As we close the book on the sporting year and get ready for another massive one, we’re looking back on some of our favourite pieces of sportswriting published on The 42 in 2023.
Today: Declan Bogue sits down with Monaghan GAA great Eugene ‘Nudie’ Hughes for a no-holds-barred conversation that went far beyond life on the football pitch.
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***
YOU CAN REDUCE any man’s life to a series of numbers.
Eugene ‘Nudie’ Hughes was born right in the town of Castleblayney. On York Street, heading out to St Mary’s Park, home of Castleblayney Faugh’s.
When he was growing up, there were 28 properties on that small stretch of street. Fourteen of them were residential properties. One house had one child. Two houses had three children.
Patrick Hughes, a carpenter, and his wife Margaret, a saint, had 14 children, an equal split of seven boys and seven girls.
Eugene was the tenth. Two more sets of twins would follow.
All totted up, there were 83 children on the street.
Beside the Old Coach Inn now is a car park, around 50 metres square, narrowing at the top. Back in the ’60s, it was just a bare patch of land, covered in flinty gravel.
The children played games of football in small plastic sandals from one end of the day to the other. Stones would leak into their shoes but they hadn’t time to shake them out. They would just live with it.
On that patch, the young Eugene would practise a skill of running as hard as he could towards the ball, dip down, get the toe under the ball, get up straight as quick as possible. Drop the ball, take a few steps, repeat. Drop the ball, take a few steps, repeat.
They call it deliberate practice now. But it was just one of the many skills that led to him being Monaghan’s most decorated footballer.
He has three Ulster titles. A National League title. Three All-Stars won in corner-back and corner-forward. Three Railway Cup medals back when they were treasured. Three Dr McKenna Cups. A Centenary Cup won against Meath in 1984.
With his club, he won one minor championship. Three senior hurling championships. Two Owen Ward Cup leagues. Nine senior county championships. Two Ulster club championships.
He has two sons, Ciarán and Conor. He is married for the second time, to Teresa. He has a stepson, Óisín, that he has great fun with.
Today, he has 11 cancerous tumours. One big one.
**
It’s a Monday lunchtime in Castleblayney, a town that never lost its sense of bustle.
As you head round certain corners of the town, the public art is taken from the very earth it lives on.
Down by the Market Place, there’s a life-size model of Big Tom, that God of Country and Wobbly music so beloved in this corner of Ulster that prides in being called ‘The Nashville of Ireland’.
There’s a musical wall of fame featuring The Regal Dance Band, Ginger Morgan Band, Margo, and yes, Big Tom and the Mainliners.
Another mural of saxaphonist Paddy Cole surprises on a corner, and then, just a door down from where he was reared on York Street, is the mural of Nudie. Dropping the ball down onto his left foot, Faughs jersey on, Mikasa gloves.
‘Wear your heart on your sleeve, Faughs forever,’ the legend reads, alongside his signature.
He’s taking a glass of red this lunchtime. And why wouldn’t he? He makes all the introductions in the bar. There’s Paul O’Connor, the Monaghan minor manager tucking into a fry the morning after the night before when they were beaten by Derry in the All-Ireland minor final.
He introduces the barman. A hardy referee from Annaghmullan. Took no shit from anyone.
Studies the menu. What’s that one there? Beef bourguignon? What’s that? Red wine sauce. Onions. Yeah, lovely. Let’s go for that.
No. Lasagne. Get us the lasagne please. Hang on. No. Chicken curry. Chicken curry half and half. Lovely. Thanks now. Thanks.
And he’s up and running. What concerns him is the same thing that has Monaghan football people up the walls this week. Does Conor McManus (he’s known to one and all as ‘Mansy’ in these parts, and Mansy he shall remain hereafter) start, or does Vinny Corey hold him for the second half?
Can he and Jack McCarron play in the same forward line? How can we keep frustrating Dublin?
Can they do it? Can they make it to an All-Ireland final? The second in their history?
A few weeks back, when Vinny (he’s Vinny and nothing else) was resting Mansy, Nudie had a chat with the Clontibret man after a game.
They rarely talk. Nudie is of a different generation and he sees half of Monaghan hanging out of Mansy after games, so he tries his best to leave him alone.
But this time, he had some advice.
“You’re hurting now, because he is not playing you. But take that hurt, and use it.”
