Shortly after half-time in the 1968 hurling league final all hell broke loose. Len Gaynor was struck, John Gleeson was struck, Ollie Walsh was struck, Eddie Keher was struck, twice. One of the Tipperary players was struck by the Kilkenny team doctor. The doc was ordered by the referee to leave Croke Park but doubled-back and sat behind the Kilkenny dugout, barely disguised in a borrowed hat. He was also a State pathologist. On hand. In case.
“Croke Park exploded in a frenzy of violence,” wrote Babs Keating in his autobiography. “If you blinked you missed someone being clobbered.” Pat Henderson, the Kilkenny centre back, described it as “toxic”. Donie Nealon, the Tipperary centre fielder, said it was “sickening”.
Everything is of its time. The poisonous relationship between Kilkenny and Tipperary had resulted in a couple of bitter league finals in the mid-1960s and one sulphurous All-Ireland. The 1968 league final, though, was beyond the pale. Uproar followed. John D Hickey, in the Irish Independent, frothed on the page.
“Hurling took a beating,” he wrote, “in eight scandalous minutes. [There were] acts of violence that must have sickened every spectator with a shred of respect for the precepts of law and order, never mind the canons of good sportsmanship.”
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Two players, one from each side, were given six-month suspensions but hurling wasn’t plunged into a novena of repentance and reflection. In the game, there was a certain tolerance for blackguarding. It was hurling’s original sin.
In the game’s relationship with discipline there was no pious outcry that ever manifested itself as a tipping point. Along the way, there were high-profile atrocities, such as the 1989 Munster final and the 1998 Munster final and a Munster first round match in 2007, and the 2012 All-Ireland semi-final, and various other games, where people were up in arms, and sanctions were doled out.
Attitudes and practices, though, were only altered by incremental reform. By that process, the line that mustn’t be crossed kept shifting closer to harmlessness. At other times in the history of the game the flaking and belting that took place in Páirc Uí Chaoimh before the throw-in a fortnight ago would not have generated such hand-wringing; the general revulsion at the spectacle, though, reflected how the game’s values had changed.
The only way to measure how far the game has come is to look back. Johnny Callinan was brilliant Clare forward from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, during a period when some of the reckless stuff was stamped out and some of it was driven underground.
“Looking at the films of games from that time,” he says, “we seemed to get rid of the ball fairly quickly. There was a lot of hurried stuff. Looking back on it, I think it was fear all right. We talk about, ‘Aw, it was much tougher in our time,’ and in a sense it was because there was a lot more one-to-one contact, there was a lot more pulling on the ball – or close to the ball. Pulling a bit early or a bit late was de rigueur.”
Some stuff is trapped in a time warp. Eddie O’Brien scored three goals for Cork against Wexford in the 1970 All-Ireland final, and for one of the goals, says Callinan, “the Wexford corner back hit him three good flakes from about 30 yards out. But he got the goal and there was no problem.”
Callinan is involved with the Clarecastle Junior Bs this year and a couple of weeks ago one of their corner backs resorted to the same kind of guerrilla defending, out of character and out of the blue. “He gave two 1960s flakes to the corner forward going through and you’re thinking, ‘Jesus, where did that come out of?’ I’d say the fellah who got the belt was so surprised he didn’t even go down.”
Once upon a time, and not that long ago, corner-forwards running through on goal expected to suffer. Corner backs were protected by the laws of the jungle.
At a county board meeting in Clare 14 years ago Callinan expressed Clarecastle’s concerns at the time about the calculation of suspensions. In the course of his contribution, he made an essential point: “In no other sport is the need to respect each other greater than in hurling,” he said, “because each player has, effectively, a weapon.”
Through the generations, hurling harboured players who were liable to break that contract. As a fast, skilful, high-scoring corner-forward for Limerick and Na Piarsaigh, Damien Quigley was a prime target.
“The club scene in Limerick in the 90s was just bonkers,” says Quigley. “It was appalling. There was an incredible tolerance of violence. I went to college in UCC and I used to follow them in the county championship. I used to marvel at the protection Joe Deane used to get, whereas, up here, some of the belts I got were just criminal.
“One in particular, my skull was fractured with the pole [heel] of a hurley. I was wearing a helmet, but he turned the hurley sideways [and hit me]. It was madness. You know when you’re at a match and you hear the crowd gasp – it was one of those. I finished the game, concussed or not, it didn’t matter a damn in those days. But I was getting headaches and six months later I had to get a brain scan.
