Teddy McCarthy a darling of the Cork terraces for good reason

Two memories from 1990. In the pre-match parade, before the All-Ireland hurling final, Teddy McCarthy still had a sliotar in his hand from the puck around. Most players in those parades are looking down, or straight ahead, passing water bottles along the line, hiding behind a mask, pretending.

Teddy, though, was glancing up at the huge Cork support massed on Hill 16, with no mind to play a straight face. Then, out of the blue, he took the ball from his hand and flaked it into the crowd. Two weeks later, before the football final, when the pre-match parade reached Hill 16 he raised his arm in salute, making the same connection.

In comparison to professional soccer there is very little terrace culture in the GAA, but insofar as the phenomenon exists, Teddy was a darling of the terrace.

The great things Teddy did on the pitch had a flashy, charismatic quality: the suspended animation under a high ball, floating like a basketball player; the long shots in hurling; the surging bursts in football. The game he played had bright feathers, always.

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The first point he scored in the 1990 hurling final was the sum of him. Cork were playing against the wind, and even though the Cork goalkeeper Ger Cunningham was the most prodigious striker of a ball in hurling at that time, his puck-outs were only landing on the Galway 65.

Teddy caught the first one, was hooked when he tried to hit it off his unrefined left, dived on the ball to gather it again, straightened himself up it, dropped it low on his forehand side, and with an almost vertical swing that defied an intervention, thrashed it over the bar from 60 metres. Everything about it was swashbuckling. You can imagine the roar on the Hill.

What Teddy achieved in that fortnight is frozen in time, unimaginable now or ever again. If he felt the enormity of it, you couldn’t tell. In the middle of the madness, a few days after the hurling final, he became a Dad for the first time when Oonagh gave birth to Cian.

There was no mention of it in any of the media coverage at the time, though he wrote about it in his autobiography years later: a new-born, and two All-Irelands. How many life-changing events can you squeeze into a fortnight?

Nowadays, interviews with GAA players only take place in the sterilized environment of a sponsor’s event, or served as McNugget quotes immediately after a match. In those days, though, you could call a player and take your chances. On the week of the All-Ireland football final Teddy agreed to meet.

He picked me up at the train station and suggested that we do the interview in his car. As a rep for Beamish and Crawford he had some calls to make in pubs around east Cork, and on a sunny morning that’s what we did, spinning around, shooting the breeze. He couldn’t have been more relaxed.

Every time he took the field he looked chilled. He had a strut. Chest out. He said that he never doubted his ability and in his big day performances that confidence was franked, over and over. Other layers, though, were at play too.

“Aggression was the thing I had,” he said. “The more aggressive I felt during a game the better I played.”

In an interview at the end of 1990 he told a story about an under-12 match for Sarsfields, refereed by a teenage Kevin Hennessy. In the view of the Sars’ supporters the referee had made some questionable decisions.

“At the end of the match a few of our mothers were telling Kevin what they thought of him. I went over and began punching him. He was as tall then as he is now, and when I couldn’t reach him with my fists I started kicking. That was the way I was.”

[ Teddy McCarthy was the GAA’s unrivalled dual star - and Cork’s one of a kind ]

[ Cork hurling and football legend Teddy McCarthy dies aged 57 ]

[ Teddy McCarthy funeral: Sporting peers pay their respects as Cork GAA hero laid to rest ]

Later on, Hennessy and Teddy played together on Cork teams for years. Hennessy tells a story about the replay of the Munster hurling final in 1987, the day Tipperary were released from captivity. As captain, Hennessy felt obliged to say a few words at the beginning of extra-time, but he had barely reached the end of his first sentence when Teddy cut across him.

“We’ll do our talking with our hurleys,” he said. In defeat, he was brilliant that day.

In Cork, being a dual inter county player carried a certain glamour and status. It was embedded in the local culture of the games. Not now, but for more than a century.

As Christy O’Connor pointed out last week, only 14 players have won senior All-Irelands in both codes, and eight of them are from Cork. Some of them were among the greatest players ever to wear the red jersey: Jack Lynch, Jimmy Barry-Murphy, Ray Cummins, Denis Coughlan.

Teddy joined that elite, but even in his time it wasn’t simple. He said in 1989 that he would have to consider dropping one code or another before too long more; he said the same thing in 1990. Ultimately, he couldn’t chose and probably didn’t want to.

The last time he togged out for the Cork footballers he was an unused sub in the 1995 All-Ireland semi-final; a year later he was forced off at half-time in his last game for the hurlers, concussed and cut. Carried out on his shield.

In the Laochra Gael programme about Teddy’s career, Billy Morgan reckoned his appetite started to wane about 1993. By then, he had spent eight seasons on a punishing treadmill, and he would keep going for another two. To make that commitment for so long, at the highest level, was an extraordinary feat of endurance and passion.

A couple of months ago Teddy appeared at a championship preview in Woods’ pub in the east Cork village of Lisgoold. On the night he was the only panellist who didn’t think the Munster championship would be straightforward for Limerick.

He spoke too about how little fun it must be for modern-day players, with so many daily obligations, and gym appointments, and all-round restrictions. In his time, he said, players could be serious and still let their hair down. That’s how he liked it.

The compêre for the evening was Gerry Kelly, a Galway man, who years ago had written a song about Teddy’s Double for a charity CD. At the end of the night he stilled the place with a wholehearted rendition. Remembering in song is always soulful. He will never be forgotten.

Doubtcha Teddy.