The Sporting Corks

The lady in the Seattle Police Department Museum knew instantly who I was talking about when I mentioned Con Walsh. She’d come across some photos of him just a few days previously, one in athletic gear, the other in his officer’s uniform. She was aware he had the reputation of a sportsman but wasn’t quite sure the extent of it. She didn’t know that before hitting the streets of Seattle as a cop, Walsh took a bronze medal in the hammer throw at the 1908 Olympics, set a slew of world records, and played in two All Ireland football finals for Cork.

Very few Irish athletes can match that CV for diversity and breadth of achievement, and the pity is that far too many people in his native county have even heard of him. In bygone eras when the electronic media hadn’t shrunk the world, we tended to forget too easily about those who went away. That Walsh won his Olympic medal wearing a Canadian singlet doesn’t diminish the fact that the people of Clondrohid claim him as one of their own.

The job of somebody writing a sporting history of somewhere with as rich a sporting heritage as Cork is to juxtapose the tales of sepia-tinted heroes like Walsh with the more recent televised triumphs of Roy Keane, Denis Irwin and Sonia O’Sullivan. It’s both a challenge and a joy.

At the end of the last millennium, Cork Corporation buried a time capsule in the city. Amongst other things, they placed in it a Keane jersey alongside a tape of Jack Lynch’s graveside oration at the funeral of Christy Ring. What better window into the soul of a people than that? Future generations need only run their fingers along the biographies of each of that trio to gain an appreciation of the place that spawned them.

That there is a common thread running through the story of Cork sport is perhaps best summed up by comparing two of its finest productions, Ring and Keane. There are so many differences between the pair that at first, it seems ludicrous to talk of them in the same breath. One is a highly-paid professional, hailing from a city suburb who has struggled with alcohol for most of his career. The other was a tee-totaller from a village in East Cork, and the truest Corinthian, eschewing countless opportunities to cash in on his fame.

Over the past decade, Keane has endorsed packets of crisps, airlines, mobile phones, football boots and chocolate bars. Ring wouldn’t allow a pub in New York take his name in its title, rebuffed repeated lucrative offers from newspapers and publishers to write his life story, and made do with his earnings from driving an oil truck.

Yet, for all the disparities you’d expect between two men who played separate codes in hugely contrasting eras, there are also a wealth of similarities. Far beyond their common birthplace, and the fact that as a schoolboy soccer player, Keane’s Rockmount team used to congregate outside Glen Rovers’ hall in the heart of Blackpool before matches, they share pet peeves: Ring denounced hurling supporters who merely turned up for the big games; Keane’s views on Old Trafford’s “prawn sandwich” brigade are a matter of public record.

Read the Manchester United captain’s autobiography back to back with Val Dorgan’s hugely under-rated work ‘Christy Ring’, and it is apparent both were obsessive about their sport, fastidious about preparation, distrustful of the media, incapable of suffering fools gladly and pathological about losing. No better summation of the Cork sporting psyche than that.

From the oldest yacht club on the planet, the Royal Cork in Crosshaven, to the site of the world’s first-ever steeplechase, a four and a half mile jaunt between Buttevant church and St. Mary’s in Doneraile, no other county in Ireland can boast such a fecund history across so many games and pastimes. Apart from stars of the wattage of Sonia, Keane, Ring et al, and important historical figures on the sporting landscape like Sam Maguire from Dunmanway and Archbishop Croke from Ballyclough, there are less celebrated names deserving of some belated recognition in their homeland.

Another Dunmanway man, Con O’Kelly won a wrestling gold medal in the 1908 Olympics in London, Tony Mullane, a Cork-born pitcher bestrode the early days of American baseball, and Hugh Alexander from Connaught Avenue, near UCC, grew up to become an international chess grandmaster and ace code-breaker with MI5 in World War II. Never heard of them before? Let me offer you a glimpse.

“…..A gifted skater, boxer, musician and singer, Tony Mullane’s legion of fans in baseball knew him as either “The Apollo of the Box” or “The Count”. The Sporting News preferred to describe him as an intolerant racist and “a man of the most sordid nature”. A canny promoter in Louisville witnessed the effect his good looks had on women and used him to introduce the notion of a Ladies’ Day at the stadium. In a Cincinnati divorce court, one of his wives admitted to hitting him with a potato roller only after he had already cut her with a knife and smashed a water jug over her head. For a sober individual who never smoke or drank, Mullane cut quite a dash.

At the age of five, his parents Dennis and Elizabeth (nee Behan) brought him away from their native Cork to live in the new world. They settled near Erie, Pennsylvania, and eight decades later, their son’s death after illness would be marked by obituaries in the New York Times and the Chicago Daily News. Between 1881 and 1894, he was arguably the best pitcher in American baseball’s major leagues, winning a total of 285 games, a statistic that still ranks him among the top 25 players in that position of all time. He was also the first player ever to throw the ball both right and left-handed in the same game, a feat so remarkable that only three others in the history of the game could replicate it…..”

“……Although he attained the level of international master in 1950, Hugh Alexander’s peculiar choice of job precluded him from competing with enough regularity against the greats like Botvinnik. In the decades after World War II, the British government would never allow him travel anywhere behind the Iron Curtain to compete against his most illustrious chess contemporaries. London was riddled with Russian spies at the time, and it was feared that if Moscow got wind of the presence of such an important Cold War code-breaker on their territory, he would be either killed or imprisoned….”

“…..Born in Gloun in 1886 (accounts differ about whether he was a March or October arrival), George Cornelius O’Kelly was educated at St Patrick’s National School in Dunmanway. Before immigrating to England in his mid-teens, he reportedly dabbled in cycling, boxing and wrestling at a local level. Arriving in the west end of Hull, an area thick with Irish at the time, he joined the local constabulary on September 18th, 1902. An imposing figure at six foot three and 16 stone, he was quickly seconded to the fire brigade where fortuitously enough, one of his new colleagues invited him along to a grappling club to work out…..”

O’Kelly, Alexander, and Mullane are just three of the Cork diaspora to have covered themselves in glory far from home. There are plenty more. There is also a certain symmetry to this narrative. The story of Denis Horgan, silver-medallist in the shot putt at the 1908 Olympics segues into the emergence of Dr. Pat O’Callaghan. As a six year old boy, O’Callaghan was brought along to Banteer Sports to watch the great Horgan in action. Within two decades, O’Callaghan was a double Olympic gold medallist himself, and American promoters were working feverishly to put together a wrestling match between himself and his fellow Corkman, Ballydehob’s Danno Mahoney, in Boston.

Another theme one comes across again and again researching this history is the way gifted sportsmen move between unrelated codes. Mick Tubridy won an All Ireland football medal with Cork in 1945 and represented Ireland as an international showjumper, Ernie Keeffe remains the only man to win caps at senior level in rugby and boxing, and then there’s Jim Young. Having annexed five All Ireland hurling winners’ medals, Young became Munster squash champion and served as non-playing captain of the Irish Davis Cup tennis team in 1967. Other counties do ecumenism in sport too, just not as well.

“People ask me where I’m from when I’m in England and I always say Cork first, then Ireland,” said Roy Keane in an interview back in 1997. “Cork first and Ireland second. I’m very proud of where I come from, proud to be from Mayfield and from Cork.”

Is it any wonder he is?

© Dave Hannigan