Talk:John Keane (hurler)

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What do I have to do to get an article published on Wikipedia? I wrote an article about John Keane on my website http://members.tripod.com/waterfordhistory and copied it to wikipedia, giving full attribution. Please note that I am the creator, copyright holder and webmaster of the above website from which the article was copied. Please let me know how I can prove that I hold the copyright?

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I am the original author and I release this article under the GFDL license

Following up. --Ngb ^?!? 08:45, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Permission confirmed. --Ngb ^?!? 08:13, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

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This followin content was removed as i feel it was un wiki-ifyble . Please feel free to wiki-ify and readd it .

ONE OF THE GREATES

In 1984 the Sunday Independent held a competition to select the greatest hurling team of the century and John was selected at centre half back. What is not generally known is that his vote was split between centre back and centre forward and it was said that he finished second in the poll for centre forward.

In the year 2000, to mark the Millennium, the Cork Examiner asked a select panel of hurlers and journalists to select the greatest Munster team of all time and John was again selected at centre back.

The ultimate honour came his way later in the year 2000 when a distinguished body of hurling men, comprising the past Presidents of the GAA and hurling journalists selected the Hurling Team of the Millennium and, again, John was selected at centre back, copper-fastening his place as one of the all-time greats of the game.John Keane died in October 1975 and many were the tributes paid to him in the national press.

A TRIBUTE

The following is an extract from an article in An Déiseach, 1971 written by John’s great friend and colleague Pat Fanning, GAA President 1970-73.

He never spared himself. He turned out in match after match, county and inter-county, championship, challenge and tournament, winter and summer, never counting the personal cost where the honour of his club or his county were concerned. Still the coveted All-Ireland medal evaded him.

For years the Waterford defence had defied the might of Munster, but a lack of decisiveness in attack could not command the victory a sterling defence deserved. The advent of John Keane to the forty yards made all the difference. He brought a new type of play to the attack and turned his great experience as a defender to good account in outwitting the best backs in Clare, Cork, Galway and, finally, Dublin in the great victorious All Ireland of 1948. Looking back briefly in one final glance at the saga of one man’s herculean efforts in the cause of Gaeldom, memories come crowding in.

The writer recalls 1937 at Clonmel. The strapping figure in white and blue thwarting the great Mick Mackey; the blonde, curly head bobbing as Keane threw back attack after attack in one of the truly great games of the Munster championship.

Then came the greatest display of courage and determination and, perhaps, his greatest personal triumph – his epic display at Dungarvan in 1943 against Tipperary, when with a badly injured ankle he stood at centre half and almost alone broke the back of every Tipperary attack.

Well do I remember cutting the boot from his swollen leg at the end of that excruciating hour. And I recall, too, the old wizened man of Tipperary who pushed his way through the crowd to where John lay, to shake, as he said, the hand of John Keane, the greatest man in Ireland.

The following was first published in Gaelic Sport, November 1975 edition.

OBITUARY

by Séamus óBraonáin

Since the strength of the hurling game anywhere lies, at least partly, in the collective wisdom, experience and enthusiasm of the past generations of the great exponents of the game, there is no doubt at all that Munster in general, and Waterford, in particular, are weaker and poorer for the death of John Keane.

We heard the news, rough and ready, when we went to buy the morning paper on an early October Tuesday. The newsagent gave it out straight from the shoulder: “Did you hear that John Keane is dead? He had taken ill the previous evening at Tarbert … (was) then rushed to Limerick Hospital but he died on the way.

John’s sentiment which we had several times heard him express - If I couldn’t live in Waterford, then Limerick is where I would chose - had proven true in death rather than in life. We, too, died a little that grey October morning.

For John Keane was not only a valued and a dear friend for a number of years: not only one of the most marvellously exciting men to spend hours in conversation with, listening to his analysis, thesis and synthesis on hurling and hurlers: not only one of the greatest (many say THE greatest!) hurlers of all time who could play anywhere with equal magnificence: not only a great trainer, teacher, motivator of younger hurlers: not only a kindly and sensitive gentleman: he was also our original boyhood hero, the sandy-blond, clean-cut, classicist for whom we would have fought, with tooth and nail, anyone who dared cast the slightest aspersion on his perfection. And heroes ought not grow old. And heroes simply should not die.

So we died a little as the lost youth still hidden out of sight within us died at last. We were not alone: it was easy to see at the massive homecoming funeral in the rain and at the burial overlooking the broad sands of Tramore.

There is an inherent danger in making the acquaintance of one’s boyhood heroes: they tend, on closer contact, to have feet of clay. Idolatry does not suit human beings for they are by nature unable to sustain the ideals which little boys build about them. It was, therefore, many a long day before we met and spoke to John Keane on any basis of friendship. It has been a cause of deep regret ever since that we did not seek out his company earlier, for no man lived up to what one’s boyhood ideal made him as did John.

He had an insatiable thirst for hurling, so he never, never tired of talking with total absorption to even the most repetitious bores. He could leave one after an hour of enthusiastic discussion and meet another as he walked away and would still greet him as a long lost friend and begin to talk all over again. And it wasn’t diplomacy, tact or advantage. It was simply that John Keane loved hurling so much and knew and understood, deep in his heart, the way the people felt about hurling and how they wanted to touch the edge of the garment of the man who made them feel so proud.

There are many stories that illustrate this. One of the best is probably that of the man who had cycled the thirty or so miles to one of those epics in the late thirties at Clonmel, which Waterford lost. Steering along the street after the game, he suddenly spotted Keane in his ordinary clothes walking to the team’s hotel. In his excitement at recognising him and never having seen him except in hurling uniform, he lost all his bearings and shouting out: "Poor John Keane, it wasn’t your fault, anyway," he cycled straight up on the pavement and crashed into a shop-front, his eyes still on his hero. Keane went to his rescue with the others nearby. [The man] was patched up and brought home. But John went to the trouble of finding out … the man’s name, where he lived, and from that day until he died used to drop in to the home of that man to say a few words when he was in the area.

You see, it doesn’t matter at all whether they put Keane up at No. 1 or 2 or 3 on the All-Time-Greats, or whether he is put, undeservedly, lower down. Hurling alone did not make the man. As the modern phrase goes: he was a great human being, apart from the hurling. Yet, the hurling is important for those who did not know him personally or for the record of history. And in this regard we remember once questioning him about Mick Mackey, and how it was that he managed to subdue him – the only man to do so, it is said.

"Well," he said, "I was a terribly long time thinking about it. God forgive me, even at Mass it used to come into my head. But, in the end I decided that there was only one possible way to beat Mackey – get out in front of him for every ball and never let it reach him at all."

"But, John," we said, "weren’t you taking a terrible risk. Supposing you missed the ball, Mackey would be through on his own." "Ah, but that’s the thing, you see," said John, as though speaking to a rather dense child, "I wouldn’t miss."

I, Urbsintacta, am the original author of this article and photos (and of the website from which they were taken) and I release them under the GFDL license

(Gnevin 15:58, 26 April 2006 (UTC))