by David Kenny
Their manager was unnecessarily petty once or twice? Clearly. There’s a line in Cody’s autobiography where he grumbles about the team being written off (yawn) at the end of 2005 and adds: ‘We’d show them!’ It’s a sentence, uncharacteristically shrill of the man, that jars on a number of levels. Whatever happened to trying to be successful for its own sake, Brian? Why some managers get worked up about the media rather than accepting them for the necessary evil they are never fails to amaze. Perhaps Cody is so tired of saying the correct and politic thing so often that it’s cathartic for him to let loose – at Marty Morrissey, at the Tribune, at the All Star selectors – every now and then. If it makes him happy, so be it.
But the biggest gripe the world has with Cody’s Kilkenny is that they’ve been too successful. To say they were respected rather than adored misses the point. For one thing they wouldn’t wanna be adored; for another, serial champions never are. The one outfit in the annals of hurling that were truly loved were loved as much for the romance they brought to the game and for their sportsmanship as for their victories. Counties like Kilkenny do not bring romance to the game. Great stories are written about farmhands and, ahem, gamekeepers, not about landed gentry. (‘Ah yes, who could have believed that I’d be part of my county’s thirty-second All-Ireland victory ...’)
One compliment that hasn’t been paid to them, and should be, is that they were good and gracious winners. There was no dissing of outclassed opponents, no taunting them with ball tricks when the result was safely in the bag. Kilkenny won four consecutive All-Irelands without making the rest of the country despise them. Not every county could manage the same.
Points, not goals, were their daily bread. The goals helped kill off opponents, the points set them up for the kill in the first place. Time and again Kilkenny reached for and struck a register of ruthlessness like no team before them had. Against Clare in the 2006 All-Ireland semi-final they were a point ahead with ten minutes left and looking edgy; cue a barrage that led to seven points from eight attempts. Against Galway in the quarter-final they’d gone from leading by 1-6 to 0-5 after twenty-three minutes to leading by 2-19 to 0-8 after forty-five minutes. Against the same opponents at the same stage in 2007 they were level eight minutes from time before rattling an unanswered 2-4. Up to last year, Cork in the 2006 All-Ireland final were the only team to get within three points of them in terms of white flags.
But Dublin would hit as many points in last year’s Leinster final and Tipperary would hit more in the All-Ireland final, the first occasion Kilkenny had been outpointed in the championship since the 2004 All-Ireland final, twenty-two games earlier. Even in their last championship defeat versus Galway in 2005 – a game that could have been scripted by Raymond Chandler: when in doubt, have a man with a gun in his hand walk through the door – they landed as many points as their opponents. Which is another reason why last September marked the end of their natural lifespan as a team. After four years on the road, bread alone could no longer feed them.
Among their greatest strengths has been to have one or two others, usually Eoin Larkin with points and Eddie Brennan with goals, supplementing their staple diet of Henry Shefflin scores. Martin Comerford always had his regular-occasional days and Aidan Fogarty chipped in more often than is realised. But Larkin, who has averaged three points per game since 2007, has been wildly out of form this year, Comerford is likely to have to be content with the role of impact sub and Fogarty lacks the craft to magic something out of nothing when Kilkenny are on the back foot. The time has come for TJ Reid and Richie Hogan to step up, not least because this is a team getting old together.
The average age of the side that won the 2006 All-Ireland was bang on twenty-five, with two twenty-one-year-olds and a twenty-year-old therein. The average age of the side that won the 2009 All-Ireland was a little more than twenty-seven, with only one twenty-one-year-old therein. And that does matter and will matter, for it was experience and nothing else – it was categorically not the vigour of youth – that saw them through against Galway and Tipp last year. The line that separates experience from old age is a fine one, and Kilkenny are no longer the right side of it. The lion in winter, or at any rate in late autumn.
A couple of years back asymmetric warfare appeared to be the only way to discomfit them. Some rabbit from the tactical hat à la Galway’s three-man midfield in 1986, some ploy designed not simply to keep the score down but to actively ask questions of them. That will not happen now. There is no longer cause for it. Tipperary twice took Kilkenny on in pitched battle last year and twice very nearly defeated them. An extra match this summer – not so much an All-Ireland quarter-final as a semi-final coming on top of a quarter-final – may be the game that pushes them over the edge. And Cody has to be lucky, or at any rate not unlucky, every time. His opponents, as the formerly loquacious P O’Neill might have put it, only have to be lucky once. Someday one of them will be.
Who, when and how? Pat Treacy of KCLR 96FM, one of the shrewdest hurling men on Noreside, identifies mental tiredness as the biggest danger. Think of Eddie Brennan and Michael Kavanagh, both with time and space to spare, missing simple pickups in the second half last September. Nobody will be able to say they hadn’t seen the writing on the wall, the Kilkenny management included first and foremost, which is why Treacy lauds their approach to the National League. ‘I think they identified the staleness themselves and tried to take every precaution against it by resting players during the league.’ If Kilkenny are to be beaten, he believes, it won’t be because they were caught on the hop by Galway in a Leinster final. ‘They’ll be waiting for that if both teams get that far. But an All-Ireland semi-final, well ...’
