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 Sunday Times 15th February 2004 | |||
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Location and style have isolated the hurlers of
Newtownshandrum but they continue to nurture their little miracle.
Four years ago, on the day after they won their first Cork
senior hurling championship, Newtownshandrum descended on the
man-of-the-match lunch in a city centre hotel, officers, privates and
auxiliaries, all marching behind the flag. Newtown couldn't say how many
they brought because that would have involved counting and counting
might have implied a limit. Overnight, winning the county final had
obliterated any number of limits.
At the door they were met by the former Cork hurler Tomás
Mulcahy, an employee of the sponsors and hosts of the gig. "Jesus lads,"
he said, "did ye bring a mini-bus?" "No," said one of the clubmen, "we
brought a big bus." Mulcahy found a seat for everyone.
Jerry O'Connor remembered hearing somebody refer to the new
champions as "culchies" in a manner that could only have been uttered
disparagingly, through the corner of a mouth. "I'd say we looked like
apes to them," he said, projecting any prejudice way beyond available
evidence. Whatever was said, though, it is how they believed they would
be seen and perception is a particularly virulent strain of reality.
It was natural for Newtown to wonder how they would be
regarded and if they would be accepted. In the long and layered history
of the Cork championship there was never a greater sensation than their
first title. Here was a tiny village nearly 50 miles from the city, a
million miles from Cork hurling's ruling caste, winning the senior
championship with eight under-21s, playing a style of hurling that was
the antithesis of the Cork tradition.
They didn't move the ball so much as move with it: a
possession game founded on running, hand-passing and short, jabbed
deliveries. It was an unconscious affront to the Cork hurling
establishment and to the sensitive palate of the Cork hurling public.
They knew people didn't like it but it suited them and they didn't need
to suit anybody but themselves.
Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that
Newtownshandrum or any club of their dimensions could win a Cork senior
championship. The Cork championship revolved around the big city clubs
of Blackrock, Glen Rovers and St Finbarr's, the Ivy League universities
of hurling in the county. Country clubs lived with their inferiority and
lost, year after year.
In their history Newtown had spent very little time as a
senior club but they were familiar with inferiority and the brutal way
it could be confirmed. When they won the intermediate championship with
a young team in 1976 the players wanted to move into senior ranks,
exercising their right as intermediate champions, but at the AGM the
will of the players was overcome by fear and defeated by two votes. "I
remember a fella standing up at the AGM," says Simon Morrissey, a player
then and a selector since, "and saying he remembered the 1950s when they
got awful beatings from the Rockies and Glen Rovers and these teams. The
older fellas were afraid of getting hammered again. As players you had
to do what you were told, that was it."
It wasn't that they were spineless, just that they had to
choose their battles carefully. Three years earlier, in 1973, they were
thrown out of the under-21 championship after an objection. Newtown
believed they had been the victims of an injustice and appealed to the
Munster council. The story reached the national media, dailies and
Sundays, and Newtown weren't afraid to enter that theatre of combat
either.
They had a story primed to explode in the county board's
face but as it happened the Munster council found in their favour before
the bomb could be detonated. Glen Rovers had already won the
championship so Newtown were granted a match against them for the title
and won it by five points.
"Frank Murphy (county board secretary) refereed the match,"
says Morrissey, who was captain of the team, "and when the match was
over he still had the whistle around his neck for the presentation.
There wasn't a word. Not congratulations or kiss my ass."
That Newtown should have so many good hurlers at the same
time, delivered in bulk by the same stork, was extraordinary. You could
call it a cycle except that would assume it would come recur and in a
place of fewer than 900 people you could grow old and cranky waiting for
nature's bounty twice in the same lifetime. But it did happen, the
second time more bountiful than the first.
Twenty years ago 11 boys started in the village primary
school in the same year; eight of them will play in Thurles today. Four
years ago the club completed three-in-a-row of under-21 titles; only one
Cork club, St Finbarr's, with their vast pick and blue blood pedigree,
had ever achieved such a feat. No club had ever won the senior and
under-21 in the same year, as Newtown did.
The odds on that group of boys being so gifted were much
longer than the odds-on certainty that they would play. In Newtown peer
pressure on this matter is absolutely compelling: "The thing about it is
that every young fella hurls at the start," says Jim Coughlan, former
player and selector. "Every young fella catches a hurley. You either
play hurling or you play nothing."
"Very few drop out," says Dan O'Riordan, full-forward on the
team. "If they do they're left on their own. If one or two of them go
back to town (Charleville) messing or drinking their friends are here.
They might leave for a year or two but then they'll come back. If they
had seven or eight more mates to go off and do the b******* with then
you might lose them. If they do it here there's nobody to go with them.
If you gave up they'd kind of look at you and say, 'Do you see that
b******* ' - and he might be a grand fella. People say about the big
towns, 'They've a big pick, they should do better,' but there's too many
distractions there. Here, there's no distractions. There's not even
football here."
