ON September 1, 1963, Liam Hinphey was where he has spent much of his adult life. Croke Park has been a second home.
Mostly hurling, often football and even an odd rugby match. Indeed, Leinster’s Heineken Cup semi-final with Munster in 2009 is right up there for him.
It was always a bit of craic. He and the brother Colm ducking and diving, finding the gatemen they knew to get in ticketless, and then the stewards they knew who’d get them into the Ard Comhairle.
Between 1947 and when he stopped going a few years ago, Hinphey missed just one All-Ireland hurling final, the 1976 decider between Cork and Wexford.
That same day, he was caught managing Dungiven footballers in a championship semi-final.
“Most reluctantly, I didn’t go. I examined my conscience afterwards.”
The deep interest in football – though to call it love, particularly of the modern game, would be a stretch – is one of the many surprising elements of his character.
The front room of his home is mostly a shrine to the family’s hurling exploits. The graduation pics, his own from UCD included, are tightly packed together at the corner of a wall dominated on three sides by the black and white sash of Kevin Lynch’s.
There are two packed bookshelves as well. You could find most things there, from Lar Corbett’s autobiography through his favourite, To Kill A Mockingbird.
Corbett’s autobiography was a present from his late friend, James O’Kane, who mischievously dumped it through the letterbox one Christmas morning knowing Hinphey’s “natural anathema” to anything Tipperary.
“I must confess, to my eternal pride, I haven’t read a page.”
On that Sunday in 1963, he was heading into Croke Park to see his native Kilkenny beat Waterford in that year’s All-Ireland hurling final.
The following day, he took up a temporary teaching post in St Patrick’s secondary school in Dungiven, which would become permanent after a brief hiatus at St Pius’.
The hinterlands of county Derry were no stranger to him. His father, William, came from Ballymaguigan and his mother, Margaret O’Neill, was from Magherafelt.
William’s politics were no secret and he left south Derry as a relatively young man. Like most, he had three options. The army, the Gardai or America.
He chose the Gardai and was dispatched to Kilkenny in 1939. Margaret initially stayed home in Derry and, being with child, she was taken in by the Mary Rankin maternity hospital in Coleraine.
So Liam Hinphey was actually born a Derry man. He spent more than a few summer holidays up the road with his uncle Con O’Neill, where he toured the county watching football.
But they’d moved down to his father soon after his birth and although he only spent his first 17 years there before heading back to Derry through Dublin, his allegiances to Kilkenny are as strong as his unaffected accent.
The family lived in Kilkenny city, where Liam went to school in the tiny St Patrick’s across the way from the glossier Christian Brothers’ school.
What’s small is beautiful. St Patrick’s produced hurlers, footballers, boxers, basketballers. And a few academics too.
“There was a big cupboard full of boxing gloves. There was a Brother there, if he felt you were flexing your muscles a bit, he’d throw you in against an All-Ireland champion. The one thing you learnt was to keep your hands up.”
The interest in reading came from Brother Finnian, a Galway man whose passion for literature was matched by his love of football and hurling.
Hinphey was a James Stephens man, and that would throw him into a generation that allows him to speak of two greats, Brian Cody and Fan Larkin, as friends and clubmates.
They were both up in Dungiven club last night to mark Liam’s service to the GAA in the town. So too was former Down footballer Sean O’Neill, another friend with whom Hinphey once starred as a “stuntman” in a famous instructional film on Gaelic football.
Most would know him as the face of hurling in Derry. When he moved up, the club championship had just come back into being after a 13-year break. Before that, its existence had been sporadic at best.
He won his first two county medals as a player in 1963 and ’64 with the amalgamated St Finbarr’s team, which took in the loughshore clubs.
“Once I took the temperature of Dungiven”, he married Mary K Brolly in 1968. He’d play the rest of his days for Dungiven and would win another eight Derry SHC titles with the club as a player.
He anchored the defence for 15 years and was played for Derry across that time, winning an All-Ireland junior title with them in 1975, the year he regards as the best of his sporting life.
Hinphey impacted as a player in Derry. That, he knew, would not necessarily have been the case in Kilkenny.
