I remember a moment when I stood barefoot on firm dry sand by the sea. The air had a special quality about it, as if it had a life of its own. The sound of breakers on the shore shut out all others. The Earth seemed almost to move with me. I was running now, and a fresh rhythm entered my body. No longer conscious of my movement I discovered a new unity with nature.
Roger Bannister wrote that at another time and another place about his first recollection of running, and it being down along a sandy beach is in magnificent synchronicity with my own. I’ve said before it’s the most natural running surface, drawing you into the most natural running style, and there is still no better training ground in the country for it than the Kingdom of Kerry.
Coming as this one does in the aftermath of their latest All-Ireland football victory, the three miles run down the length of Inch beach and then back is another reminder the Kingdom is blessed for choice. Set against the Dingle Peninsula to the right and the Iveragh Peninsula to the left, no beach runs as stunning as Inch, you think, until you reach the end and see the tip of Rossbeigh directly across the water and remember all that is on offer here.
The view also extends far up towards Kells Bay and the direction of Cahersiveen, where Maurice Fitzgerald can still be found running and dipping in nearby White Strand, just like he did as 1997 footballer of the year.
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The Kerry football team which eventually took down Galway last Sunday was widely lauded for its sheer athleticism as much as footballing skills and for good reason. Going forward or in reverse their injection of pace was frequently startling, an example set over the years by many of the finest Kerry footballers who took to the beaches of the Kingdom to perfect their own running style.
Some preferred the less fashionable north Kerry and particularly Banna Strand, where many a tale has been recounted of gut-busting sessions around the sand dunes. The steep hill over the main entrance to Banna was a favourite, the record time from bottom to top still held by Mike Sheehy, and for several generations of Kerry footballers, from John O’Keeffe to Tadhg Kennelly and Tommy Walsh, Banna was a training ground first and a playground second.
Before he left this mortal world 10 years ago next Thursday, Con Houlihan wrote frequently and eloquently about the athleticism of Kerry footballers, one report on Kerry beating Dublin in a league game in Croke Park highlighted by the standout performance of a young Jack O’Shea.
Picking up the Cork Examiner the following morning, there was his brainchild spread across all eight columns.
THE DAY OF THE JACKO
“Oh dear, dear – it unmade my day,” he said.
Another beach in north Kerry has links with one of the Kingdom’s finest all-round athletes. You may or may not be surprised to read here that the only Irish person to win an All-Ireland title and an Olympic gold medal hailed from Kerry, and his name is Edward Edmond Barrett, the bigger surprise perhaps being that title was won in hurling and not in football.
Born in 1877 in Rahela, Ballyduff, a small village between Listowel and Ballybunion, Barrett was part of an esteemed sporting family which frequently trained on Ballybunion beach. He emigrated to London in 1900 and promptly joined the City of London Police, and a year later was part of the London team which beat Cork in the 1901 All-Ireland hurling final – the first and last time the title was won by a team outside of Ireland.
Barrett was most proficient in the sport of wrestling, winning a British catch wrestling title weeks before taking part in the 1908 Olympics in London. There, he won a bronze medal in the heavyweight freestyle division, the gold medal won by another Irishman representing Britain, Con O’Kelly from Dunmanway in west Cork, also the birthplace of Sam Maguire.
In the now discontinued Olympic tug of war, Barrett was part of the British gold-medal winning team made up entirely of the City of London Police, completing his still unique All-Ireland-Olympic double. Barrett also competed in the shot, javelin and discus competitions in 1908, was back again for the wrestling in Stockholm in 1912.
Another 24 years after London, Ballybunion was the two-week training ground for the Irish Olympic team before their departure to the 1932 Games in Los Angeles. The Irish success story there will be forever associated with Pat O’Callaghan defending his hammer title and Bob Tisdall winning the 400m hurdles, within an hour of each other, another more forgotten one being Eamonn Fitzgerald finishing fourth in the triple jump, just 11cm shy of the bronze medal.
From Castlecove on the Ring of Kerry road out from Caherdaniel towards Sneem, Fitzgerald’s all-round athletic ability was already evident by the fact he’d won three successive All-Ireland football titles with Kerry, from 1929 to 1931. The Olympic triple jump in 1932 was a properly heated competition, played out in front of 101,000 spectators, Japan’s Chuhei Nambu producing a world record of 15.72m to strike gold.
A month later Fitzgerald was in Croke Park, a sub on the Kerry team which won their first four-in-a-row. Despite winning Irish triple jump titles in 1933 and 1934, Fitzgerald soon vanished from the Irish sporting landscape, moving to Dublin and later teaching at Pádraig Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, in Rathfarnham, before his death in 1958, aged 55, after contracting tuberculosis.
Unquestionably one of Kerry’s finest athletes, Fitzgerald might be entirely forgotten without the inspired intervention of Weeshie Fogarty, who helped orchestrate the rededication of his once lost grave at Deansgrange Cemetery in 2004.
Somewhere behind all this talk of Kerry footballers being the finest of all-round athletes I can hear the voice of Jerry Kiernan, who always held a gently lingering grudge after Pat Spillane was named Kerry sports star of the year, back in 1984, ahead of Kiernan, who had finished ninth in that year’s Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. Except of course that Kiernan will never be forgotten as one of the finest of the lot.
