LIAM GRIFFIN has a big nose. He knows that. Loudmouths from the grassy bank let the secret out. "Hey Griffin, ya big hoor, ya couldn't pick your big nose. Take off Billy Byrne oudda that, ya big nosed hoor ya."

Splendid wit, good sirs. Don't wait for a riposte from the Cyrano de Bergerac of hurling though. He won't turn his back or his thoughts away from the hurling field for long enough.

The thing is this. Maybe you've just noticed the nose yourself and thought Liam needed telling about it. Liam doesn't mind your crude way with the delicate truth. No. The thing is this, leave Billy Byrne out of it. No gob from the grassy bank can sway Griffin's mind about team selections. He objects to anything abusive you might have to say about Billy Byrne or any of his boys. Stick to the big nose jokes.

Griffin is the man who had the guts to take on the worst job in hurling. The job where you make concession speeches while your heart is breaking. He's been abused. He's been spat at. He's had his wars.

Now that he is hoisted on his county's shoulders he can't entirely forget what it felt like when some people were nailing his feet to the ground. More than that, he wants nobody to forget what it was like when his team seemed nailed to the ground.

Griffin puts his life into things, see. Hotels and hurling and home. When he traces his hurling story, the game, the career and the home are weaved right through a narrative of learning and working. Men who spend their lifetimes pushing the boulder up the hill seldom straighten their backs to take in the view. Griffin relates to life as slopes and inclines. Every bump teaches you something.

When he was eight years old Griffin and his pal Ronnie Walsh cycled from Rosslare to Wexford to see Christy Ring play in a league game. Two waist high aficionados. Griffin learned a little from that. He knew just about all there was to know about Wexford hurling then. He needed to see Ring in the flesh. See how he measured up.

Three years later, in 1957, he learnt a little more. He remembers Nicky Rackard hunting obsessively for goals in a Leinster final and Ollie Walsh calmly foiling him all afternoon. He realised then that when fellas are good at something in sport and it doesn't work they'll keep on at the same thing. Wexford lost that Leinster final. Made you think.

Then there was 1960. Another lesson. Wexford played Tipperary in an All Ireland final. Excitement coursed through the Griffin household. The Griffins had two cousins in the panel. Tipperary for their part had a team of blinding glamour. Jimmy Doyle was that season's young god, he'd scored eight goals and 22 points on the way to the final and the papers chattered about him incessantly.

Could anyone hold Jimmy Doyle? Well Griffin's cousin John Nolan could actually. John Nolan had never played championship for Wexford before and when he was picked at left half back the howls of derision went up.

Clever things were said about foul hoors who couldn't pick their noses. Get John Nolan off the team oudda that. Ten minutes from time on September 3rd the Tipperary selectors moved demoralised and scoreless Jimmy Doyle out of John Nolan's way.

That was 36 years ago. Wexford have won a single All Ireland since. Griffin wasn't there in 1968. Thirty six years. Still pushing up the hill.

Griffin has learned the lessons right along the way. Be flexible. Be honest. Be daring. Be passionate.

Flexibility. Honesty. Daring. Passion. These words Griffin uses a lot. These things Wexford carry with them tomorrow.

Passion. He has passions which skirt the borderlands of obsession. He knows where he gets that from too. Take the 1958 League final. Limerick played Wexford in a dusty classic. The Griffins were there in the Nally Stand. Just about.

"The father wrecked the car on the way to Dublin that day. We went off in an old Morris Minor. He kept insisting on driving no matter what happened. We broke the windscreen outside Gorey and my mother fell to giving out the rosary and me father fell to cursing. He got a polythene bag of some sort and stuck it over the window and we kept going.

"I remember we hit a bus going around Stephen's Green and we kept going, never even looked back. We got out of the car in Mountjoy Square and never even glanced back at it. He just rushed us down to Croke Park."

One life scarcely has room for the flowering of two passions, two obsessions. Hurling and hotels won't mix. Regrets and sacrifice are the harvest. Griffin hurled well in the De La Salle College in Waterford and the study books never became dog eared. An academic failure by design he took to the family hotel trade and to compensate he vowed to learn about hotels from the bottom up.

He scrubbed pots for £1 a week in Park Gate Street, he studied in Shannon, scrubbed pots in Zurich and washed more floors than he can remember.

There's a lot to give up these days. Three south eastern hotels built up with characteristic thoroughness from a Rosslare base. Griffin poured his youth; into his business pursuing hurling with adequate residual passion but insufficient time.

He hurled in the twilight world of the displaced. Won a championship for Clare on the scabby field of Gaelic Park, New York. They flew him for weekends to New York from a kitchen porter's job in Zurich.

He might have been a superstar. He remembers arriving stateside with Pat Cronin and Liam Danaher and deciding he looked just a little bit cool in his leather jacket. The fingers of an emigrant long since imprisoned in the Bronx felt the material, turned up a reddened nose and said: "So, is this what they're wearing at home now?" Life always keeps you straight.

Later back in Dublin he played senior briefly for Wexford, haunting the back door of the hotel until the early lunch shift was finished and he could tear off to the south east, train, turn around and tear back for the early breakfast shift.

The rationing taught him the value of hurling. Single handedly he blew life back into the game in Rosslare, operating on the build it and they will come basis. One night he stuck up a sign: "Hurling in the field tomorrow evening."

The next night he had two young fell as out. The night after that half a dozen. Soon he was filling his car with kids every weekend and driving to briar bordered fields all over the county.

He taught hurling and learned lessons until he arrived at a confusing junction in his life in October 1994. He stood for election as manager of the Wexford minor hurling team and was beaten. Then they came looking for him to manage the seniors because nobody else would do it. He thought about it, spoke to his family about the possibility that "Da might be branded a loser." He decided he didn't care what people thought and that the family could withstand the abuse. He put the years at the youth game to the test.

