Cork Full-Forward line - 1990 to 1992 - Thursday, July 26, 2007 By Denis Walsh of the Sunday Times newspaper
It wasn’t the most elegant goal they ever scored but it was beautiful and, in a sense, you’ve never seen anything like it. Ger Fitzgerald pulled on the ball under the Cusack Stand, a short, quick jab, rolling it along the ground into John Fitzgibbon’s corner. Two Galway players raced towards it but Fitzgibbon beat them both and, in the face of a three-man pile-up, he deflected the ball across the square with a one-handed flick. Kevin Hennessy stunned the ball softly with his first touch and swept it to the net with his second. *
The 1990 All-Ireland final was 48 seconds old. All of Galway’s plans for a clean sheet had been devastated by four touches and three left-handed strokes, not one of which had been made from the hand or played with a full swing. Strip it down and the structure of that move shouldn’t have supported a goal but that summer the Cork full-forward line was capable of anything. *
Fitzgerald started that game on the wing - as he had in the first round against Kerry - but he moved inside later and if you asked any hurling follower between 1990 and 1992 to name the Cork full-forward line it would have come easily to mind, quick as a phrase: Fitzgerald, Hennessy, Fitzgibbon. *
That summer they scored 14-25 in the championship; in those three seasons Cork played 13 championship matches and their aggregate contribution was 29-47, all but 1-5 of it from play. Ignore the points tally: gaze at the goals. As men, as players nothing about them was alike but as a full-forward line they had a chemistry for which there was no formula or scientific explanation. It worked; joyously, gloriously, it worked. *
And then they were gone. Retired, emigrated, finished. Maybe you haven’t given them another thought in the last 15 years and, now that we mention them, maybe you’re inclined to wonder how they’re getting on? *
To that question, there is no straight answer.
The first wonder is that they ever got together. For the 1989 championship Hennessy and Fitzgerald were cut from the Cork panel. Fitzgibbon was taken off, scoreless, after 52 minutes of Cork’s Munster semi-final against Waterford and was dropped for the replay. Cork lost and that management team didn’t get a second chance. In the autumn Canon Michael O’Brien took over with Gerald McCarthy as his right hand man and they saw a different Cork team. *
To see Hennessy back in a Cork jersey, though, required a special vision. On his tall, broad frame 15 stones could sit quietly but anything more than that tended to wobble accusingly. At the beginning of 1990 he was nearly 17 stones and by the time the championship came round he was still carrying excess baggage. He scored 2-3 in the Munster semi-final and was caught on camera exchanging jerseys with a Waterford player. Putting a caption to the pictures The Sunday Game commentator couldn’t resist the suggestion that he needed to lose a few pounds. This was June. *
Canon O’Brien and McCarthy had both worked with Hennessy on Cork teams before and, apart from his hurling, they knew what he would bring to the dressing room. He was a comic with an unrestricted license to slag. Nothing he might say was deemed to be in bad taste, nobody was sacred. *
“I used to have a cut off the Canon and Frank [Murphy, county board secretary] and all the rest of them that the boys used to be afraid of,”
says Hennessy, “and the gang used enjoy it. It broke the atmosphere…I remember the Canon was on a roll at a team meeting inside in Jury’s one night. He had a Cork jersey hanging up and a Tipp jersey on the ground and he was standing on it and he said ‘I watched a video of the drawn match [1991] and only three forwards played that day.’ So I stood up and I said, ‘Who are the other two?’ Silence - and yer man [the Canon] had fire coming out of his ears.” *
The other thing about Hennessy was that, by then, he’d seen it all. Won All-Irelands, lost them. Been on the team and off it. Was dropped for one All-Ireland final and was free-scoring in another. You name it. Along the winding road he was Cork captain when Tipp made their breakthrough in 1987 but in those days that position held a shallow ceremonial status. *