When facemasks came in, people became more liberal with ash. That definitely happened. You were getting belted across the head more, certainly at club level
— Damien Quigley
“I played again the following year, but I didn’t play then for a couple of years because I was sick of getting hurt. There was a point that you assumed your opponent wouldn’t cross because he has a three-foot plank in his hand – so it’s a weapon. That line was crossed that day.”
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Over the last 50 years or so, rule changes made a critical difference. In the early 1970s, the third man tackle was abolished; in 2010 helmets and faceguards were made compulsory. A few years after that, striking offences were more clearly defined with graded penalties, so that “striking with minimal force,” was a red card offence but not as severely punished as more serious striking offences. The message was that every species of striking was outlawed.
Tackling around the head, though, remained a problem. Quigley was one of the first intercounty players to wear a faceguard in the early 1990s. “There was no question, when face masks came in, people became more liberal with ash. That definitely happened. You were getting belted across the head more, certainly at club level.”
Brian Gavin, the former intercounty referee, remembers a crackdown early in 2012, “when there were terrible incidents around the head. Pat McEnaney [the head of referees at the time] called us in, told us to cop ourselves on and start refereeing the game.”
But there needed to be another crackdown at the beginning of 2019, and another one during this year‘s league. Before the championship, every county secretary received an email from Croke Park reminding them that head-high tackles would result in red cards. After all this time, should reminders still be necessary?
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Gavin spent the guts of 15 years as an intercounty referee, and in that time the game turned revolutions. “The physicality has been taken out of it, I think, because we’re not holding our positions and taking on our man the whole time,” he says. “Has it gone a bit soft? It probably has. Now, we’re seeing really skilful, muscly men creating space out of nothing. So, the skill levels have gone up. I hate to see the physicality going out of it, but the nastiness seems to be gone out of it all right. By the time I finished up there was less blackguarding.”
A foul stroke that has almost disappeared is chopping down on the hands while an opponent is striking the ball. Those belts were lethal. Because your hands were gripping the hurley so tightly any direct hit was liable to break something. Callinan remembers being “done” by a Dublin player in a league match in Croke Park.
“I knew the way yer man was coming in I was in trouble,” he says, “and he broke my finger. I turned to the ref and showed him the back of my hand – looking at it now, I can still see the lump. And the ref said to me, ‘Didn’t you get your point.’ That was the one that fellas really hated.”
For ball players, though, danger was lurking behind every bush. “I would have run with the ball a bit and I felt you were probably more in danger from a body charge than anything,” says Callinan. “Donal O’Grady lifted me off the ground one day. He didn’t get booked or anything and we missed the free. I’m still on the ground and my lungs had actually collapsed. I was drowning for 30, 40 or 50 seconds.
“You were more likely to get that kind of belt when you passed the ball. Fellas would carry on through you. Pat Hartigan ran into me another day. Just ran through me. If the likes of Frank Cummins hit you that time, you were dead. I’m not trying to be angelic or anything. I advocated it myself one day in a county final with Clarecastle. We knew we’d get away with one bad belt into the chest for Mikey Guilfoyle – and we did.”
In Quigley’s experience, “you weren’t getting horribly, filthy, rotten, dirty” belts at intercounty level in the 1990s. He got his share of belts off the ball – “a jab of the hurley into the guts” – but he always regarded it as a test.
“It was searching for a weakness in a crude, Cro-Magnon man kind of way, that’s what people were doing. You did have to be able to take a belt. You couldn’t survive at intercounty level if you hadn’t that mentality.”
The game is different now. There is more surveillance. Crime doesn’t pay as well as it used to. Teams with 14 men can’t win – more or less. The tone has changed.
“This is a bit philosophical,” says Callinan, “but there‘s nearly too much danger taken away. There‘s no jeopardy now really. Not that I was a hard man, or anything like that, but part of the attraction was the fear, it was the bit of danger. When we were growing up we were told, ‘If a fellah hits you, don’t pretend that you’re hurt.’ That concept is completely gone.”
There was no messing before the ball was thrown-in between Limerick and Waterford last Saturday. Nobody would be so foolish this weekend. Would they?
“Striking is striking,” says Gavin. “Young [Darragh] McCarthy was unfortunate that he was caught, but that stuff had to stop. Someone had to suffer for it to stop.”
Different game.
