Like his opponents over the years, cancer is getting nothing easy off Brian Greene
SPECIAL MEMORIES: Brian Greene celebrates with his father Jim after Mount Sion won the Munster Club back in 2002. Pic: INPHO
“He is a tough fucker,” says Jim Greene, before immediately apologising and correcting his remark. “Sorry. He is a tough man.”
There was need for neither the apology or correction. The initial remark did perfectly.
Jim Greene is sitting in a function room at the back of Dungarvan’s Park Hotel. He is sat talking about his son, Brian, and the lung cancer diagnosis he has lived with for the past two and a half years.
Jim, the Greene family, and former Waterford teammates are all present at the Park Hotel on this Wednesday evening.
They’ve come together to signpost a Cork-Waterford challenge game taking place next door at Fraher Field on Saturday, January 4. All proceeds collected from the fixture will go towards the Greene family and chosen charity Waterford hospice.
Dan Shanahan is among the former teammates present. He’s reminiscing about the unfortunate occasions when he was lined up beside Brian at in-house Waterford games.
“By God, when you marked Brian Greene, he was one of the best. If you got the better of him in training, you were having a good night,” Dan recalls.
Brian Greene was tough, is tough. They all said it in their own admiring, compassionate way.
Jim Greene recalls a Thursday afternoon in May 2022. It was exactly 3pm. There he saw a different side to his now 53-year-old son. It was a side he never wanted to see.
Brian and his wife, Debbie, were on their way back from the local hospital. They contacted Brian’s two sisters and told them to go up to the home house where Jim was.
“Next thing Brian and Debbie comes in, and he just stood there. He went to say something, and he got soft. Sure we didn't know what was coming next. And then he told us.”
What he told them was that he had been diagnosed with stage three lung cancer.
“When this bombshell happened, we were all just absolutely devastated, you know, especially a fellow like Brian. You wouldn't remember him playing, but he was untouchable. Fit man. Hard man. Stubborn man,” continues Jim, himself an All-Star-winning corner-forward back in 1982.
A husband, a son, a dad, a revered half-back on Waterford’s famine-ending, 2002 Munster-winning team, and from that Thursday onward, a cancer patient.
Brian deliberated long and hard about attending Wednesday evening’s launch. He and the committee were still undecided on the morning of the event.
In the end, he decided to stay away. A shy fella, as his dad describes him, it would have been a thousand times harder for him to go back over the past two and a half years. To relive all the trauma and torment. To field questions and try to find the answers.
Jim deputised superbly. He stays in the immediate aftermath of the diagnosis and plays on from there.
“It was very bleak at the time. Brian was absolutely devastated, but he's a stubborn fellow and he left the dust settle on it for a little while. He was very quiet, said nothing.
“I was up with him one day there at the front of his house, and he was in a bad way now. He kind of decided that this wasn't good for him. And he tried to go off in a different direction, and he went off successfully in a very positive way.
“‘I'm not dying of this’, you know, ‘I'm living with it and I want to beat it’. We're all playing off the same hymn sheet. Debbie did amazingly, and the way she did it. They created a positive reaction to it.
“I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It's a horrific thing within a family.”
It was a long time after May 2022 that they laughed together. The grass got a bit long up around Brian’s place. Someone went up and cut it for him.
“You'd be calling him a lazy fucker, ‘you are using this now’,” says Jim, smiling. “We'd laugh and joke. But it was a long time before we could.”
Like any half-forward that ever kept his company, cancer got nothing easy off Brian Greene. Their duel is still ongoing. Greene is starting to take an upper hand. He was switched from one chemo to another.
Prior to May 2022, cancer was a stranger to their doorstep. You very quickly educate yourself once it arrives. Jim proudly declares that Brian wouldn’t have been switched onto a different chemotherapy if his graph wasn’t moving in the right direction.
His next scan is in December. They don’t want to pre-empt anything. But they are hopeful. They hope the bell is rung for him someday. The bell to announce Brian Greene won yet another duel.
Whatever the scan results, he’ll be at the match in January. No doubt about that. To know that people care and want to help has been a mental cure.
Him and Debbie have a mortgage. He has not worked in two and a half years. May not work again. Positivity and goodwill alone won’t satisfy the repayments. Life goes on in that respect. It is in that respect where few communities are better than the GAA at stepping in and stepping up.
The Friends of Brian Green group first set up a GoFundMe page. Sonya Kelly and his former teammates John Mullane and Seán Daly have been instrumental in organising January’s challenge game, for which tickets are priced at €10.
Brian, as mentioned, is a Munster championship winner, both at inter-county and club level. His dad, Jim, as mentioned, is an All-Star winner who hurled 19 years for the Déise.
His grandad, Paddy, was a member of the Waterford set-up that reached the 1938 All-Ireland final.
The Greene name, in short, is synonymous with hurling in the county. But the Greene name has nothing to do with the support Jim’s son and Paddy’s grandson has received since he came upon tough times.
“It doesn't matter who you are or what you are when you are in the GAA, it is democratic equal. I am not an All-Star in Mount Sion, I am Jim Greene. End of story. It is a great association. And it is nights like this that prove how great it really is.
“This is humbling from a family point of view. I was what I was. But I was never in trouble. I am 75 but I am still healthy. To get to where he got and then see the support you have around you, it is a great boost for him.
“People in these positions, they need help. A family can't deal with this on its own. There has to be outside help. There needs to be this type of encouragement and love and respect coming. That lifts everyone. That lifts me. I was a bit elevated listening to what was being said tonight and looking at the picture on the ticket. It is just a good night.”
A good place. That is where Brian Greene, and everyone behind him, wants to get to.
“It is a lot nicer place than it was two and a half years ago, that is a fact,” says Jim, finishing up his deputising.
“Please God, another two and a half years on, it will be in a nicer spot again. He is going in the right direction. And he is a tough fucker. Sorry. He is a tough man. He'll continue that effort. There'll nothing stop him.”
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