In a corridor of Midleton Hospital Kevin Hennessy rounds a corner followed by an outbreak of laughter. A nurse is pushing his electric wheelchair and Hennessy has passed some remark about the driving. Over the years, penalty points have mounted up on Hennessy’s comic licence, though he has never paid a fine.
“Nobody would say the things he’d say,” says Tomás Mulcahy, laughing too. For over a decade in the Cork dressingroom, Hennessy’s humour lifted the mood and ridiculed the tension.
Hennessy tells a story of a team meeting in 1991, after the drawn Munster final against Tipperary. Canon Michael O’Brien was the Cork manager, a man with an air of old clerical authority, a baritone voice and a taste for theatrics. As props for his performance, he had a Cork jersey hanging up behind him and a Tipperary jersey under his feet, like a bath towel.
“I watched a video of the drawn match and only three forwards played well,” Canon O’Brien said, grabbing his audience by the throat.
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At this, Hennessy shot to his feet. “Who are the other two?” he said. Every giggle was choked.
“There was silence,” says Hennessy, “and your man (Canon O’Brien) had smoke coming out of his ears.”
In the drawn match, the Cork full-forward line of Hennessy, John Fitzgibbon and Ger Fitzgerald scored a staggering 4-4 from play out of Cork’s total of 4-10. The real value of a goal has oscillated with changes in hurling’s economy, but, index-linked, how does that compare to the 5-5 Cork’s full-forward line scored in a rout against Dublin a fortnight ago?
Between then and now, there is a broken line of succession. For the first time since the early 1990s, Cork have a full-forward line that is ravenous for goals. For Brian Hayes and Alan Connolly especially, hunting for a goal is their first instinct. In their company, Patrick Horgan has averaged a goal in every two games when, before that, his career average was one goal in three games. Whatever they have is infectious.
How do the numbers compare? In the 12 championship matches they have started together since May of last year, Hayes, Connolly and Horgan have scored 18-60 from play. In 13 championship matches, mostly as a three piece, Hennessy, Fitzgibbon and Fitzgerald scored 28-42 from play. Through the telescope of time, it is a towering monument to brilliance.
Their golden spell together lasted just three summers: 1990-1992. As men, as players, nothing about them was alike. As a full-forward line, though, they had a chemistry that defied science.
In 1993, each of them played their last game for Cork. After that? Life was good and life was cruel.
Hennessy has been living with brain cancer for more than 20 years. About 2½ years ago he lost the capacity to walk and has been in residential care ever since.
Fitzgibbon settled in Boston, where he is married with children and runs a successful masonry business. But 20 years ago, he had a brush with his mortality too: he took a fall while climbing in the Swiss Alps and one of the rescue team said he was lucky to survive.
Fitzgerald died in March, after a long battle with cancer. He was just 60. His funeral brought Midleton to a standstill.
“You know I scored the fastest goal in an All-Ireland final,” says Hennessy. “1990. Forty-eight seconds. I hope you put that down.”
It was their greatest collaborative work. Fitzgerald pulled on the ball under the Cusack Stand, a short, quick jab, rolling it along the ground into Fitzgibbon’s corner. Two Galway players raced towards it, but Fitzgibbon beat them both, and in the face of a three-man pile-up, he deflected the ball across the square with a one-handed flick. Hennessy stunned the ball softly with his first touch and swept it to the net with the second.
It was the kind of move that would never sustain a goal now; nobody would dream of it. From a position of no threat, the ball was propelled by three ground strokes, none of which was made with a full swing. Taking the ball to hand never occurred to them.
“I can remember it like it happened yesterday,” says Hennessy. “I said to myself, ‘If I pull on this now (as it came across) I’m going to miss it’. I just touched it a small bit and it bounced up lovely.”
