A look at the life and times of Mr. Hurling
RECLINING in his comfortable armchair in the cosy sitting room of his home in Kilcoole recently, Jackie Napier was ready to take us on a journey through his lifetime spent within Wicklow GAA.
It’s a few weeks out since Wicklow’s Mr. Hurling was presented with his President’s Award at a special shindig in Croke Park, an honour deeply appreciated and treasured by the Bray Emmets stalwart.
Attempts to have a sit-down with Jackie prior to the big night were met with lines like, “ah, would you leave it until afterwards? Wouldn’t that be the best thing?” The limelight doesn’t truly sit well with Jackie Napier. The Wicklow GAA administrative legend is truly at home at the coalface – standing on the sideline in Aughrim or Arklow or his beloved Old Conna, maintaining order, keeping notes, recording the moment on paper and in his vast vault of a brain for future reference.
If not the sideline, then Jackie is equally at home in the boardroom having spent decades involved at club, district, county, provincial and national level across a wealth of committees and causes. Fond of a quip, from the top table or the floor, adept at forcing home a point or raising an issue, clinical in his research, confident in his facts, when Jackie Napier speaks the room listens.
High points from the career of Jackie are as plentiful as there are young hurlers in Bray, and perhaps that is the highest point of all from a lifetime spent in the service of his beloved north Wicklow town, once seen as impoverished in terms of the small ball game.
After decades of winters and springs spent travelling the highways and byways of Ireland with Wicklow teams, the summers with his club would flash by in a brutal hurry as the Bray Emmets hurlers would exit championships with little more than a whimper having fallen from Senior in the mid-60s to the depths of Junior where they languished until the Junior ‘A’ win of 1990.
Several key pieces of the Bray Emmets jigsaw fell into place that allowed them to emerge from the doldrums and take their place at the top table of Wicklow club hurling. Jackie says that during the dark times he never thought that glorious day in October 2014 would ever happen.
“Never thought it would happen. We went from a Senior team to a bad Junior team over the course of a few years,” said Jackie. “When we won Junior in 1963, there was no Intermediate, so we went Senior. We stayed Senior for a few years and then went back Junior and went really low Junior then. “We won a couple of Junior ‘B’s and lower grades of Junior and then in 1990 we won the Junior ‘A’ and went up Intermediate and then won the Intermediate. But the Minors were the real stepping stones to that. Since 2004 to present they have won nine Minor championships: 2004, 05, 06, three-in-a-row, lost out in 2007, 2008, 09, 10, three-in-a-row, 2012 and 13 and 2017, that’s nine. The fruits of that had to come through at some stage.
“The day we won the Senior, the 2013 final that we lost, we had a man sent off in the wrong, we were 11 minutes without a player, we should have won it but for what would I call it, a mistake by the referee, or his linesman or whatever, we were in with a great chance of winning it. Came back then in 2014 and we had a man sent off and I thought that had put the tin hat on it, but no, we came back and won it. Leighton (Glynn) missed the free to equalise. I think that was a magic moment, to bring the cup back to Bray.
“In 1952 in Arklow I was a boy. Joe Butler brought me and there was no cup that day. There were no nets either. Avondale disputed whether a ball went over the bar or under it, but Bray won by more than that in the end.
So, what was the secret? How did Bray Emmets achieve the dream?
“A hurling plan set out by the club. They said they were going to win a Minor by such a year. It sounded crazy at the time because we were coming from a very low Tipperary native Joe Butler (right), who Jackie Napier credits with instilling in him a love of hurling after he moved to Bray to open a chemist. With Joe is Eamon Murray, and both men were involved in the Wicklow team of 1954, Joe as a selector, Eamon as a player. base.
“The Kilkenny man (John Henderson) had a big say in that. He had been there, and he had done that. He knew how to handle players as well, how to talk to them. He could say things to them that
1-
Jackie grew up in 1 Pearse Square on the Dargle Road in Bray. At 15, he and his family moved to a newsagents shop at 104 Main Street, Bray.
Along with his Bray Emmets clubmates, Jackie had the pleasure of meeting Christy Ring in 1956 when a Bray juvenile team travelled to Cork on Whit Weekend.
Jackie refereed quite a bit, the highlight being the Minor football final of 1964 between Annacurra and Rathnew.
Jackie once unknowingly roped Dan Breen (IRA volunteer during the Irish Civil War) in to umpire for him during a game in Kilcroney and only later found out who he was.
Jackie says he was born a Bray Emmets man and will die proudly as a Bray Emmets man.
2- 3- 4- 5-
I couldn’t say or that you couldn’t say, and he could get away with it. They had marvellous respect for him.
“Look, put it this way, I don’t think we would have won Senior titles or Minor titles without him. Pat Lee did great work as well, and so did Tom Walsh, a great friend of mine, the late Tom Walsh. He was in Bray since 1957. We were there when we had half a team, we were there when we had good teams, we were there when we had fair teams and it was great that he was there when we won the Senior championship. He died the following year,” he added sadly.
Jackie Napier’s love, nay, adoration of the game of hurling has brought him to almost every corner of Ireland (and plenty in England, too) as a member of the backroom teams of Wicklow panels from as far back as the 1960s.
A Tipperary man instilled a passion for the game in a young Jackie Napier and plenty other young Bray lads when he took them hurling in People’s Park after moving to the seaside town to open a chemist shop.
“Joe Butler, he hurled for Dublin in the 1948 All-Ireland Senor hurling final, he was a Tipperary man,” recalls Jackie. “He came to Bray and opened a chemist shop in Sutton Villas. He got a whole lot of kids in the area out into the People’s Park on the Lower Dargle Road and he coached them in hurling.
“He was a member of the Bray Emmets team that won the Senior championship in 1952. He brought me to the match. He lived around the corner from me. He was playing centre half-back.
“Times got bad. He was a very generous man and business didn’t go to well, so he emigrated to Kenya in Africa in 1955 and he was the man who got me involved in hurling,” he said.
Jackie’s playing days were short enough, however, with a Junior crown in 1963 being the highlight. A Minor final defeat to Glenealy prior to that also stung the young Napier while a proud finger points out a newspaper cutting from 1957 where the headline ‘Last-minute Goal Beat Kilcroney’ sits atop an article that describes how a late goal from Bray’s Jackie Napier proved the all-important score in a thrill-aminute under-16 hurling game on a Tuesday evening. Jackie is philosophical when it comes to his playing limitations and possessed the wisdom to understand where his true talents lay.
“Got to a Minor final and were beaten by Glenealy. We won the Junior in 1963. I made up football teams and hurling teams after that, but I was never good enough to make the county, let’s put it like that,” he said.
Jackie has accrued a vast library of yarns and anecdotes from his decades of travelling with Wicklow hurling teams and a brief visit to his beautiful home in Kilcoole only serves to barely skim over the top.
From Wicklow hurling in Wembley in 1968 to riding on camels with Mick Hagan on the Wicklow team holiday in Lanzarote to the countless overnight stays and bus journeys to every single county in the country, if someone could get Jackie to sit down and spill the beans they would have a serious exposé of craic and banter and mischief on their hands.
The Wembley trip was special to Jackie, as it was to all the Wicklow