IN 2007, WHEN Pearce Hanley made the move from Mayo to Brisbane as a wide-eyed 18-year-old, the world felt like a much bigger place.
These days Conor McKenna could pull off one of his trademark dummy solos for Essendon and hours later the video will be reverberating around social media and in online articles on these shores.
When Hanley made his debut for the Brisbane Lions at the end of the 2008 season, the main way Irish fans could follow his career was by catching TG4′s AFL highlights show on a Saturday morning.
Twitter was still in its infancy and it was years before BT Sport would pick up the rights to broadcast Aussie Rules games live.
When Hanley announced his retirement on Wednesday due to injury, it drew a relatively small reaction in his native country considering the scale of what he achieved Down Under. He didn’t win Premiership titles, arriving in Brisbane too late to enjoy the club’s glory days of the early 2000s, but enjoyed plenty of great moments on the field.
Arguably most impressive was the longevity of his career.
“You can’t be defined by Premierships all the time because at the end of the day one team can only win it per year,” ex-Greater Western Sydney Giants coach and former Cavan footballer Nicholas Walsh tells The42.
“At that time Brisbane were going through a transition phase. They were coming off really good Premiership success from 2001-03. He then came into the club five years after that, it was the tail end.
“The way the draft system works here unfortunately you’re sometimes at the end of it. He comes off that so he gets the experience from the likes of top class stars that have won three Premierships. He gains that knowledge and then he’s able to carry that forward into his career and bring that to the Gold Coast Suns when he transitioned there.
“He was able to bring that leadership then into a new forming group that were trying to find their feet in the game. They were such a new franchise club in the game.
“In time those clubs become good but it depends on the way the list is structured and everything. It’s probably an eight to ten year cycle sometimes. With him, he was coming off the tail end of Brisbane’s success and then into a freshly starting Gold Coast club. So he was sort of at the beginning of one cycle and at the end of another.”
The Mayo man’s 169 games over 13 seasons for the Brisbane Lions and Gold Coast Suns leaves him behind only Jim Stynes, Zach Tuohy and Tadhg Kennelly in the AFL appearances list by Irish players.
Aside from the obvious challenges of moving to the far side of the world as a teenager to pursue a career in a sport that he’d never played before, Aussie Rules is a brutal sport.
The average AFL career spans just six years. A 2013 study commissioned by the AFL Players Association – their version of the GPA – found that 64% of retired players were still affected in their daily life by battle wounds suffered during their playing careers.
GAA players who make the switch commonly break down with injuries as their bodies struggle to adjust to the physical demands of professional sport. All-Ireland winners Ciaran Sheehan and Tommy Walsh are among the most high-profile examples of GAA stars who failed to withstand the rigours of the game.
Hanley was no stranger to injury and endured his fair share, particularly in the final four years of his career on the Gold Coast. Ultimately, his retirement came down to a succession of niggles rather than one career-ending problem. It was his body’s way of telling him that, at 31, enough was enough.
“He’s lasted 13 years, that’s a long career,” says Walsh.
“If you look at it there’s normally 23 games, let’s say you play 20 of those a year. If he plays every game that’s a 260 game career so he was, I won’t say robbed of 100 games, but maybe robbed of 40 games because his body wasn’t able to produce that explosive impact week-in, week-out.
“I think when you get to an age like 31 and the way he plays the game so, so quick. You can’t go at that pace forever, unfortunately. His body just held him back and said, ‘Look, time’s enough.’
“I reckon he would have played over 200 games if it wasn’t for injury, which is an elite number of games for anyone.”
Incidentally, Walsh was on the field when Hanley made his senior debut for Mayo. Walsh’s Cavan travelled to Castlebar for an All-Ireland SFC qualifier in July 2007 when a teenage sensation from Ballagahdereen shot to prominence.
There had already been rumblings that a move Down Under was imminent. He played just two games for Mayo at senior level after being brought on board by John Maughan.
“[AFL scouts] were there and I knew they were at the game and I knew they were watching Pearce,” recalls Walsh.
