A few weeks ago, in repose, he was reading to the kids in school. The story of the boy who stole the apple. As soon as his light fingers lifted the fruit he ran and the people came running after him. The gang chasing the boy got bigger and finally the boy with the apple ducked under a cart and hid to let them pass.
He sat there and when the vanguard of the posse had gone by, he stepped out again and a man at the end of the mill grabbed him by the sleeve and said "C'mon, c'mon quick, he's gone this way." The gang and the chase had taken on lives of their own. Reminded him of last summer. "Ah, everyone looking for a tape of it. Loughnane's gone mad again. Loughnane is a total nutter. He's done it this time. Great crack, but if you looked back and asked somebody what it was all about, they wouldn't know."
The fastest nutter in the west sits across the table with his eyes twinkling, the bill of his baseball cap tilted playfully. He is remembering the successful broadcasts of last summer, his outings on Radio Free Clare, speaking to the people. The image lingers of the leader's voice crackling away and the peasants in the fields putting down their scythes and walking towards the wireless mesmerised. We took it all so seriously. The words and the chastisements. Now, in the cafe in the darkened shopping mall across from Cusack Park, on the brink of a new hurling year, Ger Loughnane looks back in levity. "It was fantastic. Fantastic," he says. "People will forget 1997, but nobody will forget 1998."
And he leans into it like a tackle. He's heard every crackpot theory and line of abuse that's going. He cost Clare an All-Ireland, that he got bigger than his team, that he lost the respect of his players, that he simply lost his way.
"People who don't know think it must have been terrible. We didn't win an All-Ireland, but I remember I met Anthony Daly about six weeks after it was all over and we said to each other that we wouldn't give up 1998 for anything. Last year was one we'll never forget. In sport you are always testing yourself looking to see how you cope in adversity. When everyone is down on you and people are abusing you from the stand, that's a great test of yourself to see how you cope, to come through that unscathed was good for the team."
How unscathed they were will be seen this summer when they go to the well again, when they tune into Ger Loughnane's messianic words.
"A lot of people say that. They say that the things I said were the ultimate cause of our downfall. Look. Going in against Offaly without Brian Lohan, Colin Lynch and Liam Doyle, three All Stars in an All-Ireland semi-final, was there ever an era when we could do that? The second day against Offaly we played our best, crispest hurling of the summer. We got it right. "And afterwards we were physically exhausted. We had two Munster finals and two semi-finals played. We were dead the third day in Thurles. I've always said that even if we had beaten them we wouldn't have beaten Kilkenny in the All-Ireland. Nothing left. We could give no more. If I had kept my mouth shut and taken it, would we have won the All-Ireland? No."
And what had it been all about? The gang chasing the boy who stole the apple? He has it figured, boiled down to two incidents.
"Would I sound paranoid if I said people were out to get me?" he says laughing "There were two things. Three maybe. First we started naming teams in midweek and playing different teams on Sunday. That grated with a lot of people. Then there was an incident with a certain commentator (Micheal O Muircheartaigh) whose custom it is to visit the dressing-room before big games. That is an important time for us and before the Cork game he wasn't let in. "I think it was said that he kicked the door to get in and was refused. Well, if someone of Micheal's status is saying something against the county, people say there must have been something wrong and it must have been that bollox Loughnane that started it. There was a certain animosity towards me, especially among many media commentators. That grated on a lot of people. And there was the thing with Eamon Cregan in 1997 that grated, too. It built up and there was an idea that we'd be taken down a peg. In the end it was a fairly good shemozzle."
When last summer was done, hurling and shemozzling, he remembers waking up on the Monday morning and feeling nothing but relief. No more fighting. No more hot words. No more nights at the Limerick Inn. "Remember how it went," he says, explaining the relief. "Saturday evening, having beaten Offaly, we were upstairs with them in Croke Park having a drink and they were slagging us away - `give us a replay now' - and we were laughing and saying get on with ye and turning our minds to the final and then they go away home and wish us the best. Then the following morning they are back in the semi-final and we are at square one. We are very down. The way we play and the concentration we use, we needed more than a week to get up again."
