Fallen gunner: Paul Brady faces seven months of rehab having played through the pain to clinch his third world handball championship

Late one afternoon a couple of weeks back, Paul Brady's body was at his brother's wedding but his mind hadn't taken up the invitation. Answers. He needed answers. Endless thoughts jousted for space in his head, each of them slain as soon as they declared themselves a winner. He was standing in for photos without joining in the celebrations, laughing along without his eyes being in on the jokes. When he could wait no longer, he slipped out during the meal and dialled the number.


On the other end of the phone was the clinic in London where he'd had an MRI scan on his quad muscle earlier in the week. He'd damaged it during a plyometrics exercise in which he'd meant to jump up on a box with both feet but missed with his left and jarred the top of his right thigh on the way down. A few days afterwards, he'd come on in a Cavan county semi-final for Mullahoran where his every kick of the ball was a knife attack, the pain too much to allow him either start or finish the game.


He didn't know it at the time but what he'd done was rip the muscle almost six centimetres off the bone, to the point where it was more or less a defunct piece of matter hanging down from a now useless tendon. And he had done all this less than a fortnight before the World Handball Championships in Portland, USA – held every three years – a tournament where he'd be going for his third title in a row after previously winning in 2003 and 2006. The MRI had been done in London because that's where he's based these days doing a post-grad teaching degree but nearly a week had passed now and they hadn't been back to him. Turned out they were trying to be nice. And obviously, they didn't know who they were dealing with.


"They knew I was at my brother's wedding and they didn't want to annoy me with the results so they didn't ring me," he says. "But sure I had to know. They told me that as far as they were concerned, this was the end of it. They said there was no way I was going to any world championships, no hope. That I would have to have surgery to reattach it and that I would be in a cast for six to eight weeks.


"But sure to them, I was just some fella with a sports injury and they were just offering a medical opinion on a scan they were looking at. I had to talk to them face to face. I needed for them to see what it would do to me to miss the worlds, that this was effectively them telling someone they couldn't go to the Olympics. They weren't to know that what they were saying to me was killing off something that I had spent seven years of my life working towards. They weren't to know that I didn't care if I wrecked my leg as long as I wrecked it on a handball court. I didn't have three more years. I had 10 days."


The doctors in London told him not to go to the US, as did the staff at the Sports Surgery Clinic in Santry. They warned him he would be risking serious and lasting damage to his leg, that he would certainly never have the same power in it again. He thanked them for their time and their advice and packed his gloves and goggles anyway. If he could stand, he could play. If he could play, he could win. And if he could win, he'd be remembered as arguably the greatest handballer in history.


Those are the skies he walks and he's never been inclined to look down. As a play-anywhere half-forward, he's been a fixture on the Cavan football panel since 2003, and he's fairly confident he'll manage the county at some point. But among handball people in the US, they talk of him in hushed tones. Nobody has ever been more ruthless or more dominating. He's owned their national championships for most of this decade and needs one more All Ireland to equal Duxie Walsh's record of seven here. Or, as Brady would put it, he needs two more to beat him.


"You put so much into the thing," he says. "My life for the past seven years has been almost non-existent apart from this. The three-in-a-row was something I was aiming for the whole time, to the extent where I actually didn't even enjoy the things I won along the way. After I won the first world title in 2003, I looked at the US national championships and thought if I won two out of the next six, I would be well on the road to three world titles in a row. But then I won five of them and even then I felt they were just a means to an end.


"When you win one world title, it leaves you with the problem of where to go next. You are the best so what's left? That was the big reason I set out to win three rather than one. Because then, you're not left with the problem of how to motivate yourself. You're gone past trying to be the best in the world and now you're on to trying to be the greatest. I've always been afraid to admit anything like that because it sounds like a very arrogant thing to say but the truth is I had to set myself a kind of intangible goal to work towards, something that sounded beyond the beyonds."