By this stage, Mansy’s hips are the most prayed over items in Monaghan. Padre Pio’s glove wouldn’t last three vigorous rubs on these venerable joints. Playing intercounty from 2007, strapping a county to your back and dragging them to glorious heights will do that to anyone.
Nudie has his own story of kicking his heels on the bench.
In 1988, he would win his third All-Star. But at the start of the year he was left off the team. The late Sean McCague was the manager.
One Sunday morning they were commencing pre-season training with a 15-minute run. Nothing to get excited about. Not even two mile. Just a jog to open the pores, lads.
Nudie remembers the exact time he was the first to drop out: three minutes 48 seconds. He had blown up. Lungs burning already.
The Tuesday afterwards, McCague took a set of scales out and slid it along the dressing room tiles in Nudie’s direction, took a notepad and pen out, and said, ‘Right now boy. Up you get.’
By the end of the month, he had lost a stone.
“I was working manually,” he says.
“I have done everything. I have shovelled shite out of sewers and I have been the top salesman in Bass.
“There were seven boys and seven girls in the house. A two-bedroom house. We were reared rough and tough.
“Most of the boys on the Monaghan team were highly paid in professional jobs. I was working night shift at the beef. Started at 12 o’clock on a Sunday night, finished at 3pm during the day. I would go to bed, and get up around six and go training, back into work, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.”
Work was something they were used to. When he was six, he inherited a job from his sister taking the eyes out of potatoes for the local chip shop.
But he hasn’t worked since 2018 and the first diagnosis.
He was at the 2018 All Stars night. There was a table of Monaghan men celebrating their haul of three All Stars for Rory Beggan, Karl O’Connell and Conor McManus. The slagging was fierce. They were running Nudie down but you cannot puncture confidence like Nudie’s.
He had an exercise regime that he stuck to at the time. He would walk laps of the pitch at home and every so often, would lean against the rail and do a half push-up. Just enough to feel the bite of resistance across the chest.
So he challenged one of the Ballybay boys to a push-up competition. The wine was good that night. The fella did 26 and had to stop. Nudie got down. He was over 50 push-ups when he decided the joke had gone on long enough.
The night after, he and Teresa – the GAA Operations Manager in Croke Park – were at the annual night thrown for the referees. He was enjoying the craic but his stomach was in knots. He told Teresa to stay and enjoy the night, but he has to go to their home in Finglas.
The following morning, he got up and made his way to the Mater Hospital.
He sat down on a hard plastic chair at noon on Sunday. He sat on the same chair for three days solid until he was taken in.
Inside A&E, they found a plastic bed. He was tested up and down. He was diagnosed with cancer. He was sitting there feeling very sorry for himself when he heard the shuffle of feet and a radiographer and familiar voice.
Ryan Wylie, who arguably should have been Monaghan’s fourth All-Star a few nights previously, was on a shift as the radiographer.
“‘I just wanted to come over and see if it was indeed the legend, Eugene Hughes of Castleblayney!’” said Wylie.
“We had a good chat then, but I knew there was something wrong when they were doing the ultrasound,” explains Nudie.
“I worked in beef for years, butchering beef. We used to see the livers of the cows and the cancers and all sorts. It’s no different in humans.
“And they spent ages on the one side.
“The specialist came in and said, ‘Mr Hughes, you have cancer.’
“Oh, it annoyed me! Big time.”
**
His liver is bad shape. Put bluntly, and he prefers it like that, he is just getting through the next bout of treatment, the next bout of treatment, the next bout of treatment. At some point, they might have a drug that helps him.
He sits here with his goatee beard and his golf outfit and he smiles readily and often. When he laughs, it comes from the belly.
Long, long before he was sick, Nudie was a serious man to raise money for charity. He has been involved with the late horse trainer Oliver Brady and Rita Shah through the Shabra Charity Foundation.
He himself would use the famous name for the Nudie Hughes Golf Classic, hosted at Concra Golf Course. All the names from the GAA world would come to play. They raised the money and put gene testing equipment into the Mater Hospital.
Long before he was sick.
And yet when he was sick, he never felt tempted to say, ‘Here, it’s Nudie Hughes here. Put me further up the queue!’
He has just 16% of his liver function. In order for an operation to take place, he needs it at 30%.
“Four weeks ago, I had a report that the liver came back a wee bit, so the maintenance programme has been working. It’s just ongoing all the time. You’re just hoping a new drug comes out,” he says.
“Everything you do is for the short term and you hope that something comes in. A new drug. Hopefully. And that is what we are waiting on. This one doesn’t work for me. Grand. The next one might work.