On the day of the re-match, he remembers best the bus from Cashel to Thurles. They'd pucked around at Cashel, as is their wont at lunchtime on a big match day in Thurles. He walked among them and he'd never seen them as quiet. The bus to Thurles was the same. Fellows staring out the windows. Heads down. Gazes going nowhere. Nothing there.
"We were trying to bluff our way along. I remember trying everything to rouse them up. Offaly started hurling the way they did and it was last thing we needed. They were the best team the last day. I was just hoping something on the pitch would trip our wires and spark us up. Just to get through it."
It didn't. They had their quiet walk to the bus, their holiday in the Canaries, and there they left it. Lots unsaid. And again, what was it all about? "To me it was about a fella who gets suspended on no evidence that can be produced. If you don't go on evidence you are behaving like paramilitaries. You are not behaving like a democratic organisation if you haven't a referee's report or video evidence. There was neither for Colin Lynch. It doesn't matter what people thought they saw. People were out to get us. There was another agenda. It took on a life of its own, but it started off with another agenda."
Any regrets?
"Hah. Everyone asks that. What do you regret? I promised myself that next time I'm asked I'll say what do you think I should regret?
Well, The Limerick Inn, the whole summer going mad, you getting bigger than the team?
"The media focus didn't come in till after the Munster replay. The Tuesday or Wednesday after the Munster Final it all started, after a radio programme on the Monday night. It went from there. I don't regret any of it. I'm not bitter about any of it. I'll still talk to anyone, any journalist just has to call."
And the Edith Piaf of The Banner smiles hugely.
The Championship is his crucible. He has to be as right for it as any player. Come the championship, his immersion is total, he sacrifices himself to the summer's rhythms. Dancer inseparable from the dance.
In summer he thinks about hurling all the time. Never out of his mind. Sometimes he'll be out for an evening with Mary and they'll be talking to people and inexplicably his mind will drift to hurling. Suddenly he'll come to, and the company will look at him, and he'll say apologetically: "Sorry . . . what?"
And Mary will squeeze his arm and lean forward and say "Sorry, Ger does that a lot."
He will wait until April before he even speaks formally to the players. In the meantime, he will scuff his toes and fiddle with the change in his pockets. Spring is for throat-clearing and for cobbling together ideas. Today's skirmish with Kerry is fluff for the breezes.
The hurlers have half a pitch at Crusheen on Tuesdays. Tonight the footballers, more numerous and just as sprightly, have colonised the other half.
Crusheen belies the lyricism of its name. Fanciful journalists reckon there is a hard hill some place here upon which Claremen yomp through meanest winter. The only hill is psychological.
From Crusheen on a winter's night to Thurles in the height of summer is an impossible leap. Some nights Tony Considine looks out over the parallel lines of fencing which separate the GAA field from the neighbouring scrub and he tries to imagine Thurles. The odd night he manages it and it keeps him coming back.
Loughnane hates this time, loathes the finger-drumming monotony of it. Winter and early spring provide fitness coach Mike MacNamara with his turn at the baton, his voice prompting the swells and diminuendos, dictating the aches and pains his boys will feel next morning.
This year Mike Mac's audience is diminished. Clare have gambled big and there is scarcely a player on the hurlers' half of the training field who would be recognised outside the county borders.
They go about their business as novitiates. Jumping hurdles, pulling sit-up duty, pumping through the endless sprints. The big boys with the medals to rattle have too many rings on their trunks, too many summers of toil stacked up on the mind to be here. Loughnane and co decided before Christmas to leave them away till the evenings are long and the hunger for hurling makes them wince.
"It's a big change to be letting them go their own way. It's a tactic. Have they the experience and craft to get them through? We can't do what we did in 1995. We'd play great hurling maybe in April or May, but by the late summer, if we got there, we'd be in trouble. Most of the boys won't be back till the 20th of March. That week anyway."
