CHAPTER 2
WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
AT THE BACK of my grandparents' house in the village of Bennettsbridge, tucked in off the road, just a short walk from the River Nore, is a small yard about 20 metres wide. I turned that patch of concrete into my hurling arena. My Croke Park, a place where I hurled for hours upon hours, practising the game, loving the game, becoming obsessed by the game.
I would get home from school by 3.10 p.m., fire the bag of books into the corner of the kitchen, and would then be straight out the back door. I came alive there, staying out for hours pucking a ball. Often my brother Paddy was with me but if he wasn't it wouldn't deter my enthusiasm. All I needed was a hurl, a ball and a wall. There was no conversation, no laughter - just the constant thud of the ball being hit.
They have an old corporation bungalow with a large back garden. The garage has a door on either side and the wall in between is marked with a white line. It was perfect target practice. Hit the line from 10 yards, 15, 20. Strike, repeat, strike, repeat. I never got tired of it.
Across the yard was the oil tanker for heating the house. When I was nine, they changed it from the classic steel structure to a new plastic container, shaped like a figure of eight with two holes in it. I watched the workmen put it in one day and my mind lit up at the hurling possibilities. I began firing balls off left and right, aiming for the holes in the tanker.
That kept me occupied for hours.
The back of the container led on to the neighbours' house. Mrs Kealy lived there: a lovely, kind old woman. During the summer days when school was out, Paddy, my cousin Denise and I would knock on her door and call in for a chat, knowing that we would each get a Penguin bar in exchange for our company. The odd stray sliotar would fly past a gap between the wall and partitioning leylandiis, travelling directly across her back yard. We would close our eyes in fear, hoping not to hear a yelp from the other side. Later, her daughter came back from England, moved into the house and built an extension out the back, meaning their external bedroom wall was now directly lined up behind the oil tank.
Soon hurling started to be squeezed in before school, often on freezing and wet mornings, although I felt immune to the cold and the rain. Saying that, if you're asleep, that thud, thud, thud of the ball against the wall would quickly wake you up. So it wasn't long before my grandmother got a polite suggestion. Maybe Richie could bang the ball off another wall?
So I started at the other side of yard, going for hours and hours.
The simple joy of striking a ball against a wall never left me. I loved getting into the rhythm of it, repeating that motion, getting my eye in.
When I went to college in St Pat's in Dublin, I lived for two years at Number 20 Home Farm Road, with seven other lads wedged into the terrace house. It was a big sporting environment. Cha Fitz and I were on the Kilkenny Senior team. Niall Tennyson and Shane Campion were classmates of mine from St Kieran's, both of whom went on to win All-Irelands and county titles at various levels over the years. A Clare man, Pa Minogue, played with Tulla, while Declan McKiernan and James Carroll were county U-21 footballers with Cavan and Donegal at the time. Another housemate - Cavan man, David Galligan - was one of the top boxers in St Saviour's Boxing Club in Dublin city.
Every college house is wild, but the crowd of lads packed into ours heightened that. Wherever I could find a small bit of space, though, I'd puck a ball against the wall. I had a spot in the kitchen and another in my bedroom where I could be striking into the early hours of the morning. Everyone gave out about the noise, especially the old lady who lived next door. She couldn't understand what the constant banging was, particularly so late into the night.
Our landlord was a great character, Brian Brady from Cavan, but his patience was tested. He rang his friend, Eddie Nolan - a Conahy man who was heavily involved in the Kilkenny Supporters Club - to vent his frustration. 'Listen, Eddie, I have a house down in Drumcondra. There's a gang of Kilkenny lads in it and they're banging the ball off the wall at all hours of the morning and the neighbours are giving out like mad. Will you go down there please and have a word with them?'
Eddie's intervention didn't work; I kept pucking the ball off the wall at any opportunity.
