WHEN PATRICK HORGAN retired from county hurling a friend told me he was heartbroken for him. I didn’t understand why at first. My friend does react emotionally in many cases, and he’s no supporter of Cork hurling.
“It just doesn’t seem right,” he said when pressed. I kind of got it.
The N7 was different on Monday morning, 14 April. Normally we move in, and at the pace of, lockstep from the Kildare commuter lands towards Dublin’s offices, but life was an open highway that day. We made progress as if in a car advert, high gears all the way to the Red Cow and beyond. Why? The nation was floored.
Rory McIlroy had won the Masters a few hours before. Anybody that could work from home did so while those who might get away with phoning in sick made the call. To be fair to them, being emotionally spent is debilitating. It was the middle of the week before I started to feel normal.
And I don’t follow golf closely beyond the majors, and don’t have any real affinity with McIlroy. There was the usual admiration, and hope he’d get over the line for the career Grand Slam at some point, but there was no real investment on my part.
Yet there I was, teary and overwhelmed when he finally won in Augusta. He’d done it for himself and, whether he wanted or not, the rest of us.
Maybe that’s why the last steps of the hero’s journey are so tough to take. They have to deal with the baggage of not one but all.
What is sport but a story we tell? And what are stories but things to make sense of our existence?
There’s a reason nearly all movies have happy endings. We’re paying for a sense of order when we fear it might be chaos. We want resolution and arcs that curve towards a neat bow. We want things to work out as they damn well should!
That’s why films with sad or open conclusions unsettle and stick with us longer. How many people have wondered what happened to the truck balancing in the Italian Job? Did they fall off the cliff? Did they manage to right the lorry and make off with the treasure? Patrick Horgan retires as a kind of Michael Caine: stoic, inching towards the gold before gravity forces him into rethink. “Hang on lads, I’ve got a great idea.”
Disbelief and denial was my first response to his retirement. Ah, there’ll be an injury crisis by March. A quick chat with Ben and he’ll be back in. This is but the latest blip on the arc eventually bending towards justice. But now Horgan is a signed up coach with the Cork U20s. He has had a civic reception in the City Hall. It seems for all the world like he’s done. And it still feels off.
Tom Maher / INPHO
Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO
Lions don’t die of old age, Lions die in the jaws of younger lions. So said Yellowstone’s beautiful but demanding Sarah Atwood to Jamie Dutton when trying to talk him into joining the conspiracy to murder his father, big John Dutton. Sarah would be unconvinced anybody has torn the red jersey off Patrick Horgan’s back.
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Two short weeks after Cork lost to Tipperary in Croke Park, Glen Rovers were playing Erin’s Own at Pairc Uí Rinn. A visitor from beyond the hurling world would not have sensed the shadow of disappointment. Dozens of kids flaked the ball against the back of the wall at the Ballintemple end. Young fellas joked in a haze of herbal smoke at the entrance to the stand. Inside, people sat at their ease and took in the usual sight of Horgan being by far the best forward on the field, scoring 0-11, seven from play. Conor Lehane lit up the game that followed between Midleton and Newtownshandrum to advance further the idea that succession is not always a straightforward process.
Pretty much as soon as the Glen were done in this year’s Cork championship, Horgan called time on his county days.
Legacies are funny things to assess. It’s part of the fun of following any sport, the debate over good versus great. There was a view expressed that Horgan wasn’t quite at the truly elite level, his scoring record in All-Ireland finals presented as evidence. He never scored more than 0-2 from play in the deciders he played: two in 2013, 2021, 2024, 2025. That’s a hard analysis. If you’re counting up players who have All-Irelands without producing their best on the ultimate days you’d be well into the hundreds.
There is perhaps an onus on the big performers to be at their absolute peak when it matters most, and that could be where Horgan stops short of entering the pantheon of the game’s true greats. Again, it’s harsh, but perhaps valid. The very best drag their team over the line, turn the good around them into something extraordinary. Horgan did that time and again for Cork, if not on All-Ireland final days.