Nor will the champions fail for lack of enthusiasm, argues Eddie Keher. ‘I’ve no doubt they’ll have the same drive as they’ve had for the past number of years. But the other teams have all upped their game and have come very close to them. In the end they’ll be beaten by a better team on the day.’ As against that, Keher points out, a successful return by Noel Hickey would liberate JJ Delaney and provide a tailwind. ‘Last year their options were curtailed by injuries. If they have better luck in that regard this year they’ll take some beating.’
The team that sees them off will be younger, fresher and hungrier. They’ll also be as accurate as Kilkenny, or as near to it as makes no difference. Unsurprisingly, over the course of the four-in-a-row Cody’s side have become more and more deadly with their shooting. Seven wides in the past two All-Ireland finals tells its own story.
Twice in 2009 they had to hurl for their lives, initially against Galway in the provincial semi-final when, five points down ten minutes into the second half, they mustered twelve scoring attempts during the next twenty-five minutes. The first one Brennan, attempting to place the sliotar in the top corner, swung narrowly wide. The second, a long-distance Shefflin free, failed too. But each of the next ten found the target, not one of them despatched from Hail Mary distance. Instead Kilkenny poked and prodded away until they’d worked an opening. No haste, no hurry, no overplaying. Their decision-making was deep-chilled, their accuracy laser-guided. Galway had three scoring chances during the same period and put two of them wide.
Clinging on by their fingertips in the second half of the All-Ireland final, the holders’ need to make every shot count was more acute still. To a large extent the match turned on a three-minute spell around the hour mark. With Tipp leading 0-19 to 0-17 Shane McGrath, Pat Kerwick, Seamus Callanan and Noel McGrath all had chances for a point. Callanan obliged; the other three missed, the first two because they went for broke rather than playing the percentages and dropping the ball short. While all of this was happening Kilkenny had one chance, an effort from TJ Reid that just about crawled inside the near upright at the Railway End. The real wonder was not the champions’ subsequent double-barrelled blast but the fact that they were still alive to pull the trigger.
In much the same way that Kerry did not need to win a fifth in a row in order to sea
l their fame (if anything, come to that, Seamus Darby burnished rather than tarnished their legend), Kilkenny do not require five. Winning three was history-making. By winning four and beating Tipperary in the process they finished the decade the way they’d begun it, thundering home in an All-Ireland final they dared not contemplate losing. Their testament is already hewn in stone. What need to embark on the Mona Lisa when you’ve painted the Last Supper? Those Kilkenny folk who insist that half of the team of the 1970s would have walked onto the current XV are forgetting that the reverse also applies. Either way, they may steel themselves for a change of diet. Not that a few years of puddin’ suppers will do them any harm after an epoch of lobster and foie gras.
Nobody knows, least of all the man himself, when Cody will ride off into the sunset. Make it five and he may be tempted. Come up short and, knowing him, the temptation will be to stick around and do an Alex Ferguson by building yet another new model. Whenever he does go, the announcement will come as a shock but no surprise.
In their talent, in their resolve, in their power, in their fearsome focus and in their modesty, Brian Cody’s Kilkenny have been a cause for celebration. And when at last they succumb to a better team, that will be a cause for celebration too.
EWAN MCKENNA
The White man’s burden
An unfulfilled snooker genius, Jimmy White has battled through booze, bankruptcy and cancer but still considers himself lucky.
22 February 2009
Being Jimmy White – an existence spent scuttling between the seldom-used backrooms of dank, dreary bars, midday promotions in village bookies and cubicles with just enough room to slide the cue all the way back. On Friday it’s a hidden-away qualifier for the World Championships, an event that earned him the title of peoples’ champion but never more. Here and now it’s an exhibition in the function room of an Athy hotel, a town that lost its own snooker hall a decade ago when it became too dangerous. Both games involve scratching and scraping at the past, trying to hopelessly claw it into the present.
White wanders in, takes a quick look at the freshly-laid table, the five rows of seats that have been brought from the dining room and starts remembering wilder days in Ireland. The time he bumped into UB40, who were over playing a gig and ended up with them and Phil Lynott for seventeen consecutive nights. The more common week-long benders with Alex Higgins that always seemed to start in the Gresham. Given his former lifestyle it’s little wonder his ghost-writer spent her advance in six weeks, following White out on boozy evenings while trying to catch up on a past that seemed the far side of hazy.
He’s due to play Higgins in a couple of hours but most of the early-day commotion has surrounded trying to get the Northern Irishman out of a pub. When Higgins does arrive there’s a suspicious looking bottle peaking from his pocket and by the end of the night he’s threatened to stab someone in the chest, to smash a digital camera, turned on a ten-year-old boy and had the referee stand over his shoulder on every shot for fear he’d lash out. Had White not changed his ways it would have been easy to draw parallels and point to where his own future lay. You enquire if he ever feared ending up that way.
‘Many times I looked myself in the mirror and said I’ve got to stop this. But when you are involved with drinking it’s not that simple. You can go weeks without it and think you are fine and then you go somewhere and have a couple and you are back on it again.’
So are you an alcoholic?