When I finished college in 2009, I started my first job as a teacher in Belgrove Boys' School in Clontarf. I'd give the kids some Maths or English work to do, then put that 15 minutes to good use, walking around the classroom with a hurl in hand and hopping a tennis ball off the wall, picking spots between the kids' artwork. The big thick walls of the 100-year-old school building were perfect to slam a shot off. The very odd time a ball would go astray and some poor young lad would get it on the forehead, but the kids lapped it all up, telling their parents: 'Mr Hogan plays for Kilkenny and he practises his hurling all the time in the classroom.'
I knew I shouldn't have been doing it in school, but I just couldn't help myself. I was obsessed; any chance I got to hit a ball, I took it. Teaching was how I made money at the time, but hurling was the reason I got up in the morning, and I never wanted to waste a second.
It never really left me - that constant need to practise. I found it therapeutic, saw it as time to think and settle my mind, just swinging the hurl away and connecting with the ball.
It's one of the things that I miss most now; a price I pay for all the wear and tear, all those back injuries that accumulated over the years. I just can't do it to the extent that I used to; my back can no longer stand up to the rotation involved in repeated striking.
It was such a simple thing in my hurling life.
And I miss it.
* * *
'Where are you from, Richie?'
Good question. When I was young, I had to pause before answering. Kilkenny was hardwired into my DNA, so there was no questioning my county allegiances. Drill deeper into my locality, though, and it got trickier.
Identity is a complex thing.
Danesfort GAA club is a few miles off the Dublin-Waterford motorway, stuck on the N10 road that takes you into Kilkenny city. The club is on a crossroads opposite The Harvester Bar. The road past The Harvester leads down to Bennettsbridge. It's two and a half miles long; when you drop down the small hill and cross the bridge, you're into Bennettsbridge village. The water under that bridge is the River Nore, which splits the parishes of Danesfort and Bennettsbridge. I woke up every morning and went to sleep every night in our house in Danesfort, but so many of my waking hours in between were spent in Bennettsbridge.
My mother, Liz, is from Bennettsbridge. My parents were young when Paddy and I were born, as were my grandparents, Mick and Eileen McCarthy. The McCarthy family are steeped in hurling. My grandfather won six county championships with the great Bennettsbridge team of the 1960s. His career with the 'Bridge ended in his early thirties when he lost his eye in a county championship game. My uncle, Richie, maintained the family club tradition, earning a place on underage Kilkenny teams and during his time winning Minor and U-21 All-Ireland medals in the 1980s. His cousins, D.J. Carey and James McGarry, are two of Kilkenny's greatest ever players.
So my mother and father pitched up in Danesfort, in between Bennettsbridge and my father's home town of Callan, after they married at 21 and got their hands on a site.
Paddy was born in May 1987; I arrived the following year, in August 1988. The two girls came later: Rachel in 1994 and Niamh in 2002.
Myself and Paddy, our lives were intertwined from the start. Every morning we made the short walk down the hill to my grandmother's house in Bennettsbridge village, before Mam would get a lift into Kilkenny to the vegetable shop where she worked. Our cousin, Denise, slipped into the same routine, also getting dropped off at our grandparents' house. That house became the centre of our universe, the three of us growing up together along with the other children on that street.
There was a wild streak to myself and Paddy as young lads. Fifteen months apart in age, that sibling rivalry always simmered and regularly boiled over. In that little bungalow and out into the backyard, we would tear around like a whirlwind, causing chaos. Racing after each other, climbing trees, jumping off barrels, pushing, shoving, fighting. We were locked into a constant battle.
Paddy was bigger and stronger than me but that didn't mean that he didn't come off second best from time to time. When it did happen, it tended to be dramatic. One morning Paddy and I were drawing on pieces of paper when a scrap broke out in the room. I sensed what was coming and bolted for safety, running through the hallway, pencil still in hand. As Paddy was tearing after me, he tackled me to the ground. We fell and I accidentally stabbed him in the eye with the pencil, causing him to be shipped off to Waterford University Hospital to have the pencil dislodged and the damage repaired.
Another time the pair of us were in the back of a trailer,...