The teams he played on were full of talented and dedicated players, just not quite as talented as what had gone before. Were he born in 1978 he’d have been the embellishment on a team that won three All-Irelands. 1968 and he’d have been around for 1990 at least, 1958 and he’s in on the end of the three-in-a-row three in a row and 84 and 86. And you could keep going back through the decades. But that wasn’t his lot. Horgan arrived in 1988 and came of age in a Cork hurling team full of declining greats and strikes and their prolonged aftermath . . . Born under a bad sign, yet perhaps more interesting for it.
Horgan chases Tommy Walsh in 2008. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
There’s something about players who blaze during the dark times that make them more loved, more relatable. We can all admire success, and as supporters share in the feeling, but it’s not real life for most. Somebody that gives everything, who falls short and gets up and gives it all again – that’s the stuff of everyday heroism.
When Floyd Patterson lost his heavyweight title to Sonny Liston he was asked whether his opponent would be a good champion. “That remains to be seen,” Patterson said. “We’ll find out what he’s like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.”
Horgan’s true greatness came in how the losses never beat him. His love of hurling only seemed to deepen with the years, his efforts became more spectacular. Fear of failure never inhibited him, he ran towards responsibility.
When he retired you naturally thought of the stellar days, the 3-10 in vain against Kilkenny in 2019, his 0-15 in the 2021 semi-final, maybe his 2-2 against Tipp back in 2010.
Mainly you thought about the times he stepped up and saved, or at least prolonged, Cork. The last gasp free from distance to send the 2018 semi-final with Limerick to extra-time. His free at the end of normal time in last year’s All-Ireland final to force extra-time. And of course the penalty to beat Limerick in Munster last year, sparking frenzied celebrations and a passion for this Cork team that lasts despite the heartbreak in the meantime.
The equaliser: Horgan scores a free to bring the 2024 All-Ireland final to extra-time. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
For me, one that endures is his point in stoppage time during this year’s Munster final. Cork are one down and, as per most of the previous 71 minutes, there is an almighty scramble for possession. Horgan has not had his best game, but his body language is consistent: give me the ball. He backs into a pocket of space as he sees Brian Hayes diving for the ball, already a move ahead and making the angle. He picks up the rolling ball one-handed on the turn then snaps through it to bring parity.
Horgan has all the brilliance that goes with a scoring record of 32-683 in championship and league 26-674 games with Cork, and this particular 0-1 is typical of the hundreds of other scores and thousands of interventions in general play. It’s not what he does, more the way he does it.
Horgan, simply, looks way cooler than nearly everyone else while playing. If you don’t think this is important, ask the swarms of kids that surround him after every game, ask the Cooper accountant totting up the revenue from white helmet sales, ask the RTÉ ratings counters.
How many kids took to the street or garden after a Cork game to re-enact his latest act? How many togged out for training picturing themselves firing a Hoggie style point over the shoulder? You could take phenomenal hurlers with eight All-Ireland medals and they know they’ve not launched a quarter of the impromptu puck arounds Horgan has. To do this, you need something beyond mere excellence. Coming from where he does helps.
The northside of Cork has not grown physically with the rest of the city and the satellite towns. The GAA’s demographics report brought Marty Morrissey to the area a short while ago, where he was the latest to hear about a lack of new housing, leading to less kids around the place to play hurling, or any sport. This is something of a tragedy, albeit a solvable one.
Horgan is the archetypal northside hurler: sophisticated, tenacious, fast wrists and a faster mind. There’s a poise and insouciance to him, as he prowls waiting for the ball to come in. Then, before it does, he’s gone – he knows what’s going to happen while others are still developing the picture. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the elegant, dancing ruthlessness of Tony O’Sullivan and John Fitzgibbon in Horgan’s bite and bearing.
Fidelity to the craft means more than the spoils of victory. He got into this with Dónal Óg Cusack before the 2024 All-Ireland final with Clare. The years-long scoring duel with TJ Reid, the pursuit of trophies. There had to be more to your days and nights than that.
