February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
After Barry spoke his piece, Christy Ring took the floor and delivered a rabble-rousing oration that had his teammates fired up and desperate for battle. A priest lurking in a corner of the room wasn’t too pleased with Ring’s ardent tone or his choice of colorful vocabulary, and he ventured to complain.
“My dear Christy,” he said, “I’m sure you never read that in the New Testament.”
“The men who wrote the New Testament,” replied Ring, “never had to play Tipperary.”
That, right there, is what separates a Cork and Tipperary Munster final from deciders featuring all other counties in the province. A devoutly religious man, a daily communicant who later donated a selection of his medals so they could be melted down into a chalice for St Augustine’s Church, Ring knew that Cork and Tipp was somewhere beyond the biblical.
After all, Archbishop Thomas Morris of Cashel and Emly, an otherwise devout man of the cloth, once described Ring as “the devil himself.” What else could Morris reasonably say about the man who so tormented his county?
At Pairc Ui Chaoimh next Sunday, the rivalry renews, and even if defeat no longer spells the end of the summer for one team, there is something larger at stake.
With apologies to the thirty other counties on the island and to practitioners of the other code, there is nothing quite like a Cork-Tipp Munster hurling final. It is quite simply the most special pairing. How special? Well, where to start?
Many sports devotees swear by the spectacle of the Old Firm derby but this is Celtic-Rangers without the sectarianism or drunken bile. Cork people will deride Tipperary fans for their reluctance to spend money on their travels and their historic over-reliance on homemade sandwiches, but they will never call them Prods or Taigs.
Above in The Pale, plenty vouch for the rousing atmosphere afforded by the blood and thunder meetings of Dublin and Meath. This is Dublin-Meath without the relentless pulling and dragging and the tolerance of casual on-pitch violence. Not to mention that unlike the fair weather denizens of Hill 16 who’d struggle to name half their own side, hurling supporters actually know every player on both teams and could hold forth on their pedigrees.
This is the New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox without the lop-sided history; Real Madrid-Barcelona free of the preening, highly paid mercenaries; The Lions versus the All-Blacks stripped of the stifling corporate hype and increasingly manufactured media significance.
The difference with the drawn-out rugby tour of the moment is we cannot imagine even the saddest of Dublin 4 types dreading going to work on the Monday morning after a Lions defeat. In the Park this Sunday, plenty on both sides will live with that fear until the final whistle sounds.
In sport, the truth is that nothing really compares and the beauty of it all is that both counties care less about the hubris involved in such a claim. Cork and Tipp are already regarded by their compatriots all over the island as impossibly arrogant. Guilty as charged too.
In typical style, fans of both would dismiss such criticism as a misreading of their innate confidence. Kilkenny may be Cork’s actual rivals for overall claims of hurling supremacy but only Tipp would have the nerve to erect an enormous sign on the road into their county ludicrously claiming to be “the home of hurling.”
An empty boast yet this is the place of whom Ring said: “You can say what you like but the only team you can hurl all out against are Tipperary.” From somebody who never went less than all out, that is praise indeed.
That Tipp gave Ring nothing for nothing is summed up in a yarn about one of their own legends. Decades after a stint in blue and gold where he distinguished himself as a corner-back and won four All-Ireland medals, Mickey ‘The Rattler’ Byrne was lying in a Dublin hospital having a hip replaced. The intervening years hadn’t been kind to the body but had thieved nothing from his mind. As the nurse went to fling the old hip out the window to the local dogs that passed for a waste disposal unit, Byrne awoke from his slumber and beseeched her to stop.
“Don’t throw that one out,” begged Byrne, “it’s the hip I used to hit Christy Ring with.”
Historians can argue the accuracy of the anecdote and push for a name of the medical institution involved. Our only intention is to offer a flavor of the literary canon that swirls around this fixture and that differentiates it from all others. Times and dates are not important when savoring such exceptional heritage.
Take the following account of another Sunday morning in Thurles sometime in the 1920s as recounted by Tim Horgan in his classic book ‘Cork’s Hurling Story.’
The Cork hurlers had traveled up to take on Tipperary and in the team hotel, Father Eddie Fitzgerald presided over a private mass for the players and officials. As was customary at such affairs, the curate rounded off proceedings by good-naturedly requesting that the Man upstairs might look kindly on the hurlers knelt before him and bring joy to them that day.
At a subsequent breakfast, Fr. Fitzgerald repeated that blessing while saying grace and it was about midway through the repast, some of those gathered noticed that renowned goal poacher Michael ‘Gah’ Aherne was being especially quiet. After a couple of attempts failed to bring him into the conversation, one of his colleagues pulled him up.
“What’s wrong with you this morning?”
Aherne lifted his head, turned his gaze upon the priest nearby and then back to his friend, before replying.
“Ah, I don’t know about all this. To tell you the truth, I’d rather beat them fair and square.”
Sunday really can’t come soon enough.