How they came together was a miracle of circumstance. For the 1989 championship, Hennessy and Fitzgerald had been cut from the Cork panel. Fitzgibbon was taken off, scoreless, after 52 minutes of Cork’s Munster semi-final against Waterford and dropped for the replay. In the autumn, Canon O’Brien took over with Gerald McCarthy as his right-hand man and they envisioned a different Cork team.
On his championship comeback against Waterford in 1990, Hennessy carried 17 stone and scored 2-3. For the All-Ireland three months later, he had dropped two stone, but by that stage of his career the fleetness that mattered was in his mind.
“He was so quick-witted off the field and he was the same on the field,” says John Considine, a former Cork teammate. “You know, the flick, the pull. Kevin would be issuing directions to the other lads and directing traffic.”
Fitzgibbon, for his part, only cared about goals. “You’d be marking him in training and there was a good chance that for six balls out of 10 you’d leave him for dead because he wouldn’t be bothered,” says Considine. “Then he’d get two balls and it would be two goals, bang, bang. It used to drive the Canon berserk. He’d be standing in so close to goal and they’d be on to him to push out. And he’d just say, ‘there’s no goals out there’.”
In the 1990 All-Ireland final, Fitzgibbon scored two in the space of 90 seconds. Dr Con Murphy, who has been involved with Cork teams since the 1970s, went for a walk with Fitzgibbon and Mulcahy on the morning of the final near the team hotel.
Dr Con asked Fitzgibbon what he was going to do if he scored a goal in Croke Park that afternoon and, as a devotee of the greatest hurler who ever lived, Fitzy said he was going to celebrate like Christy Ring. “You know the way he’d run out,” says Dr Con, “hurley up, hand up. So, there was Fitzy doing this war dance around Ballsbridge.”
Halfway through the second half, Cork were in bother and Dr Con embarked on a solo mission down to the Hill 16 goal, where Fitzgibbon was hibernating in broad daylight: “I called him over and I said, ‘For Christ’s sake Fitzy, what was all that bulls**t about this morning. You haven’t pucked a fecking ball’. By the time I was back to my seat in the dugout, he had banged in two goals.”
Fitzgibbon was much quieter than Hennessy, but he had a razor wit too. When he won Goal of the Year in 1990, Mick Dunne presented him with his prize on RTÉ. Fitzgibbon never gave interviews, but he was fleetingly held captive by Dunne’s microphone and Dunne asked him what his highlight of the year had been.
“Visiting Elvis’s grave in Memphis,” said Fitzgibbon. It might have been a confection rustled up for the camera, or it might have been true. Either way, it was true of him.
His fascination with Ring wasn’t an affectation. Fitzgibbon’s best friend in Glen Rovers was Ring’s son, Christy jnr, and Fitzgibbon was a regular visitor to Christy’s brother Willie John in Cloyne. Hennessy reckons it was why he didn’t wear a helmet and it was probably why he didn’t speak to the press; Fitzgibbon’s passion for ground hurling was another strand of that doctrine.
When he moved to Boston in 1993, he played on the Cork team in the city for the guts of 10 years while training them at the same time. “He was big into pulling on the ground,” says Denis Keohane, the goalkeeper on those teams. “He would have us do that for half an hour at training. He would show us, ‘this is how you pull on the ball on the ground’. He didn’t say much outside of training, but he was an amazing motivator, and he would quote Christy Ring once in a while.”
Fitzgibbon’s taste for adventure eventually led him to mountain climbing. By 2005, it had gone beyond a hobby. Early that year he made contact with the Irish climber Terence “Banjo” Bannon who was organising an expedition to K2; until seven years ago, no Irish climber had ever reached that summit. Fitzgibbon’s original plan was an assault on the Rupal Face of Annapurna, but his partner had pulled out. Annapurna is the most dangerous mountain in the world, claiming more lives per successful summit than any other peak. On that list, K2 comes second.
