As Clare circle the wagons for another tilt at Liam MacCarthy Cup success in two months the most senior player in their ranks will be John Conlon facing into his 17th season — the first All-Ireland winner to have such a lengthy record of service was Pa ‘Fowler’ McInerney writes Joe Ó Muircheartaigh, who dips into the archives of his remarkable hurling story.
As the twin qualities of versatility and longevity go, it’s hard to argue with John Conlon being top of the class in Clare thanks to his achievement of winning All-Irelands and All-Stars in defence and attack, while representing Clare at senior level in three decades is a huge achievement too.
Not many can claim all of the above. Indeed, the greatest player to measure up as something similar is Pa ‘Fowler’ McInerney, who won All-Irelands in goal and at full-back, while he was also an All-Star, with an extra layer to his achievements being the fact that they came with two different counties.
Of course, the comparisons between Conlon and McInerney whose inter-county starts may have been nearly 100 years apart don’t end there. That’s because longevity was their hallmark, with Clonlara titan Conlon now closing in on McInerney’s long-service record at inter-county level.
A couple of more years and he will there — considering that Conlon started way back in 2009 under Mike McNamara’s reign as manager, it just serves to magnify the record that McInerney chalked up on the course of a career that started before World War 1 and continued into the 1930s when slow wind up to World War 2 and begun.
Fifty years ago, when he was among just four survivors from the 1914 All-Ireland winning panel — Tom McGrath, Brendan Considine and John ‘Lang’ Rodgers were the others — he recalled his remarkable career, when he quite literally had been hurling from the cradle.
“It is, indeed, very fresh in my memory those far off days when I first got my love of hurling,” he recalled. “I had a hurley constantly in my hand since I was four years of age and had started going to school.
“Going to school we always carried a hurley, …