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Friday, June 25, 2010
The Greenhills gentry
OUR CORRESPONDENT with impudence corroding his black heart sends the following extract from the sensational memoir of the late lamented Chancellor of the Diocese of Ferns and Rector of Wexford, Rt. Rev. Norman Ruddock.
He asks for a comment. He shall get one.
“Waterford was a sleepy city in the early fifties. The YMCA had a flourishing hockey team as had Waterford City. We played hockey all over the southeast. These were great social occasions and there was much aftermatch drinking. I played hockey for the YMCA and one holiday I returned to play in a cup match. I stayed with one of the players who got quite drunk after the match.
My host was asked by a friendly garda to leave his car outside the hotel on the quays and collect it the next day. We walked about three miles to his home and fell into bed.
Our fiercest rivals were the Greenhills hockey team near Wexford. My memories are of a hockey pitch which was ready for silage cutting!
There were a number of hurlers on the Greenhills team and they played a robust game a cross between hockey and hurling. Our big centre forward from Waterford tried to trip up his opposite number, Vin Byrne who didn’t take prisoners.
Vin Byrne lifted his stick and told our player that if he ever came near him again, ‘he would cut the ***** off him’. That player was afraid to play against Greenhills again.
There was one courteous member of the Greenhills team by the name of Nicholas Furlong, now a distinguished journalist and historian. How did they get round the GAA ban which did not allow them to play foreign games?
Greenhills, like so many provincial teams, folded up over the years. While ladies’ hockey survives, there is virtually no men’s hockey in the South East of Ireland.”
The hidden question in our correspondent’s contribution is not to emphasise one’s gently bred courtesy but to infer that anyone who associated with a team of hooligans and yokels, blackguards and ruffians in the sport of the empire must of necessity have a dart of the kinatt in him as well. I refute this slur.
The ladies and gentlemen of the Greenhills teams were the progeny of the deprived gentry of Forth and Bargy who though often hungry in bad times, kept their hearts up.
I will not speak ill of the ordained dead but I overlooked the rambling rector’s remarks on silage to boost sales when he was alive.
His inference is that Jack Tanner and Jim Power induced the hair-oil men of the YMCA to play in a fertile grass field instead of the regular pitch which was as smooth as a ball alley. There is an explanation.
It was the time of the mixematosis cure for the millions of rabbits who were stripping every crop which had shoots over the ground.
I can now reveal that the dying and diseased rabbits were accumulated on the regular Greenhill pitch. Greenhills were prepared to play the match there despite the fur, the bones and the stink but the YMCA captain declined.
He said it was ever so affecting. “I am quite distressed”, he said. Only for Jack Tanner we would have gone home and brought the milk churns of porter with us. I’m not deceived by the rambling rector’s words about Greenhills’ “robust play”.
What he meant was filthy, violent, butt of the stick in the guts play. He is answering to God for that remark. The like would not have entered a Greenhills’ head.
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