DERMOT KELLY WALKED out of the 1955 Munster hurling final a hero.
Limerick had secured their first provincial title in 15 years and the 23-year-old Kelly had scored 1-12 from his team’s 2-15 total. In what was then a 60-minute final, his feat had never before been accomplished; now forever unsurpassable.
Throughout his youth in the 1930s Limerick hurling had been a dominant force and Mick Mackey the talisman. By ’55, Mackey was the county team’s de facto manager. Kelly and his teammates, owing to their swift style of play and relentless running, became best known as his “greyhounds”.
“Speed and more speed was the secret of Limerick’s tremendous victory,” the Cork Examiner declared on the Monday, Limerick’s energy all the more impressive on what was a sweltering hot Sunday. “Limerick burned them up with speed, and it was nothing unusual to see a Clareman beaten by yards to the ball.”
Theirs was a persistence rooted in youth. Although most had expected Clare to win, it was quickly assumed that this young Limerick team, heightened by their proximity to the legendary Mackey, had a sense of destiny about them.
“It was as if the hands of time had been turned back to that golden era,” the Evening Herald suggested, “and as if to make their portion more sweet, there appeared on the horizon Dermot Kelly, from Claughaun, who, with a superlative display, left all and sundry satisfied that a new Mick Mackey . . . has now emerged.”
Eighteen years would pass before Limerick experienced Munster success again.
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In Limerick hurling’s grand scheme, 1955 was respite in a prolonged period of drudgery and irrelevance. “This was Limerick hurling at its lowest ebb,” Éamonn Cregan once told me, a star of the 1973 team (and another Claughaun clubman) that went one better than Mackey’s Greyhounds and won an All-Ireland.
As the new ‘Mick Mackey’ of a false dawn, Dermot Kelly, despite his scoring heroics, could have inhabited a sorry realm in the years that followed.
“He was always far more interested in what I was doing and what was currently happening,” says Stephen Lucey, the former Limerick dual player and a nephew of Kelly’s. “My cousins told me that he was massively proud that I played for Limerick, he just loved that.”
Unquestionably proud of representing his county, it never appeared to make much sense to Kelly that what he achieved at 23 should overly influence how he lived his life thereafter.
A father, a husband, a golfer, a songwriter, a poet and a bank manager, the fulfilment he wrought from life was so great as to barely be constrained by the remaining 67 years he lived up to his passing last week.
Famous for what he achieved as a Limerick hurler, Clare became his home.
“Lahinch is where we all would hang out,” recalls Lucey, the all-night singing sessions of which his uncle Dermot would hold court among his fondest memories. “He wrote these great songs about the likes of Muhammad Ali, Padraig Harrington, Katie Taylor, about Young Munster when they won the AIL in 1993.”
And it was in Lahinch, crucially, that Dermot Kelly golfed.
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Captain of the famous Lahinch Golf Club, Dermot Kelly could mix it with the best of them – away from the course, particularly.
“He was great friends with Ken Venturi,” notes Lucey, the 1964 US Open champion a regular visitor to Ireland over the years. “And do you remember that famous photograph of Jean van de Velde?”
Stood in the water at Carnoustie with hands on hips and trouser legs rolled up over his knees, that infamous photograph captures the Frenchman van de Velde in the process of blowing what seemed an unassailable lead at the 1999 Open Championship.
“Well, Dermot wrote a poem about that,” explains Lucey,” and in the Dunraven Hotel in Adare after one of JP McManus’ first golf fundraisers Dermot recited it on stage.
“And sure didn’t he walk off into the crowd then where Jean van de Velde was sitting and present him with the poem! Dermot gave him a hug and there was this big cheer for the pair of them.”
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In later years, Lucey recognised the value in what years remained and found himself spending more and more time in Dermot’s company.
“He was exactly like all the rest of us really, a massive Limerick fan,” he says, hurling the focal point of all discussions right up until their final meeting last Saturday week.
“It became kind of obvious that he was coming toward the end of his life, so I just sat there with him. He was sitting up, his eyes were open and he was looking at Mayo vs Kerry on the television. I was trying to talk to him but he was just looking past me at the match.”
No longer able to remain in his own home, Dermot’s family ensured that he was surrounded by what few possessions mattered most: some photographs, his guitar and what Lucey suspects might be the very hurley Kelly scored 1-12 with in a Munster final all those years ago.
“When it kind of got to the time that I had to be going, I was holding his hand and he just kind of grabbed it and looked at me,” recalls Lucey. “I was getting a lump in my throat and in my head I was just thinking, this is it. ‘Dermot, you take care now and Sean (Dermot’s son) is here with you,’ I told him. ‘I’m only around the corner if you need me at all.’
“And yeah, that was my final meeting with Dermot.”
As difficult though it may be to summarise such a life, Lucey returns to the words Dermot’s daughter Aileen committed to a Facebook post following her father’s passing:
Rest in peace, Dad, you had the fullest life
A real and rare character that always seized the day
A singer, a songwriter, a sportsman, and the very best storyteller, we’ll miss you all so much
I’m sure the sing song has already started up there with Mam by your side smiling with pride and clapping away
Dermot Kelly left this world a hero, and so much more beyond.