Tom Humphriestalks to Kilkenny manager Brian Cody about his lifelong love affair with the game and the enjoyment he derives from his involvement with a special group of players

BRIAN CODY. Remember him? When was the last time you heard a good Brian Cody yarn or chanced upon a half decent Cody rumour? Have you spotted him drunk in Lillies? Seen him cavort on reality TV? Thumbed through his juicy biography? Somewhere over the last couple of years there was an imperceptible but pivotal moment here on Planet Hurling when Brian Cody got his wish and faded entirely into the scenery.

His virtual disappearance came when Kilkenny's discipline and excellence became matters of self-imposed habit rather than stricture. Cody was no longer haunted by the ghosts of Galway in 2001, no longer bracing himself hard against the storm caused by a Charlie Carter or a Denis Byrne or even a Stephen Grehan. He was just Cody. All landscape. No drama. Not gone but almost forgotten.

The back pages fill themselves anyway. In Cork the hurlers still strike, in Waterford they mutiny and in Limerick they drink. There are still hurling men who have a gravitational pull for media. Loughnane. Meyler. Bennis. Mike Mac. Fellas who speak in headlines.

But Cody is Cody. Just an elemental force who exists mostly dormant within the atmosphere. He does what he does. Kilkenny do what they do. That's all there is to it. Until there is a major crisis in the House of Stripe we are unlikely to hear too much about life and conditions inside Kilkenny.

Tomorrow, unless everything we know is wrong, Cody will deliver unto his people the first hurling three-in-a-row since Cork in the 70s and Kilkenny's first since an unsatisfactory hat-trick early in the last century. By winning Kilkenny its 31st senior All Ireland he will deposit the Cats on top of and out clear on hurling's roll of honour for the first time ever. His managerial CV will comprise six All-Ireland titles, nine provincial titles and four hurling leagues. It's a CV he won't ever be typing up.

Perhaps behind locked doors he likes to fulminate and froth and if so perhaps some brave soul will post a stolen video of that insight on to the web. Maybe he kicks the cat or his mouth gets frothy or he freebases cocaine to alter his reality.

He sits across the table from you now, a courteous man pouring tea for you and knowing the agenda for the day. You want to subtract from his invisibility. Trap him into a moment of hubris or spite or silliness. He wants to stay velcroed on to the background. He is just here to be polite.

He manages to be good company while being a bad interview.

Q. What are you looking for when you go to watch a club game?

A. For The Village to win the match is what I am looking for!

Q. When did you last lose your temper? A. I wouldn't lose my temper easily and never with referees - I realise they are always right.

Q. The media gets under your skin doesn't it?

A. Would that be the perception. Are you serious? Did you read that in a reputable paper?

Q. How are you perceived?

A. There is a perception out there about all this ruthless stuff and all that caper. What an adjective to bring with you. Ruthless. It is gas. Does it annoy me? No. It was invented by the media. So be it. I just carry on. I am not irritated by the press but I don't enjoy being asked stupid questions.

So you ask him abstract questions to see if anything will grab him and lead him into the locality of the decent anecdote.

"This journey", you say to Brian Cody,

"what has it taught you about yourself?"

"Dunno," he says after a little while, "have you learned anything about me? I have read several things about me down the years but I haven't learned anything.

"I don't know what the public perception is. If an individual on a newspaper decided to write something about me, well that may not be the public perception of me, that is his perception of me. His way of giving himself the opportunity to write more stuff about me.

"The public perception of me doesn't matter. Does there even have to be a perception? What is the public perception of anybody? Just because I am doing this job doesn't make me any different from the fella down the street, so I don't feel like I need to have a public persona."

All questions about journeys and learning are in retrospect misplaced. Cody's virtue is permanence, his adherence. He lives, by his own estimation, 60 yards from where he spent his childhood.

His father, William, who made a comparatively epic journey up from Thomastown to settle in that hinterland of Kilkenny city that forms The Village was a pillar of the James Stephens club, chairman for almost two decades. Brian Cody was the fourth in line of nine children and childhood was spent with a hurl in his hand.

Today if he wants to unwind that's what he will still do. Out to the garden with Donnacha or Diarmuid, his sons, to enjoy the timeless pleasure of pucking around or he will find a wall and beat the ball against it for a while, the whickering sliotar making it's own soothing rhythm; the pace, such as it was, is gone from his legs but the touch still satisfies him.

"Hurling is an addiction. You want it more. Want to get better and better and better, you hit a ball against the wall and control it. You never want to stop doing it. That's the key to it. Talking about it won't do that for you. Websites or internets or computers won't do it. A hurl and a ball and a wall. It's brilliant. It's just so enjoyable. It is addictive. At the end of the day and the beginning that's the key to performance. Things they can do with a ball. It's because they love it."

He shakes his head. You think of the Cody you sometimes spot away from the sidelines. Sitting high and anonymous in the stands at O'Moore Park in Portlaoise this spring intently watching every game that preceded the Under 14A National Féile final, from which his son Diarmuid took home a winner's medal, or speaking in a hall on a winter's afternoon to a group of youngsters about the game they play, giving off a radioactive passion that soaked into them as they listened. Hurling couldn't change him because it is part of his DNA .

He shakes his head.

