Kevin Cashman will be remembered as one of hurling’s finest writers

WARMEST DELIGHT: John Fitzgibbon celebrates during the Cork v Galway All-Ireland hurling final at Croke Park in 1990 - Kevin Cashman kept the picture of his nephew above his bed. Pic: Ray McManus, Sportsfile

News of Kevin Cashman’s death on Tuesday night sharpened due to Cork’s senior hurlers being mere days away from an All-Ireland final.

Sharpened rather than made poignant, mind.

Certainly one of hurling’s finest ever writers, Cashman prized exactitude and calm knowledge, same as he esteemed seeing a hurler’s correct technique create lethal elegance.

He revered the opening point of 2001’s senior final, struck by Tipperary’s Tommy Dunne in echt wristy style.

No step sideways, a no backlift in the stroke. Just the gift of class to itself.

The poignant or the sloppy or the adequate? Never appealed. Said orientation remained in place even when Cashman’s prose, unique in its bearing, inclined towards the baroque.

This writer’s prose style? A form of sifting, the mark of someone who felt knowledge had to be a form of savour.

Like Charles Lamb, one of his literary heroes, Cashman believed in taste, believed in an aristocratic emphasis of spirit. Suffering not fools, he thought people either get something or they do not.

Kevin Cashman: His mind brimmed with insight and wit.

Cashman most admired hurlers, such as Christy Ring and Ciarán Carey, with what seemed snow melt in their veins and a tamped fire in their head.

He recurred often to Carey’s winning point in Limerick’s 1996 Munster Championship joust with Clare.

Limerick’s centre-back, having stormed up the field at the death, gulled Clare’s defenders into thinking he would strike left, off supposedly stronger side. Carey bevelled right into trickster-created space, clipping over the winner off supposedly weaker side.

Cashman beamed when I mentioned this score in 2007, during our first and only meeting. By temperament and conviction alike, he knew that courage is the only sure source of momentum, that cold courage counts as only sure source of human knowledge.

His mind, brimming with insight and wit, abhorred sentiment.

Whether writing about the myths of Munster hurling or an overpraised player’s one-sidedness, he believed at striving for the truth. This orientation made him enemies in about the same measure as the striving delivered unforgettable insights into the game and its exponents, past and present.

This journalist turned most naturally to the insights born of acerbity. I remember reading a Sunday Independent preview of 1987’s senior final.

Cashman delivered a two-word summary on one of Galway’s key forwards: “Durable mullocker.”

An arty farty young fella in South Kilkenny, I treasured those moments like I treasured Mark E Smith with The Fall.

An undeceived joy about excellence is one of life’s rewards. Cashman and Smith, maverick and unforgiving, were cut from the same unrippable cloth.

While Cashman possessed no pedigree as a player, he stands in that absolute first rank as a GAA writer. His only possible equal on this front is PD ‘Carbery’ Meighan (1884-1965), another Cork native.

The latter, who featured in an All Ireland final with both Cork and London, was a completely different figure and a completely different kind of writer, benign and poised. Meighan’s work, simply because of its date, possesses an importance not matchable by later writers.

Cashman’s only credible rival over the last few decades for sheer writing quality? Keith Duggan of The Irish Times. But even Duggan, for all his marvellous gifts, did not invent an idiom. Cashman managed the feat, deploying a remarkable vocabulary (‘nabob’, ‘rococco’, ‘sciolist’) as the outriders of insight. His best sentences will remain as unmistakeable as Lagavulin whisky, vin jaune from the Jura.

But who was Kevin Cashman? How he ended up Ireland’s most compelling sportswriter during the 1980s and 1990s remains the trade’s most curious tale.

Facts? He was born on a farm in Killeagh on August 15, 1941. The townland is Ballinalough, down the Mount Uniacke end of things. A brother is the bookmaker Liam Cashman.

The boy attended Inch NS. For secondary school, there was North Mon, followed by a scholarship to Farranferris for his final two years. Brief enrolment in UCC led to peregrine years and many different jobs. His was not a tidy life. 

Activism as a trade unionist became one of the few constants, along with an enduring love of reading and books.

There was a spell in England during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Return involved a succession of jobs in construction. But at least he got to resume eternal vigilance when watching top flight hurling matches. That youngish man settled in Cork City and became.an adopted Blackrock clubman.

Then his life changed in nigh Biblical fashion. A supplicant of strange kind, Cashman wrote an extraordinary letter in the mid 1980s to Vincent Browne, editor of Magill, about Raymond Smith's deficiencies as a hurling historian. Browne quickly made him a headline writer. 

Cashman went with him to the Sunday Tribune and cut a deep groove of influence. The Sunday Independent took the hint and offered a bigger platform, leading to that devastating 1987 preview.

He became Ireland's highest paid sports journalist but never wished to move from Cork City. Warmest delight? The hurling prowess of his nephew John Fitzgibbon with Glen Rovers and Cork.

Kevin Cashman's journalistic career, like his health, declined from the mid 2000s onwards. By then, he bad probably said what he needed to say. 

Like many truly gifted individuals, he was not always an easy colleague, an easy companion, even if he was forever great company, as I found out. Above his bed, he kept a photograph of John Fitzgibbon celebrating a goal in 1990's wonder season.

This week, in his posthumous life, his uncle is not thinking in terms of the dreaded poignancy. He would simply like to know what happened, to know how Ciarán Joyce, his type of hurler, fared. Above all else, Kevin Cashman liked to know.

He was not just a superlative hurling writer. He counts as a great Irish writer, full stop.