“What is it like?” Horgan said.
“ . . . All I want to do is be training Tuesday. We’re going to be playing a final in two weeks, but being down training is the best thing of the lot. It’s another night of, I suppose, memories you have with fellas that you love training with, you’re togging out.
“Like all these numbers and all the thing? What is like? Do you know what I mean? Even to win an All-Ireland, and you’ve won plenty, it’s just one day. You have a lot of other things that you refer to other than those three days you had. You have so many other things, and I have so many other things I look back to and think, that was class, do you know what I mean? . . . And not just numbers and this and that.”
It’s even more poignant listening to that back now in late 2025. What does the universe do only test people to within an inch of their conviction. So it’s not about numbers or medals then Hoggie? Well have this: a one-point All-Ireland final defeat to Clare with a late free not given, and then a second-half collapse in the 2025 final? . . . Still think it’s not about medals and this and that?
Horgan has held the line; followed his talent to the dark places it led and come out as the same man who is obsessed with hurling, who hits the ball thousands of times a week, each rhythmic strike delivering the same sustaining satisfaction as the last. During barren times he was a reminder to Cork supporters of how great things used to be, and a promise of what it could be again. Like Jeff Bridges in the Big Lebowski, Hoggie abides.
It said in our Junior Cert science books that energy doesn’t die, it changes form. The obsessive passion for hurling, the near constant thought about how to be capable and meet its myriad challenges in the moment – that remains.
James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
From 2026 it realises itself in a different way. None of those U20s can remember a time he wasn’t on the Cork senior team, its dazzling star that lit many a grey afternoon. Can he inspire them? On that side of the job, Horgan couldn’t have done any more already.
Coaching Cork, mentoring kids’ teams, playing at lower grades as the years slip by, that’s how he’ll continue you’d imagine: giving all of himself, hurling’s devoted son going on with his life’s work. Still searching for his treasure, finding it every day.
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The swagger and substance of Patrick Horgan, hurling's great devotee
WHEN PATRICK HORGAN retired from county hurling a friend told me he was heartbroken for him. I didn’t understand why at first. My friend does react emotionally in many cases, and he’s no supporter of Cork hurling.
“It just doesn’t seem right,” he said when pressed. I kind of got it.
The N7 was different on Monday morning, 14 April. Normally we move in, and at the pace of, lockstep from the Kildare commuter lands towards Dublin’s offices, but life was an open highway that day. We made progress as if in a car advert, high gears all the way to the Red Cow and beyond. Why? The nation was floored.
Rory McIlroy had won the Masters a few hours before. Anybody that could work from home did so while those who might get away with phoning in sick made the call. To be fair to them, being emotionally spent is debilitating. It was the middle of the week before I started to feel normal.
And I don’t follow golf closely beyond the majors, and don’t have any real affinity with McIlroy. There was the usual admiration, and hope he’d get over the line for the career Grand Slam at some point, but there was no real investment on my part.
Yet there I was, teary and overwhelmed when he finally won in Augusta. He’d done it for himself and, whether he wanted or not, the rest of us.
Maybe that’s why the last steps of the hero’s journey are so tough to take. They have to deal with the baggage of not one but all.
What is sport but a story we tell? And what are stories but things to make sense of our existence?
There’s a reason nearly all movies have happy endings. We’re paying for a sense of order when we fear it might be chaos. We want resolution and arcs that curve towards a neat bow. We want things to work out as they damn well should!
That’s why films with sad or open conclusions unsettle and stick with us longer. How many people have wondered what happened to the truck balancing in the Italian Job? Did they fall off the cliff? Did they manage to right the lorry and make off with the treasure? Patrick Horgan retires as a kind of Michael Caine: stoic, inching towards the gold before gravity forces him into rethink. “Hang on lads, I’ve got a great idea.”