"I see lads in training now doing things with a ball, those things players do when they are warming up. I see them doing them and I just shake my head. Just fabulous. So enjoyable and instinctive."

Would you go home and try them yourself? He is about to say yes but breaks into a grin. "Sure, they saw me doing those things first. Don't quote me on that one!"

And that's it. when you have permanence and hurling, who needs image?

The man without a public persona sits back in his chair and awaits the next question. He is friendly and polite as always but an interview with Cody is a voyage around him rather than an exploration of his inner self. And there is one thing he doesn't like much it is journalists and their . . .

"Stupid questions. I won't ask what the points are to get into the profession of journalism. Is there a back door for ye lads? Surely the media would feel that, yes, I would throw back a stupid question.

"There are very high standards demanded of what I do. What the players do. And the same standards should apply with everything else around that day in Croke Park. Why should we get asked stupid questions?"

But not every reporter in Croke Park is a hurler?

"We'll, why don't they go through the local junior team first before they get to Croke Park? It is a big gig."

A big gig. And one he handles with ease. There is no point or value in asking Brian Cody about Waterford, about the standard of hurling in Leinster, about the three-in-a-row, about his views on players. He speaks to the media willingly but not wantonly. There are no hostages abandoned to fortune. No loose quotes sent out to be pinned to the walls of rival dressingrooms.

What is interesting is what drives him and what annoys him and what pleases him.

He insists again and again that behind Kilkenny's excellence there is no secret. No mystery. No mystique. Nothing special. He has been blessed with a good crop of hurlers, the harvest of a system which involves many hands.

"I'm not suggesting I haven't done anything but what I have done I have done with terrific people with me. Great players, great people in the background. I just get on with my part."

Kilkenny, as he points out, is a small county where an absurdly high proportion of the residents know their hurling and the rest are prepared to bluff. Cody has laid down a blueprint for almost constant success and somehow the ghost in the machine has been removed. Kilkenny don't succumb to human frailty. Players vested with celebrity along with their first All-Ireland medal don't stray, they don't be come barflies or poster boys or big time charlies.

There is a story of one recent first-time medal winner explaining to a baffled Cody the next spring that the bit of condition he had added around the waistline was explained by the fact that there is more to life than hurling. Cody is willing to concede the point. Sort of.

"There is more to life than hurling but you have to interpret that not in a simple way. You can live an ordinary life and have an off-season and enjoy yourself as a county hurler but it is about the ambition and whether you have the ambition to be an intercounty hurler.

"You say to me that there is more to life than hurling, Well if you want to carry on like a fella who is not an intercounty hurler well then there will be more to life than hurling. Lots more. But there won't be hurling. That's the reality of it."

And that you imagine is a position he has iterated many times. If you are hung up on there being a life with more to it than hurling you will end up with no hurling and if you know the love, the passion and the addiction that would be a loss too cruel to bear.

When the season ends tomorrow there will be a hole left in his life.

"Aw, you'd miss the training. You would miss the regularity of it. You are caught up so much, you would wish it would go on another while. I don't get tired of it ."

It's the training he misses through those fallow winter months.

"Definitely, the training. I love the match days too. That's what you are working towards the whole time but the training is what I really enjoy because of the quality of players that are there, the type of player that is there. It is hugely enjoyable and fulfilling. In itself. The players come to training and they are genuine, honest and they come and really prepare well. That is enjoyable. Being part of that set-up.

"I love the way they come prepared to do the work of their own accord. It is not about driving them. I don't have to rant and rave to get lads to work, they are committed, they know what is involved. They have total realisation of what it is about, they are talented, there are no prima donnas, just a solid bunch of fellas.

"Seeing them coming out, pucking in twos and pucking in threes, the way they go about it, trying to improve the whole time. The way they look to be ready for the game. The kind of fellas they are, they are sound fellas, down to earth. That's enjoyable being part of that."

He has been part of that for most of his life now. It is 36 years since he he was called into the Kilkenny senior team for a league match against Limerick to play on Richie Bennis. He was 18 and out of St Kieran's where he had developed the habit of winning things. He ended up with the complete set of medals but never thought about it. Hitting a ball is what he loved.

All these years later that stick and sliotar still bewitch him. He grew up in a house of hurling and now presides over one.

"Yeah, it is. We are like the house I grew up in in that hurling is serious. When you say that it can sound wrong, though. Not serious, serious, serious. Not programming or brainwashing. We just get out and hurl and play and love it. It is a mad game. Really the love of hurling is what consumes everybody. It is a mad game. Pucking a ball against the wall, hurling. Part of our lives."

One of the great pleasures of his life these days unfolds in the yard of his own school which is home now to Lithuanians, and Latvians, kids from the Czech Republic and Bangladesh.

"I look out and see those kids getting stuck into hurling. Ten or eleven of those kids. Hitting the ball against the wall and controlling it. They can't live without the hurl and the ball. They are besotted. It is just amazing. You see them improving. They just hurl for hours. That is beautiful to watch."

And with that passion growing in him again he is suddenly ready to leave.

He has given an hour of fairly effortless tapdancing. He laughs to himself.

"I'm not sure what I've been sitting here for. I've nothing to say, have I? I presume you are talking to Davy Fitz," he adds, "there is much more there."

He leaves with a firm handshake and the old loopy grin.

You thanks him for what he has given but know as he fades back into the background that there is much more there.