Our Richie was smiles better than all the others
He was simply lethal with ball in hand
He was always a gentleman off the pitch
ONE blessing of these strange times we are living through it is that it gives us a little more selfmade time for entertainment, reflection and education.
Sometimes you can get all three at the once by passing the evening in the company of a good book, like the one I am reading currently.
And every page echoes with the voice of my good friend Richie Bennis, whose autobiography A
Game That Smiles is well titled. There was as much roguery in Richie as there was hurling, which meant that there was a nationwide stand-up tour in him.
In my time playing for Limerick, he was simply the best player we ever had in our dressing room.
I know that is a big claim to make when you consider the likes of Eamon Cregan, Eamon Grimes and Joe McKenna, who were perhaps more celebrated than Richie.
I am not knocking any of them as they were all wonderful players in their own right and it was a privilege to play with each and every one of them, but Richie was different and I would argue even better.
He was simply a lethal player with ball in hand, one of those who had a computer for a brain in terms of working out the right thing to do; he had a kind of inbuilt satnav that took him around the field so that, more often than not, he happened to be in the right place at the right time.
All that would have counted for nought had he not the ability to execute, which he had in tons.
But one of the reasons I rated him a cut above the rest is that he is a Patrickswell man. We have an unusual relationship with the Well in Ballybrown in that we share a parish with them, but there were times we felt like they belonged to another planet.
For years, they hurled on a different level to us and yet there were constant links between the two clubs.
My father, Willie, who was originally from Clonoulty in Tipperary, was one of the founding members of the Well, before we moved to the Ballybrown side of the parish.
And Richie’s older brother – the Bennis family could have registered as a GAA club in their own right as there were 13 in the family – Seanie had the good sense to marry a Ballybrown woman and, as a result, he was one of my mentors growing up.
I suspect that bred a certain kind of respect for the Well in my eyes, in that I felt they bred a different kind of player.
They always had a dollop of arrogance, tended to be high-skilled but were as hard as granite beneath it all and they loved to bring war.
They were at the heart of that Limerick team that won the 1973 All-Ireland; Seanie Foley, Frankie Nolan along with Richie and his brother Phil.
But Richie was above them all, the purest of Patrickswell hurlers in that he was blessed with as much devilment as daring skill.
Mind, reading his book he appears to have developed a degree of diplomacy and a love for polished language that was a bit different from his playing days.
The truth is, and I am not giving away any state secret here, is that he was as much hated as he was loved as a player, although all would be forgiven when the final whistle sounded.
Although sometimes it could take a bit longer as in one particularly infamous day in the Gaelic Grounds when the pair of us became headline news for all the wrong reasons.
Richie recalls the incident in his book, suggesting that I was great fun to ‘wind up’ and that I could be ‘careless’ with the hurley. I won’t be calling the solicitor about that; only reminding Richie that I was always careful about my moment to be careless with the stick, and that day I did not need any timber.
The reason why a lot of his opponents hated marking him – apart from the obvious that he was so damn good – was because he had a waspish tongue and when he could not be bothered to articulate his disdain, he used to often give ‘the fingers’ after getting a score off you.
I knew all afternoon that moment was coming my way.
The previous Sunday I was wing-back as we slaughtered Clare in the Munster final and, as ever, it was Richie who did most of the butchering.
He tormented Gus Lohan, father of Brian and Frank, all day and near the end he ran at him, flicked the ball over his head, and ran around the other side to fire it over, before unleashing his scorn on Gus.
That day in the Gaelic Grounds we were beaten out the gate as the game drifted towards its inevitable end.
There was no surprise in that; in a matter of a couple of decades the Well had become a powerhouse and they had us in such a psychological death grip that had he just hung out their jerseys in the Gaelic Grounds, the sight of them would have been enough to beat us.
Anyhow, I was marking him and happy enough with how I was doing when late on he drifted off me to go back and take a pass from Foley and I knew, with Gus Lohan fresh in my memory, what was coming next.
But, unlike Gus, as he flicked the ball over my head I did not stand in bewilderment but ploughed straight into him with a frontal shoulder charge that cleaned him. It sparked a huge brawl – the Well are never shy on that front when one of their number is felled – and when Richie cleared the head, he wanted my pound of flesh.
We were both sent off which at that time meant a minimum month’s ban but because of the ferociousness of the brawl, the papers speculated we could be hit with double that, which would rule us out of the All-Ireland final.
As hot-headed as we can be in Limerick, we were never in the business of cutting off our nose to spite our face, and there was no way that we were ever going to lose Richie to a county-board imposed ban.
They could have locked me up and thrown away the key and it would not have bothered them – in subsequent years they were a few county board officials who probably fantasised about that – so I knew I was also going to feel the gentle hand of GAA law as a result.
As abrasive as Richie was on the pitch – and we all invent our own characters in the war zone – he has always been a gentlemen off it.
I never knew his son was gravely ill on the weekend of the 1973 All Ireland final, which he talks about in great detail in his book, which just shows the kind of mental fortitude he was blessed with.
If I have one regret in my time as Limerick manager it is that I never got to work with him and he would go in that same role to lead the county to the 2007 final.
He was defeated in a vote to become a selector in my time, but had I the freedom to select my own selectors, he would have been number one choice.
He has a wonderful hurling brain and he would hardly shy from making himself heard, which would have made for the kind of salty meetings that would have made for another chapter in his compelling book.