a while, but when the crash came he fell hard.
“I’d to start back at square one. If I was to get a decent job I’d need to get some qualification. I’d never finished a course before because I’d always been in that mode, that bubble, where hurling was number one. So at 31 I decided to go back to college and the Shannon hotel school of management.”
The course was five whole years. In second year he did his placement in Gleneagles, the five-star hotel well-known for its championship golf course, and was stuck carrying trays, running food, for the first five months before earning a series of promotions. But then when he returned home the following summer he met his wife Marie, a musician, at the Willie Clancy festival. He’d work with John Burke in the Armada Hotel in Spanish Point, do another placement in Dromoland. Start his own self-catering business.
Now he runs the Fiddle and Bow Connection, overseeing a 12-room hotel in Doolin, running Russell’s Seafood and Russell’s Bar, looks over 160 holiday homes on the west coast, and lately took over the Abbey Court in Nenagh with his friend Brian O’Neill. Between all those ventures, you’re talking about looking over and looking out for 200 people. So while his business has taken off, he’s keeping his feet on the ground. “In business there’s always an exposure of some sort.”
He lives in Cratloe now with Marie and the kids. His middle child Casper has started hurling with the U6s with Quinn himself giving a helping hand. The pair of them and his eldest, Caitlin, have also gone to every Clare game this summer. And with it all, a love affair has been rekindled. On their journeys he sees old faces, old friends, that prompt only smiles. The likes of Gilly. Even Mike Mac. A circle is rounding.
“With Clare I’d have felt slightly annoyed with some of the internal politics in my last few years in the bubble but you move from that. You remember the good times because for the most part it’s an amazing experience for a young fella to be in that bubble. I had great fun. I suppose I was a bit of a messer, a bit carefree, and I’m glad I took that attitude even if it meant I was sometimes misunderstood. Because it’s to be enjoyed.
“And I’m enjoying watching the team play this year and how they’re responding to Brian. I always liked Brian so I’m delighted for him. He’s got the defence right, that their first priority is to stop your man scoring. I think Clare had lost that for a long time. The aggression levels are back to where they were.”
In Lohan’s time. And his. They're kind of Clare.
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