Keith Dugganmeets the teak-tough Tipperary corner back with eight Celtic Crosses and a place in legend assured

JOHN DOYLE still lives in his childhood home, two miles beyond Holycross Abbey. Conor, his grandson, had given precise directions – the Cashel road; a cluster of six or seven houses, the last bearing a Tipperary flag (sodden on an afternoon of saturating rainfall); a lone field and then white gables giving way to the sudden entrance to the farmhouse. In the driveway, the family dogs potter around, looking for amusement on a bedraggled day. The man himself answers the door.

One of the complications of sport is the more vivid the sportsman becomes in the imagination, the more he remains inseparable from his greatest triumphs so that when you call to John Doyle’s front door, you half expect the powerful, dark-haired figure from the photographs to step into the afternoon gloom to greet you, in full Premier colours.

The hair has greyed somewhat and he apologises that he has slowed up lately and after shaking hands he casts a wary look at the sky. As he leads us into the sitting room, he moves with the natural athlete’s expectation to be at the next place quickly.

Of all the names that illuminate 20th century hurling and through Tipperary’s rich lore, it could be said John Doyle has become a coda for the perpetuity of tradition. The sweeping success of his playing career, during which he won eight Celtic Crosses, a record shared with the immortal Christy Ring, has partly ensured that.

But it is more than the medals.

Nineteen years operating in an unflinchingly tough back division, 19 summers without ever being prematurely withdrawn from the field through injury or indifferent form, spoke of a consistent excellence and a brand of invincibility that, for several years in the mid-1960s, seemed to radiate through the entire Tipperary team.

It is well known that Doyle won the first of his All-Ireland medals at the age of 19 in 1949 and therefore no secret the man is touching 80 this year. He has lived all his life in this small, spiritual patch of Tipperary and although he travelled regularly to the great American cities for league finals, he jokes that most of his generation “would not have seen Shannon let alone New York had it not been for the hurling”.

Sometimes when recalling the matches, he becomes impatient and complains, reasonably, that after 20 years of hurling, the details tend to merge – all the seasons become one. But about Holycross he instantly becomes animated, agreeing with satisfaction it is a rare place. “It hasn’t changed. It is a beautiful village. And the abbey sets it off.”

In the build-up to the 1967 All-Ireland final, in which Tipperary were favourites to beat Kilkenny, it was claimed in a GAA periodical Doyle would retire after the match. A few days later, Paddy Downey, The Irish Times Gaelic Games correspondent, reported he had phoned the Tipperary legend. “Unless the game ends in a draw, when I walk off the field, it will be with a wave of goodbye,” he told Paddy then.

“I hope the record is mine and it will be a very happy ending. If it isn’t, well, after all the success I enjoyed, how could I possibly complain?”

It was a perfectly logical adieu. But still, it seemed somehow brutal to simply stop after such a long run. But that is what he did. Kilkenny won that final, hastening the end of Tipperary’s dominance and Doyle simply stopped.

“Yeah,” he says flatly now as we sit in his sitting room. “It was the last game of hurling I ever played. Ah, I was 37 years of age then. It is time to go then, isn’t it? Actually, had I played the following year, I think we might have won the All-Ireland. Tipp got to the final and our full back line was inexperienced and Tony Wall (the team’s outstanding centre back) was gone as well. When five or six fellas leave a team at once, it is hard. But I wasn’t sorry. I got eight All-Irelands. That is a good lot.”

But still, the severance – because that is what it was – bothered him more than he might have imagined. That Tipperary team broke up and, no longer bound by the common cause and the rituals of the season, they seldom saw one another.

“No. We saw each other very little. We would go our separate ways. The odd time we would meet up. I tell you, you would really miss it for a while. Ah, I missed it for a few years terribly. Nineteen years and I suppose it became like clockwork. You do have to make the decision to move on, though. Then you get used to it not being there. You can’t keep going forever.”

Doyle’s hurling supremacy was always in slight conflict with his conscientiousness as a farmer. His legacy in the game was assured after he won three All-Irelands in his first three seasons (1949-51) and when Pat Stakelum, the senior figure on the “first” Tipp team he played on, retired after the 1957 season, the Holycross man was tempted to go as well.

Paddy Leahy, the legendary Tipperary trainer who lived just a mile down the road – “we used to drink tea together at the dairy in the mornings” – persuaded him to stay on.