"That's always with me, the youth game. There's fellas in this county telling me what to do and who to pick and they've never seen the sky over an under 12s match. Listen, when you've wiped their tears and blown their noses and dried up their blood and put your arms around the young lads when they've lost, then you've learned a bit about how to treat players and what they feel.

"When I went looking for selectors I went looking for lads who had done all that, who had worked the youth game. I wanted no egos and no agendas around me. Just fellas with a passion for the game.

Passion. Sometimes when the passion is boiling in him the honesty can be alarming.

When he sat the Wexford players down in front of him for the very first time in the Ferrycarrig Hotel on a winter's night he wrote the word "honesty" up on the board in one of those silent, near theatrical gestures which can inspire or embarrass. The first word he said to them was the same. Honesty. The first thing he offered them was just that. Honesty.

He'd like to tell you that he moved them to tears, that they climbed on their seats and cried `my captain, oh my captain', that he knew then that they would all be where they are today.

"To be honest," he says, "what came back that night was lethargy and reluctance and faces that said they'd heard it all before."

He told them that nobody would work harder than he would, that nobody had more to learn than he had, that nobody was owed anything, that honesty was the passport to staying in the dressing room during the months ahead. And then they cried?

"Well no. Fellas were blatantly dishonest with me after that so let them go. Good fine hurlers, said goodbye to. Credibility was on the line.

When credibility is on the line Griffin is disinclined to flinch. When he and his selectors took the captaincy away from Liam Dunne last year in a celebrated spat Griffin stayed up all night worrying himself about the decision. Not prevaricating. Just worrying about the effects on other players, on the effect on his friendship with Liam Dunne. He notes the following day down as the day his dispensation proved itself credible with the players.

"We got them together again on the day after the 1995 All Ireland final and I remember thinking these guys are serious now. They know we are serious. Another thing, to his eternal credit Liam Dunne never let it affect him. I'd still value Liam Dunne as a friend and a hurler.

WHAT he prizes most in his team, after the friendships, is daring and flexibility he has managed to instil. He can pull off with ease what seem like the most audacious tactical manoeuvres now. Old theories of Griffin's have born fruit.

"We had men in the great days who were powerful men, big hefty men, who'd deliver a calf for you in two seconds flat. But you couldn't get them to go from nought to 60 like a Porsche. The game changed and we stuck for a long time with our big hefty men who used the stick in a certain way. It dictated our philosophy. The game moved on."

Griffin went looking for some youth, some pace and some flexibility. He likes the notion of moving his players around and getting a performance out of them no matter where they play. He enjoys the blending and moulding, the tinkering with the formula.

He refuses to be a crowd pleaser. The impulse to please the crowd is the bane of GAA administration in his view. If you walk the high wire, he says, you shouldn't use a safety net. Fall if you have to fall. Take a real risk.

And that gets him going. A man who sacrificed the promise of his youth for the pragmatism of his profession identifies most with those who have strived the longest. He tells young lads like Rory McCarthy that they are blessed to be in the right place at the right time but old faces like Billy Byrne and Georgie O'Connor, well, Griffin can do little more these days then just beam at them. They've been artists of the high wire for years and years.

"The most satisfaction I've had from any individual is from Billy Byrne," he says and he's leaning forward excitedly now. "Billy is a magnificent hurler but I've stood on the sideline and listened to people telling me that I couldn't put Billy Byrne on because Billy was this and Billy was that. People don't know what Billy has done for this team. They'll never know.

"Billy was playing so well at a time during the league that we went to him and said `Billy you're playing well enough to be in the first 15. Do you know why you aren't in the first 15?' Billy told us to stick with Gary Laffan, that Gary was the future. Billy told us he was happy to be there, to be part of it, that he was there if he was needed. That's a hero for you.

"Look at Tom Dempsey, blamed in this county for everything from hurling to bad spuds. Poor old Tom and myself had to sit down this winter and I had to advise him to take a rest. He needed to get out of the group and take his time and reassess where he was going and then renew himself.

"I get great satisfaction now. Fellas walk up to me and say Tom Dempsey is some player. Tom Dempsey was always some player but a minority of people in this county wouldn't see that.

"We have some of the greatest thugs in the country in the GAA. Rural fellas from the heart of countryside who blow about and think they know everything. They get the run of the crowd, the big guffaws. They bear a responsibility, that minority. They never appreciate the likes of Billy Byrne and Tom Dempsey.

"Or George. There are men in this county with All Ireland medals who aren't fit to wash George's feet. Not fit to be in the same room. Fonts of knowledge because they were once in the right place at the right time. Tom Dempsey, George and Billy. Fellas who were told they would win nothing. I'm glad for them.

"Listen to this, Georgie probably wasn't going to play in the Leinster final with his injury. He was touch and go. We were keeping it quiet. I sat with Georgie and he told me `I wouldn't pick me if I were you.' Nineteen years that man has given. He knew this would be his last Leinster final but he had the honesty and integrity to tell me that."

Passion and honesty, coming right back at him.

Tomorrow they are all far from the grassy banks and the bellowing begrudgers. Beneath the towering stands and amid the deafening noise perhaps a long journey will end. Liam Griffin has poured his life into this, big nose, big heart, big mind and all. His team carries his best attributes.

Typically his parting words are passionate and quick. "Whatever happens this can't be the end. We have to plan to keep Wexford there forever. We have to get down to that straight away."

For obsessive hearts perhaps some journeys never end. Men who push boulders up hills don't, after all, straighten their backs to soak in the view.