It wasn’t a typical weekend in Tony Griffin’s life, which isn’t to say it was untypical of him. In the afternoon he scored 1-2 for Clare against Waterford in the final game of the 2005 qualifiers; at three o’clock the next morning he drove to Dublin airport to catch a red-eye flight, day-tripping to the Tour de France. A minibus had been booked to take the panel drinking in west Clare after the match but he let it go. His Monday would start as his teammates drained the last from Sunday’s glass.
He flew to Lyon and drove to Grenoble where Tuesday’s stage would begin. His flights had been booked at the last minute and without a bed to be had he slept in the back of his hired car. He rose early the next morning to get a good pitch on the mountainside. As he stood there the Tour rushed his senses: the great chaos of crowds and carnival, the stifling heat and relentless hype; the great, tainted struggle and the peleton of altered bodies.
“Up close it’s scary how lean they are. They look like machines pedalling along. I was a lot more naive last year. I’ve read a lot of things about the Tour and cycling in general since that has opened my eyes. But when you’re there you get caught up in it. It’s what we all aspire to, enduring that much pain, being in that physical shape, being at the top of your sport.”
He promised himself he’d go, so he went. He was curious, so he went. It would have been easier to go drinking but then he would still have been curious. It was only a little thing but it was true to him nonetheless.
All his life his curiosity and his ambitions and his aspirations have taken him places. Two years ago he reached a crossroads and the path least travelled didn’t even seem to be mapped. He had an honours degree in economics from UCG and had spent two years on the road as a rep for a medical company but he wasn’t fulfilled in his job and for a guy with his drive coasting was the wrong gear.
Sports science was his passion. There were courses in Ireland and England but a Canadian friend, Travis McDonagh, drew his attention to a degree at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia: a bachelor of science in human kinetics was the title of the course, with an accent on sports medicine, sports psychology and biomechanics. Perfect. So he raised the funds, rearranged his life and quit the comfort of the world he knew.
“If I had a return flight in the first week or two I’d have taken it. I came from a situation where you go into every shop and people know you — and it’s funny, I never liked that. I used to stay away from all that kind of thing. But you go over there and no one knows you. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. You had to develop a level of confidence when you met new people because nobody had heard of hurling.”
The university produced high-performance athletes in a range of disciplines and Griffin filled his plate at the buffet. He joined the track and field club in his first term to work on his explosive power, did specialised plyometrics on Saturdays, sparred in the boxing ring three times a week, shared digs with one of Canada’s leading shot putters and took an evening job at the ice hockey rink. His mind was open and curiosity filled it.
Naturally, hurling travelled with him to Canada and his conscience was his drill sergeant there as it would be at home. He did his stamina work on Citadel Hill, a climb that made the training hill in Shannon seem like a drumlin, and his ball work wherever and whenever he could. Between September 2004 and April 2005 he made nine trips home for hurling matches and when he returned to college last autumn the pattern began again.
Once, it was hairy. Griffin’s club, Ballyea, were playing Wolfe Tones in a relegation semi-final. To arrive on time he needed to make a connection in Boston but his flight from Halifax was delayed. He pleaded at the check-in desk.
“‘What’s so important that you have to get home tomorrow?’ she said to me, ‘all of these other people have reasons as well.’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll have to pull this one out of the bag,’ so I said to her, ‘I’m actually getting married’.”
Ten minutes later she came back with a ticket to Toronto and a connection to Boston. He was upgraded to first class and when Griffin took his seat Michael Stipe, the lead singer from REM, was sitting alongside. Stipe declared his love for Ireland and showed Griffin his Cladagh ring to prove it. “Nicest, most down-to-earth fella.”
He got home with three hours to spare and Frank Lohan cleaned him out. The relegation final was a week later and he hung around; they won.
At the time his father was in the final stages of lung cancer. Jerome had never smoked but tearing down and rebuilding British train stations in the 1960s had exposed him to asbestos and, ultimately, that was as bad as 40 fags a day. “He was at the game and that was the last time I saw my father out of hospital. That was the last game he saw, which was great because he was a great club man. He brought me to the airport the following morning and he was weak at that stage.
“I came back again in November and had a great week — he was very poor, but it was a great week to get with him. Reports weren’t good and on the morning of one of my Christmas exams my sister rang to say that he’d passed away. So I came back and I just had a feeling that I couldn’t face all the travelling back and forth again. My mother was on her own and I could see she wasn’t looking forward to me going back. Anthony Daly [Clare manager] said to me, ‘Is there any chance you could defer a section of your course?’ And I said, ‘Definitely.’ I go with my gut feeling and I knew it was the right thing to do.”
SINCE the beginning of the year he has lived the life of an elite athlete. It was the faith he always observed; all he lacked was the time for worship. The farm at home doesn’t take much minding, so he trains and rests and trains and rests. Ger Loughnane used tell the Clare players that they should read as much as they could about other sports and in the past few months Griffin has ploughed through the books he’s been gathering for years. He will return to Canada in September and he knows that he will never have this precious time again.
Loughnane’s last year as Clare manager was Griffin’s first on the panel. Straight out of minor, he was a gangly, unfurnished colt. Loughnane was good to him but the whole culture of training teams was different, even then, only six years ago.
