THE TRANSITION FROM elite sportsperson to regular civilian is made incalculably more difficult when retirement is dictated to you.
Pádraic Maher entered January 2022 hellbent on donning the blue and gold of Tipperary for a 14th season — or a 17th if you stretch back as far as The Premier’s All-Ireland minor win in 2006. At 32, and having dedicated so much of his life towards ensuring he was in the optimal condition to play hurling, there was plenty of road left to run in his third act as an inter-county player.
At the end of January, Maher was told that to continue hurling would risk the prospect of his partner having to lift him off the couch into bed every night. The nature of a neck injury he had sustained while playing for Thurles Sarsfields a few weeks beforehand, and the potential consequences of the injury being worsened while playing contact sport, had reefed the jersey off his back. Roll credits.
It was sudden and simple and devoid of sentiment. Maher wouldn’t get to stow the hurley over his shoulder and walk off into the sunset at Semple Stadium or Croke Park as would have better fit his career. It was ended instead in a conversation with a doctor and in an app on his phone.
“The morning that I was putting out the public statement to say I was retiring”, Maher tells The42, “I had a message written out for the WhatsApp group as well just to let them know beforehand — because obviously, I wouldn’t have spoken about any of them with the way everything happened so quickly.
I’d had it all prepared since the night before: the statement, the message to the lads… I woke up, I sent the message, and left the group immediately, y’know? That was another very tough scenario. People might think it sounds very straightforward but when I left that WhatsApp group, it immediately hit me: ‘That’s it now. You’re gone. It’s all over.’
“I remember I was lying in bed after I sent it and there were a few tears, I won’t lie, inside in the bed. ‘You’re done.’
“Them small things, people mightn’t see or believe them but it’s those small things that make it so difficult, really.”
The phone wasn’t long nearly hopping off the bed.
“In fairness, like, the support I got was unbelievable — from everyone: players, supporters, friends, family, my club Thurles,” Maher says. “The messages just started coming in. The phonecalls… Y’know, I didn’t leave the house all that day because I was just constantly on the phone and replying to messages. It was unreal.
“I suppose it’s not until something like that happens where you finish up that you realise what support you had out there over the years. When you’re a player, you kind of detach yourself from all that: you’re just concentrating on the things you have to do to prepare yourself as best you can.”
In his first season as a retired hurler, Maher attended as many games as was possible “to almost flush it out of the system”.
He began with a league game between his recent inter-county teammates and Laois at O’Moore Park, Portlaoise, only four days after he had broken the news.
What he expected was some initial devastation that he hoped would dissipate as hurling ploughed on without him and as he continued to recalibrate for life on our side of the chalk.
What he got was nearly the inverse.
“I did find it very difficult,” he says. “But it’s funny: the league games were grand — but I was down, then, for the first round of the championship this year in Walsh Park and just when the lads came out on the pitch, that’s when it really hit me that I wasn’t part of it.
Like, I still felt great and fit so, down at that match, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I feel good here. I should be out there.’ D’you know that kind of way? That was all very difficult and even still, now, like, you’d be hoping and wishing that you were some way involved with the club or something. But that’s just the way it is, unfortunately.
It’s been 10 months, now; enough time for the rest of us to immortalise Maher’s career in the tapestry of hurling.
On top of the team honours — three All-Irelands and five Munsters with Tipp; seven county titles and one Munster with Thurles — Maher pucked his final ball as a six-time All-Star.
To put some context on the kind of company Maher is keeping on six, note that TJ Reid, whom Maher himself believes will go down as the greatest forward of his generation, marginally ahead of the likes of Joe Canning and Patrick Horgan, picked up his own sixth this year at the age of 35. Canning, incidentally, retired with one All-Star fewer. So too did Jimmy Barry-Murphy in purely hurling terms. And Eddie Keher. And John Fenton. And Pat Hartigan. And only a handful of other bona fide greats.
Tied with Maher on six are only two Premier County men: Nicky English and Eoin Kelly. His name belongs to the same air as theirs when the true icons of Tipperary hurling are being reeled off during St Stephen’s Day pints in Fethard, Mullinahone, Kilsheelan or wherever.
Just five players in the history of the game — all of them from Kilkenny — have won more All-Stars than Paudie Maher.
But this is not the lens through which he reflects on his playing career, even when all of that company is laid out to him. Not quite yet, anyway.
“Again, I never really thought about those things because you’re always nearly concentrating on what’s next, whether it was a club championship or inter-county…
“I suppose really, I got to reflect when I started doing the book (All on the Line: A Memoir of Hurling and Commitment) with Michael Moynihan. Sitting down, just chatting over different things over the years — both the good times and the bad times.
“When I look back over it, I have to be grateful for the good times… Playing in so many All-Ireland finals in Croke Park, and I was so lucky to win a few of them.