“But you hope that your body sustains the treatment you are going through, that you are able to get to the next phase.”
He continues, “I very rarely go into negativity. I am always, if you want to say it, ‘Nudie’. Nine times out of ten, I am positive. I went in there five years and I have been down on myself twice.”
One of these came earlier in the year. It was unrelated to his cancer but Jesus, how much bad luck could a man have?
He was in Liverpool in mid-January. A few were over for the Manchester derby and they were heading out for something to eat in Liverpool city centre.
He slipped on some cobbles. Shattered his leg. Not broke, but shattered.
The operation was carried out in Aintree University Hospital. Afterwards, he was kept in a storage unit converted into a four-bed Intensive Care Unit, with one single pane of glass.
“I was sweating in the bed. The dew was coming through the window and I couldn’t move out of the bed because I thought I had wet the bed, there was that much sweat.
“I couldn’t move properly because I got cold. I had to stay in the one spot and keep my hand rubbing my right leg. The pins were in my right side. It took me three days to realise this.”
By this stage he had long sent Teresa and Oisin home. The hospital gave him a crutch and put him into a taxi. They pulled up 600 yards from the entrance and dumped his bags at his feet.
Ryanair were brilliant, but they had to bring him on the flight through a lift used to transport the food. Was he not glad to see Dublin…
All those indignities haven’t stopped him being, well, ‘Nudie’. But he’s done a lot of reflecting.
“It changes your whole mindset and your values in life. Your sporting career comes into it, because your discipline has to kick in. Your temperament has to come in and you have to adapt to a new situation,” he says.
“Even though you don’t want it, you have to adapt and you can’t take it out on your partner, your sister, your wife… Everything that is going on in your body, you have to fight to control it and not show it to the person beside you, because you can’t have them feeling sorry for you.
“It’s a strange one, but the discipline in sport has kept me focused for my mindset. And there a lot of people out there helping others – good people – and you don’t want to take advantage of them.”
Like Teresa.
“Any money I get, I give it to Teresa. Because I wouldn’t be alive only for her. She is so thorough, you wouldn’t believe it.
“She runs me, like she runs her office. She’s just unreal.”
He doesn’t socialise as he used to. Maybe three times a week. If he goes to a game, he will go to a quiet corner of a stand or terrace and leave early to avoid the crowds. He can’t risk an infection.
He stays in touch with people. He works hard at the charity and keeps those relationships strong. He’s building up his immune system by walks around Concra Wood golf course. He’s gonna do it. Nothing is going to beat him.
**
In 1979, Kerry beat them 5-14 to 0-7. In 1985, they took Kerry to a replay, the second game finishing 2-9 to 0-9. By 1988, that team were hanging on and lost the semi-final 1-14 to 0-6 to Cork. And that was as close as that Monaghan team got to an All-Ireland final. This current crew have a chance, even if Diarmuid Connolly has predicted a ‘whipping’.
“I have no regrets in sport. If you asked me, what would I have liked to have done? I would have liked to have gotten to an All-Ireland final to see how we would have acted on the day,” Nudie says.
“Just to compete, and see how the team would have taken the day at the time. Would we have been good enough? I believe we would have been.
“We needed one or two players. But we had four scoring forwards. And nowadays, you have Karl O’Connell as a speed merchant. Back then we had Ciaran and Brendan Murray could have ran 100, 200 or 400 metres for Ireland. Gerry Hoey and Declan Flanagan, also sprinters. We had four of our six backs that could have ran 100 metres in about 11.5 seconds.
“You had Gene Sherry, Gerry McCarville and Fergus Caulfield, big strong men who could have adapted to the situation. David Byrne midfield. Hugo Clerkin was coming to the end of his career. Ray McCarron, Eamonn McEneaney, pure class.”
Once upon a time, he was the first man to win Footballer of the Year and Hurler of the Year in the same year in his county. Nowadays, hurling holds more of an appeal.
“[Football] coaches now have no regard for the game. They just want to win the next game. But the punter is paying their money through the turnstiles still. They want some emotion. It should be a celebration.”
He’d hate to be one of those ‘better in my day’ merchants, but he certainly thinks there was more fun.
“In 1988, I was just coming back from the All-Star trip and we were facing Cavan. They had beaten us the year before. Of course, the Monaghan boys weren’t happy with me going,” he says, warming up for a good yarn that he has told on the chat night circuit for years and we will let flow.
