Let the record show that Brian Cody’s final appearance in front of the gentlefolk of the written press lasted precisely three minutes and 52 seconds. The losing manager at an All-Ireland final never hangs around too long, in fairness. Pádraic Joyce sat for just a shade under six minutes yesterday – and if he hadn’t a bee he needed to get out of his bonnet about the crucial Kerry free near the end, you can bet your boots he’d have gone a lot quicker.
But even allowing for the fact that there’s never anything fun about a losing manager’s press conference on All-Ireland final day, Cody’s one in the aftermath of the Limerick defeat nine days ago was fairly whistlestop. He didn’t want to be there and, in all truth, none of us wanted to delay his exit. He knows what we tend to ask, we know what he tends to reply, three minutes and 52 minutes was about enough all around. “Sound, lads,” he said as he got up and left, for what we now know was his very last time.
He did a bit with radio and a bit with TV outside of it. All told, let’s say it took up around 10 minutes of his day. Now multiply that by 282, which is the number of league and championship matches he took as Kilkenny manager over the course of 24 years. That’s 2,820 minutes. That’s 47 hours. That’s almost exactly two days of this man’s life that has been taken up doing post-match interviews alone.
Two days! Two whole days. Not bits of two days. Not two days with sleep and rest and sustenance built in. Two full days of explaining to jumped-up typists the ins and outs of a game most of them haven’t the first idea about. Imagine spending 47 hours of your time doing anything, much less doing it to help out the media. It’s a miracle he ever kept a civil tongue in his head at all.
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Will we miss him? More than he’ll miss us, that’s for certain. His ears will have been burning over the weekend with the curses of GAA writers up and down the country who had to file reports and retirement columns just as we were easing into the football final. One last swat of his paddle down on our knuckles before we got to break up for term.
But yeah, we’ll miss him. The game is light enough on characters as it is. Say what you like about Cody – and we have and we will – he inspires absolute fascination. You can’t be around that long and win that much and influence that many lives and not be interesting. Regardless of how hard you try.
Cody always reminded me of a paragraph the late, masterful journalist AA Gill wrote about the Taj Mahal. It was in the preface to his collection of travel writing, AA Gill is away, and it was about the perils of getting too clever in your choice of subject matter, too for-the-sake-of-it esoteric.
“In India, I wrote a long bit about the Taj Mahal,” Gill wrote. “Too many travellers and old India hands say ignore the Taj in favour of some more obscure site because it is the alpha tourist attraction, so accessible and familiar it must be culturally, semiotically worthless; virtual kitsch. But the truth is the Taj is f**king stupendous. It is popular because it is supremely magnificent.”
That’s who Cody was down all those years. He was there, always. He was consistent, always. Grindingly so. He had aggressively little interest in breaking the game down into anything other than his first principles. Take this post-match quote of his from the aftermath of an All-Ireland semi-final and try to pin down the year.
“We had lads out there playing the very best in the country and we just worked and worked and worked,” Cody said. “In the end, it paid off. They have brilliant hurlers as well as being strong. But in that second half, we had lads just chasing and chasing, blocking, hooking.
“We really worked to make it happen. I wouldn’t want to go picking individuals but they were out there playing a wonderful team today and, yes, they did really well.”
Would you be able to guess? It’s impossible, isn’t it? It could literally be from any of the 17 All-Ireland semi-finals they won under Cody. As it happens, it’s from August 1999 when, in his first season in charge, Kilkenny beat Clare to make it to the final against Cork. He actually followed it up with a bit of a quip – something to the effect that he was going to retire, go while the going was good kind of thing. It took him 23 years to make good on the gag.
He was, like the Taj, supremely magnificent. Not in every respect, obviously. The thing about being around for a quarter of a century is that regardless of how dead a bat you try to play, everyone gets to see the flaws in your stroke.
[ Brian Cody in the archives: ‘The better team will win on the day and that’s it’Opens in new window ]
[ Brian Cody’s achievements will be the benchmark, probably for all our lifetimesOpens in new window ]
Cody could be graceless, never more so than in his very public boorishness towards Henry Shefflin this summer. The famed ruthlessness that shaped his Kilkenny teams is all very well when you have an All Star in every position but when you don’t, isn’t it just rank bad management? He has never been shy about coursing referees and linesmen either, plainly never accepting that as the most famous manager in the game, he might have some responsibility in cutting them some slack.
But for all that, he was a joy to write about. If you can’t get the juices going at the idea of a man bringing his fifth (sixth? seventh?) iteration of a team back to an All-Ireland final and running the best team of the age to a puck of a ball, you’re in the wrong gig. He’d have been a brilliant curiosity again next year, chuntering away in the league about savage intensity and serious hurling and pushing, pushing to get Kilkenny up to Limerick’s level again.
That’s why somehow, after 24 years, it nearly felt this weekend like he has gone too soon. Like we could have done with another go-round, even though he’d know what we were going to ask and we’d know what he was going to say.
That’s some trick to pull off, much as he’d harrumph at the notion.
