Christy Ring

As the decade died on them with a long and painful whimper, this may just have been the final insult for the Cork hurling nation. The All Irelands drying up. The strikes continuing. Losing their place at the head of the roll of honour. Kilkenny equalling their hallowed four-in-a-row. And now the ultimate indignity: Christy Ring only the second-greatest hurler of all time, according to a national newspaper.


What with Mick Mackey, long accepted as the best after Ring, managing no higher than eighth place, the Irish Independent's list last weekend constituted the equivalent of placing a bomb in the Sistine Chapel. To put it another way, in three years' time Sight & Sound magazine will be listing their 100 top films of all time, as they've done at 10-year intervals since 1952. There is not the remotest prospect that any film other than Citizen Kane will figure at number one, where it has figured every decade to date. But Ring, it seems, is no longer the Citizen Kane of his genre.


The Indo will have been gratified. There is little point in a newspaper embarking on a venture of this kind if it doesn't succeed in triggering a hundred alehouse arguments and a thousand angry emails. To that extent the objective of the exercise was handsomely fulfilled. Yet in a wider context the paper's ratings – and wondering about what criteria were employed is idle – have by their studied iconoclasm done the game some service. For too long we've been forced to worship at the shrine of men who hurled half a century ago and earlier. If the truth is supposed to set us free, memory and received wisdom all too often hold us captive. That isn't to say that Justin McCarthy was correct when he declared in 2007 that "the best hurlers are now". But Joe Canning and Noel McGrath deserve better in the coming years than to be compared – and, inevitably, compared unfavourably – to players from generations ago. The sooner someone brings a motion to Congress calling for the outlawing of the argumentum ad Ring, the better.


The week before the 2003 decider, the Tribune did a piece that compared the respective All Ireland final records of Christy Ring and DJ Carey and concluded that Carey's record, in spite of everything, stood up perfectly well. The response from Leeside was instructive. There wasn't a response. Not a letter. Not an email. Faic. As the article had been quick to point out, Ring hadn't been required to do much in his first four finals, had lit up the skies in 1946, had been marked – or horsed – out of it in '47 and that anyway his reputation had been forged in the smithy of the Munster championship and burnished by the neverending story that were his Railway Cup exploits. In short, though he did it better and did it longer than anyone before or since, and though the sales of Tim Horgan's recent book on him demonstrate that his memory will never fade, Ring didn't actually out-Cú Chulainn Cú Chulainn every time he took the field. He was, strange as it may sound, only human after all – and very human at times. It is no harm to remember that.


Mick Mackey's demotion from the number two spot underlines the truism that tastes change over time. The Ahane man had charisma by the bucketload, but none of the paeans to him spend overlong waxing on the breadth of his range of skills. Was Mackey any more gifted than, say, Jimmy Smyth, 43rd in the Irish Independent list but a man none other than John Doyle numbered among his trio of most dangerous opponents. What might Smyth have achieved had he been born in Roscrea rather than Ruan? As it is he remains the hurling equivalent of a much-loved indie band, revered by those in the know but never fortunate enough to come by a breakout hit.


There is, as Seamus King, the author of A History of Hurling, points out, no scientific way of assessing hurlers, no set of criteria under which someone can score x number of points in various categories. "It's all hunches, it's all opinions. That's why we will always have arguments." Anyone selecting a Best Ever XV or Top 125 does so on the basis of preference and prejudice (not to mention their county background), aided by selective use of evidence. Me mind's made up, don't confuse me with the facts.


In racing they do these things differently. Coruscating as Sea The Stars was this summer, he wasn't a better horse than Sea Bird, another brilliant Prix de l'Arc winner. We know he wasn't a better horse because the Timeform ratings tell us so in black and white. Sea Bird 145, Brigadier Gerard and Tudor Minstrel 144, Ribot 142, Mill Reef 141, Sea The Stars 140. Granted, supporters of John Oxx's charge will point out that their boy only did what had to be done in his races, always finished with something in the tank and would have pulled out more – and consequently gained a higher Timeform rating – had the gun really been put to his head. Argue as they may 'til the cows come home, however, the cold figures leave them fighting a rearguard action.


The closing chapter of King's book, written in the mid-1990s, painted a downbeat picture for the future of hurling. He confesses to being substantially happier with the game's health today than he was 15 years ago. "It's a better spectacle now. There's more excitement. Some of the games we remember were not the games that were actually played. Rose-tinted glasses are a terrible thing in sport, particularly in hurling. I'm 71. When I was young I heard older people saying that the games then weren't as good as the games they saw when they were young." King has watched enough footage of All Irelands from the 1950s to be in a position to assert that many of them were far from the "mighty spectacles" of legend and that a number of the protagonists were, as he puts it, "plodders".


Consider too the dangers of folk memory. DJ Carey, a man who more so than Henry Shefflin expanded our modern concept of what was possible on a hurling field, even if the graph of his career resembled a mountain range compared to the gradual upward line of Shefflin's, caught a ball while lying on his back inside the Offaly 70-metre line in the 2000 All Ireland final, jumped up and pointed it. This we can be sure of not only because many of us were there but also because TV has preserved the moment for posterity. Had the same point been scored 50 years earlier it would have been handed down to us as a sacred relic, lanced over the bar from inside his own 65 while Carey was still lying on his back. In fact, a crucial point in an All Ireland final of the 1950s remains widely deemed to have been scored by a man who was on his knees at the time. It wasn't, as the man himself will happily confirm to this day. And decades passed before the myth of Art Foley's save from Ring in 1956 was debunked.


Look at this year's All Ireland final, King urges. Look at the National League final. "Tremendous games, both of them." Good matches weren't uncommon in the mid-1990s, but a tally of 1-13 sufficed to win both the 1995 and '96 All Ireland finals while 1-11 won one of the 1998 semi-finals. By way of contrast, Kilkenny and Tipp had 24 scores on the board between them at half-time in this year's decider and 47 at the end of it.


A faster game, undoubtedly. More intense, clearly. But better? Paddy Downey, the former GAA correspondent of The Irish Times and a man who's been attending All Ireland finals since 1950, demurs. Refreshingly for one of his vintage, Downey doesn't deplore the death of ground hurling. "A ground ball couldn't be directed as precisely as a ball hit from the hand, say from the half-back line to the forwards, so in that respect the game has changed. But overall the skills of the present day don't surpass those shown by Ring, Jimmy Doyle, Jimmy Smyth, Jim Langton – I could name so many. I don't think the modern game is more skilful than the game of 50 years ago. The extra speed and fitness gives it the appearance that it is."


The best hurling is now? Logic says yes; it is more precise as well as being faster. The best hurlers are now? As alluded to by Downey, an entirely different debate. Let the arguments rage forever and a day. In the meantime, let nobody dream of coming up with another list of hurling immortals between now and 2025 – and then may it only begin at 2000. It is good that we commemorate the heroes of yesterday. It is not so good that we allow their deeds, real and imagined, to enchain our todays and tomorrows.


emcevoy@tribune.ie