Disbelief and denial was my first response to his retirement. Ah, there’ll be an injury crisis by March. A quick chat with Ben and he’ll be back in. This is but the latest blip on the arc eventually bending towards justice. But now Horgan is a signed up coach with the Cork U20s. He has had a civic reception in the City Hall. It seems for all the world like he’s done. And it still feels off.
Lions don’t die of old age, Lions die in the jaws of younger lions. So said Yellowstone’s beautiful but demanding Sarah Atwood to Jamie Dutton when trying to talk him into joining the conspiracy to murder his father, big John Dutton. Sarah would be unconvinced anybody has torn the red jersey off Patrick Horgan’s back.
Two short weeks after Cork lost to Tipperary in Croke Park, Glen Rovers were playing Erin’s Own at Pairc Uí Rinn. A visitor from beyond the hurling world would not have sensed the shadow of disappointment. Dozens of kids flaked the ball against the back of the wall at the Ballintemple end. Young fellas joked in a haze of herbal smoke at the entrance to the stand. Inside, people sat at their ease and took in the usual sight of Horgan being by far the best forward on the field, scoring 0-11, seven from play. Conor Lehane lit up the game that followed between Midleton and Newtownshandrum to advance further the idea that succession is not always a straightforward process.
Pretty much as soon as the Glen were done in this year’s Cork championship, Horgan called time on his county days.
Legacies are funny things to assess. It’s part of the fun of following any sport, the debate over good versus great. There was a view expressed that Horgan wasn’t quite at the truly elite level, his scoring record in All-Ireland finals presented as evidence. He never scored more than 0-2 from play in the deciders he played: two in 2013, 2021, 2024, 2025. That’s a hard analysis. If you’re counting up players who have All-Irelands without producing their best on the ultimate days you’d be well into the hundreds.
There is perhaps an onus on the big performers to be at their absolute peak when it matters most, and that could be where Horgan stops short of entering the pantheon of the game’s true greats. Again, it’s harsh, but perhaps valid. The very best drag their team over the line, turn the good around them into something extraordinary. Horgan did that time and again for Cork, if not on All-Ireland final days.
The teams he played on were full of talented and dedicated players, just not quite as talented as what had gone before. Were he born in 1978 he’d have been the embellishment on a team that won three All-Irelands. 1968 and he’d have been around for 1990 at least, 1958 and he’s in on the end of the three-in-a-row three in a row and 84 and 86. And you could keep going back through the decades. But that wasn’t his lot. Horgan arrived in 1988 and came of age in a Cork hurling team full of declining greats and strikes and their prolonged aftermath . . . Born under a bad sign, yet perhaps more interesting for it.
There’s something about players who blaze during the dark times that make them more loved, more relatable. We can all admire success, and as supporters share in the feeling, but it’s not real life for most. Somebody that gives everything, who falls short and gets up and gives it all again – that’s the stuff of everyday heroism.
When Floyd Patterson lost his heavyweight title to Sonny Liston he was asked whether his opponent would be a good champion. “That remains to be seen,” Patterson said. “We’ll find out what he’s like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.”
Horgan’s true greatness came in how the losses never beat him. His love of hurling only seemed to deepen with the years, his efforts became more spectacular. Fear of failure never inhibited him, he ran towards responsibility.
When he retired you naturally thought of the stellar days, the 3-10 in vain against Kilkenny in 2019, his 0-15 in the 2021 semi-final, maybe his 2-2 against Tipp back in 2010.
Mainly you thought about the times he stepped up and saved, or at least prolonged, Cork. The last gasp free from distance to send the 2018 semi-final with Limerick to extra-time. His free at the end of normal time in last year’s All-Ireland final to force extra-time. And of course the penalty to beat Limerick in Munster last year, sparking frenzied celebrations and a passion for this Cork team that lasts despite the heartbreak in the meantime.
