Hurling is more than a game and Christy Ring was more than an athlete. These two points – essential to understanding his place in Irish history – are grippingly conveyed in Christy Ring: Man and Ball (RTÉ One, 10.15pm).
This is part documentary, part hagiography, part social history. And it is to be commended for communicating not only Ring’s genius as a hurler but his almost mythological aura as his notched up All-Ireland after All-Ireland in a career stretching from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Whether leading the attack for Cork or Glen Rovers, Ring lived every second as though it were his last while radiating huge humility in everyday life. In that respect, he was the embodiment of what an Irish sporting hero should be. This is quite distinct from the sort of players idolised in other countries. The closest comparisons, perhaps, are the soccer stars of South America, similarly worshipped as much for what they symbolise off the field as for what they represent on it.
The biggest challenge facing the documentary-makers is that little actual footage of Ring exists. This is surmounted through imaginative use of archive photos – the producers borrow the old Ken Burns trick of panning across an image so that it seems to come alive – and through pop-art style illustrations that chronicle Ring’s rise from under-age star in Cloyne to the summit of Croke Park on All-Ireland Sunday.
But the point the documentary, from the team behind 2018’s The Game: The Story of Hurling, makes is that Ring was bigger than the sport and that old news-reel clips couldn’t do him justice anyway. Instead he lives on as an almost folkloric figure.
That sense of Ring as folk hero was captured as giants of Cork hurling such as Donal O’Grady, Donal Óg Cusack (a fellow Cloyne native), Jimmy Barry Murphy and Gerald McCarthy lined up to pay tribute. My own father saw Ring playing for the Glen in his twilight days. He spoke of him the way I probably will when telling my kids about having seen Bowie in concert.
Ring: Man and Ball also challenged the idea that Ireland before the Celtic Tiger was uniformly bleak and suffocating. Yes, it was poor and suffused in religiosity. But there were still wide open fields where men such as Ring could bend history to their will.
“In Ireland, back through the centuries, the tribes were led by the chieftain,” says Donal O’Grady, former Cork manager and Centenary All Ireland winner in 1984. “And Ring was our chieftain.”
