GAELIC GAMES:When Nicky Quaid lines out for his championship debut as a goalkeeper for Limerick against Waterford tomorrow he'll be maintaining a proud family tradition, writes KEITH DUGGAN
‘TO BE honest, I wasn’t fit to lace his boots as a goalkeeper,” Joe Quaid says of his late cousin Tommy, whose son Nicky will follow both men in making his senior championship debut as a Limerick goalkeeper tomorrow.
For followers of the Treaty County old enough to hold crystallised memories of the years of hyper-drama and excruciating bad luck that have followed their last All-Ireland success in 1973, the emergence of the latest Quaid man to keep goal for the county at least offers proof that some legacies are consistent.
Donal O’Grady’s decision to ask the Effin man to join the squad with the intention of making him a goalkeeper was perhaps the most startling example of the reorganisation and sense of purpose that has swept through the squad since the Cork man took over.
Quaid had form as a goalkeeper but had also proven himself as a skilful and effective outfield player, winning handsome notices for his performances at half-back for the under-21 team. So O’Grady’s invitation came from out of the blue. Nicky told Joe Quaid about the phone call, uncertain about what to do. He hadn’t really played in goal for the previous two seasons. The older man didn’t hesitate in offering his advice. “I just told him I thought he was a fantastic keeper and to give it a go.”
And, of course, they were both strongly aware of an absent presence in that moment, the father and goalkeeper whose reputation and influence looms large in Limerick hurling some 13 years after a tragically early death. Because of the Quaid story, it would have been impossible to say no.
Tommy Quaid won his first All-Star in the 1992 season, some 17 years after his first year of senior hurling. Like many hurlers, his excellence was often obscured by the shortness of many of Limerick’s championship seasons. But he was a compelling sight in the goals, edgy and laconic, gum chewing and seemingly unfazed regardless of the occasion.
It is 19 summers since Limerick and Waterford met in a tense Munster semi-final, with Limerick defending a one-goal lead in the closing minutes of the game. Johnny Brenner’s shot was as deceptive as it was ambitious, struck from some 30 yards and, as Paddy Downey wrote in that Monday’s The Irish Times, “lobbed over backs and forwards and dipped towards the right corner but the splendid Quaid dived to his left and brought off a superb save”.
Limerick won 2-13 to 1-13 and although they were easily brushed aside by Cork in the final, Quaid’s individual excellence had had a sufficient stage. He finished with two Munster championship medals from 1980 and ’81, two NFL medals from 1984 and ’85 and that one All Star but it was never about the accolades. He was just a hurler, capable of turning in exceptional performances both within the confines of the goalmouth and outfield, where he regularly played for his club, Feohanagh.
“As a goalkeeper and a hurler combined, he was the best I ever saw,” his cousin says now. “Outfield with the club he was fantastic. I remember him scoring 4-11 out of 4-14 in an intermediate final. So he was fantastic but as a goalkeeper, I don’t think there was anyone better around. He was unlucky he was coming up against (Ger) Cunningham and (Noel) Skehan during a time when Limerick was not going well. But for a man to give 18 years of service as he did for Limerick was phenomenal.
“I remember some guy came up to me after the first match I played for Limerick and said, ‘Jaysus, you are way better than Tommy’. I pinned him to the wall and said, ‘Listen, when I have 18 years service given to Limerick, come back then and discuss that with me. But don’t you dare say that about Tommy’. That was the regard I held him in.”
The baton was passed from Tommy to Joe fairly seamlessly. The younger Quaid says the best goalkeeping tip he ever got came from his cousin one day when they were kids and playing in the back of his parents’ house. Years later, standing there as an adult, he realised just how small it was: a patch of grass and a low hedge at which they took turns belting penalties. Strange as it was but a goalkeeper who became renowned for his fearless shot-stopping began life dreading the sliothar and because he tried to save shots blind, his head turned this way and that, he regularly took hits to the body. “Keep your eye on the ball,” Tommy advised him. “That way you can keep out of the way of it.”
And after that, when he studied its trajectory and began to read it, he realised he excelled at stopping it. Joe Quaid played in All-Ireland finals for Limerick in 1994 and ’96 and, in the first of those finals, had the best – or worst – seat in the house for Offaly’s indecently late comeback, which saw them score 2-5 in the last five minutes of the game.
In the months of disappointment and recrimination that followed, blame was invariably cast in Quaid’s direct but he was clearly the outstanding goalkeeper of that season. Anyway, Quaid knew it was one of the treacheries of the goalkeeping life. His cousin Tommy had encountered similar criticism in 1984 when, in the rarest of misjudgments, he let a John Fenton sideline cut slip through his fingers for a late and crucial Cork goal. But he recovered from that setback and by the time he handed the jersey to his cousin Joe, he had established himself as one of the key hurling figures of modern day Limerick hurling.
“He was a great presence in the dressingroom,” says Ciarán Carey, the current Limerick selector and former team-mate. “I can remember well the help he was too when I started out – making me feel welcome. Putting me at ease. Tommy drove a red Hiace at the time and I always recall that it was the first van there at training.”
Tommy Quaid was only 41 when he died. He ran his own engineering business and visited a project in Charleville one morning in October 1998. He was helping his team cut a steel girder on a 14-foot wall and when it was halved, he overbalanced as he bore its weight and fell. What initially seemed like a bad but survivable accident worsened in the days ahead. Quaid’s death is linked to Limerick hurling in the strangest way imaginable.
The story is retold in Last Man Standing, Christy O’Connor’s definitive book on the life of hurling goalkeepers. After he finished playing, Tommy had applied his energies to the future of the game in the county and as well as becoming an integral part of the group who put structures in place that yielded Under-21 All-Ireland titles in hurling and football, he was a selector on the intermediate team that year.