“Head or harp - that was the only choice you got and if you won the toss you were told which way to play. Before extra time in Killarney [1987] the selectors came over to tell me what I was supposed to say. They made their speeches and then they called on me. I said what I was told to say and I was half-way through it when Teddy Mc [Carthy] reared up. ‘No harm if you did something yourself.’ I couldn’t say any more - he was right.” *
On his bad days Hennessy took plenty of stick and there was no public outcry when he was left out in 1989. But in the new Cork forward line he was the focal point. As a younger man he would have railed against the thought of hanging around the square but by 1990 he recognised the importance of it - and the convenience. For any full-back, he was a handful. *
“Sure he’d be pulling and dragging and playing the hurley and leaning in, you know, all elbows and hands,” says Ger Fitzgerald. “He’s a big man. But he was also very smart. Very quick brain. Sometimes he’d be wrecking your head, maybe, calling you to run there, go there, but at the same time he did read the game very well.” *
Hurling was plainer in those days. Cork didn’t have any governing pattern to their play. They let the ball in quickly to the full-forward line and given that all of them were over six foot they could manage the ball any way it came. At times, though, Fitzgerald and Fitzgibbon snuggled into Hennessy like chicks in a brood. In Fitzgibbon’s case, that would have been an undisguised play to feed his goals habit. *
“The Canon was on to Fitzy one day about playing more in the corner,” says Fitzgerald, “and he said, ‘Well, I suppose they [the fans] paid their money over there too Canon.’ But Fitzy never thought he’d score a goal in the corner and goals were his thing. He was a serious goalscorer.” *
In those three years Fitzgibbon’s tally was 11-7 in the championship. Points were a refuge of last resort. Six of those goals were against Tipperary and that wasn’t an accident either. One year he failed to score against Kerry in the first round of the championship, simply because a game like that would act as a tranquilizer to his interest. *
“John Fitz would only get excited if it was Tipp he was playing,” says Hennessy, "or Kilkenny. Other than that…I remember Barry Egan’s first Munster final [1992]. The Canon said to the forwards, ‘Get together there and decide what ye’re doing.’ Barry Egan came in all enthusiastic and I said, ‘Come on now, we’ll get it going from the start,’ and John piped up.
‘Relax,’ he said. ‘We’ll win by a score a man.’" *
Fitzgibbon had played in his first Munster final as a 19 year old in 1986 and scored a goal that day too. But injuries interrupted his progress and against Tipp in Killarney in 1987 he came on and was taken off again. By 1990, though, he was primed to explode. Before the All-Ireland final he had scored 4-2 in two matches and there was more to come. *
Dr Con Murphy, Cork team doctor for nearly 40 years, tells a story about the morning of that match. He was walking near the team hotel with Tomas Mulcahy and Fitzgibbon when he asked him what he would do if he scored a goal that
afternoon: "‘I’m going to celebrate like Ringy,’ he said, “and he imitated Ringy around the road in Dublin.” *
Late in the game, with the outcome against Galway in the balance, Fitzgibbon scored two goals in 90 seconds. The celebration was just like the one he had unveiled for his second goal against Tipp two months earlier: arms aloft and spread, hurley jerked into the air at full length, a jump and a skip: just like Christy Ring. *
Ring had finished playing before Fitzgibbon was born but he made no secret of his adulation for the greatest hurler that ever lived. Ring’s son, Christy junior, was one of his closest friends in Cork and he was a regular visitor to Ring’s brother, Willie John, in Cloyne. In that house the hurling talk is scholarly and searching and that would have appealed to Fitzgibbon too. *
“Fitzy was a student of the game,” says Fitzgerald, "he’d do a lot of thinking about it. He’d be a deep sort of character. Kevin would be always bubbling and talking whereas Fitzy would be quieter and more into himself.
Now, he wouldn’t be averse to a great one-liner put-down. With one sentence he might wipe the floor with Kevin. He’d be quick-witted. But there was a certain mystique about him. It was always ‘John Fitz this, John Fitz that.’
