WHY DO WE want to talk to John Fenton? Striking the ball, really, in as much depth as he’s prepared to go into.
“I’m sure there’s a lot more younger fellas who are more relevant to your readership than what I am,” he tells us.
There are a lot of younger fellas who have hit the ball exquisitely in the 35 years since Fenton last played inter-county hurling. Whether they are any more or less relevant is contestable. Current is not always shorthand for best practice. You can learn from the masters of any generation. To believe otherwise would be ignore the footage and thoughts of Tony Kelly or Cian Lynch three decades from now.
It wouldn’t make sense to do that, and it makes absolute sense to ask Fenton about how he managed to do what he did.
Consider his two most famous moments: The goal against Limerick in 1987, the ball into Jimmy Barry Murphy in ’83. Do either belong in a museum, marked in the category of impressive at the time but routine feats now? Hardly.
Were either to happen today they would be shared across every platform, with superlatives in lightning pursuit.
More than a third of a century later both strikes still fizz with menace and beauty.
Dermot McCurtain handpasses to Fenton in the ’83 All-Ireland semi-final against Galway. Fenton runs onto the looping ball, gathers in his stride and drills it towards Barry-Murphy. The ball stays true on its trajectory as it crosses the 65, the 45, before it’s met with the most celestial double near the 20-metre line.
There is a martial artist’s timing to the long pass. The power and zip have little to do with muscular force, but come from the transfer of weight and momentum through the ball at the very moment of contact. The follow-through is graceful, controlled.
His extraordinary strike in ’87 would not be attempted now, yet even if it was it would unlikely to be bettered. Again, Fenton’s momentum, his very lifeforce, is sent through the ball at the point of impact. The velocity is helped by his run up and pivot through the ball, while his hurley-speed is almost too fast for the eye. These combine into the irresistible force of the sliotar which would only alter its flight when met by the net some 40 yards away.
It’s true that many a hurler has achieved remarkable accuracy and power, and most elite players over the years have been adept at timing and the shift of weight necessary to yield stellar results.
The thing is that some do it with more precision, more flow, more art and more threat. How do they achieve this? You normally find a lot of hard work has been put in. How do you work really hard? Well, it helps if it never feels like hard work.
Fenton is chairman of his club, Midleton, now. Like at clubs everywhere, children are taught how to strike the ball from four or five years old. It wasn’t the same when he was of an age.
The first organised team he played on was at school, U14s, and even then ‘organised’ is over-selling the endeavor.
“Like, we had very, very little coaching,” he says. “When we went to a training session, basically the Christian brother would throw in the ball and, ‘Off ye go lads, and sort it out yerselves’, that type of thing.”
Before then local kids would organise themselves into street leagues among different areas of the town.
“Pick a green patch and throw in the ball, God forbid if it was a tight score because there was no referee.”
For those years, and well beyond, the coach was made of stone. “Basically, the thing was the ball and the wall,” he says. “It was the gable end wall of the house. Pucking the ball out of that, left hand to right hand. It was just pure repetition.
“I heard somebody there debunking this thing about muscle memory, but I firmly believe that it is there and it’s about tuning the eye in, the hand, the ball.”
There was a field beside Fenton’s home where as children they played “everything”, all the sports. But any time he had on his own he drifted out to the end of the house and pucked the ball, left and right, immersed in the moment; mindfulness long before the term was commonplace.
“I’d be happy out. And I’d be the same when I was playing inter-county. I’d go into the ball alley or someplace where there was a wall and you’d lose yourself there. There’d be an hour gone and you wouldn’t even notice,” he says.
A tennis ball, a wall and a never-diminishing satisfaction in striking played a key role in getting Fenton to Cork’s senior inter-county panel in 1975. To stay there, and push for a regular starting spot which would not come for a few seasons yet, he’d have to change things up. This realisation came suddenly.
“I really didn’t know how good or how bad I was until I started playing inter-county hurling,” he says.
One of the first times he wore the red jersey at senior level was in October, 1975. Tipperary were the opponents for a national league game at the Mardyke. Fenton remembers throwing up the ball to strike. By the time his backswing had been completed, his swing beginning, Noel O’Dwyer from Borris-Ileigh had hooked the ball away and hit it clear.
“I remember saying to myself that day, ‘You have an awful lot to learn’ . . . It took me until I started playing inter-county level to realise about speed and how quick you had to be. And then after that I won’t say I changed my routine but I certainly upped my routine. I knew I had to get smarter and quicker.”
Around that time Fenton started to use a racquetball in the alley. It was made of rubber and pinged off the surface. Fast enough, he thought, to quicken his catching reflexes, hone his touch and also improve his striking speed as he strived to maintain a rhythm with this new ball.
“Sometimes I used to use a handball,” he says. “That was too fast, really, like. But I did use it at times.”
If he thought he was comfortable when, say, seven or eight yards from the wall, then he’d shorten the grip again on the 36-inch hurley (35 in later years), step in, and keep moving in until his reflexes felt the strain.
“In our ball alley we had goals painted on the back wall. What I used to do was I’d go close to the side wall and hit the ball between the goal post and the side wall. And that ball comes back at you very fast, you’ve got to catch it. The quicker you want to speed it up, the closer you move to the wall.”
He set targets such as catching ten in a row from a certain distance before moving to a more exacting spot. If one dropped, then it was back to the start of the routine. The same peril applied when practising frees.
