Richie Power: ‘If I’d stayed on the road I was going down, I’d have ended up losing everything’

In the middle of the book they have produced together there is a long chapter that is mostly about a son’s addiction and partly about a father’s instinct and love.

Ten years ago Carrickshock lost the Kilkenny county final, triggering the usual drink-fuelled grieving. Richie Power jnr was content to take refuge in that safe house for a few days. It was another place to hide from himself.

At that time stories about his gambling had no status beyond rumour and if you weren’t tuned into the frequency of clacking tongues you might have heard nothing. Richie’s parents were ignorant of everything: the rumours, the reality.

That week Richie senior sensed something was wrong. He drank with the players for a while on the night after the match, and the following day he drove to Tramore on his own, bothered by a feeling he couldn’t explain and couldn’t reject.

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“My head was all over the place,” he wrote. “I was just in a bad place. The match was going through my mind but I just knew that something wasn’t adding up. This wasn’t just about hurling. I couldn’t have been any lower than I was that day.”

He spoke to his wife Ann and they asked Richie jnr to come to the house on the following Friday night. At the time he was living with his older brother Jamie in Kilkenny city. Jamie had been aware of the rumours for a while but every time he broached it with Richie he met a wall of denial.

One of the Kilkenny players had contacted Jamie about it, so it must have been flying around the dressing room too, but that made no difference. He had cultivated a lie as his only defence.

Sitting in front of his parents, Richie snr asked him straight. “‘Richie,’ I said, ‘I’m going to ask you one question, but don’t answer if you’re not going to tell me the truth.’”

He broke down. At the kitchen table, the lie was swept away. He could no longer make a life with it.

“They say that until you hit rock bottom you won’t ask for help,” says Richie jnr now. That time had come.

Two days later he took a call from Brian Cody asking him to meet the Kilkenny management on the following evening. Kilkenny’s season had ended in mid-summer and Power had been poor. He didn’t expect good news.

“I had a big dip in form in 2013, in particular. What was going on with me off the field was having a huge impact on my form and I suppose everything else along with it. They kind of had an idea about my issues. They were after hearing rumours and whatever else. They mentioned it [the gambling]. Maybe it was just something that they didn’t want around the set-up. That I needed to go away and get it sorted myself. I left Hotel Kilkenny that night thinking that I was more or less finished [with Kilkenny].”

Power was just 26 years of age. Straight after the meeting he went drinking. Preseason training resumed without him. He was omitted from the team WhatsApp group. No official statement was made by either party.

The only member of the Kilkenny management to keep in touch was Derek Lyng, once every two or three weeks. There was no timetable for a comeback or any agreed plan. He wasn’t made to feel like he was on probation, something that might have put parameters on his exile. The separation was deliberate.

Looking back now, says Richie snr, “I felt it was handled wrong”.

Richie snr made contact with Oisín McConville, the former Armagh footballer; he too had suffered from a gambling addiction and is a counsellor now. All three of them met in the Carrickdale Hotel and spoke for hours. The conversation, says McConville, was “raw”.

At home they discussed the option of going into rehab for a few weeks but Power was worried that word would get out and he wasn’t ready for everyone to know to truth. He knew how to live with a rumour.

The Gaelic Players Association put him in contact with a counsellor in Dublin and he started to attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings. During the first few months there were lapses, but was no longer falling down alone.

“If I’d stayed on the road I was going down,” wrote Richie jnr, “I’d have ended up losing everything.”

“From October 2013 to May 2014 we were seriously worried,” says Richie snr. “When we got everything out on the table we went about sorting it out. The first thing you have to do is admit it and start from scratch. But, like, I was seriously worried about him for those six or seven months. Every day I used to ring him. He was in a very bad place. It’s very easy for a lad to maybe slip over the edge.”

“Anyone looking in from the outside would have thought life was brilliant,” says Richie jnr. “We were winning all these All-Irelands and going on these holidays – it’s the things that dreams are made of. It wasn’t that way for me for a long time. It’s a life I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

During that winter Power jnr became friendly with Mickey Comerford, former Kilkenny star Martin’s brother. They met in a hotel gym one night and started chatting. Comerford was a soccer player and an army man and was fanatical about fitness. Power asked if he would write a training programme for him.

Getting back on the Kilkenny panel was his goal. Did they still want him? They didn’t say. Did they still need him? They couldn’t be sure that they didn’t. That wasn’t said either.

After a few months, Lyng started meeting him for occasional runs. That was the beginning of the thaw. In April the Kilkenny panel were doing fitness tests in Carlow IT and Power was invited to attend. In the dressing room, nobody passed any remarks. He didn’t feel like he had landed from Mars.

