CHRISTY RING’S HURLING days with Cork came to a finish near the moment games started to be broadcast on television. 

There is little decent footage of him playing. The best by far is the league final of 1960, captured by Louis Marcus and his team for the short film where he famously demonstrates the skills of the sport he came as close as anyone to mastering. 

No such recording of Mick Mackey exists, his great days with Limerick coming in the 1930s and 40s. 

This one point made by Arthur O’Dea in his new book Mackey and Ring, which starts with the famous picture of the pair and goes from there, really.

The highest compliment I can pay the book is that I finished it less than three weeks after starting – possibly a post-having-children record. Where once books were devoured and then contemplated, now they are read in small pockets of space under the gegenpress. 

The depth of research and thought-provoking interpretations of the facts will kept me turning pages into the hours when I should have been asleep. The book also encourages you to form your own perspectives. The more I read the more I came to feel it was better for Mackey and Ring, and better for us, that their deeds were not preserved in film. 

Stories

For the most part of our time on this planet people foraged and organised and hunted by day, and at night sat by the fire and told stories. The stories could be about a lot of things, but many believe a recurring theme was the great acts of ancestors. The hunts of yesteryear made immortal through the retelling and, well, embellishment. 

It wouldn’t do the atmosphere, nor the evolution of our species, any good if someone was to pipe up that maybe the bison wasn’t that fierce and Trevor’s arrow hit him from only ten paces away. He didn’t actually get the shot off while doing a backflip out of a snake-infested tree on the dark side of the valley. You need to dream, to be inspired. 

Games on television can inspire, especially at that time. Film of old games, though, can harm the myth, which is maybe the most important part of the game. 

A book on Mackey and Ring and the lore and lingering magic around them is irresistible. Would it work for icons of the 1960-80s the way it does for the 30s through 50s? Does a book on Eddie Keher and Joe Cooney have the same allure? Sadly not. 

Keher and Cooney are in the category with every other retired star of the TV era, respected universally for their feats, but there’s also a sense of ‘we’ve seen GAA Gold on TG4’. What they did might have been amazing, but by the standards of today it can look pedestrian. 

Often, you can watch a game that was hailed as a classic at the time and it can hurt your eyes now. The decision-making and skill execution do not compare well to what you have become accustomed to. 

These feelings are undeniable, yet they miss entirely the context and true meaning of what was happening. You’re not really taking into account a lot of things, including underfoot conditions, the quality of equipment, strength and conditioning levels, the longevity of careers of some of the star players or even the level of TV production which can enhance the modern version. 

We just focus on the bare product, and find it lacking. This is sad. Players of old are not so much preserved by film, more undermined, sometimes even mocked by it. The first among many casualties is the story. 

Myth

Few sports are as rooted in myth as hurling. It’s a blessed thing there is no footage of when all that went down. If so you’d have lads clipping it on socials today and asking was it really a murderous hound, or just more of a tenacious spaniel? Did he even kill the dog or just give it a gammy leg? Maybe if he’d put a proper grip on that hurley he might have generated more force . . . As it stands he was lucky to have become Cú Chulainn, rather than staying as plain old Setanta: a passable striker of the ball for the time but not at the level of most of today’s Junior A players. 

When held accountable by the TV camera everybody becomes average soon enough. Someone like Cian Lynch, for many the most impressive hurler of the past decade, may have what appears to be only average vision and speed of execution by 2056. This bypasses the critical element of how Lynch makes us feel when he plays now. How he has innovated, thrilled, inspired and given people a reason to talk about what they have seen, to prolong the joy, to double on it. 

Ring famously said that the best hurlers will always belong to today, not the past, and the best will always be to come. That’s only natural. If we didn’t have such progress you’d be worried. 

What O’Dea’s book achieves is to show us how the greats of today are only possible because of the colossal life force and impact of those who have played before. Hurlers like Mackey and Ring who inhabited the space between Heaven and Earth, where God-given talent meets human compulsion. Who took hurling as far as it had ever been and kept going, into new ground. 

There remains a purity to their endeavours. Their names continue to echo. We still get the picture, in part because there aren’t many. Just stories that rise to meet their brilliance.