“Obviously, you mention the individual honours there. Look, it’s probably something I never thought would happen. When I started playing with Tipp, if you’d have said to me that I’d be even on the team at the time, I’d be saying, ‘Sure that’s a massive achievement for me.’ And it is a massive achievement!
“But it’s worth pointing out I was lucky enough to part of very good teams and, more often than not, we got to the latter stages of the championship so if you played well, you were giving yourself every chance [of an All-Star]… But you can take pride in your consistency of performance over the years.”
Eventually, he acquiesces about his own individual excellence — most likely just to escape this part of the conversation.
“Ah, I suppose them honours you’re talking about there, you can look back and say, ‘Yeah, look, it’s nice to be part of that company.’ Nicky English and Eoin Kelly are legends. They were heroes of mine to look up to, so it’s kind of surreal to be mentioned with the names of a few of those lads.”
Maher is dead right, though, to place equal pride in his consistency of performance as he does anything else. He won his first and sixth All-Stars 11 years apart. He was named in The Sunday Game Team of the Year four times, three of them from his mid-twenties onwards. There’s a case to be made that not only was he consistent but that the older he got, the fractionally better he got.
And really, that was the plan.
“I did put in a lot of hard work to be fair,” he says. “Every single year, I was trying to find new ways of looking after my nutrition, my recovery; ways of getting fitting, stronger, sharper on the hurling pitch; picking the brains of different people.
“I probably feel I put in the effort to get to where I got to. It didn’t come naturally to me at all. It was the hard work that I put in that gave me the window of opportunity to play in All-Ireland finals and win a few individual awards, if that makes sense.
“I probably took it more seriously than most players when it came to recovery and nutrition. I was always trying to find extremes, really take it to the extreme. At times, I probably took it over the edge — it probably didn’t do me any good. But in terms of my career overall, I feel that mentality stood to me and made me as good a player as I ever could have been.
“I was always looking to improve something, anything. Even if I had a good year the year before, I’d be always saying to myself, ‘I’m going to come back fitter now next time.’”
Fitting, then, that while he can’t represent Tipp on the pitch, he’ll at least be able to influence those who can as part of his new role as selector in Liam Cahill’s setup next year.
“At the end of the day, it’s not going to replace the feeling of being out on the pitch”, Maher says, “but the way I look at it is I’m getting to test myself in a different kind of way. You’re probably helping more people whereas before, I was looking after myself and making sure I was right for the team, the panel of players; getting myself in the right condition for training and for matches.
“Now, it’ll be a case overseeing more people and trying to help out more lads, give them a bit of advice here and there. So, it’s never going to replace the feeling of running out for a championship match but it’s the next best thing: a new challenge in a high-performance environment. That’s some bit of comfort so soon after having to finish up, like.”
Taking the selector’s role wasn’t a difficult decision even so soon after departing the panel, Maher says, because the playing group has “changed enormously over the last year or two”.
“If I was to flick down through it, I probably only played with less than half of them,” he says. “And it won’t be an issue at all that I played with any of them: any of the lads left from my time are well experienced and understand that we’ve a job to do and I’ve a role to play.”
In the end, Maher consulted only with his fiancée before accepting Cahill’s invitation in July. His brother Ronan, a two-time All-Star in his own right and still very much part of the playing panel at 27, found out like everybody else that Maher would be returning to the fold in a new capacity in 2023. As for whether or not Ronan is excited by that prospect, Maher laughs: “Ah, he wouldn’t tell me much, like!”
Being involved in such a hands-on capacity will surely aid Maher’s transition away from being a player. There will, at least, be the opportunity to win a fourth All-Ireland, even if it’s in a different way to which he would have imagined it. On the club side of things, there will soon be the opportunity to steer Thurles Sarsfields from the sideline — perhaps even as soon as next year.
Already a garda, and with a wedding scheduled for the spring, 2023 will bring less time for grieving his days on the wilder side of the white line. They are now weaved into the legend of his sport alongside some of his childhood heroes regardless, even if he’s reluctant to believe it.
There remains one personal accolade from his playing career about which you suspect Maher will always speak unabashedly, though. It’s not one that you’ll find in the ‘Honours’ section of his Wikipedia entry, and it’s not even one that’s commemorated on the walls of his home. But it’s one that he finds gives him perspective, even during times when he feels robbed of his final years in club and county colours.
“I got to play against the best,” he says. “I got to play against probably the greatest team of all time in Kilkenny. I got to play against Joe Canning several times, TJ Reid several times… I got to play against Henry Shefflin, Richie Power, Patrick Horgan, Richie Hogan… The list just goes on and on, like. Tony Kelly!
“You’re not going to come across a better crew of players throughout the years. And as difficult as it was to mark ‘em, you’d be privileged, too, to be on the same pitch as them all.
“I don’t really have any pictures around the house at all but I suppose it’ll always just be in my mind, in my memory, that I got to test myself against the very best. You can’t ask for any more than that.”