In the end, his comeback was spectacular. For the league final in May, he was in the starting team and he started against Galway in the Leinster semi-final too. He was floored by a knee injury that day, but six weeks later he was fit enough to join the All-Ireland semi-final with 20 minutes to go, and his goal changed the match.

The All-Ireland final against Tipperary went to a replay and in both matches he was Kilkenny’s outstanding forward. In the replay, he scored a goal just after half-time that broke the game open, just as his father had done against Cork 29 years earlier.

At the final whistle he was in a state. Emotions washed over him in waves. It was 12 months since the meeting in Hotel Kilkenny and the summit in his parents’ kitchen; at that time everything important in his life was under siege. For years he had learned to suppress his feelings. It was essential to the lie.

“You give a lot of time just being numb,” he says now. “You’re putting on a persona, pretending everything is alright. I would have done that for a long time. It takes a long time for the emotions to come back. They were messed up. You’re dealing with so much off the field and no one knows about it.”

Parts of the book are a love letter to Carrickshock. Their devotion is simple and enduring. Richie snr was the first Carrickshock man to play senior hurling with Kilkenny, 43 years ago now. They lost an intermediate semi-final on a winter Saturday and as Power was walking to the dressing room, the chairman of the county board asked if he would tog off against Kerry in the National League a day later. They started him at centre-forward and didn’t look beyond him for the next 12 years.

Power snr played for Carrickshock until he was 40; his son didn’t have that privilege. In January 2015, surgery was performed on his left knee for the fourth time in his career. In July they operated again. Hardly any cartilage was left.

With number 24 on his back, his season started 10 minutes from the end of the All-Ireland final: he made a tackle, a scoring pass and a shot at goal. Kilkenny’s triumph was divided up and the royalties distributed. That year, Power’s share amounted to pennies. That was the last time he wore the jersey.

Carrickshock were in relegation trouble that autumn and Power tried to carry on. Before the relegation semi-final four syringes of fluid were drained from his knee and he muddled on with a painkiller; before the relegation final it was the same routine. When those games were finished, his knee went under the knife for the sixth time.

Before the operation the surgeon told him that he’d be right again for the following June but that prognosis didn’t survive the procedure. He went to Croatia to explore stem cell surgery and met the doctor for the national soccer team, a specialist in that field. He wasn’t convinced about it then, though he changed his mind later.

His search for a viable solution took him from one specialist to another and very soon their feedback blended into a consensus. In December 2015, he emerged from a consultation in Belfast having listened to another requiem for his knee. He was just about to turn 30.

“For now I’m walking fine. I’m able to cycle and go to the gym and play a game of golf and run around after the little ones. But I will need a knee replacement. That’s the bottom line. I’ve accepted that. I have no cartilage in the knee. It’s bone on bone. I’m just trying to get as long out of my own knee as I can.”

Somewhere between Newry and Dublin, Power’s intercounty career ended. The phone call with Cody lasted about 25 minutes, the longest conversation between them in Power’s 11 seasons on the panel. In his dressing rooms, Cody made a virtue of distance.

“Look, we probably had one or two run-ins,” he says. “I wouldn’t say they were anything major. There was probably the odd time when we wouldn’t have seen eye-to-eye. There were probably one or two things on the pitch and off the pitch as well. I probably got myself into trouble once or twice.

“He said to me [in the last conversation] there were times when I might have felt he was being hard on me. He just kind of said, he knew the potential was there and that was the reason he pushed me a little bit harder. I suppose in a way that was nice to hear.

“I was dropped for the ‘07 All-Ireland final when I felt I was going very well at the time. I suppose there was the time of my own personal issues as well. Was it [dropping me from the panel] the right way to deal with it or not? I don’t know. We finished the phone call, I suppose, on what you would call relatively good terms. That was that.”

He finished with an astonishing haul of eight All-Ireland medals. In every All-Ireland final that he was picked to start he played the full 70 minutes. That said something about what they thought of him; for all Kilkenny’s brilliance, they knew they were better with him than without him.

But was he fulfilled at the end? It wasn’t that simple.

“There’s a lot of regrets there. There were times over the years when I felt I reached my potential, but not with consistency. I couldn’t get that consistency. Without doubt, what I was dealing with off the field affected me.”

Very few intercounty players have sons or daughters who follow in their path. Richie senior says his son was a better player: more skilful, terrific in the air, brilliant vision. The admiration was a two-way street. “The big thing is,” says Richie jnr, “I spent my whole life looking up to Dad.”

Hurling was the least of it.

Power: A Family Memoir, with Dermot Keyes. Published by Hero Books; profits donated to Cois Nore cancer support and Kilkenny Home Care