Excerpt from “My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary”
From the word go, he started to instil a love of hurling into the hearts and minds of the youth of Tallow. It was hurling country anyway, so he was certainly not preaching a new religion to people in West Waterford. The generation that he was dealing with, however, had known only failure to the be the lot of the Tallow GAA in terms of performance on the field – a generation believing that they were inferior to other clubs in the county.
Tallow GAA did not have any field of their own at that time. Moreover, there was no money around for many children to be able to afford the basics of a hurley and a ball.
“Your father used to train in Aquin Murphy’s field,” Eddie Cunningham told me. There was also a field known as Curley’s Field, but which was used on and off by the local club as disputes erupted and became resolved and then erupted again. “When you think of it now… We used two coats for the goals. Your father would go in goals and I’d be taking shots at him. We practised up there; we practised in Keefe’s field behind the graveyard of the Church – he was allowed in there; Mort Kelleher allowed him into the Bride Valley Field alongside the graveyard; we hurled in the big Barracks field. Just the two of us – I was only a youngfella at the time – and there was nowhere else to train.”
Facilities did not, of course, include such luxuries as a changing room. It was a case of togging off by the ditch at the side of the field. With Curley’s field, there were stables and if the horse wasn’t there, then you could tog off in the relative comfort of the stable.
“I always said he (Ned) was a man before his time where coaching was concerned,” says Eddie Cunningham.
“There’s no doubt about that,” says Johnny Curley. He was born around the time that my father first came to Tallow and was one of the first generation to grow up under the direct influence of my father as a teacher and a hurling coach – two roles that blended seamlessly into one in reality. “The schools thing was something that came across big time, because he was always ball-and-hurley. Ground hurling was his first love; catching the hurley the right way. In fact, some fella could be very good and still catching the hurley the wrong way, but your father would be there saying: ‘You can’t hurl like that, you’re catching the hurley the wrong way!’”
By the early 1960’s, my dad was firmly established as a Tallow player and a star of one of the best inter-county senior hurling teams in the country. Moreover, as a teacher and a member of the GAA club, his presence was beginning to be felt in the beginnings of what was to become a series of skilful Tallow hurling sides.