HURLING IN THE PAST

“I enjoyed every minute of it, bangs and all. I often say to myself I’d love to go out and play one more hour. In my time it was a lot more, what’s the word…” “Abrasive.”

“I was going to say dirty. There were a lot of injuries, a lot of off the ball stuff. I still enjoyed it. For every bad fella I met there were 40 or 50 gentlemen.”

“I suppose at the time in the village there was very little else to do, there was no soccer or rugby, there’s still isn’t any.”

“We used to play out there (on the road). You take the back road men, we fancied ourselves at the time.”

Sheila laughs.

“We would play from the steps outside the old Church of Ireland school, one lad would stand there, one lad would stand at the gate going into the graveyard, we’d have three or four lads on each side and we’d hurl with a sponge ball for three or four hours.

“If we saw three cars in that time that would have been in it. John Anderson had a car and we knew what time he’d have been coming home from Bray, about a quarter to six. You’d hear the chuck in the car coming along the road. We’d hurl for hours and hours, nothing else to do. We’d hide the hurls in the ditch going to school.”

Tommy described some of his practice drills, writing numbers with chalk on a wall and trying to hit them. Sheila has something similar at home.

“I had a goal made out the back on the wall, I had 1 to 6 on different places for the grandchildren”.

That provoked more memories about playing hurling back then, with the children from the different parts of the village playing against each other.

“On our terrace it was always jammed with hurling, everyone used to come. The ball used to go into Kathleen Porter’s and she used to take them and then she’d give them all out at the one time and there’d be a row about them all when we were children.”

Tommy: Pat: Tommy: Pat: Tommy: Tommy: Sheila: Sheila: