The idea of your children growing up with different county allegiances to your own is a rapidly developing problem among my peer group. The fruit of your loins growing up to support the Dubs, for example, is a cross that many of us have to bear in life, and one that may yet befall me, apocalyptic a vista as that sounds.
When my father moved out of An Sean Phobal in the Waterford Gaeltacht in 1966, he wasn’t to know that he would not return to the county of his birth. He met a Galway woman, my mother, and after 13 years in Dublin, they eventually settled in her home town of Milltown, on the Mayo border. Two of his sons were born in Dublin, and two more were born in Galway, and all four of us now are of course Galwaymen, and we can remember being nothing else.
I was the last of those four boys, and as far as I was concerned my father was as big a Galway football fan as I was. Shortly after he moved to Milltown, we had three players on the Galway football team that were beaten by Dublin in the 1983 final (mentioned quite a bit in dispatches this week to put some perspective on the gloom currently enveloping the county after last Sunday), and all three of them would become fast friends with my father through his involvement with the local GAA club.
He was a Galway GAA man, a supporter, one of the die-hards. The question of who he would support if Galway were ever to play Waterford in the All-Ireland hurling championship was about as abstract a notion in the late 1980s as the question of whether androids dreamed of electric sheep. I would silently congratulate my father on hitching his wagon to Galway’s star – why would you want to support Waterford?
The doldrums
And yet, he would tune into RTÉ Radio One for their annual championship game, and later listen to his brothers’ lament a refereeing decision that cost them, or a spate of injuries, or an incompetent coach. As the 1990s rolled on and Limerick, and then Clare, and then Wexford, made their breakthroughs, and Offaly continued to defy geography and tradition, it became harder to accept that Waterford would always be in the doldrums.
I began asking questions and he’d tell me about the Munster finals of 1982 and 1983, and I’d remind myself never to ask such questions again. I was born two weeks after Cork scored 5-31 against Waterford in a Munster final at Semple Stadium, for God’s sake . . . I’m surprised he didn’t try and get me exorcised. Being irrelevant had to be better than that, and irrelevance was the course of action Waterford chose, for much of the 80s and 90s.
But I remember picking up a hurley in my cousin's house in An Rinn one summer, and my cousin Tomás telling me about a young hurler named Paul Flynn who was going to be better than Christy Ring.
That would probably have been in 1992, when Waterford won Munster titles at minor and U-21 level. It took a while for those successes to bear fruit but my father, having cycled to the square in Dungarvan as an 11-year-old in 1959 to see his heroes bring the Liam MacCarthy back to Waterford, and after going through almost four decades of misery subsequently, has lived long enough for Waterford to be relevant again.
On the day in 2002 when Waterford won their first Munster final in 39 years, I was reporting for the Tuam Herald on the Connacht minor final in Castlebar – he would've gone to Cork otherwise – and we listened in the car on the way home to Milltown as Waterford finally ended the famine.
But that wasn't the end. That was just the start. We were in Thurles together the following year to see John Mullane score a hat-trick and still end up on the losing team.
He was there in 2004 at the greatest Munster final of them all. He was present in 2008 when the nightmare of 1982 was played out again, with Kilkenny in the executioners’ cape this time. He had never seen Waterford win an All-Ireland title in the flesh until the minors won in 2013, and he shed a little tear sitting beside my brother in the Cusack Stand.
And he will be there in Croker on Sunday when they tilt at that black and amber windmill again. Whenever I complain about Waterford, and their curious way of hurling with the handbrake on, I should think of him, and that stretch of time – from when he was in school, until the youngest of his four sons was finished school – when Waterford did nothing, and won nothing. Half a lifetime.
Understand those years, and maybe you’ll understand why Waterford are plotting a route to success from every conceivable angle . . . and a few inconceivable ones, too.
