Looking back I should have stuck around but life went in another direction
GRIFFIN ADMITS REGRET OVER HIS RETIREMENT
TOWARDS the end of his Laochra Gael profile, Tony Griffin remarks that “the fairytale would be one more year where you do win an All-ireland”.
The Ballyea man was just 28 when he announced his retirement from Clare duty in November 2009, citing issues with the management team which was on the brink of being ousted at the time, as well as the fact that he was starting a new business.
However, as he admits in the documentary which airs tomorrow night, his 7,000km cycle (right) across Canada in aid of cancer research was effectively what finished him as an inter-county hurler.
Still, he was just 32 when Clare stormed to the All-ireland in 2013, and a fully firing Griffin would surely have been an asset to then manager Davy Fitzgerald.
“There definitely is regret,” he reflects now. “Because I was away in 2010; ’11 and ’12 just vanished. I was playing with the club but I was living up in Dublin. So I was trying to go up and down, up and down.
“So two years slipped by and all of a sudden they’re in an All-ireland final. I was thinking about it watching the documentary myself. I was thinking, if
I was smart or if I had someone guiding me or mentoring me as it were, they would have said, ‘Look, don’t retire now. Say you’re taking a year out. Rehab the body after the cycle and just then see where you’re at.’
“But I didn’t have anyone like that to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I wouldn’t do that just yet’. I do that for people now and I realise its value because I didn’t have it.
“Would I have gone back and played with Davy? He was my first ever manager when I was
13 or 14 with a Clare under-14s when he started ripping up a Limerick jersey in the dressing room. I was like five foot four. I was hiding. I was petrified!
“I’d never seen anything like this.
He’d still have the same tactics in
2013. Would I have responded?
Maybe. Fergal
Lynch stayed around. He was only a year younger than me and he got his All-ireland.
“But life had gone in a different direction. It had already gone a different direction for me. It would have been nice if it hadn’t gone before they won it.”
Reflecting on the experience of participating in the documentary, Griffin, an All Star in 2006 who spent much of his Clare career commuting from Canada where he was studying, said he appreciated his sporting achievements more as a result of it. It also afforded him the opportunity to delve deeper on the passing of his father, Jerome, in 2005.
He added: “It was a great experience. I was saying to someone recently as a family we never really talked about my father’s passing and when I was asking my family were they ok with doing it I had to say to them, ‘They are going to talk about Daddy and they will want to know about him’ so I was forced to have conversations.
“It created a reason to talk about it and I think we are all the better for that.”