The Club

Home > Other > The Club > Page 25
The Club Page 25

by Christy O'Connor


  The man was always in the wars. Some of us used to call him de la Hoey, after the renowned boxer, Oscar de la Hoya. In four of the ten photographs in the collage, Ger is wearing his yellow helmet, which rarely lasted 60 minutes. A couple of weeks before we played Clarecastle in the 2000 championship, Ger received 16 stitches in a head wound while playing a game with the AIB. Twenty minutes into the Clarecastle game, the helmet was gone, fired to the sideline.

  Ger played for the club for only one more season before he and his family moved to the USA. His last game with Doora-Barefield was the 2001 Munster club quarter-final against Ballygunner in Walsh Park. As we made our way off the pitch that day, he extended his hand to me in the bottom corner of the field, just in front of the tunnel. ‘The end of an era,’ he said. ‘A great era.’

  Moving on, though, never meant that he was leaving anything behind. Ger’s ties with the club were never severed. If anything, they only grew stronger while he was away.

  ‘Even though he might not have been around, he was always there,’ says Ger’s brother, John. ‘That love for the club never left him. The club was his second family. It was most of his life. I suppose he experienced the ultimate journey, from Under-10 parish league up to the All-Ireland club final. Then it was the work journey: Portlaoise, Limerick, the States, Carrigaline and then back home to Doora-Barefield. Basically, everything was linked. Doora-Barefield couldn’t be separated from the big picture. It was always there.’

  Ger’s death has had a devastating effect on his family, but St Joseph’s have also felt a deep sense of loss. What the club has really lost is decades of presence and leadership, years of getting back what Ger Hoey was prepared to give. The chance to regenerate what is important.

  ‘I suppose what the club have lost is huge in terms of administration and leadership,’ says John Hoey. ‘Ger would have given so much back and it would have been so effortless for him. It would have just been another natural progression. He would have been coaching underage teams and he would have taken the senior team eventually. There’s the huge loss that the Hoeys have, but there is a huge loss to the hurling club as well. You’re only guessing but you could have no problem imagining Ger as chairman of the club in ten years’ time. And staying there for ten years. He was there so long, he had the respect of everyone, even the auld boys.

  ‘The two people I remember most coming in to the funeral were Mikey Mac [McNamara] and Lott [O’Halloran]. I remember them bringing the entire Under-12 team to Corofin once for a match in two cars. Health and Safety out the window. Lads would be stacked on top of each other in the back and then three in the front seat. Mikey Mac’s yellow Beetle and Lott had this auld brown Ford, an enormous yoke. I can remember it like yesterday. Ger was the captain of that team.’

  John played alongside Ger on that side, both of them in the half-back line. John was one of the most promising hurlers in the club at that time, but he suffered a neck injury when he was 16 and a swollen disc forced him to stop all contact sports.

  Ger was responsible for partially resurrecting his career five years later. In March 1991, we were on the way to play Blackrock from Limerick in a challenge game in Kilfinane and we only had 14 players heading through Limerick city. John was in college in UL at the time and Ger corralled him into lining out. John survived and he committed to training again, but his career definitively ended that August when he broke his leg in a junior game against Feakle in Tulla.

  As he lay on the field in agony, the Feakle goalkeeper tied his legs together with a sock. There was no stretcher at the ground, so they took the ladder from the scoreboard, padded it with some coats from a few of the Doora-Barefield supporters, and then carried John off the pitch while he lay across the makeshift stretcher. As he waited outside the dressing room for the ambulance to arrive, it started raining. And the Doora-Barefield supporters reclaimed their jackets from underneath John’s back. They wanted to watch the rest of the match in comfort.

  ‘To be honest, I really missed the hurling because I was injured,’ says John. ‘The bond you get in a dressing room can’t be replicated anywhere else. It just can’t, especially a club dressing room. It’s absolutely unique and it’s very rare that it’s broken. You’d have such pride in your club, especially when your brothers are playing. Then Ger playing behind David on the one line on such a brilliant team. You could clearly see Ger choking with pride. And the pride watching your brother do that is unbelievably special.

  ‘It’s been very hard but, when Ger was buried, I’d say for most of the lads on that wall [from the framed photograph of the 1999 All-Ireland winning team], I can literally imagine it was close enough to losing a brother for them. I’ve talked to a good few of them about it, and those lads were family to him. They were as good as brothers and I can say that with me being his brother. And there would be no jealousy saying that Ger had another ten to fifteen brothers from that photograph. It was just natural.’

  The Hoeys’ link to Doora-Barefield still remains as strong as ever. Ger’s sister Sarah still plays camogie, while John coaches the U-6s and David has already been recruited for the U-12 management next season. Ger’s father Bernie is the unofficial groundsman in Gurteen, along with Jimmy McNamara. And two of Ger’s daughters, Caoimhe and Orla, play camogie and ladies football with the club. ‘Although Ger is gone, our family link with the club is still as strong as ever,’ says John Hoey. ‘It will never be broken. Ever.’

  The St Joseph’s senior team retired the number 2 jersey this year in honour of Ger.

