Griffin finally done with pleasing people as he reflects on struggles
Former Clare hurler has written a second book to help teenagers with their mental health after his own battles on and off the field
AWEEK before Clare played Waterford in the 2008 Munster hurling championship, Tony Griffin had a panic attack while training at the match venue, Limerick’s Gaelic Grounds. Feeling unable to articulate what was happening, he rushed to a toilet, locking himself into a cubicle until his breathing settled. Griffin was a star member of the Clare attack, a 2006 All-Star who would score 0-5 from play the following Sunday in an imperious personal performance.
From the outside, he was the epitome of a confident, modern athlete. Articulate and questioning off the field, furiously dedicated on it to an extent that his former Clare manager, Anthony Daly, suggested “at times bordered on obsessiveness”.
But the surface impression of his performance against a Waterford team about to part company with manager, Justin McCarthy, communicated something profoundly different to what he himself was experiencing.
“I just thought I was having a heart-attack, ” he recalls now of that moment of panic one week earlier. “I was so naïve to all of this stuff, I didn’t even know what it was, ” Griffin explains in a compelling conversation with Ruairí McKiernan on the ‘Love and Courage’ podcast.
“Having to race for the changing-rooms and go into a bathroom on my own, just to let myself calm down. Then I went out and played the following week on the same pitch.”
The year before, Griffin had completed a 7,000 km charity cycle across Canada in memory of his late father, Jerome. The cycle raised close to three quarters of a million euro, but – having returned to commuting from Halifax, Nova Scotia where he was studying – he found himself increasingly conflicted about the path his life was now taking.
That sense of panic experienced in Limerick was no psychological aberration. It ran in harmony with what had begun to feel like a broad emotional unravelling.
“It started with not feeling comfortable in lectures,” he explains to McKiernan. “It was almost like I was itchy. Then not wanting to go in. Then not wanting to leave my room. Then I looked up the word ‘depression’ one day and I said, ‘That’s me!’
“I didn’t talk to anyone about it, just tried to get on with it. I was drinking a bit too much, more than I would have. Then one evening I was walking home from a lecture. I had an exam the next day and felt under such pressure. And I saw a bus coming down the street. The place was real slushy because it was around December.
“The bus was coming down and I just said to myself, ‘That’s the answer!’ I stepped out onto the street when it was maybe 20 metres away and, just as it was getting closer, I stepped back. And it frightened me. I said, ‘What happened there?’
“So I rang one of my sisters I’d be very close to. I said, ‘I’m not well, I’m not myself!’ We talked through it and then I just went to a counsellor. The first one didn’t match me, the second one didn’t. Then I found a wo man back in Ireland who was just a lifesaver and started going to her.
“And I realised there was a lot of things I hadn’t given due significance to. And that was a great experience because it kind of brought me back to myself. But it was kind of gradual. It wasn’t like two sessions, that’s it, done. I was still playing for Clare, still going out in front of 40 or 50 thousand people, but having a panic attack the day before.
“So it was a gradual process, probably the best part of 18 months to two years before I was able to look at it in the rear-view mirror and see it maybe for what it was.”
Those two years fed the energy behind SOAR, a non-profit organisation he co-founded in 2012 to help teenagers navigate their way through what can be the most volatile, tumultuous years of their lives. It was inspired by ‘Every Heart Beats True: The Jim Stynes Story’, a documentary highlighting the late, great Dubliner’s work with The Reach Foundation in Melbourne.
Griffin has since moved on from SOAR, but his interest in the mental health of young people endures, italicised in this week’s publication of his book, ‘The Teenager’s Book of Life’.
Hindsight, he says, now educates him on how so much of what he was driven to do as a teenager was governed by a desire to earn approval, not simply from his father, but from his local village of Ballyea.
“You know, when you make the Clare team at 14, that’s what’s celebrated in the village,” he explains. “There’s great approval in that. But then you go on and play for the seniors and you play in an All-Ireland final and….amazing approval.
“And I think, probably unknown to me, that was the fuel that drove a lot of what I did. There’s a gift and a curse in that. Because it comes with
a lot of pressure as well. ‘Jeez, I better not mess up. I’ll let all these people down, let myself down, my whole identity will crash.’
“When my father died, it really caused me to question, ‘Well, who am I?’ It’s almost like I didn’t need that approval any longer. He wasn’t there to give it to me, so I kind of started thinking about other things and then I did the cycle across Canada.
“That really for me was trying to prove to myself that I was strong enough to do it. So I think a lot of that sport was probably seeking approval from people.”
Griffin is candid about the kind of verbal and physical intimidation he encountered routinely as a celebrated young hurler, specifically at club level.
“Like I played sport for a long time and I met so many bullies,” he reveals. “I could fill Croke Park with the amount of bullies I met, especially when I was younger, who told me what they were going to do to me.
“’I’m going to break your hand before this game is over!’ ‘Going to break both your hands!’ And I learned pretty quickly that most of them were saying that was because they were bullies. The guy who would break your hand wouldn’t tell you that he was going to do it. He would just do it. Or try to do it.
“So I learned quickly, maybe 16 or 17, that not everyone’s going to do me a favour. Not everyone’s got good intentions.
“It was more so at club. In county hurling, guys know that kind of s**t just doesn’t wash. The intimidation doesn’t really work. But at club level when I was younger and playing with older men – I was 16 or 17, they were in their late twenties – especially when I was starting to make a bit of a name for myself, they would tell you…”
Griffin remembers one game particularly in which a venerable Cork opponent counselled him beforehand: “The way this is going to work Tony, I’ll give you one or two points, but don’t you dare try and embarrass me.”
Even the death of his father from cancer became fuel for the bullies’ poison.
“I remember playing club games within Clare where fellas would be walking past me after I’d missed a shot, saying, ‘Jesus your father would be so ashamed of you right now!’ That kind of stuff goes on, but usually at a lower level.”
Griffin now remembers his breakdown after that charity cycle as “a dark, dark 18 months”, but is adamant that it lit a fire inside that led to the creation of SOAR, the organisation that monopolised his career-path for almost a decade.
Initially, he had plans to join the corporate world after leaving. But that instantly felt like a failed skingraft.
Jumped
“I went to my first one or two workshops in different parts of the world with these high-level execs and I sat at the back of the room, saying: ‘This is not me!’, he remembers now. “But I didn’t know what was me. I had jumped off this moving train.”
Then a friend asked one day, if free to choose his passion, what would Griffin do? ‘I’d write!’ was his immediate answer. That conversation begat his second book (the first, ‘Screaming at the Sky – My Journey’ was published in 2010). Griffin describes ‘The Teenager’s Book of Life’ as “the first thing I’ve done that involved no seeking of approval.
“Because my manifesto for it was to be daringly honest and write to young people. Not to please anyone. There’s a song that has the line, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’. And not needing the approval of others has just been a wake-up call for me. Because it’s like an underground river. It’s there so long, when you start to see it, you start to see it everywhere.
“That’s why I’m proud of this book. Because I know there’s not one ounce of ‘I hope you like this’ in it.”