'I'll be forever grateful to those I hurled with and hurled against'
Former Déise hurler Brian Greene being presented with signed Cork and Waterford jerseys by managers Pat Ryan and Peter Queally after January's hurling challenge between the counties to raise funds for Brian's battle with cancer and Waterford Hospice. Pic: Tomás McCarthy
It’s gone 1am. Tuesday hasn’t long left the stage. Brian Greene greets Wednesday from the local riverbank. His preference has always been to fish at unorthodox hours.
In the dead of this particular night, he is without company at the end of his rod. No tug on the line to indicate success. No bait touched or taken. A fruitless 1am fish.
As the clock pushes deeper into the darkness and still no sign of a catch, Brian is of a mind to vent. To fill the silence and his empty bucket with vexation.
“You’d often say to yourself, ‘Jaysus, would somebody give me a bit of luck’. At 1 o’clock in the morning, pitch black and alone on the river, that thought may cross your mind.”
During so many previous fishes, that would have been his reflex reaction. But not any more. Not when luck has been constant company of late. Not when his standing on the river bank is a catch in itself.
So now, when there is nothing to be reeled in, as was the case the other night, he’ll smile and tell himself to hold back.
“Aren't I lucky to be here, you’d say to yourself. Catch a fish or not, I’m a very lucky man to be here. That'll do me. I don't need to call on any favours from the big man above just to put a fish on my bank. He's after doing me enough favours to let me be on the bank at all.”
Once his hurling days with Mount Sion and Waterford were behind him, fishing became Brian Greene’s release. Fishing became his passion and place of switching off.
During his almost three-year battle with lung cancer, fishing was the one element of his paused everyday existence that he refused to let go of. During his almost three-year battle with lung cancer, the fishing rod rarely gathered dust.
There were times when he was not at all optimistic about where this battle would lead. Time became precious. Time was not to be frittered away.
Time well spent required the intervention of others. His fishing buddies, Mickey Organ and Mossie Browne, were not found wanting. Many a low day they shifted him out of the chair and onto a nearby bank.
“There were occasions when I wouldn't have been in great shape, physically and mentally, but they never failed to get me out. They were fantastic. It was huge to be somewhere you enjoy, to get some fishing done and be laughing and slagging in the company of friends.
“I find fishing massive for my head. Standing on the riverbank gives you time to reflect. We do an awful lot of sea trout fishing up on the Blackwater. To be out listening to the birds sing, there are some magical moments you can have that show you life is worth living, be it seeing a shooting star and its reflection on the river at night, to watching quietly as an otter passes up.
“Fishing, since I stopped playing, is my go-to place.”
***
In Waterford and Mount Sion colours, Greene kept the company of many a fine half-forward. Many a ferocious duel. And yet no opponent turned and twisted him like the one he first encountered in April 2022. No opponent troubled him more than the unexpected duel he was thrown into three years ago last month.
One random afternoon, the then 51-year-old noticed some blood when clearing his throat. He thought little of it. He thought he might have coughed too hard. He thought maybe the specks of blood were connected to his smoking past. There’s a superb picture of him after the 2002 Munster final; Munster Cup in left hand, fag hanging out the right side of his mouth. He’d smoked when he shouldn’t and so would always have been chesty.
The diagnosis pulled the rug out from underneath him. Lung cancer. Stage 3 lung cancer. Inoperable Stage 3 lung cancer.
“The cancer was high up in the lungs, too close to the heart to be operated on. So the first thing you do is Google, and I know that is the last thing you should do, but you are checking recovery rates and looking at your chances of pulling through.
“There is only one more stage after Stage 3. As positive as everyone is being, in your own mind you have to be real about things. There is no point going around with your head up in the air and thinking everything is going to be rosy when there are no guarantees. Thinking back, it is tough to talk about it now,” he says, the emotion tugging at the bottom of his throat.
Brian wasn’t long in a new job with Munster Joinery when the diagnosis was communicated to him across a consultant’s desk. He wasn’t long finished the early season training slog with the Glenmore senior hurlers. The job and management were put on hold. Life was put on hold. The kitchen sink was lifted up and launched at his cancer.
Four weeks after the diagnosis, he was in the Hillman Cancer Centre at Whitfield Hospital to begin his course of radium. He was in there Monday to Friday for seven or eight weeks. Chemo came next. A full week in the Dunmore wing of University Hospital Waterford. Scans thereafter showed him eligible for immunotherapy. Back to Whitfield he went for the year-long treatment.
Radium, chemo, and immunotherapy was his hospital existence. Living with the illness at home was an altogether different existence.
“When you are getting the treatment, everything drains you. It is an awful place to be. There are days you don't want to get out of bed, days you don't want to get out of the chair.