  *

  In the last few weeks, we’ve appointed our underage hurling coach. Interviews took place in the Auburn Lodge Hotel in early October, where the interview panel comprised Ronan Keane, one of Clare’s Games Promotion Officers, along with Joey Carton and Jamesie O’Connor. Candidates were called for interview and Alan Small – a highly qualified and hugely respected figure within Clare coaching circles at grass-roots level – was eventually appointed to the position.

  We feel good to go now. Our sub-committee held a meeting with the three school principals in September and they were fully supportive of the new initiative. It’s a hugely progressive step forward for St Joseph’s, but it is equally important for everyone within the club – particularly underage mentors – to realize that the appointment is not a panacea for all our ills.

  Ten years ago, St Joseph’s were All-Ireland club champions and a huge number of people within the club took that success for granted. We didn’t build on it with enough hard work at underage level and now we’re all paying the price. St Joseph’s still have huge respect as a club around the country, but the test now is to ensure that such hard-earned respect is not lost. Success is no accident or twist of romance. It is the result of planning and perpetual effort, and that’s the challenge for all of us now.

  Already, everyone seems really up for it, including the senior players. We all appreciate how important the next few years are, and the perils that lie ahead. Seven of the team that started against Newmarket were over 30 and those players will retire from senior hurling in the near future. With that issue in mind, a large group of players – from U-21 to senior – came together on 22 November for a ‘Players Hurling Forum’, where a ten-page framework document was drawn up for next season.

  Conny chaired the forum and we were broken up into four groups in which one young player wrote the points raised by the group on a flipchart, before outlining those points to everyone else. The goals for adult hurling in the club over the coming season were discussed against the background of ‘what success would look like in 2010’. Our goals were far more realistic than the ones we would normally have set.

  Win promotion from Division Two of the Clare Cup.

  Beat one of the top 4 clubs in the Championship.

  Qualify for the Quarter-Finals.

  Get our pride and respect back by playing with spirit.

  I suppose, for many of us, we crave getting our respect back more than anything else. Newmarket may h
ave taken our name in the quarter-final but the hurt has just made us all more determined to reclaim it as soon as we can.

  We’ve been fighting that battle for a while now. Two years ago, a small group of us were at a match in Cusack Park when a couple of lads standing behind us began discussing the prospects of the teams left in the championship. When our name came up, they didn’t even entertain us as realistic contenders: ‘Sure those boys are finished. They’ve no young players coming through. Football has taken them over. Their good days are long gone.’

  We casually smiled at each other, silently vowing to use those words like a flame-thrower on every other team left in the championship. Yet, we didn’t. We couldn’t even get out of our group that year.

  Coming back the following season and reaching a semi-final was about more than just defying the odds; it was a diligent and hard-working response from a proud group of players. This year was more than just aiming to go one step further; it was about the impact and the perspective that death and loss had on our club. Overcoming grief. Healing pain. Siphoning hurt. Renewing hope. Rekindling joy.

  On the face of it, ultimately we failed to do what we’d hoped to achieve. Yet did we really? We tried. We dreamed. We hoped. We fought. We healed. We tried again. We failed again. But at least we expressed ourselves through the forum which best defines us as people. Surely that isn’t failure?

  Sometimes we beat ourselves up too much. We see the final destination as all that matters, when the beauty is always in the journey – the camaraderie, the spirit, the togetherness, the hard training sessions, the battles, the joy in victory, the devastation in defeat, the purity of feeling part of your own unique little tribe.

  For now, the good days have gone. The bad ones may only be around the corner but that doesn’t mean we turn our backs and walk away. No matter what happens – good days or bad days – the club will always be part of us. It is who we are. It is in our blood. There is no separation.

  Two days before we played Clarecastle in the 2002 county semi-final, Seán Mangan, our former trainer and one of Doora-Barefield’s greatest clubmen, said to us that St Joseph’s were normally the gauge for the mood and temperature of the parish. At the time, we were just after hitting a sticky patch for the first time in five years. ‘When we’re winning and playing well, the whole place is in a good mood,’ said Mangan. ‘When we’re playing poorly and losing, everyone is in bad form.’

  The communal loyalty to St Joseph’s is still deep and persistent, but it no longer pervades the parish to the same degree it once did. When people talk about Doora-Barefield, hurling is often the prism through which they view us. It is how many of us want them to view us. That stems from the pride we have in our club, our history, our heritage. The strong principles and beliefs which determined the sense of worth and place that Ger Hoey always carried with him, no matter where he went.

  Yet in our very own parish, the majority of our people certainly no longer view themselves through that prism of its flag-bearing hurling team. There are a myriad reasons why we have lost part of our identity as a club and that’s why we almost have to start again. To redefine our goals, reset our objectives. Appointing an underage coach is a long-term plan, the fruits of which we may not see for over ten years. Yet that is the investment we are willing to make.

  In the meantime, the journey will just continue. Patsy is moving on and so is John Carmody. The word on the ground is that Carmody and Ciaran O’Neill are renewing their partnership with Kilmaley again. Seánie McMahon and Davy Hoey have already announced their retirements, while Conor Hassett is going to Australia for a year, maybe longer. They are serious losses.