For Fitzgibbon it was his first attempt at a peak over 8,000 metres. He was ready. “He was jumping out of his skin,” said Bannon at the time. “I never had a stronger fella climbing with me in my life. He was far stronger at the high altitude than me.”
They were 2½ months into the expedition when bad weather forced them to retreat. Fitzgibbon turned his mind to other targets and in 2007 he attempted to scale the Eiger by the north face, one of the toughest ice climbs in the world. About four hours from the summit, though, he came away with some loose rock and plummeted over 100 feet. The rope saved him.
“It probably would have been worse than a car crash,” said Bannon . “If it was another man, he’d have been killed outright, but he’s as strong as a horse.”
The alarm was raised by Swiss climbers who happened upon him and Fitzgibbon was eventually airlifted to safety. Both of his legs were broken and he had suffered injuries to his hips and back. He spent five weeks in a Swiss hospital before being well enough to be transferred to a hospital in Boston. By the summer of that year, he had made a full recovery.
Around that time, in a parallel universe, Fitzgerald was a selector with the Cork seniors. At other times, he was manager of the Cork under-21s and the Midleton seniors, but he was always stuck in something.
He had been a fine player: brave, generous, uncomplicated. “He was a great man to catch a ball in a crowd and lay it off when he had two or three fellas hanging out of him,” says Mulcahy. “I benefited on loads of occasions from the dirty ball that he won.”
“He had size, he had a hand, he could play – he could just do stuff,” says Considine. “A very different character to Kevin and Fitzy but he loved the company of the lads and the messing that went on. He loved being on the periphery of that.”
What they remember most is the person. Over the years, Considine was involved in many Cork age-grade teams and players he coached ended up in Fitzgerald’s care with the under-21s.
“I would like to think that a lot of the guys I coached would have a fair amount of respect for me – but they loved Ger. You talk about man management – there was something about him. Like, did you ever meet anybody who didn’t like Ger?”
It is more than 20 years since five tumours were discovered in Hennessy’s brain. He was told they were inoperable. “I read a very good book about beating cancer and the thing you must admit is that it can take you,” said Hennessy at the time. “If you admit that, everything is all right. If you can’t admit that you’re in trouble. It’s all psychological, it’s all about the right attitude.”
For the last 20 years, Hennessy’s attitude has been the pulse of his existence. He refused to lie down. A couple of weeks ago he turned up at a club match in Midleton. From time to time, he will arrange a visit to a local pub for something non-alcoholic and a chat. Hardly a day passes that John Fenton doesn’t visit. People have been kind.
This has been a fertile week for reminiscence. In his playing career, most of the biggest days were against Tipp: six Munster finals, two of which went to replays. In those games, there was a terrifying chasm between winning and losing. In the 1985 Munster final, a sulphurous match, a Tipp corner back kicked Hennessy’s helmet clean off his head, though he wasn’t squeamish about that kind of stuff.
“Some fellas said, ‘you deserved every bit of it’,” he says, laughing. “But then you could catch a fella sneaky, like.
“The first time I got sick, I got a card signed by the whole Tipperary team. Nicky English came down to see me. Bobby Ryan came down. Pat Fox came down.”
The last game that Hennessy, Fitzgibbon and Fitzgerald started together was the 1992 All-Ireland final. Fitzgerald was captain. Cork lost to Kilkenny. The Canon had a late brainwave to switch Hennessy and Fitzgibbon, against their wishes. The gambit backfired.
What else does he remember? A bit of messing. Before the match they were standing in line at the red carpet to meet the President and they caught the eye of Jimmy Barry-Murphy in the RTÉ commentary position. Hennessy and Fitzgibbon took a step to the side and beckoned JBM to join them.
Justin McCarthy noticed this skit and in his column in the Irish Examiner a few days later, he scolded unnamed Cork players for “acting carelessly” before the match. Hennessy laughed then and he laughs now.
That day, they scored one point between them. Nothing clicked. For three years, they had been a streak of lightning.
The time they shared was precious.