“When I joined the panel first I was the same height as I am now but I was a stone and a half lighter and there was no advice there. I remember sitting across from Loughnane at dinner one night and he said, ‘You’d want to be doing a bit of weights or something’ — that was it. It was up to yourself, kind of.”
By chance he struck up a friendship with Travis McDonagh, a chiropractor in Ennis, who devised a weights programme for him. The Clare panel had access to a hotel gym and during Griffin’s first year players remember seeing his name signed in for a session on Christmas Day. He was still learning the value of rest.
While he was in college in Galway the former Clare team doctor Colm Flynn set him up with Francie Barrett’s trainer, Chick Gillen, in the Westside gym. That was his first contact with boxing. It was good for endurance and it was good for movement and Griffin was looking for anything that would give him an edge.
“In my first year on the panel [2000] we were beaten by Tipp and it took me three or four months to get over the training, I was so knackered. I was young [19], I wasn’t ready for it yet. I was so eager to make the panel and I knew I’d make it after a few months. The team was the next thing and I wouldn’t have been near ready. You know, there are no guarantees. You earn it yourself, you earn the fact that you’re going to make it over time.”
For the first round of the 2002 championship he was ready and Clare pitched him in at centre-forward. He looted Tipp for six points from seven shots. In any context it was a sensational debut. Clare lost but reached the All-Ireland final through the qualifiers and with 17 points to his name Griffin was the outstanding newcomer of the championship.
“It’s funny, when you’re going well you don’t want to get carried away with things and when you’re not going well it’s all you obsess about. I didn’t enjoy that season because I was saying, ‘Now, don’t get carried away, concentrate on what comes next’.
“The huge pity is that we didn’t bring any competitive edge to the All-Ireland final, there was no fight whatsoever. To be honest, I think we were happy having got there — some of us were maybe. I know I tried my damnedest not to get carried away with the things that come the week before . . . We didn’t go out believing we could win and that’s the way it played itself out.”
Griffin took Peter Barry for a point early on but it wasn’t his best performance of the summer and it wasn’t his worst. Ask him to reflect on it now and he doesn’t fib or flinch. “I was average, average at best. The first thing you have to analyse is, ‘Did I do my job?’ And that day I didn’t do my job. Peter Barry didn’t catch any ball but I didn’t catch any ball, either. I watched the video afterwards and I had more of an input than I thought but nowhere near what I’m capable of.”
For the team that All-Ireland final was neither an end nor a beginning. Every year since they’ve been there or thereabouts, knocked back and bouncing back. Three years in a row they’ve failed in the first round of the Munster championship; three years in a row they’ve flourished in the qualifiers. They believed they would beat Cork seven weeks ago, believed it with every atom of their being, and they were beaten out the gate. How could they let it happen again? “I know hindsight is 20:20 but looking back on the whole day we weren’t ready for the battle that was coming. We expected to produce it, we expected to flick the switch and we’d battle for it. Two weeks before we’d played well against Galway and maybe we did go in complacent. We actually trained better in the three weeks after the Cork game than we had in the three weeks before. We thrashed it out on the Wednesday night afterwards and we trained better from then to the Limerick game. I think we fooled ourselves going into the Cork game.
“After the Cork game if you were to believe what was said within Clare you wouldn’t get up the following morning. You definitely wouldn’t have the balls to go on and do something. We still need to answer some of the questions about performing when we need it most but I think we’re a better team than we were 12 months ago. I think I’m a better player than I was this time last year, no doubt about it — more consistent in training, more consistent in games, and we have that all over the field.”
HE’S read a lot of cycling books in the past few months. For all the poison in cycling’s bloodstream there’s something elemental about the sport that appeals to him: more than anything it’s the bloodyminded resolve that it demands. “And you learn that we all have this resolve, just to be tapped into.”
Outside of that, it was boxing that captured him. “I’d love to have grown up in the era of Foreman and Ali and be in the middle of that. I keep saying to myself, ‘One of these days you should head over to Pennsylvania and meet Ali.’ Even wait outside his house until he comes out. He’s supposed to be very gracious if people come to his house.
“I’m very interested in people like Kieren Fallon. What makes him tick? What makes him so good? I just feel sport is such a fascinating world.”
On the university campus in Nova Scotia, Griffin is a little piece of exotica from the wide world of sport; the guy with the stick. One day, in sports psychology class, the lecturer picked him out to demonstrate how an athlete should be interviewed. It was last autumn and she asked him what he was like under pressure, how big was the last crowd he played in front of — was it hundreds or did it run into thousands? “I said to myself, ‘This might sound like boasting but I’m going to say it anyway. Well, the last game I played there were 53 and a half thousand at it’ and there were gasps.”
Over the years big days have been his metier. For two seasons he’s finished in the top five scorers from play in the championship and this year he’s on course again. In the beginning people wondered if he’d acquire the calmness to be a goalscorer at the highest level; from his past 17 championship matches he has 10 goals to his name. Answered.
He can’t look beyond Wexford today but at the beginning of the year he was looking further. All of them were. Why not? On the day of his debut in 2002 he was profiled with a Q&A in the match programme. Just 21 years old himself, he was asked to offer his best advice to young people.
“Set out what you want to achieve, be it sport or work,” he said, “and just go for it. Never berate or congratulate yourself too much. Always believe that anything is possible.”
He’s been true to his word.
TV MATCH
Clare v Wexford
Today RTE2, 1.55pm, throw in 2.15pm