“It was the last week of April, the first week of May and we were playing the preliminary round of Ulster against Cavan.
“Eugene McGee was over Cavan. He went to Jim Reilly and said to him, ‘They are giving you a replacement fucking All-Star. And you’re going to take that?’
“With me, Sean McCague said, ‘You’re going to the All-Stars?’ I said I was. He just said, ‘Look after yourself.’
“Armagh had Fr Sean Hegarty over them. Kieran McNally from Armagh was picked too and we were all on the trip for 18 days.
“I trained 15 out of the 18 days in America. Big Brian McGilligan, Tony Scullion, what a week we had. You couldn’t write the script. But Fr Sean Hegarty got word back that it was a bit of a mess and he sent word to Kieran that he was to go out with me every day for a run.
“I could have been out to 3am in the morning, but I would be up for my run at 8am. Didn’t matter what was going on. I had everything done. Even if we were playing that day, I would still go for my run.
“So I landed back on the Friday night. I was labouring around the course on Friday night, letting on I was dying running around Clontibret.
“Boys were giving out fuck about me. I was only messing with them.
“So Sean said to me, ‘Good trip, Nudie?’
- ‘Great trip Sean.’
“And I gave him the thumbs up to let him know I was good to go.
“So they started me on the ‘40’, and it threw Cavan off. I was marking Sean Sheridan and I was making hay with him, but they moved me into the corner to Damian O’Reilly. We were defending the town end goals and Eugene Sheridan was full back for them.
“‘Don’t listen to that man. Don’t you talk to that fucking man!’ he was saying to Damian.
“I said to Damian, ‘You’d think that man would have a bit of sense. It’s just a game of football. Look at the crowd on the hill. I’ve never seen a bigger crowd in my life.’
“And he was staring at me. Just staring, mad at me.
“So I kept it going, but looking across the pitch at the same time, I had good vision to see what was around me.
“‘Damian, how many do you think is up there on that hill? I’m telling you, there’s an awful crowd. The far side there is a bit bare but I’d swear, there must be 6,000, 7,000 up there on that hill.’
“And as he turns, he starts staring at the hill and I can see the ball is coming down the far side. Next thing you know, McEneaney plays the ball to me and I stick it over the bar and Eugene Sheridan ran over to thump Damian: ‘I told you not to be talking to that man!’
“So he jogged back to me, and of course I started again.
“‘Don’t listen to that man Damian, that was an accident how that happened…’”
**
When he meets people, they ask how he is.
- ‘I’m very well. Very well.’
Well, you’re looking good anyway, Nudie.
- ‘Thanks very much.’
It’s not the truth. So why?
“People only ask you to see what your reaction is.
“My job is to compete with myself. I wouldn’t be great at that all the time, but nine times out of ten, I would be disciplined. I intend to get more disciplined from this week on, because I have a tough time ahead of me for the next six weeks.”
On the second week of September, they are, as he says himself, “opening me up from top to bottom”.
So he vows he is going to “prepare like I have never prepared before”.
Last week, they sought a second opinion. Teresa came along to meet the surgeon and former Meath midfielder Gerry McEntee.
It was a very sober meeting. McEntee was saying how they could not operate on his liver. There’s just not enough of it there.
Two ladies were taking notes throughout.
Nudie had his eyes fixed on the floor. Eventually, he started speaking.
“I think Gerry, you have to take some responsibility for this,” he said.
Some nervous shifting in the chairs. The ladies stopped writing and looked up. McEntee looked at him, concerned.
And I said, “The 1984 Centenary Cup final, and the tackles you made on me, I’m lucky to be here at all!”
In that moment, he’s Nudie. Smiling. Laughing. Skin glowing.
The six-year-old cutting the eyes out of potatoes for the chipper. The young man on the tear on an All-Stars trip around America to come home and light up the Clones Hill. The worker, shovelling shit out of the sewers and later selling keg upon keg for Bass. The man raising money for the Mater Hospital, putting the most expensive equipment in.
And with that he shakes your hand, tells you the pleasure is all his, and he can’t wait to see you again. He makes for his car parked outside The Old Coach Inn, a few doors down from the mural of him in his prime in the green and gold of the Faughs.
To where he grew up on that hard gravel surface. Dipping and picking the ball at speed. As hard as he humanly could manage, the stones cutting the feet off his toes.
And him ignoring the pain, lost in his play and imagination.
