From water-boy to corner-boy, the rise of Mikey Butler

Among the many spiky shards of defiance that go into making Richie Hogan such a singular dude is the fact that he doesn’t swap jerseys at the end of matches. He has nothing against it in theory – nor even in practice. He just doesn’t personally go in for it. Never has. Well, almost never.

Anyone following the luminous rise of Mikey Butler through this championship will probably have seen the photo by now. It’s from the aftermath of the 2015 Leinster semi-final, during Butler’s spell as waterboy/helper/general gofer in the Kilkenny camp. He’s standing there in his black and amber tracksuit holding two crates of water bottles as Hogan and Lee Chin pull on each other’s jerseys. We’ll let Butler’s clubmate Brian Hogan take up the story behind the story.

“It’s so funny because Richie was never into that. For whatever reason, he never swaps jerseys. But Mikey was on to him, ‘Will you get me a Wexford jersey, will you get me a Wexford jersey?’ And of all the jerseys he ends up getting, it’s Lee Chin’s – sure Richie would be swimming in it, never mind Mikey. But that’s what that was about.

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“Mikey was having the time of his life. He was at training every night and there wasn’t a teenager in Kilkenny who was walking around with more free Avonmore milk and free Lucozade in his hand. I’d say the dentist was going mad.

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“He did it for the club too. I sent him a picture a couple of months ago from around those years. We were playing Ballyhale in the county championship and he was handing me a water bottle. And I was just going, ‘How times change.’”

Rackard Coady was Butler’s backstage pass through those years. Coady has been the Kilkenny kitman since 1977 and he noticed Butler hanging about Nowlan Park on training nights back around 2013. Or it could have been 2014 either – he wouldn’t be a great man for dates in fairness. One of those summers anyway, the young lad was there and Rackard was there and the kitman found one night that he had more jobs to do than he had hands to do them and that was more or less that.

“What happened was he used to be around the park, just hanging about,” Coady says now. “We were very busy that time with training and matches and everything coming so quick. I used to be run off my feet. So because he was just hanging around, I got him to go and fill a few bottles of water for me and that was the start of it. He would fill the water and collect the balls and help me with all the bits and pieces.

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“He’d be laying out bits of sweets and biscuits for the players after training. And sure then he used to get to puck the ball out to the boys when he got a chance. He would always have a hurl in his hand if he could.

“He was a grand young lad, I got on great with him. His mother used to work in Langtons and I got to know her and once she was okay with it, he came in and helped me the whole time. He blended in and Brian [Cody] didn’t mind then when I wanted him. He just let him in with me.”

Can you imagine? You’re a 14-year-old kid in Kilkenny in high summer and every time there’s senior county training, you’re there. You and the squad and nobody else from the outside world. That’s you and Henry and Tommy and JJ and all the last vestiges of the great, great team and the likes of Richie and TJ and all the rest there too. Talk about a golden ticket.

“He was cheeky enough now,” laughs Paul Murphy. “He’d be there early with Rackard setting everything up so he always had some bit of a word for anyone coming in through the door. Training used be at seven o’clock and I liked to arrive at six. But if it was 6:02, Mikey would be there going, ‘You’re late today ...’ He was always chancing his arm looking for jerseys too. But everyone liked him.”

How do you get from there to here? Butler was part of a crack underage set-up at O’Loughlins, collecting trophies up through the age groups. Even so, Hogan wouldn’t have necessarily picked him out from a young age. Not because he wasn’t promising, more because promise doesn’t mean anything at that stage. Nothing concrete anyway.

“I don’t think it really works like that apart from in a few really exceptional cases,” says the former Kilkenny defender. “We knew in the club that he was good but a lot can happen and it’s not always obvious. He was a corner back from early on and he was solid and hardy and loved defending.

“I think the one thing that he did have though was he had no fear of hardship. There are ups and downs in everyone’s career and he had a real bad one with a cruciate injury when he was 19. He overcame that and recovered from it and so once he got into the Kilkenny set-up, the one thing you knew was that he would have the mentality for it. I felt that getting there was the big hurdle. But once he got there, he would thrive in the environment.”

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And how. This has been Butler’s first season in the senior set-up and already he has become Kilkenny’s go-to man-marker. Looked at one way, it’s some vote of confidence in an untried defender. Looked at another, handing a key role to a bolter has never bothered Brian Cody before so it’s unlikely to start now.

“It’s a good time to do it,” says Murphy. “If Mikey had gone out those first few days and had a man-marking job to do but it didn’t happen for him, nobody would have held it against him. When you’re a young player like that, it’s nearly expected that you’ll get the odd roasting. If an established player gets skinned for a goal and few points, people come down a lot harder.”

Heading into the final, Butler’s list of victims is piling up. In the league semi-final against Cork, he wiped Shane Kingston from the game in the first half before swapping across to do the same to a rampant Alan Connolly in the second. Cathal Mannion didn’t get a sniff in the Leinster final. Tony Kelly’s hurler of the year award was torpedoed a fortnight ago. Maybe his All Star too.

“Teams were going, ‘How do we stop Tony Kelly scoring from play?’” says Murphy. “And no one had the answer. I was looking at it as a Kilkenny supporter thinking, ‘If we can keep Tony Kelly to four points from play, we have a chance.’ Mikey kept him scoreless from play. To put in a performance like that was immense, not to mind doing it in your first year.

“The thing about a man-marking job like that, it isn’t just a case of winning the ball when it comes between you and your man. You have to understand the runs Tony Kelly wants to make. The high ball is coming down, any good forward is going to make a run that puts another player between you and him. That’s how Tony manages to make space for himself so often because his running is so clever.

“But he wasn’t able to get that traction the last day because Mikey was thinking one step ahead. When a ball was coming down, he was thinking, ‘Okay, Tony likes to wheel around here – where’s his run going to go? How will I make sure at all times that I’m between him and the ball as opposed to him getting a man between us?’

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“So for me, it was that level of understanding that was so impressive. He was always keeping Tony Kelly where he would be able to get in that basic flick or hook to stop him. Those are things that often aren’t seen.”

Rackard Coady let him go after a couple of years and wished him all the good the world could find for him. Look what happened. All the signs this weekend point towards Butler going after Aaron Gillane, who took over as favourite for hurler of the year after he held Kelly in the semi-final. It wouldn’t be a bad one-two punch to finish out the year. A dream debut season, whatever happens.

“It’s great,” Coady says. “When he was there, you never think of that kind of thing. There’s no point saying you saw a star in the making or anything like that. He was just there helping me. It was great that he was. Even now when I arrive in, he’s always the first in the dressing room. He’d be chatting away with me while I’m doing other stuff. I wouldn’t ask him to do anything for me now.”

They have other jobs for him these days. Jersey swaps come as standard.