  We just have to have faith now in our younger players. I have already been appointed U-21 manager for next season and I assembled a backroom team only last week: Conny and Darragh O’Driscoll. There is a good crop of young players there, even if roughly half of them are still minors. They are our next generation.

  For now, a long, emotional and trying year has ended for us all. Along with trying to honour Ger, much of my own personal motivation this year came from Róisín. Before every match, I’d bless myself on the pitch, look to the sky and ask Róisín to look out for me. The beautiful little girl that I never got the chance to raise or cherish. The hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was place her in that little white coffin and whisper to her through my tears how sorry I was that I wasn’t able to protect her or take care of her. A father would do anything for his child. The huge regret is that I never got the opportunity.

  Grief is always there, at every turn. Your son doesn’t have the sister he should. You see your wife depressed, and it tears you apart. The grief is just more private because people didn’t know your child. They don’t know what to say to you. In the early days, they often just avoid you.

  The well of emotion that was bubbling inside me all year, I just kept it in check for the welfare of my family. They were my priority. If I was to finally let it all out, there was only one place I felt I could. All along, I could picture myself at the final whistle in the county final, after we’d won and I’d collapsed to my knees and the raw emotion just burst out of me like a geyser.

  Maybe it’s just the big-boy syndrome where men don’t show their emotions, but hurling is where I express myself most. Two of my favourite places on this earth are Gurteen and the handball alleys in St Flannan’s College when there is nobody else around. On those evenings, that’s where I connect with Róisín more than anywhere else. Maybe it doesn’t have to be this huge outpouring of emotion to grieve for my daughter. Maybe this is my way of coming to terms with her death.

  In the weeks after Róisín’s passing, Olivia trawled every website and booklet imaginable to try and find the words to put some kind of meaning on our grief. She couldn’t find them, and then they came from the most unlikely source: Conny. It was from a text message he sent me in February after he got engaged to Sinéad. ‘The year will yet offer sprays of sunshine, with Róisín all over it.’

  That’s what keeps you going: the loyalty, the friendship, the camaraderie, the honesty, the togetherness, the support. Most of which comes from your club-mates, all of us bound up together in this communal brotherhood that almost defines us as people.

  No matter what happens, we are Doora-Barefield and we will always stick together. As Darragh O’Driscoll said, ‘We will be back.’ We will get stronger. We will win county titles again. We will aim to win Munster and All-Ireland titles again. And no matter how long that may take, we will certainly enjoy the journey along the way.

  As for my own career, I can think of numerous reasons not to go back playing next year: my age, the injury to my leg and the risks of a recurrence, having to wear a helmet for the first time. But I can’t think of one good reason why I shouldn’t go back. St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield is my extended family. My passion. My future.

  And anyway, what else am I going to do?

  The St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield team before the 1999 All-Ireland club final on St Patrick’s Day at Croke Park …

  … and after it

  Bloodied but victorious: Ger Hoey after the 1999 All-Ireland final

  Ger Hoey accepts the trophy for the Clare senior hurling title from Father Michael McNamara, October 1999. Both men passed away suddenly in 2009

  Portrait of an artist: Seánie McMahon, one of St Joseph’s greatest ever players, in 2001

  Seánie McMahon, Christy O’Connor and Ger Hoey march before the 2001 county final against Sixmilebridge

  Ken Kennedy in action in our opening championship game in 2009 against Ballyea

  Christy O’Connor surveys his options after fielding a high ball on the line

  Coach Patsy Fahey encourages his players from the sideline

  Through a difficult season, team captain Darragh O’Driscoll’s leadership shone through

  Jamesie O’Connor, St Joseph’s most decorated player, squares up to his Clare teammate Brian Lohan in a 2004 match against Wolfe Tones

/>   Five years later, during a short comeback after a serious knee injury, Jamesie sits among the St Joseph’s subs

  Eoin ‘Conny’ Conroy pursues Clarecastle’s Conor Plunkett

  After the trauma and pain of losing his brother, David Hoey focuses on the sliotar as he tries to win possession against Kilmaley

  Team photo before the county quarter-final against Newmarket

  Christy O’Connor tries to stop a point against Newmarket, but the points keep coming …

  Acknowledgements

  Some of my closest friends advised me against writing this book. They told me that I would be bringing unnecessary hassle on myself and attracting attention to our club for more wrong reasons than right ones. Some people felt that this book would have no relevance around the country. But this is a snapshot of club life and all that goes with it. Every club in the country can relate to this story in its own way. What drives us in Doora-Barefield drives club people everywhere.

  There are a number of people I would like to thank, in no particular order: Mike McInerney (St Flannan’s), Fergal Cahill, Jackie Morris and Damian Lawlor. I would like to extend special thanks to Kieran Shannon, Michael Foley, Richie Fitzpatrick, Denis Walsh and Tom Humphries for all their friendship, help and advice on this project.

  To Anne McManus at Sportsfile, Flann Howard, Joe Ó Muircheartaigh and John Kelly for the photographs. To John Redmond for his photographs and for his continued loyalty.

  To Michael McLoughlin and Brendan Barrington at Penguin Ireland for all their help and assistance in getting this project over the line.

 

‹ Prev