For me, one that endures is his point in stoppage time during this year’s Munster final. Cork are one down and, as per most of the previous 71 minutes, there is an almighty scramble for possession. Horgan has not had his best game, but his body language is consistent: give me the ball. He backs into a pocket of space as he sees Brian Hayes diving for the ball, already a move ahead and making the angle. He picks up the rolling ball one-handed on the turn then snaps through it to bring parity.
Horgan has all the brilliance that goes with a scoring record of 32-683 in championship and league 26-674 games with Cork, and this particular 0-1 is typical of the hundreds of other scores and thousands of interventions in general play. It’s not what he does, more the way he does it.
Horgan, simply, looks way cooler than nearly everyone else while playing. If you don’t think this is important, ask the swarms of kids that surround him after every game, ask the Cooper accountant totting up the revenue from white helmet sales, ask the RTÉ ratings counters.
How many kids took to the street or garden after a Cork game to re-enact his latest act? How many togged out for training picturing themselves firing a Hoggie style point over the shoulder? You could take phenomenal hurlers with eight All-Ireland medals and they know they’ve not launched a quarter of the impromptu puck arounds Horgan has. To do this, you need something beyond mere excellence. Coming from where he does helps.
The northside of Cork has not grown physically with the rest of the city and the satellite towns. The GAA’s demographics report brought Marty Morrissey to the area a short while ago, where he was the latest to hear about a lack of new housing, leading to less kids around the place to play hurling, or any sport. This is something of a tragedy, albeit a solvable one.
Horgan is the archetypal northside hurler: sophisticated, tenacious, fast wrists and a faster mind. There’s a poise and insouciance to him, as he prowls waiting for the ball to come in. Then, before it does, he’s gone – he knows what’s going to happen while others are still developing the picture. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the elegant, dancing ruthlessness of Tony O’Sullivan and John Fitzgibbon in Horgan’s bite and bearing.
Fidelity to the craft means more than the spoils of victory. He got into this with Dónal Óg Cusack before the 2024 All-Ireland final with Clare. The years-long scoring duel with TJ Reid, the pursuit of trophies. There had to be more to your days and nights than that.
“What is it like?” Horgan said.
“ . . . All I want to do is be training Tuesday. We’re going to be playing a final in two weeks, but being down training is the best thing of the lot. It’s another night of, I suppose, memories you have with fellas that you love training with, you’re togging out.
“Like all these numbers and all the thing? What is like? Do you know what I mean? Even to win an All-Ireland, and you’ve won plenty, it’s just one day. You have a lot of other things that you refer to other than those three days you had. You have so many other things, and I have so many other things I look back to and think, that was class, do you know what I mean? . . . And not just numbers and this and that.”
It’s even more poignant listening to that back now in late 2025. What does the universe do only test people to within an inch of their conviction. So it’s not about numbers or medals then Hoggie? Well have this: a one-point All-Ireland final defeat to Clare with a late free not given, and then a second-half collapse in the 2025 final? . . . Still think it’s not about medals and this and that?
Horgan has held the line; followed his talent to the dark places it led and come out as the same man who is obsessed with hurling, who hits the ball thousands of times a week, each rhythmic strike delivering the same sustaining satisfaction as the last. During barren times he was a reminder to Cork supporters of how great things used to be, and a promise of what it could be again. Like Jeff Bridges in the Big Lebowski, Hoggie abides.
It said in our Junior Cert science books that energy doesn’t die, it changes form. The obsessive passion for hurling, the near constant thought about how to be capable and meet its myriad challenges in the moment – that remains.
From 2026 it realises itself in a different way. None of those U20s can remember a time he wasn’t on the Cork senior team, its dazzling star that lit many a grey afternoon. Can he inspire them? On that side of the job, Horgan couldn’t have done any more already.
Coaching Cork, mentoring kids’ teams, playing at lower grades as the years slip by, that’s how he’ll continue you’d imagine: giving all of himself, hurling’s devoted son going on with his life’s work. Still searching for his treasure, finding it every day.
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blood and bandages End of an era GAA Patrick Horgan