‘I’ve been doing bits of programmes with Ronnie Wood, he’s not drinking either at the moment. My last drink was 27 December and apart from that, the week of the 14-21 December I went to see my nephew, and prior to that I hadn’t a drink for seventy-three days. So I can take or leave drink. Really, it’s not my baby. I can go out now and have a coffee and have a good time, makes no difference. But I come from a family of drink. Unfortunately. So I’m always aware. But sometimes you are brought up in an environment like that.’
The family he speaks of is his father. A builder in the east end of London, he spent his Fridays cutting into the pay cheque in a bar near work. Young James White would sit in the car as the clock ticked into the evening and beyond. Aged eleven, he was finally allowed in and started to play pool. Aged thirteen he’d made a century break on the snooker table. Before long his natural habitat had become the Pot Black Club near Clapham and the principal of Ernest Bevin Comprehensive tried to cut him a deal – if he came to school in the morning nothing would be said about him disappearing back to the club after lunch.
But it was too late. Within a couple of years he was earning big bucks from hustling, giving the majority to his mother and gambling away the rest, and at eighteen became the youngest winner of the World Amateur Championship. Yet despite six final appearances, the professional equivalent never followed for the most gifted kid of them all.
‘I was a bad boy. I used to like the gargle and that cost me a couple of those finals. I was always up late the night before and when you are young you think you can recover. Then you suddenly wake up one day and you are thirty-five; you’ve got a headache. I was up playing cards, drinking. And I’ve got no one to blame but myself. I had people around me and even if they went to bed I was always going to be my own worst enemy.
‘That was then and in a couple of the finals I twitched on the black, like you would at golf. And I was 14-8 up in one of them and I started thanking God and all the people I wanted to and I wrote the speech in my mind. That’s why I told Ronnie O’Sullivan that these discos will always be there when it’s all over. It’s my only regret, the one thing I’d change. I’d go to bed early and go out after these games instead of before them.’
Cancer. It was 1995 and White was in the shower one morning. He reached down only to find a hard lump on one of his testicles and quickly realised something was wrong. He dried himself and let the thought pass but it wouldn’t go away. He didn’t want to but deep down he knew. His GP knew as well. ‘Listen you are going to the hospital this afternoon.’ ‘What?’ inquired White. ‘I don’t like the look of this at all, Jimmy. You’ve got to go.’
‘I went to the hospital and they said we’ve got to take that out tomorrow. I went to see the doctor at two in the afternoon and by seven in the evening I’d got a gown on signing these consent forms. I thought I was going to die. I had to build up the courage to ring my wife and tell her. We do a campaign for testicular cancer and every male, there’s a stigma there just not to say to their mum or dad that they’ve got to check this. Sometimes these things harden up within weeks and it’s something you have got to get done. There was a bit of that with me. Thankfully I was alright.’
Others close to him weren’t. Within a couple of years his mother had passed away as did his brother, Martin, who died of lung cancer at fifty-three. The latter crippled him. ‘It was a horrible time. He was a hard working man, got struck down and died within six months.’ But you are more curious about his own health at that time. The night before the funeral he put five grand behind a bar and started to drink. Within a few hours he had taken his brother’s corpse and brought it out on the town.
‘My sister just started drinking and crying more and more. The funeral parlour was only across the road so I said let’s go and f**king see him. We went over and as true as we sit here, there was this big chain with this big padlock and I just kicked it and the door opened. Swung right open as easy as that. So we went through. We’d seen him in the day, and he was dressed, so we just put his hat on, put him in the car, took him to my brother’s, then to my house and so on.’
Is that comic or tragic, you ask?
‘Both.’
Doesn’t it scare you that you were in a place in your head where you could do that?
‘It was such devastation. I was at a stage where I didn’t really know who I was.’
Without making light of it Jimmy, others have lost people to cancer and don’t do their own version of Weekend at Bernie’s.
‘You have to understand what nowhere really
means I guess. Me and my sister and my other two brothers ended up finding ourselves nowhere if that makes any sense. Just nowhere in our minds. It was very weird. It was angry as well as weird. It was all screaming and crying and laughing. It was all over the place. I was all over the place. The taxi driver said your friend doesn’t look too well and it was quite hilarious actually; we all got a good laugh out of that. But we put him back the same night and then all the police came the next day and they were going to arrest us. But they saw there was no damage done and let us off and I didn’t get arrested for breaking and entering. But I was still nowhere.’
How do you get to nowhere? Too much, too soon? Loneliness? Depression? Tragedy? Bad advice? No advice? White’s case might tick all of those boxes but it’s still impossible to overlook an addictive personality. There are the cigarettes (‘I may have a packet of cigarettes for a week now but I do hate cigarettes, I absolutely detest them’). There’s the drink he reckons he’s blown at least half a million on since people started to see him as a success. There’s been the gambling too, which saw him blow well over a million in that time (‘It can be very addictive but I’m not addicted’). And while the rumours he blew his 1994 world runner-up cheque of £128,000 the next day in the bookies are untrue, it’s little wonder that despite ten tournament wins and over £4.5 million in career earnings, he was declared bankrupt and his wife Maureen left him after twenty-two years.