As for himself, he ain't ravenous yet. Nothing gnaws his insides.
"There is still a doubt in my head. January came and I felt I should be enthusiastic for it and I wasn't. I won't know how up I am until the long evenings come. I hope I'll see a few challenges and then take them up. See where the challenge is and take it from there. I'm not rearing to go now. I hate standing in Crusheen and the wet league Sundays and the ball slow and fellas rolling over one another like drowsy cattle."
You want to come, he says, when they are hurling in the park. Nights in Crusheen are one thing, an easy evocation of hurling's toil, but the stretched evenings in the park when the hurling goes on and on, frenzied but with method in it, they're the nights that capture the lovely madness of it. That's the time he loves best, being among hurlers hurling. He hopes it will spark him.
"I always say it's my last year, but I couldn't possibly see myself doing another year. It's a struggle this year. I know when the fine evenings come and it starts to snowball and the Tipp game gets closer it will start. This year we will be giving it everything."
This is a rare night in Crusheen for Loughnane. Mostly he stays away or just drops in to say hello. Sean Stack is here, too, new to the huddle. Putting down the time, himself and Loughnane are talking about the World Cup and great World Cups from the past. Remember Holland in 1974. Beaten by Germany when they were a goal up, but you know says Loughnane, "deserve" had nothing to do with it.
Memories, though.
"Neeskens," says Loughnane.
"Rensenbrink," says Stack, "and Cruyff."
"We played Tipp that day, Sean," says Loughnane. "The day of the final. When Germany bet them we were playing Tipp. We never got to see it. Limerick bet us in the Munster final that year."
Sean Stack screws up his eyes.
"You know, you're right."
If Stack wasn't here he'd be in another county, Loughnane reckons.
"That's no secret. He'd be in Galway maybe. We have to look down the road. The difference between the professional and the amateur is that I can only survive and give it my best for a limited amount of time.
"We have to set the groundwork. One man takes over and when he leaves there is a full stop. Another man comes in and there is a process which starts again. Offaly have done it, they have come back with new teams. That's the only way. A brand new team comes along and wins an All-Ireland - that's when we have done it in Clare. Offaly are there. We're giving Sean time to take up the overlap."
In the middle of the training session, a strange thing happens. A bus full of freshman hurlers pulls up on the N18 and the beery boys leap off, full of vim and voice, and start chanting at Loughnane and the Clare boys.
Mike Mac's charges don't break a stride as the giddy abuse comes through the darkness. Twenty yards away Loughnane leans an ear into the wind.
"What's that," he laughs. "Loughnane is a bollox, Loughnane is a bollox. Isn't third level great?"
He creases with laughter. He'll miss it when it's over. And when Loughhnane steps back, burnt out, he'll carry no regrets or longings with him. He remembers when he quit playing he did it clean. No messing with junior hurling and fighting the night. Just walked away.
"I gave it what I had and then I was finished."
Later, back in the restaurant with his team grazing around him, Loughnane raises the old days again. The times that haunt him. All those Sundays when after all the talk and hype Clare teams left their guts in the dressing-room toilets and went out and let the day pass them by.
"That's when I'm a nutter," he says. "Match days. Tread on my ties on the day of a match and anything could happen. Training, I can get on with anyone. Match days, we have to be right. Those hours before a game are so important. I remember playing and all the talk would stop and we'd have nothing left. This team, we get out on the pitch and we are focused and ready. That is a hard thing to do and I know I do it well. That's the thing I bring to the mix."
And he is right. Love or loathe him, the hoor he'll be missed. Every game Clare play in the summer is an event, a grand, compelling, unique, visceral event. Look at this summer's calendar and official summer time starts when the ball is thrown in for Clare on June 6th. "One last go," says Loughnane, "one great last blast."
He balls his fist, gets up to go, pulls his baseball cap down over his brow and hunches his shoulders against the night. The passion is blazing in his eyes again. "One more time," he roars again, greeting the night happily.