But he took the grá for hurling north with him. When he left St Patrick’s primary school, he leant in the doors of the famous St Kieran’s College. There, he studied and pucked about. He won an U16 championship at centre-forward with James Stephens, but above all what he took from it was the lesson of humility and recognising your own limitations.
”I know at a personal level I wasn’t terribly well co-ordinated and appreciated very early on that I wasn’t a naturally gifted player.
“But sure there was feck all else. We weren’t exactly rolling in it, but you had a hurl, you fecked up to the field, that engaged you for some hours and you’d good companions.
“And, in spite of ourself, you improved a wee bit. We were very lucky in James Stephens that we’d guys in charge of teams that were old county players. If they smiled upon you at all, you grew visibly.
“I got on the team at U16, we won the county championship, I was centre-half forward and I felt like that was progress. I was gone out of the place by senior.”
Yet when found the bag of old, warped camogie sticks outside the changing rooms and summoned young volunteers to the field up on the hill in St Patrick’s Dungiven, it was the beginning of a legacy he couldn’t have dreamt of leaving.
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AS he sidles to the back door at what appears to be the front of the house – “it’s one of the quirks of my personality” – it’s a slow limp.
An ulcerated leg has given him bother and pain over the last three years. At Christmas, he had his second heart attack. The last time in the early 2000s they couldn’t operate, but this time they “forced their way through an artery this time so I had some surgery, which I tell you was fairly debilitating.”
“That’s the bulletin over…”
He hasn’t been involved hands-on with a team in Kevin Lynch’s since he helped their U14s win a Feile na nGael title in Croke Park seven years ago. These were sons of fathers.
The name they bear on their beating hearts now is one he’s proud to see them wear. Kevin Lynch was one of his young students, one of the stylish young hurlers he’d moulded that had won an All-Ireland ‘Special U16’ title with Derry in 1972.
Hinphey carried his coffin when his remains returned to Dungiven, and maintains that attempts to drag the club into political arguments ever since its renaming are “sh*t”.
“People who know the make-up of the club, there’s nothing overtly political about it. If hurling is politically overt, then we do that.”
His understanding of politics is deep, and his tolerance thin. His father was the same.
Hinphey revels in telling a story.
Brian McGilligan rang him one day a few years ago.
“Are you busy?”
“When did that happen? It was without my knowledge’.”
McGilligan told him to come up to the Curragh Road, just below the school and a couple of hundred yards from the club’s new pitch. There, they sat in the car laughing as they watched a footpath being laid down towards the field while a local TUV councillor bounced up and down, demanding to know under whose authority it was being done.
Hinphey has a tongue that as educated as it can be visceral. A few lashings are dealt upon citizens, as he calls them, and it’s done with an acerbic wit.
Just as it was from his perch in McReynolds’ Bar, where he’d hold court many evenings over a few pints of stout. Jim McGuigan once famously asked Hinphey for an office number, and was promptly given the number for the bar.
“That was the thing about the oul craic, it was harmless. You didn’t offend anybody, in fact there was an insistence that you didn’t. If you’d any wee grudges and wanted to work them out, there was always a way around it.”
He keeps his friends close. One particular story centres on Anthony O’Hara, with whom he’d go on an annual pilgrimage to the Leinster hurling final. O’Hara always drove, which was handy since Hinphey never learned to.
O’Hara hurled under him in the first Feile na nGael in Tipperary, to where they travelled 15-strong in the back of Terence McMacken’s van.
“Aidan Hegarty had an Anglia – some guys travelled in luxury. There were only about eight in it.”
When they met Silvermines, they got the ‘go back to the Bogside’ treatment, and the Tipperary men had earmarked O’Hara for some special treatment.
“They attempted to bully the least-likely-to-be-bullied fella on the team.
“Jack Ryan hurled for Tipperary, he was standing beside me and said ‘I think they’ve got the wrong guy’.
“O’Hara hurled all round him, melled all round him, knocked boys rotten. The parish priest came over to me after it and said ‘I’ll keep number six’.”
He talks in glowing terms of his old James Stephens clubmate Fan Larkin, and from him he learnt that no matter what you do, there’s only so much that can be coached.
“Fan Larkin was playing for Kilkenny against Limerick. I reckon he was 37, but he’d deny that.
“Limerick came with a strategy. They isolated Larkin out on the right hand side with a fella Paddy Kelly, who was the All-Ireland 400 metres champion. He was a good hurler and could fly.
