Tony Griffin: 'Parents had tears in their eyes thanking me for helping their sons reach their dreams'

Kerry performance coach Tony Griffin explains his role with the newly crowned All-Ireland champions

Fri, 29 Jul, 2022 - 14:00

John Fogarty

Once a month. That was supposed to be height of Tony Griffin’s visits to Kerry this season. That’s exactly what Jack O’Connor put on the table in The Bianconi Inn in Killorglin when they met last autumn. One visit and matchdays.

Turns out, because of O’Connor’s “silver tongue” it was a lot more. From Griffin’s home in Ballymore Eustace to Killarney, it’s a six-hour plus return drive but on occasion he shared it with Paddy Tally on his way from Galbally. Long before last Sunday came around, the performance coach was hardly feeling the commute. “If you’re in, you’re really in – at least I am – and it really was a joy."

Having worked with O’Connor during his two years with Kildare, former Clare hurler Griffin had seen how the manager was able to “be himself and get the job done and his emotional intelligence is very broad”. He was also coming into a Kerry group of players who had figured out a long time ago that mental resilience was the couple of percent they were missing.

It wasn’t that they were crippled by the expectation laden on them since capturing multiple minor All-Irelands; Griffin quickly recognised them as an outfit simply sick of finishing short. “They just wanted to win. They knew they were good enough and they were looking at other teams who they knew they were a match for but they were just hungry and I loved that appetite, so they were very open to whatever I suggested.

“I was with Dalo in 2013 in Dublin, I was with Jack for two years in Kildare so you begin to have a sense of what can help. But as I said to them on day one, ‘I don’t have the answers. If you think I do, you’re going to find me out because I don’t. "But you have the answers and my role is to help you discover them’.

“With those Clare teams I was on in the 2000s, we didn’t integrate those incredibly well travelled players that had won All-Irelands with the younger generation coming through like myself and others to make it a cohesive unit and that was to our detriment. When I came into Kerry, there were only four guys with All-Irelands, a lot of younger guys with huge potential so the question was how do you unite the tribe as it were?”

It was a delicate exercise, Griffin admits. “One thing I’ve realised that has been there since people began to leave the caves in search of something is belonging. If there was one thing I focused on this year, it was belonging and how we create it because there are some natural barriers to that.

“The fact these guys are from different clubs and they don’t really get to know each other that well and there are different age groups in the panel. There’s a guy coming in and then there’s a David Moran who is in the winter of his career the last three or four years, so belonging is important but it’s a very tricky thing to build authentically.”

Griffin also had to figure out his own role too. O’Connor never handed him a prescribed brief. He had watched intently Caroline Currid’s work in Limerick and noticed the hurlers’ soundbites about her reflected some of what he was doing. He was also able to call on a couple of people who work in professional sport to discuss his position.

“For me, the challenge was what’s the line between being a counsellor, a motivator, a facilitator to actually being nothing at all and sensing things. Jack never told me, ‘This is your role’ but it was just about being myself, being unapologetically myself because that is what we wanted to build for the players.”

Recalling the hour’s delay to the start of the All-Ireland quarter-final win against Mayo, O’Connor credited Griffin for bringing calm to what was a nervous situation, one rescheduled throw-in time replaced by another when the Galway-Armagh game went from extra-time to penalties.

“You’re always thinking that whatever you say or do here you don’t want it to be gimmicky and you don’t want it to harm but help,” says the co-founder of Soar, the youth outreach organisation. “I spent 10 years working with teenagers where you were constantly reading the situation to see what’s going on in a group context.

“So, on occasions like that what you’re looking for is what do they need right now and sometimes that’s managing your own anxiety and your own enthusiasm, assessing and having a cool head. What they needed at that stage was to be less emotionally aroused and calmed down and brought back up. Jack being Jack turned to me and said, ‘Say something there’. So, I had to do a walkaround for five minutes and go through in my own head what do they actually need.”

From his early chats with Tally and talks with Diarmuid Murphy and Mike Quirke, Griffin realised O’Connor had created a high-achieving environment. “These guys had off-the-charts capital in the bag and in terms of the team there were a few occasions when I said, ‘How are these guys going to be beaten?’

“But there were little things along the way. That’s what I loved about the year, there was no big crescendo even though you see it externally with that score against Dublin. But there were loads of little moments building up to that, loads of sessions we did where I said, ‘These guys, magic is starting to happen here’.”

From the final whistle to the ovations at the homecoming, Griffin has got a hell of a kick seeing the happiness it has brought the group. “I think it’s the closest a Clare man is going to get to lifting the Sam Maguire Cup any time soon even though I have huge respect for Colm Collins and what he does with the Clare lads,” smiles the 2006 All-Star. “Look, I do other things. My first love is writing, I just happen to do this with Kerry. But life’s funny. Sometimes, what you want and what’s good for you are two different things. It’s an absolute privilege. I was meeting parents coming up with tears in their eyes thanking me for helping their sons reach their dreams. I was saying to them that I was a small part in it but isn’t that what life is about, seeing your children realise their dreams and the joy of that as a parent? Like, what more could you ask for?”

Griffin will miss the drives with Tally, meeting up in Kildare Village for a coffee and “talking shite the whole way down. Well, we did good work about mindset”.

That isn’t to say he won’t be pointing the car south-west again next year. O’Connor, a man who he describes as having “a vibe, a lifeforce that’s fairly ageless”, may work his silver tongue again.