“That night Pearce had an unbelievable game and I actually played on him for a little bit through the midfield. He just had this lightning speed.
“I didn’t know Pearce before I went out [to Australia] apart from playing against him that night in MacHale Park where he destroyed Cavan.”
He scored his first point for Mayo in the round 2 qualifier defeat to Derry and embarked to Australia that winter after inking a rookie deal with the Brisbane Lions.
Hanley admitted himself that it took him a couple of years to adjust to life in Australia, even if his transition to the senior team was quick. A wake-up call was required for him to leave his partying ways behind him and realise his full potential on the field.
“I think I was drunk my first two years,” he told the AFL website in 2015.
“I still had a great time and it’s made me who I am now. My professionalism has got a lot better and I’m really enjoying my footy at the moment and I’ve definitely pulled my head in.
“It dawned on me at my three-year mark. I got in a bit of strife and thought I was in a bit of trouble. The club were very good to stand by me.
“I thought I wasn’t going to be given another contract and I thought I was going to be sent home. I remember I got a bit emotional in front of the boys and I think from there I turned my year around.
“The next pre-season I knuckled down and from there my game has got better and better and I’ve turned into the player I am today.”
And what a player he turned into.
“They generally look at the profile of Irish players and sort of pigeon-hole them into positions where they can play,” explains Walsh.
“If you look over the years – Tadhg Kennelly, Marty Clarke, Colin O’Riordan – these types of players are all playing half-back.
“What Pearce Hanley was suited to was that run and carry game at half-back. He has an elite engine, he used to run 2km and 3km time trials in elite time. His speed is exceptional and then his ball skills – I know he worked really hard on them but both sides of the body, he just adapted really, really, well.
“His ability to cut through traffic and take on players was really good. He was one of these fellas, after getting to know him a bit, he doesn’t look too far ahead to the future. He stays in the now and when you’ve got those creative players staying in the now, they suit that position and they’re able to take the game on a little bit more.
“His speed and ability to find the ball was elite. There was a period of time through probably the ’10, ’11 and ’12 seasons where he used to rack up 40 possessions a game and kick a couple of goals off half-back which is very, very unusual in the game.”
There were difficult times too, not least when his younger brother Tommy passed away after a battle with cancer.
“A lot of things happened for himself personally off the field. To change a club and then his brother dying, all that sort of stuff.
“Then he went back to Ireland on a couple of trips during that period of time when his brother was really sick. Then he came back and suffered a lot of soft tissue injuries.
“He had a knee injury on top of that and then he did a stupid thumb injury, it happened in training one day.”
Kennelly was 28 when he quit the AFL to follow in his father’s footsteps and went on to win an All-Ireland with Kerry. When news of Hanley’s retirement filtered through this week, it might have sparked some optimism of him making a comeback in the Mayo jersey.
But earlier this summer, in an interview with the Mayo News, Hanley said it would be “very hard to leave the climate and the lifestyle out here, it’s home right now.”
He established a gym on the Gold Coast with a friend that is now up and running following a Covid-enforced delay, and his partner hails from Queensland, so he is well settled in the area.
Given how close Mayo came to lifting the Sam Maguire in the past decade, it’s hard to shake the feeling that a player of Hanley’s calibre could have helped them over the line in one of those drawn All-Ireland finals against Dublin.
“It’s interesting,” says Walsh. “I tease him about that all the time. I actually call him the ‘curse of Mayo’ as a joke when I see him. I even text him yesterday and I was saying, ‘Jesus, the curse might be lifted.’ You don’t know the way his career would have panned out and where he would have played.
“Would he have played? I presume he would but you just don’t know. It’s one of these would have, could have, should have type thing. What I do know is that when I was at the Giants we were very interested in getting him because we needed a run and carrier for our half-back line in about 2014 or 2015.
“We met him and what he was was loyal, loyal to Brisbane Lions at the time and wanted to stay there. So that’s the sort of character Pearce and his family, and Cian [his brother] are. They’re loyal to where they’re from.
“Would he have influenced Mayo [to win an All-Ireland]? He probably would have but who knows? He might still, you never know!”
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