Christy laid bare in The Club

THE handy stereotype won’t work here. It’s just that Christy O’Connor doesn’t seem sufficiently eccentric to have cut it as a hurling goalkeeper or brazen enough to write an absorbing, deeply personal and often grim account of a season in the life of St Joseph’s Doora–Barefield GAA Club.
Christy seems to have emerged fairly balanced from two full decades protecting the net behind him, while fronted by great and middling Barefield teams. Great enough to reach two and win one All-Ireland club title. Middling enough in more recent times to struggle to emerge from their group in Clare.
Ironically, it wasn’t a hurling man who ushered Christy between the posts. Gordon Stewart was The Safest Hands in Soccer and his weekly comic strip convinced Christy that minding the goal wasn’t an unreasonable option. And, of course, that allowed his brother James to play outfield, which suited everyone.
“I was always a goalkeeper. When we were very young we were big into soccer,” Christy reminisces.
Soon he changed sports, pulled on a Doora-Barefield jersey but stayed where he was position wise.
“I was the minor keeper at 13 and the U-16 keeper at 12. I packed it in for a couple of years but to be honest with you, I was useless out the field.
“I went for a Clare U-14 trial as a defender and I didn’t make it. I was more or less told afterwards that if I’d gone as a goalie, I would have made it,” he added.
Christy had barely managed to squeeze inside the gates of St Flannan’s College when he was met with advice he had grown used to hearing.
“Timmy Kelly (teacher) came to me and he said, ‘we don’t want you hurling here outfield. We want you hurling as a keeper.’ So I made up my mind then that I was going back into goals.”
His 20 years tending his club’s adult goalmouth have yielded three county championships, two Munster club and an All-Ireland club medal. Not bad.
Yet, it’s a 1999 All-Ireland semi-final win over Athenry that has stuck with Christy. This has more to do with his involvement in conceding a soft first-half goal than with the match-winning save he executed near the end of the hour.
“Eugene Cloonan took a shot and it was going a foot over the bar but it dipped at the last second. The wind caught it. I tried to take it on the hurley but it got away from me. Next thing Cathal Moran pulled on it and it went into the net,” he explains, lapsing into silence at the now 11-year memory.
“We were six points up at half-time and we were facing a hurricane. The only ball I had touched in the first half ended up in the net.
“The game was level with 15 minutes to go and I swear to God, I never in my life put down mental torture like it. There were stages in that game when I was saying, ‘if we lose this, how am I going to live with myself?’”
St Joseph’s won and the following month, they brought the Tommy Moore Cup back to the parish.
Ten years later, he was still in goals for the club but having to pay to attend county, provincial or All-Ireland club finals. Unless of course he was covering them in a journalistic capacity.
However, it wasn’t the Doora-Barefield hurling team that was affording Christy a pass to the big time. Those days are gone, which makes his book, The Club, all the more intriguing. Most clubs never win anything.
They often spend their summer avoiding working towards a championship winning goal that the previous winter they swore they would put their life on the line for.
But, of course, there is more to life than hurling or indeed football in every GAA club. If only it was just about putting the ball over the bar.
On January 26, 2009, Christy and his wife Olivia lost their newborn baby Róisín, who lived for just five minutes.
The last person Christy spoke to in Drumcliffe graveyard, after Róisín had been laid to rest, was Ger Hoey. Just five days later, Ger Hoey, whom every Barefield man who had hurled with him idolised, was dead.
“I had to lay myself bare,” Christy says of the personal and hurling issues depicted in The Club.
“I couldn’t have written this book in five years time. I got one shot at this to pay tribute to Róisín and to Ger. And maybe for Thomas, my son, in 20 years time, he’ll be able to see what our lives were like at that moment,” he reflects.
Patsy Fahey, a close friend of Christy’s, ousted Kevin Kennedy as Barefield’s senior hurling manager in 2009 and is one of the central figures as the story of the club’s year unfolds.
“There might be a few people who mightn’t be too happy about stuff that’s in the book but nobody has put their neck on the line more than me.
“People ask me was it part of the healing process? I honestly don’t know. Hurling and writing is where I express myself most and that’s what the book is. It’s a writer talking about his hurling career.
“Look it, I’m a bit of a journeyman hurler but every book that is written about the GAA is written about the elite inter-county player,” he suggests.
The Club also addresses the manner in which Doora-Barefield has been urbanised over the last 10 years and their loss of identity following the sale of the club’s pitch in Roslevan and their subsequent move to Gurteen.
“I have to live in Roslevan. My whole life is the club and please God for as long as I live, I’ll be involved with Doora-Barefield. My family are heavily involved with the club and we all live local.
“I had to weigh up all of that and I just felt that if I was going to fall out with people or make enemies, it wasn’t going to be worth it. But I wasn’t going to sit on the fence either.”
He didn’t. Then again a net-minder, who is planning to hurl into his 21st year for the club, was hardly going to fence-sit, even if Christy O’Connor doesn’t initially come across as being mad enough to sculpt a successful career as a goalkeeper.

Half of the royalties from the sale of The Club will be donated to Croí and to the Jack and Jill Foundation.