I’m not sure he particularly cultivated that, it was just the way he was." *
Part of the mystique was that he didn’t have a carefully groomed public persona. As a rule he didn’t do interviews and when he came into contact with the trappings of celebrity he was liable to be curt with them. He was man-of-the-match in the 1989 Cork county final, for example, but at the victory lunch on the following day he grew impatient with all the pomp and left early, leaving his brother to accept the trophy. *
Fourteen months later he won his first All-Star. Before he emigrated to the States Fitzgibbon often travelled during the winter and he arrived at that All Stars banquet directly from his latest tour, wearing jeans and a shirt, neglecting to bring the appropriate attire: so, an employee of the hotel was despatched to fetch a dress suit. *
Charlie Haughey was Taoiseach and guest of honour and as the award winners were called out they received their trophies from Haughey on stage. But the Taoiseach missed Fitzgibbon’s name and, handing over the statuette, asked him who he was. “I’m John Fitzgibbon,” he replied, “and who are you?”
Whether the story is true or not was less important than the fact that people were prepared to tell it and others were prepared to believe it. From what people knew of Fitzgibbon they readily accepted that it could be true.
There were often games where Fitzgibbon wouldn’t be engaged in the play for long spells and in his three tussles with Paul Delaney in 1991 and 1992 the Tipp corner-back cleared plenty of ball. But what Fitzgibbon had was a deadly capacity to rubbish his marker’s dominance in a fraction of the time it took to build it up. *
Fitzgerald was different because Cork always knew what they would get from him and it would be same in the first minute as the last. His father Paddy had been one of the most cherished players on the All-Ireland winning team of 1966 and Fitzgerald inherited his father’s outsize heart. He was a fine hurler, a fearless competitor and an uncomplicated player. He was busy and classy in equal measure and those years were his best in a Cork jersey.
“At that time,” he says, “we would have fancied ourselves marking anybody on a one-to- one.” From that blissful feeling, everything else flowed.
For three weeks Hennessy had pains in his head. Bad pains, so bad he couldn’t sleep. His doctor prescribed Solpadine but the pain took no notice.
Hennessy asked his doctor to take a second look and he saw a repeat prescription coming across the desk: “‘Hold it,’ I said, ‘this is more than Solpadine.’ Now, I was thinking migraine.” *
He was sent for scans and was sitting on a trolley in the hospital corridor with his wife Una when the specialist returned with the results. Hennessy watched the specialist come through the door and his body language screamed at him. “I said, ‘Una, we’re in trouble here.’ And she says, You’re always the same.’” *
The specialist walked over flanked by a pair of nurses and broke the news, masked in a thin veil of jargon: they’d found a “mass” on his brain. One of the nurses looked at Hennessy and sensed the urgent need for brutal clarity:
“You’ve brain tumours,” she said. “The surgeon will be down to see you.” *
There were five brain tumours: all inoperable. *
“When you hear cancer you think: Dead. And my mother was of the opinion, ‘Everyone beats cancer now, come on.’ I said to my mother, ‘Not everyone beats it.’ I read a very good book about beating cancer and the thing you must admit is that it can take you. If you admit that, everything is alright. If you can’t admit that you’re in trouble. It’s all psychological; it’s all about the right attitude.” *
Word spread quickly that Hennessy was in a bad way and the companion rumour was that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending. Hennessy lived with that fear too but everything the specialists told him countered that feeling.
"They were positive all the time. They did a biopsy and they said, ‘Good news. We can treat it.’ But it’s hard to see the bright side all the time.
When you’d be on your own in the hospital in the morning you’d be crying away to yourself. It was tough going. " *
The treatment regime was severe and from last June Hennessy was in hospital for nearly six months. For five weeks they did radio therapy every morning and after that they moved on to chemotherapy. “I found the radio therapy harder because it burnt you. You’d lie there with a mask and they tied you down…The last two chemotherapies I was sick, especially the second last one. I didn’t eat for about a month, I was only picking at things. All the hair fell out and I lost three and a half stone - but they were small things. I have it all back on again now.” *
When he was sick the hurling community rallied around. Old Cork players used call in on their lunch hour and send him texts. He got a card signed by all the Tipperary players from the late 80s and 90s and Nicky English kept in touch. For his morale it was massive. “You know, you’d hate 'em [when you were playing] and you kill 'em if got a chance during a match but when that was over that was it. With these fellas it goes beyond hurling.” *
For the last six years Hennessy has been a selector with the Cork U-21s.