They reached the minor football county final seven years
ago, each player lining out in his hurling position, begrudging the
exercise any deeper consideration than that. Shortly afterwards football
was systematically eliminated. "We'd go into a dressing room and have
the radio blaring - like Wimbledon," remembered Ben O'Connor. "You could
have a bottle of poteen handed around and fellas swigging out of it. It
was a joke to us.
As soon as the football started to get a bit serious we
pulled out."
It was Bernie O'Connor, father of the twins, who chiselled
and shaped that generation of players, but while the future was being
sculpted Newtown sought outside help. In 1992 they failed to win the
junior hurling county final but decided to take their chances at
intermediate level anyway and O'Riordan and Morrissey were detailed to
find an outside coach. After three months their search ended in
Limerick. They were beaten in the first round that summer but they' ll
never forget the journey.
"One night at training," says Morrissey, "he told them that
they had to sprint down to the cones and when he gave them a shout
they'd have to turn left. When they got to the cones he shouted,
'Right!' They didn't know where to go, they were all bumping into each
other."
"It was like the Marx brothers," says O'Riordan.
O'Riordan was captain that year and on the night of the
championship match the trainer told them that in his club they always
said three Hail Marys before they went into battle and O'Riordan was
invited to lead the prayers. But the same night he told them that if any
of their opponents were soloing with the ball to hit them on the bottom
of the elbow with the hurley. Maybe the prayers were a down payment on
forgiveness.
When the young fellas came through Bernie O'Connor took
over. O'Connor wasn't a native of Newtown, he had married into the
parish, but his reputation would have preceded him like a fanfare. He
was such a precocious player that he played senior hurling championship
at 14; not for a club team but for Duhallow, a divisional team with
access to a dozen clubs or more.
He was still playing when he took up coaching and in the
mid-1980s he drove Meelin, the club of his birth, to a junior county
final playing the same possession game that Newtown have since adopted.
They lost the final and the old-timers weren't slow to denounce his methods but it didn't shake his conviction. Newtown's next-door neighbours in Milford sought his services and in two years he delivered a junior championship, followed by an intermediate. When Ben and Jerry began hurling, though, he devoted himself to their team and from the age of 10 that group was drilled in O'Connor's methods. As one clubman put it: "He stitched it into them."
Morrissey served with him as a senior selector for three years and never doubted that he was dealing with a formidable character. "We were above training one night and this fella (O'Riordan) said to me, 'I'm gasping for one pint' - he didn't have a pint for about two weeks. And I said go home and I'll pick you up and we went down to Ballygran, over the border (in Limerick).
"So we're picking the team up in the field a couple of nights later and The Baron 'Connor was writing down the names and he said to me, 'Was O'Riordan drinking on Wednesday night?' 'Be God now,' I said, 'I doubt that very much - I doubt he was drinking this week.' 'And what's more,' he said to me, 'You f****** took him!' "In fairness, he was a great man to train a team. All skill and speed. Everything was done at pace."
When O'Connor stood down at the end of 2001 Newtown brought in the former Limerick manager Tom Ryan. He brought them to another county final but they played poorly on the day and were beaten by Blackrock. Ryan was critical of Newtown's "big players" in the local press and their relationship ended.
"He tried to change the style that the boys had," says Coughlan, "and they couldn't do it. They had that style since they were under-12. They couldn't adjust. They're not a big physical team. There's no point in trying to mix it with other teams. The forwards are small and light. You have to play to what you have. There's no point in putting in a high ball to a lot of our fellas."
With Ryan was another Limerick man, Ger Cunningham, whose brief was the physical training. He didn't come as part of the Ryan package, though, and for 2003 they separated him from Ryan and asked him to be the manager. He restored their natural equilibrium. "Ger left the team hurl themselves," says O'Riordan. "He let us do what we were used to." They returned to the county final against Blackrock and chinned them.
Munster champions now and the little miracle is more wondrous than ever. It's not so long ago that nobody but their neighbours passed any remarks on them.
Wedged into a far-flung corner of the county they were invisible to the outside world. A paper once asserted that the great Jimmy Doyle of Tipperary was the only hurler to win three All-Ireland minor medals; Coughlan rang up and issued a correction. Their own Johnny Buckley had done it too. It was worth pointing out because such achievements were, to borrow from Beckett, their stain on the silence.
Others carried the torch too. When Cork's seniors won three in a row in the 1970s they were coached by a Newtown man, Fr Bertie Troy. There weren't any Newtown players on those Cork panels though; last summer there were four.
Because of that, there were evenings when Newtown's seniors would struggle to make 15 for challenge games or League games and there was one evening when one of the selectors had to stand in goal.
What harm? In 1968 they had to subpoena a retired player from Dublin to make 15 in a junior county final because the four subs they had were either too young or too old to start. They have plenty today. The best they've ever had.
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