“The whole lot of the Limerick forwards f****d off, they left Larkin and Paddy Kelly and the ball was fed incessantly down the right hand side. And Paddy never got his hands near the thing.
“On the full-time whistle, they shook hands and Paddy said to Larkin: ‘Tell me this, I could beat you over 10 yards, I’d destroy you over 20 and you wouldn’t be at it over 30. And yet I never got my hands on the ball, you were out in front of me the whole time’.
“Larkin gave him the definitive answer. ‘I start out from a different place’.”
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HIS son Liam played both codes for Derry, while Kevin hurled over more than a decade. Along with Kieran, who has championship medals with Kevin Lynch’s, and Emer, they make up the Hinphey household.
Liam senior, whose alias around the town is ‘The Big Show’ was actually on the Derry football backroom team when they won Ulster Championships in 1975 and ’76, and had been involved with under-21 teams in the past.
He managed Dungiven footballers for a few years, and was briefly both chairman and secretary of the football club.
But he is, to all intents and purposes, the archetypal hurling man.
When he was trying to push hurling in the early days, there was a meeting held in the parochial house in Park. One prominent former county board member told the room that hurling ‘will be a great game for the lads who can’t play football’.
“I don’t know how the subsequent inhabitants lived because I put a curse on all their houses.”
His stints either in charge of teams with Kevin Lynch’s and Derry, or on the sideline alongside the man in charge, are too numerous and lengthy to ever attempt to quantify.
Suffice to say that he’s taken every age grade, bottom to top, and across 28 years in St Patrick’s Dungiven until his early retirement in 1991, he moulded a lot of them his own way.
Of slights, he recalls finding out he’d been replaced as Derry manager in ’94 when he was in Meagher’s before the All-Ireland football final and Brian McGilligan stepped in.
“I says ‘ya big bollocks, the least you might do is play a bit of hurling this year’. He turned around and said ‘what the f*** has me playing hurling got to do with you? You’re not there either’.
“That’s how I found out I wasn’t manager any more, McGilligan told me in Meagher’s that Joe McGurk had been given the job a fortnight before. So anybody ever said anything about [Eamonn] Coleman [who was sacked the same year], I say f*** it, at least they told him.”
Hinphey will turn 80 in July. It has been a life exceptionally well lived.
He was always one to know his own mind. As he recalls the cloud that hung over Dungiven during the hunger strike that led to Kevin Lynch’s death, he stops himself, as if scared to be drawn into negativity.
“There was a definite shadow over the place, and the fact that it would be lifted by somebody dying didn’t help much either…. but there were some good days. You were asking about highlights…”
There were many, but rather than narrow it down to one day, he felt his proudest any time he stood in Kevin Lynch Park and surveyed all that he’d helped build.
The pitch itself, he says, is a monument to Brian McGilligan, who subsequently fell out with the club and transferred to neighbouring Banagher.
“Sometimes there’d be an inordinate pride if you go up to the field. First of all, the field itself. You see it filled with citizens knee high and they’re all hurling away.
“And the expertise. There were three or four lads taking U10s and U12s, and their expertise was as good as you’d get in Kilkenny.”
His own proficiency came in many forms. He would have the walls of the changing room shaking with the thunder inside before a championship game, especially were it against the old enemy, Lavey.
That rawness was largely how people on the outside saw him, and he would be unsparing. Yet he was a student not just of hurling, but of sport and of life.
The conversation could turn from the merits of any book in the house – a conversation oft repeated now with Liam jnr, who’s taken to delving into his father’s collection – to Michael Murphy’s performance for Donegal on Saturday, right back to Croke Park on September 1, 1963.
Here he sits in his front room, able to turn conversation from his favourite John Wayne film to Jim McKeever’s performance in the Railway Cup final of 1956 – “Munster must have tried six men on him”.
He had a mind capable of making it more complicated. But to him, hurling was and is a simple game.
“The same presets always applied: Keep it simple, hit it on the f***ing ground, and don’t go running around with the hurl in one hand.”
Every generation that ever pulls on the black and white of Kevin Lynch’s or the red and white of Derry should be reminded of his name.
Those that ever met him certainly won’t forget it.