He’d start close in, from 21 yards out then move out. “Once I’d put them straight over the bar from there I’d go back another 20, 30 yards and do the same again, and then go back out to 60 yards and do the same again. But if you gave yourself the target of hitting 10 over the bar or catching 10 inside in the ball alley, if you dropped one or missed a free, you’d start it all over again.”
Was he hard on himself? Not so much, he says. “It was just a routine to kind of hone the concentration. A lot of the time when you had seven over the bar, or eight, you might lose concentration and think, ‘Yeah I have this thing mastered’. And then you drop it, and you go back again.”
Ball striking was the emphasis for the Cork panel Fenton joined. On the ground, out of the hand, doubling, batting down, left side, right.
Cork coaches such as Johnny Clifford, and before him Canon Bertie Troy and Justin McCarthy – “the master of the Rochestown ball alley” who constantly encouraged “fast and skilful hurling”, according to Fenton – would start a session by throwing 15 to 20 sliotars on the ground.
Fenton says county panels then were smaller, with about 20-22 on board, so there was more space on the field, with the instruction that “there’s none of those balls to stop for the next quarter hour”. The players whipped on the sliotars first time, drawing from the Cork style of the time that was borne of the belief that the ball moved faster than anyone could carry it and the objective was to move it quick and direct towards the forwards.
“No helmets or anything at the time,” Fenton says of those sessions, “You had to be moving, you had to be sharp, be alert because if you weren’t you’d get a smack of a ball fairly fast.”
And looking around as a teenager at hurlers such as Tom Cashman, Gerald McCarthy, Charlie McCarthy and Denis Coughlan, Fenton quickly appreciated the standard required.
“If you didn’t sharpen up you were left behind, and playing and training with these guys . . . you knew the level that you had to be at.”
A combination of this environment and the work Fenton was doing on his own would in time chisel him into the hurler he became during his peak year of mid-80s, after which he retired with three All-Ireland medals and five All-Stars. He won four county titles with Midleton, the last in 1991. Captaining Midleton to glory in 1983 against St Finbarr’s was “the greatest day” of his career.
Fenton’s routine, tests of one’s concentration and joy in the activity of striking are a conspicuous example the flow state that athletes seek. And that deep level of concentration in the moment carried into gameday. After his goal in ’87 Ger Canning on commentary drew attention to the smile on Fenton’s face. The smile was fleeting, hardly discernible.
Instead, moments after scoring possibly the greatest goal of all, there was the glazed expression of someone who is simply doing their task to the point where everything else has ceased to matter.
Perhaps the most arresting description of this state came from Chad Harbach about his fictional baseball prodigy, Henry Skrimshander, in The Art of Fielding. “There was always something frighteningly aloof in his eyes, like a soloist so at one with the music he can’t be reached. You can’t follow me here, those blue eyes seemed to say. You’ll never know what this is like.”
The smile was fleeting, and so too in the greater scheme is sporting prowess. When you step back from the elite level of your game, it’s not so much the roar of the crowd you miss, but the release that devotion to the craft brings.
“It was one of the changes that I saw when I stopped playing,” Fenton says. “When you go out and run and you could hit a ball or whatever, it would clear the head mentally and clear the body physically. It set you up for everything you had to do, family life and things like that.
“I found it one of the things, after retirement, it took me a bit of time to adjust mentally and physically to the fact that I wasn’t going out pucking a ball . . . certainly I found it very therapeutic.”
When he meets players from his own club now Fenton’s mantra is “ball alley, ball alley, ball alley”. There are competing demands on today’s top level players who have to adhere to strength and conditioning programmes, but Fenton believes this should complement ballwork.
“If you want to play hurling and be good at hurling, you need a hurley in your hand every day of the week,” he says. “You need to be out in all weathers, you need to be prepared for what comes at you.”
Fenton admires today’s stars and says hurling “is still the best game in the world” even if he’d like to see more ground and first-time hurling. “Quick, fast ground ball behind the defence will certainly upset the rhythm,” he says.
The emphasis has been on the safe transfer of possession across and between the lines for many seasons, yet there are still echoes of the style Fenton employed in the modern game. In the 2019 League final Tom Morrissey’s sublime, flat ball in and Aaron Gillane’s first time finish evoked the Fenton and Barry-Murphy axis of ’83.
For Galway’s goal against Limerick in this year’s All-Ireland semi-final, David Burke rose the ball and hit it first time and long towards the square. Mike Casey, for once, was caught flat-footed as Brian Concannon got the jump on him to gather and shoot.
Burke’s swift ball in wasn’t dissimilar to the one Fenton rose and drove forward to help create the chance for Cork’s first goal in the 1984 final. The delivery was of a pace which gave Barry-Murphy and Tomás Mulcahy the scope to set up Seanie O’Leary for the type of clever, improvised finish he so often provided.
Speed, says Fenton, is the quality that even the most astute of tacticians will struggle to counter. Speed of thought, of hand, of strike, and of the manner and pep with which the ball cuts through the air.
“How often do you hear coaches of all sports saying they did the basics well? And that’s what hurling is all about, and the basics of hurling are striking the ball with the hurley. The difference between a good player and a great player is the great player will strike the ball faster and quicker than a good player. That’s the difference.”
To reach that speed all you’ll need are a wall, a racquetball, a happy surrender to the act of hitting left and right, high low, off the ground and in the air as the minutes turn to hours, the hours to years.