Last summer, if he was released from hospital for an hour or two, he’d go down the Pairc to watch training or pick a team but when Cork played Tipp in the U-21 Munster final he watched it from his hospital bed. *
They played again last Tuesday night and he patrolled the sideline in Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Cork trailed by seven points with ten minutes left and won by a point. In this life, there’s always hope. *
“I love Christmas and I’m really looking forward to it this year because, you know, I thought I wouldn’t be around for it. I’ve been for two scans since the treatment finished and there are no signs of any tumours. I’m still fighting it. Next November now is my next scan…” *
Hennessy hasn’t seen Fitzgibbon since they last played for Cork in June 1993. Fitzgerald has bumped into him a few times, just by chance, when Fitzgibbon was home on visits. Without asking him, though, they would have known the outline of Fitzgibbon’s new life in Boston. That he was married with children, that he had a successful business, that he hurled for the Cork club out there and ran marathons in his spare time. But, with Fitzgibbon, you would never know everything. *
Two years ago Fitzgerald ran into him at the Kilmacud Sevens on the weekend of the 2005 All-Ireland final. Fitzgibbon’s passion for rock climbing came up in conversation but Fitzgibbon neglected to say what he had done that summer. Typical. *
Early in 2005 Fitzgibbon made contact with the Irish climber Terence ‘Banjo’
Bannon. Banjo was organising an expedition to K2. No Irishman had ever reached that summit and Banjo was making his third attempt. Fitzgibbon wanted to join him. *
Banjo hadn’t heard of him as a hurler and didn’t know of him as a climber but they talked and Banjo was impressed. That summer Fitzgibbon had planned an assault on the Rupal Face of Annapurna but his partner had pulled out:
Annapurna is the most dangerous mountain in the world, claiming more lives per successful summit than any other peak. On that list, K2 comes second. *
Everest is the only peak higher than K2 but Everest has sold some of its soul to commerce now with teams of skilled sherpas guiding ‘tourist’
climbers to the top every year. In an average year 200 climbers might make it to the summit of Everest; some years nobody makes it to the top of K2. *
Fitzgibbon shared Banjo’s distaste for assisted summits and on K2 it would just be the two of them. They had a team to help them carry their equipment on the 75 km walk to base camp but after that it was just them. For Fitzgibbon it was his first attempt at a peak over 8,000 metres: he was ready. *
“He was jumping out of his skin,” says Banjo. “I never had a stronger fella climbing with me in my life. He was far stronger at the [high] altitude than me. He was very focused and his mental attitude was unbelievable. Strong, determined rugged. He was a huge support on the mountain. Very methodical, very meticulous about safety. Does a lot of background work too. He’d have looked at it from every angle.” *
They climbed in the summer months and on the mountain their only contact with the outside world was by satellite phone. Banjo couldn’t help overhearing Fitzgibbon’s conversations. “He was ringing boys at home and ringing boys in the States asking how Cork were getting on. ‘What’s the line-up?’ ‘How are they getting on?’. All the way up the mountain.” *
After two and a half months bad weather forced them to turn back. Banjo regrouped and made another attempt with other climbers but Fitzgibbon needed to go home. “His wife was due their second child,” says Banjo, “and the child was coming pretty quick.” *
Banjo made another unsuccessful attempt on K2 last summer. Fitzgibbon turned his mind to other targets. A few months ago he tried to scale the Eiger in the Swiss Alps. Climbing it by the north face is one of the toughest ice climbs in the world and that’s the route Fitzgibbon chose. *
It takes about 16 hours to reach the top but less than four hours from the top calamity struck. "There was a bit of loose rock and he came away with it. The rope saved him but even then he fell over 100 feet and he was bounced off the rocks. It probably would have been worse than a car crash.
If it was any other man he’d have been killed outright but he’s as strong as a horse." *
The alarm was raised by a couple of Swiss climbers who happened across Fitzgibbon. Mark Zeigler was involved in the rescue operation and he says it wasn’t straightforward. Darkness was starting to close in and the location of the accident made it difficult for the rescue helicopter to get close.
