GAA
All-Ireland final remains special for Joe Hayes
Former Tipperary star Joe Hayes looks back on a colourful career and tells Denis Walsh that the big day remains special
Denis Walsh
August 18 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Life after hurling: Hayes worked as a Garda and trained the Monaghan juniors and a series of camogie teamsBRYAN KEANE
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After the 1994 league final Joe Hayes was the last Tipperary player to reach the winners’ dressing room. Blood was still weeping from a cut above his eye. A few reporters were waiting inside and one of them wrote that the reception for Hayes was “the biggest cheer of the day.” In that circle Hayes was loved. The craic radiated from him in bright, blistering sunbeams and the others basked in it.
“A lot of people thought that Michael Coleman and Pat Malone would make mincemeat of myself and Pat King in the centre of the field,” Hayes told reporters. “But we more than held our own, didn’t we?”
The former Galway hurler Brendan Lynskey was the first to approach him after the final whistle. “He knew how much it meant to me,” Hayes says now. What Hayes had been through wasn’t common knowledge. In the Tipperary dressing room only a handful would have known. On Christmas Day 1993 he was admitted to St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin. The poignancy of the date was of no consequence: it just happened to be the day when he could no longer go on.
“That was a black time. I just got mixed up. I got mixed up in prescribed medication. Became addicted to it. It was a very, very hard time. The only thing I had — and I remember I brought it in — I had a hurley with me. I remember hitting a ball up against a wall but I had no interest in it.
“It was bad at the start. Babs [Keating, Tipperary manager] came in to see me and he said, ‘Hey, you’re part of our plans.’ I never forgot him for that. There was a caring side to Babs that people didn’t realise.”
Over the course of a couple of months his health improved and on February 18th he was discharged from hospital. Then a strange thing: Con Houlihan, the late sportswriter, mentioned Hayes in his Evening Press column. On that day. Hayes had met Con before and maybe word of Hayes’ circumstances had reached him. In any case Con thought of Joe.
“The world is well populated with people who take you at your own valuation,” he wrote. “They do not take comedians seriously — my friend Joe Hayes, brilliant Tipperary hurler, needs no telling.”
For half a dozen seasons in the late 80s and early 90s that Tipperary team illuminated the game: they were silky and smart and in the thick of every fight. Hayes shared that stage even though the spotlight didn’t always dwell on him. Not on the field at least. When Tipp made their breakthrough against Cork in the replayed Munster final in 1987 he was nursing a broken thumb from the drawn game; two years later, when they won Tipp’s first All-Ireland in a generation, he had played so poorly in the semi-final that he lost his place for September. Over the years that pattern continued: the distance between in and out was never comfortable.
“A lot of it was my own fault. I suppose, how would you put this, I was elsewhere when I should have been training maybe. I did things that were foolish. I didn’t murder anyone but, I don’t know, I wasn’t always in bed when I should have been.
“I remember one occasion I was meeting this girl. This is unbelievable. I said I’d go to Dublin. Where will I go in Dublin that would be safe? Ballsbridge. Paddy Cullen had a pub there. I went upstairs – I had a pint of Guinness and I bought the lady a drink. You wouldn’t believe who walked in, only Babs. He’d tell you that story. Talk about being caught.”
Along the way, though, there were plenty of good days. When Cork and Tipp drew again in 1991 he was left out for the replay (“very harshly dropped”) and in a convulsive match Tipp got themselves into a state halfway through the second half. “I tell you when they needed me they called me in. We were seven points down and I wasn’t on five minutes when we were seven points up. Lads ask me, ‘How do you think you played? And I said, ‘Are you stupid?’”
Self-glorification was part of his comic routine. “Who do you think is the best player in Ireland?” he asked Michael Lyster once. “And why am I?” Match commentaries were part of his shtick too, riffing on the great GAA voices: all of it was easy and natural and in any company he had a magnetic presence.
The 1994 league final was his second-last game for Tipp; a couple of weeks later he pulled his hamstring in a challenge match against Kilkenny (“chasing Billy Hennessy”) and missed the first round of the championship. Clare ambushed them in Limerick and Babs resigned. The next management team didn’t made contact, not even to say good luck and thanks. “Look, I was probably finished anyway. But no one ever thinks they’re finished, do they?”
His afterlife as an inter-county hurler came in an unlikely setting. In his job as a Garda he was posted to Emyvale in Monaghan and he was appointed player-manager of the county team. In 1997 they won the junior title, the only All-Ireland Monaghan have ever won; Babs and Michael O’Muircheartaigh were parachuted in to give pre-match team talks on the day of the final and Hayes scored three points from full-forward.
“I got sacked afterwards. I wasn’t getting on with the county board. They didn’t want to promote hurling. I switched to camogie after that. I trained the Monaghan camogie team, the Tyrone camogie team and the Lavey camogie team [in Derry]. Just to be a small bit involved.”
Along the way life wasn’t always simple and there times when he needed to take refuge in one of Cuain Mhuire’s treatment centres. On that journey he met Seamus McCormack, a coach and mentor in Sacred Heart Boxing Club in Omagh. “He’d be around the coffee shop [in the treatment centre] and he’d sit down with people who were going through a rough time and talk to them. He’d say, ‘Why don’t you come up to the gym and do a bit of a work out?’ I started going up doing work-outs there. A lovely man. A beautiful man. He looked after a lot of young kids in the area. The boxing club hadn’t a lot of funds but they’d be doing their best.”
When Hayes was in good form he was still a force of nature. One year he organised a celebrity golf classic at Warrenpoint in aid of Cuain Mhuire and Sacred Heart Boxing Club. The timesheet glittered with the biggest names in Irish sport. When Joe was asking what could they say?
Six years ago, when his club Clonoulty Rossmore, organised a white collar boxing event to generate funds Hayes was top of the bill: stitched on his robe was The White Tiger of Sevilla; his opponent was The Beast of Dundrum, Paudie Slattery; Seamus was in Joe’s corner.
“You often heard of corruption in boxing. I won but I didn’t get the verdict. They gave it a draw. I put him down twice. It’s on YouTube, you can watch it. I decked yer man twice. This man was full of muscle and I’ve n’er a muscle. I’d say there was a lot of illegal betting patterns but there was no investigation.”
After 25 years Hayes retired as a Garda, left Monaghan and decamped to Portugal. “It was more therapeutic than anything that I went out there,” he says. “The sun shining. It was nice. I got friendly with a fella who had a bar and I lived in an apartment at the rear of his house. He had a great swimming pool. Living like a king. I was doing a bit of gardening and landscaping, not too much now. I was working the head more than anything else. It was a beautiful life but I got bored with it.”
After seven years he moved to London for a few years and from there to Liverpool for a while. He’s back in Ireland at the moment, doing a bit. For how long? Plans are fluid. Day by day.
“Things improved, they did. They improved for the worse [laughs]. I’m still alive. I’m going well. The head is fine now. I enjoy going to matches and playing a bit of golf. You know, all my friends are getting old and there’s people getting sick and there’s people dying that we all know. It would make you realise, ‘Hey, Sunday, All-Ireland final day, we’re going down Jones’ Road: breathe it in.’”
Con Houlihan was right. Behind the laughs Joe was something else.
Something else.