“There are other days when you get up and get busy outside, maybe pick up the strimmer and have a stab at something. But after 10 minutes, you are back in the chair again and feeling down on yourself. That can have an adverse effect too because you could be going around wound up to 90 and turning on someone you shouldn't. Constant up and down. A rollercoaster.
“Having the people around me be positive was a massive thing. I have some great people around me. My own family, Debbie's family. Debbie herself is an angel, a saint. We’re together now over 30 years. I don't know how that woman is so strong.
“I remember saying to Debbie that you hear of people going off the rails when they get such a diagnosis, they might be living in the pub or something. Looking in from the outside, you'd be saying, how can someone do that? But when it is you dealing with your own diagnosis, you can kind of understand the people that don't do everything they should and don't do everything they are told.
“It is a slippery slope. I was just really lucky with the people around me. It could just as easily have gone one way or the other. And also very lucky with the treatment I got that the cancer responded.”
Scan results not long after January’s Cork-Waterford fundraising game showed the cancer is no longer active. Brian Greene, just over two and a half years after the rug was pulled from underneath him, entered remission.
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January’s fundraising game was a phenomenal act of collective goodwill. It grew out of an extraordinarily simple act of goodwill. Pat Ryan, who hurled club and inter-county with Greene, called in one day to check on his good friend. A welcome visitor at a time when cancer was still an unwanted guest.
Brian told Pat he was practising a rewilding project such was the overgrown state around the house. The truth was that the garden was beating him. He hadn’t the energy for even routine jobs.
Brian isn’t one to take a favour. It’s not in his makeup. He’d rather carry out a favour than be in receipt of generosity. Pat and Debbie knew as much. And so they initially kept the favours from him.
The pair organised for a crew of lads from Mount Sion to call up and do a bit of strimming. The lads did the bit of garden work and then wanted to do more. As did others. A GoFundMe page was established, driven by family friend Sonya Kelly.
Prior to the diagnosis, Brian had dug the foundation of a shed. The diagnosis meant there were 700 or so blocks strewn at the side of the house causing an eyesore. He swallowed his pride and the shed flew up.
The favours moved from blocklaying to a fundraising fixture. Former Déise teammates Seán Daly and John Mullane grabbed the baton and ran. A Cork-Waterford challenge game on January 4 at Fraher Field. A series of small gestures had given way to a few thousand souls braving the wet and cold on the fourth day of the New Year. All proceeds collected went towards the Greene family and chosen charity Waterford Hospice.
Brian’s honesty and candour should be long evident. He correctly sees no indignity in admitting that after three years out of work, the family was in a tough place financially. Another large gulp of pride thus had to be swallowed.
“Over the last 12 months, or maybe longer, I had to take a decision that was best for Debbie, my son, Tadhg, and my daughter, Mia. I didn't know what the future held for me, but it was very important for me to let people help my family.
“The week of the match, one minute you might swell with pride that people think that much of you, but the other side is the darker side, you feel a little bit embarrassed, if that’s the right word.
“The match and what came with that has given me room to manoeuvre financially. It has bought me space with the mortgage. It has put me in a place now where the background noise and all the pressures have faded for a while and given me this opportunity to try and get myself back as healthy as I can be and get back to work, which I hope to do as soon as possible.
“There's not a word I can find to express how much relief all this has given me towards being strong and doing my best to fight this illness. A landslide of positivity. It made things possible.”
Tipperary and Waterford dance tomorrow in Thurles. Greene was left corner-back when Tipp and Waterford danced on Munster final Sunday 23 years ago. A 39-year Munster famine eclipsed.
The nerves of that week and every other Munster championship week he never expected to stir inside him once off the pitch. During the post-match meal following January’s game, the 54-year-old thanked the Cork and Waterford players for giving an old soldier those feelings again.
“A little piece of everyone is measured in their achievements. I didn't win an All-Star like my father, but I did well, did better than most. But my biggest achievement was that in my moment of biggest need, you had achieved enough in the eyes of your peers that they rallied around you and did not see you stuck. For that, I'll be forever grateful to those I hurled with and hurled against.
“That day and the support shown still makes me very emotional. There are still people I have to thank and give a hug. For now, I am thanking out loud all those people.”
The recovery is slowly gathering pace. The weight put on over the last three years is slowly being shed. He’s tipping away in Peter Kirwan’s gym in Kill. Nothing hectic, but enough to move his sense of self-worth in the right direction. He cut the lawn a few weeks back for the first time in three years. He’ll slip out to the shed and do a bit of woodturning.
“I won't say I will ever get back to where I was, but I can see improvement now and that in itself is great. It’s great to be able to put your hand to a little bit more around the place. I hope I am not putting the kibosh on myself. That’s just the way I feel, whereas before I was struggling to make up ground.”
In life as he was on the field, Brian Greene never ceded ground he couldn’t eventually reclaim.
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