When he got to Portland, he went straight to the tournament doctors with his scan on a disk. They knew him well enough to know he wasn't asking their opinion but instead was looking for them to find a way to get him on the court. In the end, they fashioned a bandage that went from his right thigh up and around his waist and back down, wrapped so tight it would attempt to mimic the action of the quad muscle. Effectively, it was designed to make the other muscles in his body do the work of the stricken quad. Combined with painkilling injections, they got him inside the glass door.


He couldn't risk too many sudden movements so he had to cut right down on gymwork and restrict himself to the pool. He couldn't train with the ball so instead he went and stood in the centre of the court and imagined the shots he would play. Everything was going to hinge on his serve, which if it was good enough and clever enough could save him from over-exertion. Get drawn into rallies and he would be toast.


"I got through to the final alright. I was lucky in that my hardest match didn't come until the final. If I'd had a really tough one before then, I wouldn't have been able to make it through. Painkilling injections only do so much and they leave you incredibly sore afterwards. All they're doing is masking the pain but you're going to feel it eventually. And what was happening was that I was using the rest of my body to compensate for the quad. There was no way I would have been able to play in the final if I'd had a really hard match in the semi-final. But I got through okay."


In the final he met Allan Garner, a young Texan who had come through the tougher side of the draw. Garner was quick and quick-thinking and by now Brady's body was beginning to seize up. He managed to take the first game 21-14 but lost the second 21-18 as he tried to get it all over with. He was going for shots that weren't really there, like a contestant on Countdown desperately making up words as the clock runs dead. By the time he was leading 4-1 in the first-to-11 tie-breaker, his body wouldn't go another step and he had to call for an injury time-out.


He retired to another court for some privacy while physios tried to massage some life back into his muscles. He drank pickle juice to loosen them out, walked around and stretched to try and flush the pain away. His long-time doubles partner Michael Finnegan tried to make him focus on how close he was to the win and to get past the pain but he wasn't altogether sure he could go back in. He wasn't sure of anything.


"There was such inner chaos going on in my mind. Part of me was thinking that I had nothing to lose now because I was genuinely coming to the point where my body could give no more. If I was carted off the court, then so be it. It wouldn't be so bad, I would have given everything. But then I would snap out of it and realise that I was only a seven points away from something I had been working towards for years. My mind was racing 100 miles an hour. I couldn't pretend to you that I was thinking straight at any point after I came back from the injury time-out."


But come back he did. He lost his lead almost immediately, as Garner pulled it back to 4-4. One fluffed shot from the Texan though and Brady was back in. He rattled off six quick points to get within one shot of the title but Garner pulled it back to 10-7. And then, whether it was through exhaustion or a blip in concentration Brady doesn't know, Garner left a simple shot short of the wall and that was that. An unprecedented three world titles in a row – Mr Paul Brady of Mullahoran, Co Cavan.


"The whole thing had been such a mental trauma and it had been building up on me more than I had realised. So the feeling at the end is hard to describe because it wasn't any huge rush of joy and it wasn't exhaustion or relief either. It was just numbness really. It was the end of a nightmarish couple of weeks where my emotions overwhelmed me. Because although there were times where I was thinking I had nothing to lose, the rest of the time I knew I was looking at history here and that this was something I set out to do seven years ago. I've never cried after a win in my life but I cried last Saturday.


"I can relax a bit now and be happier with myself. For the last six or seven years, I've been very, very intense. My first reaction anytime I won was always relief. There was never any joy in it. I really didn't care that I had won as long as I hadn't lost. As soon as they were over, they were forgotten. It was always 'Next tournament, next tournament.' I don't regret that because I didn't know any different. But I'll relax more now, definitely."


He went out for a drink on the Saturday night but needed pretty heavy painkillers to last even a couple of hours. He went to bed shortly after midnight but was too sore for anything more than fitful sleep. By Sunday morning, he couldn't move and Monday wasn't much better either. It took until Friday before he was able to get proper rest and looks likely now to have the best part of seven months rehab ahead of him.


A small price, happily paid.


mclerkin@tribune.ie