That was good enough.

Farming 100 acres of dairy and tillage helped in terms of his strength and fitness, but balancing work and sport proved tough. Reaching for a pack of Silk Cut and sending up a cloud, Doyle laughs as he recalls playing in a Munster final against Cork in Limerick. He had arranged for a man he knew to do the milking that day.

“The ball went out over the sideline and whatever way I looked into the crowd, there was this hoor staring back at me.”

He grins and shakes his head.

“I can tell you, after the game I got into my clothes straight away and had half the milking done when this fella showed up.”

But those mishaps were rare. The generosity that neighbours showed astounded him. The New York trips lasted anything between a week and a month.

“People around here would be down and they would go through more work than I would do myself. I had great neighbours.”

It is one of those incredible GAA quirks that Doyle grew up across the road from Michael Maher. Along with Kieran Carey from Roscrea, the Holycross neighbours formed what is reputed to be the most uncompromising and fearsome full back line in GAA history.

Doyle and Maher were born within a fortnight of one another, they went to school together and lived the same existence, more or less. Maher did not join his neighbour in the defence until after the ’49-’51 victories.

“He would come up to that field there with his brother and we would give an hour to hurling every evening. He was a big, strong fella and a good hurler too.

Often he would take the ball down and give it off to me and I’d let it fly and get a roar for it, but Michael was after doing all the hard work. And Kieran too, Lord rest him, they were fine hurlers.”

Doyle is not sure when the Tipperary division was christened Hell’s Kitchen.

“That was just a name. It didn’t bother us. I always thought it was funny more than anything.”

He has heard most of the stories that fall between barstool legend and notoriety, such as the time when they were playing Clare, who had skilful but small forwards and, as the players took their positions, the call came out from the Tipperary back line: “Lower the blades, boys.”

“I don’t know if that was said,” Doyle laughs. “Might have been. I don’t know. You hear these things.”

He grimaces when asked if he and his colleagues were as fearsome as their reputation suggests. “That was a good back line, but they were all well able to hurl. They were brave. There wasn’t anyone who would run through them too handy. We had the best goalkeeper ever, in my opinion, in Tony Reddan.

“He was the best man I ever saw to stop a ball dead, to kill it on the hurley no matter what speed it came at. He was terrific at that. And then we had another fine goalkeeper in John O’Donoghue. And we gave them good cover.”

In all his years hurling, Doyle hardly received more than a graze – he wore no helmet and the full inventory of his career injuries amounts to three stitches above the left eye. He shrugs at what seems to have been a blessed existence.

“I don’t know; if you are used to playing hurling, you will never get hit if you know how to defend yourself. I knew how to look after myself. And there won’t anyone hit you if they don’t want to hit you.”

Outside, the rain has not stopped. After three, Andrea and Eoin, Doyle’s grandchildren come in from school and chat with Anne, their grandmother. Anne’s brother Ray [Reidy] earned a lasting reputation as a mercurial minor star (he captained the county in 1955) and was regarded as one of the finest prospects ever to come out of the county before he entered Maynooth for the priesthood. He returned as a selector in 1984.

For all the hurling heritage in this home, hurling artefacts do not crowd the Doyle household. In the living room, a plaque celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1947 Tipperary minor team Doyle had played on takes pride of place on the sideboard.

On the mantelpiece is a framed photograph of a priest, Fr Bobby Horkin, a close friend, who died young. Beneath that is a framed black and white photograph in which he is leading a parade around Croke Park – somebody presented it as a gift. The house is hardly a shrine to his own feats.

“I have nothing. It is all gone. Everyone takes them,” he grumbles happily. “I don’t mind. Sure what about them?”

Earlier, John had pointed to a photograph in which he is standing outside a clubhouse drinking a cup of tea with Christy Ring. It is on a dresser in the kitchen. The men had been guests at a pitch opening in Ruane in 1971. Both are suited, Doyle wore a chequered jacket and his black hair was swept back and he is holding the cup and saucer while Ring smiles anxiously into the eye of the camera.

“You won’t see many like that photo,” Doyle said quietly. “Christy. He was something else.”

In his farming days, Doyle would take a hurley with him as he walked the fields, just to have the grip of it. Sometimes he took a sliotar but he walked everywhere with a stick. When he reviews his career now, he talks with a direct honesty that could be interpreted as arrogance but it is not that. Rather, he just never bothered with the fraudulent bashfulness successful Irish sports people are expected to hide behind.