In fact, they were playing in the 1998 All-Ireland intermediate final against Kilkenny on the very Saturday when Tommy’s wife Breda was sitting by his beside in the hospital. By then, she had been told to prepare herself for the worst. Their sons, Thomas and Nicky, were at the match: they would go into the dressingroom as they always did. Jack, their youngest boy, was being looked after by family. With the match on, the procession of visitors to the hospital eased and Breda Quaid had a peaceful half hour to sit by his side. It was then, at 3.55pm on that Saturday afternoon, he died. It was only later the significance of the time became apparent.
As it transpired, the second half of the final had just begun and Limerick looked to be in trouble. But for whatever reason, the team suddenly found its stride and played terrifically to the finish. The two boys were in the dug-out, shouting support as they always did.
“I was there, yeah,” Joe Quaid remembers. “It was the eeriest thing I ever came across in my life. Because Limerick were in trouble about five minutes into the second half and we only found out afterwards that that is when Tommy died. It was as if a cloud lifted from the team and they started performing marvellously against a team with Shefflin and these lads. As someone said, it was like he knew it was trouble and he felt it was time to leave.”
That match marked Limerick’s first All-Ireland at any grade since 1987. In a tribute to his former team-mate, Eamon Cregan said at the time: “He was an excellent hurler and played outfield for his club side Feohanagh and if you wanted to beat them you had to stop him scoring. I remember when we (Claughan) were playing them in a championship game, the fella who was marking him said, ‘I don’t want to go through that again’. He said in an interview with Martin Kiely after he won his All Star that what he really wanted was an All-Ireland medal. He went on to say that he hoped to coach Limerick to an All-Ireland final.”
That intermediate final was as close as he came to achieving that. That night, Breda Quaid had to break the worst news to her boys and it is thought that 20,000 people came to pay their respects at the home in Effin. Some were well known to the other faces, others hurlers known by reputation and complete strangers showed up as well.
“At one stage this guy walked into the room and he didn’t come near us,” Breda Quaid says in Last Man Standing. “He came and stood at the heel of the coffin. He was a big tall fella who had come on a motorbike and he folded his arms and just looked at him. I found it hard to believe what he was doing so I actually got off the chair and went over to him. I said ‘Did you know him?’ He just said ‘I was one of his admirers’ and he left. I don’t think he shook hands with me, he just walked out. I often think about him since.”
There is a marvellous photograph in the book of Nicky Quaid standing in goal in an Under-12 shinty international match taken the following year. It is cold and the boy had the jersey wrapped around his knuckles, the hurl leaning against his hip and he is following the play downfield through a white helmet with a faceguard. He looks both vulnerable and completely at home. He still had a lot of growing to do but in the years ahead, he was often reminded of what his father meant to Limerick people.
“I’m really proud of who he was and most people, that’s all they really know me as,” Nicky Quaid says in Last Man Standing. “People often come up to me and ask me am I Tommy Quaid’s son and I don’t have a clue who they are. I just know that a lot of people idolised him.”
Tomorrow, he begins his own journey as a Limerick championship goalkeeper. There can be few debuts in sport tougher than the hurling debut: above all positions, the goalkeeper’s is the one where a lone mistake is magnified and remembered and can obliterate an otherwise perfect performance. Maybe that is part of the thrill of it. In his league debut, a slippery kind of afternoon in Ennis against Clare, Quaid looked assured and calm and that characterised his form as Limerick went about securing promotion with little fuss.
They played their league final against the same opponents. Joe Quaid was in the crowd and one vignette seemed to bring his cousin Tommy back onto the field: a long ball was sent into the Clare corner forward and even as it arrived it was snuffed out by Nicky, who had read the angle and the flight and was there before the ball was. “He has superb hands – like his father. I wouldn’t have hands like that – I was never confident in my ability under a high ball. Thankfully I never dropped one into the net.
“There are pictures of Tommy coming out of a square with three of four fellas dragging at him and him three feet in the air catching the ball. That is something I never did. And when Nicky has a few seasons behind him in goal, then people will see the old shades of Tommy coming out.”
Already, Quaid is more than familiar with the turbulent recent history of Limerick hurling. He was a member of the shadow squad that played under Justin McCarthy during the league and championship last year and he made his outfield debut when he came on in the second half of the Munster championship against Cork last year. But 2010 will always go down as the year best forgotten in Limerick hurling. This is a new start. Limerick will be outsiders going in against Waterford but it is appropriate it should be a Quaid manning the last line of the rearguard.
“A scrawnier version of him,” laughs Carey when asked about the comparisons. “He is taller too. Nicky has no fear about coming out 20 or 30 yards whereas Tommy was very cute but in terms of an eye for the ball and their presence in goals, they have the same characteristics. I had Nicky at under-21s two years ago and I played him in goals. He is a terrific goalkeeper.”
The great pity is, of course, Tommy will not be in Thurles tomorrow. The rest of the family will, of course. Joe Quaid hasn’t spoken much with Nicky since the season started, content to watch him from afar. Joe Quaid has young boys himself now who have seen the dazzling stops he made on the Top 20 Saves TV programme. But all they want to talk about is Nicky. And he knows how much it means to Breda Quaid when she sees him out there.
All three of her boys continue to hurl. Thomas is on the fringes of the senior squad this year. Jack, the youngest, played for Limerick Under-15s last year. Joe Quaid laughs when asked if he was playing in goal. “No, he was out the field. But don’t you know he is going to end up there at some stage.”