Eventually they had to lift him about 170 metres, a much longer lift than ideal. “He was quite lucky to survive the fall,” says Zeigler.*
Both of Fitzgibbon’s legs were badly broken and there was damage to his hip and back. He spent five weeks in a Swiss hospital before being transferred to a hospital in Boston. A few weeks ago, however, he was discharged and he’s on the mend now. He expects to be back driving a car soon. *
And climbing? Take what you know of him and make a guess. *
Their time together came to a bad end. Hennessy’s form dipped during 1992; Fitzgibbon’s goal did enough to hurt Tipperary in a tight, low-scoring Munster semi-final but he was injured in the Munster final and didn’t play again until September; Fitzgerald picked up an eye injury at the end of 1991 and that didn’t help him. His retina was crinkled and he lost depth vision in that eye. And then the1992 All-Ireland final against Kilkenny was a disaster.
Hennessy was up early on the morning of the match and went to the lobby of the team hotel where he bumped into the Canon. The Canon had an idea: he wanted Hennessy and Fitzgibbon to switch. “He said, ‘Discuss it amongst yourselves and only if ye want to do it will we do it.’ I met John Fitz and he was so easy he said, ‘I don’t mind.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘We won’t do it at all.’ ‘We won’t so,’ says John. Like, I didn’t mind marking Pat Dwyer [Kilkenny full-back] because Pat was like myself, he’d be slouching out to the ball, whereas Eddie O’Connor [Kilkenny corner back] would be flying out to it.” *
At the puck-around in UCD the Canon asked Hennessy what he thought and Hennessy told him. Maybe it was the way Hennessy said it or maybe the Canon had asked the question expecting only one answer. Either way, the Canon told them to think about it again. *
“We were pucking around and I was after calling my confidante, Dr Con. Con said, ‘Look, relax, don’t leave it bother you.’ The Canon came over to us again and I said ‘Canon, I’d prefer if we didn’t.’ I got on the bus and Frank [Murphy] was standing there. We were heading directly to Croke Park from the puck around and he said to me: ‘I’m telling you, you’re in the corner.’” *
“The first four or five balls that came into John Fitz were grand high balls and he was lethal on the low ones. With me and Eddie it was 20 yards to the ball and Eddie was there 19 yards before me.” *
Cork lost and Hennessy’s point was the only score between the three of them.
Ger Fitzgerald was captain that year but the ball didn’t run for him that day and he was replaced twenty minutes from the end. *
“I didn’t have a problem with it really,” says Fitzgerald. “I don’t think we made enough moves [during the match]. Previously, we’d have moved the forward line around - that day we weren’t going well and we didn’t move the forward line around. We probably should have. But I had no issue with being taken off. At the time you’d be gutted and it compounded the disappointment when you lose but I’d no problem with it.” *
Hennessy had announced his intention to quit and there was an assumption that Fitzgerald would follow him but both of them decided to give it one more shot in 1993. Fitzgibbon wintered in the States and came home in time for the concluding match of the League final trilogy against Wexford: scored a goal. *
He started at wing-forward in the championship against Clare; Fitzgerald started on the bench and came on for the last 13 minutes; Hennessy wore number 14. A couple of months earlier Cork had destroyed Clare in a League play-off in Thurles and Hennessy had taken Anthony Daly for 1-2. In the championship, though, Daly was a different beast. *
“Anthony was clearing a good few balls and every time he’d clear a ball he’d turn around and shout, ‘Sure we can’t win, we’re only Clare!’ He’d say it out loud but it was meant for me.” *
Daly was man of the match and Hennessy was replaced 11 minutes after half-time. And that was it. Finished. Fitzgibbon was only 26 and pleas for him to return and play for Cork kept reaching him in Boston over the next couple of years but, like the other two, he never played for Cork again. *
Fitzgerald played club hurling for another six years, spent three years with the Cork minors as a selector and coach and is a Cork senior selector now.
Under his watch Cork played Tipp last night in a luke warm qualifier but in their time matches against Tipp had the power to make you as a Cork player or break you.
Source: The Sunday Times