He has called it as he saw it – when asked – and sometimes may have landed him in trouble. He knows his haul of medals is extraordinary. When he says his Tipperary teams always believed they could beat Kilkenny, it is because that was true.

“We always thought that we could beat Kilkenny because we were after winning so often. As far as stickmanship and style are concerned, Kilkenny are the past masters. If you stand back and take them on at hurling, as if you were playing basketball against them, then they will give you a lesson. You have to hurl them close because they had some great hurlers. I think that because we were such a strong team, they found it difficult. Maybe they had to change their style a bit. In 1967, we could have won but Kilkenny took their chances. That is the way it goes.

“I didn’t think that game was overly hard. The rivalry wasn’t too bitter either, at least between the players. Between the supporters was probably a different thing. You wouldn’t want to be crossing into Urlingford blowing your trumpet or you would be soon put right. But ah, I think it is an easier game now than then.

“Because the third man tackle is gone out of it. Playing then, when a fella ran into you, you would know all about it. It was just part of the game. But that is gone. There is less first time hurling and you never see anyone doubling on the ball.

“When Theo English was there, my God, he was like a robot. These were physical men but they could hurl. Jimmy Doyle was the lightest of us but an exceptionally good hurler.”

Time and time again, Doyle returns to Paddy Leahy, whom he clearly reveres. He leans forward in his seat when speaking of him. “You would do anything for him. He had a way about him that made you feel as if you were twice as good as you really were.

“He was his own boss. Whatever he said went and that was it. But everyone had a good word for him. He was a lovely man. I found him that way anyhow. Tipperary have never replaced him and never will.”

Later, when talking about his boyhood, John looks around the room as he says: “No brothers or sisters. My mother died two or three weeks after I was born. My father reared me and he died when I was 22. That was it. I had three All-Irelands by then. I would say it was hard for my father. That is why I say Paddy Leahy had such an influence on my life.”

There is probably more about John Doyle contained in those few sad, bare statements than in hours and hours of reminiscences about hurling. He grew up quickly, achieved so much at a young age. He admits, half roguishly, that by the end, the homecomings in Thurles with the MacCarthy Cup had become something to be endured rather than enjoyed: the bonfires, the Archbishop on the steps, the cold and the singing. There was no enjoyment?

“There was not,” he scolds warmly. “But I had to go through with it anyhow. I think that by the end, even our own supporters were getting a bit fed up.”

He followed the game keenly in retirement, worked the farm, became a county councillor, served two years in the Seanad and watched as his sons, John and Michael, followed him on to Tipperary teams.

Like many of his generation, he marvels at the sudden halting of those September processions down from Dublin, so seldom coming since that deluge of 1960s successes they can be counted on one hand. And he knows should Tipperary triumph this weekend, the celebrations will be heartfelt and special. He believes this Tipperary team has a great chance and declares: “When they play their best, they are a match for any team.”

He will watch the game in the Abbey tavern, his daughter’s premises. He likes the big screen there and he has no fear of being disturbed by other patrons.

“Oh, they won’t bother me,” he says, chuckling with a hint of the dark, forbidding demeanour of his playing days. He knows that in this Kilkenny-Tipperary instalment, it is the black and amber men who are imbued with the iron certainty he evinced. And he knows too the senior Kilkenny men are coming close to joining him on the record roll for most All-Irelands medals won.

“I have no doubt but they will,” he says in a way that sounds almost courteous. “I don’t mind. Records are there to be broken. You know, I gave my all and could give no more.”

His grandchildren come out to greet him when we leave the room. They are beautiful kids and happily indifferent to the mystique the patriarch carries. Eoin says he is going to the final and you can see the thrill in the young boy’s eyes as his grandfather takes a seat by the range. By now, it is after four o’clock and gloomy outside.

A few hundred yards up the road, a motorist is waiting in the rain, the bonnet of his car raised. The engine is dead. As we attach jump leads to the batteries, the man nods happily when the hurler’s name comes up.

“John Doyle. Sure I live just down the road there from him.”

He looks up when the plugs spark on contact, as if the voltage has brought him back to the bright fury of Tipperary’s best days. “Oh, I remember him in his heyday.”