**By John Harrington **

Maurice Leahy was described as ‘Mr. Kerry Hurling’ by Paul Galvin in his 2014 autobiography.

That hat fits snugly, because Leahy has given a life’s service to the game and has had a more profound influence on it in the Kingdom County than anyone else.

He hurled himself for Kerry as a minor and senior from 1968 to 1989, but even that considerable service will not be his most lasting legacy.

Much more important has been his work as a County board coach, then Games Promotion Officer, and now Games Development Administrator for the last 27 years.

Throughout the best part of three decades he has been Kerry hurling’s answer to Johnny Appleseed. Wherever he has wandered, hurlers have sprung from the soil in his wake. The part he has played in Kerry hurling’s most recent blossoming cannot be overstated.

Every single one of the Kerry panel that pulled off that brilliant 2-18 to 2-17 Allianz Hurling League Division 1B win over Offaly on Sunday have been coached by Leahy at some stage in their careers.

And, for the majority of them, Leahy is the man who has moulded them more than any other. Roughly 80 per cent of the Kerry hurlers went to secondary school in Causeway Comprehensive.

As a hurling nursery, it has always been Kerry’s equivalent of St. Kieran’s College in Kilkenny, and it is Leahy’s domain.

The Kerry County Board recognised that the school acted as conveyor belt of talent, so their most highly qualified service technician was given the job of making sure it ran as smoothly as possible. By any measure, Leahy’s time coaching the school’s teams has been a spectacular success.

They won five Munster Vocational Schools Junior ‘A’ (U 16 ½) titles in a row from 2009 to 2013, and Leahy estimates they lifted a Munster Senior or Junior title every year for a period of ten consecutive years until the Vocational Schools were absorbed the All-Ireland Colleges competitions in 2014.

Causeway also won two Junior ‘A’ All-Ireland titles during their era of Vocational School dominance, as they consistently triumphed over schools from traditional hurling counties like Tipperary, Cork, and Galway.

Most of the current Kerry senior players are products of that hurling hot-house, and Leahy admits he takes a lot of satisfaction from seeing so many of them develop into the hurlers they have.

“Just looking at the players who were playing, it's nice to know that I have had personal contact with them all,” he says.

“From a county point of view it's tremendous as well. When you look at Kerry who have just eight traditional hurling clubs and pick all of their players from those clubs.

“I'm always reminding them here in Kerry that if Éamonn Fitzmaurice sat down and had to pick his football team from eight small rural parish clubs, then he'd be doing amazingly well if he was doing as good as the Kerry hurlers are doing.

“It's great. It's happened several times in my lifetime down through the years that we've had good periods and then bad periods, that's the way it is. You go through good times and you go through bad times.

“But it's getting better from the point of view of coaching in the schools and the work that's going on in Causeway Comprehensive."

Leahy will turn 65 this year and was supposed to finally step down from his position as a GDA after 27 years of considerable service. The thought of giving up what he regards as his dream-job filled him with horror, so he persuaded the Munster Council to let him stay on for one more year.

He knows the day will come all too soon when he has to hand over his life’s labour to someone else, and he is still struggling to get his head around the finality of that prospect.

“I don't know what I'll do,” admits Leahy. “I would worry about it to be honest. I could never imagine myself sitting down inside the window and just looking out and admiring the scenery.

“I'm very poor at crosswords or watching Coronation Street. I'll be having nothing to do with anything like that, no way!

“I'm the kind of person who just has to be bobbing around and moving the whole time. But I'll find something in sport, something in hurling, to keep working at.”

His track-record of success as both a hurling and football coach should ensure a steady stream of recruiters will make their way to his door. Whoever gets there first will probably get their man, because Leahy has always struggled to say ‘no’. That was certainly always the case when the Kerry hurlers were the ones doing the bidding.

He is not even sure how many separate occasions he was appointed the county senior hurling team’s manager, but estimates over the course of the last 30 years he was in charge of the team for 15 of them. And that doesn't include stints as a player-coach, and team selector.

“I started in 1980, that was the first year, I was full-back on the team and manager,” recalls Leahy. “Because at the time no-one else wanted it. I won two 'B' All-Irelands as manager in '83 and '86. And won a couple of Leagues. I'd take a break for a year or two and then something else would happen and I'd come back in again.

“The last time I did it was around 2005 or 2006. I suppose I was kind of the last port in every storm!

“I'd get a knock on the door if someone had walked away or they couldn't get anyone else, and of course I was only too happy to take it again.”

Even if he often took charge at a time of crisis, it never felt like hardship for someone as committed to the cause of Kerry hurling as Leahy.

He’ll tell you too that he has been paid back many times over for his loyalty with a trove of treasured memories. If you were to push him, he’d probably put their epic three-point victory over Waterford in the 1993 Munster Senior Hurling Championship on top of the pile.

“I was a selector with John Meyler that day,” says Leahy. “That was John's first year. I had been manager for a year or two before that. Then Meyler came in and asked me to help him because he didn't know the set-up.

“To be fair to Meyler, he did a super job. I had great time for him. He had great presence in the dressing-room. There was just something about him. He'd say very little, but just walk around the table and say the odd word, and in that way was a great motivator.

“He knew how to get through to fellas, and they all responded to him. That day in Waterford, I'll never forget it. It was just a fantastic day.

“The Rose of Tralee was being sung while we were coming off the pitch, all that sort of stuff. It was just a bit of magic, that day.

“We get those days occasionally in Kerry hurling. I was manager one year when we won Division 3A I think in the League, and Clare won Division 2B.

“There was a trip to London for both teams and we played one another, and we beat a Clare team with Ger Loughnane on it, which was another big day for us. That was sometime in the early to mid-eighties.

“We drew with Kilkenny in Tralee in 1979 in the National League. Christy Heffernan, Nickey Brennan, Ger Henderson, and Matt Ruth were all playing for them.

“Of course the rumour went out afterwards that they had enjoyed the night before in Tralee a bit too much. But we played well that day to be fair.

“Funnily enough, down through the years when I was playing with Kerry, the gap between Kerry and Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork was not as big as it is now.

“I played against all of those teams in League matches. And the gap, particularly during the winter, was hardly there at all.

“But now the gap is so wide that it is very difficult for a county like us with such a small pick to bridge it. And the same is probably true for Offaly and Laois and those teams.

“They'll find it difficult to ever match a team like Kilkenny again because it's gone so professional and they have such a tradition and pick of players.”

Leahy is in love with Kerry hurling, but it is not a blind infatuation.

He sees beauty in her homely charms, but knows the day is unlikely to ever come where Kerry hurling can stride confidently side by side down the same cat-walk as supermodels like Kilkenny and Tipperary.

“25 years ago now if you had asked me that, I would have said we'd eventually get up there,” says Leahy. “But then the other teams got much more professional.

“I'm not being down on the current system because what they're doing is fantastic. But they're punching above their weight, without any shadow of a doubt.

“If you look at the village I'm from here, Causeway, we have five people on the panel at the moment. If you blinked going through Causeway you'd miss it.

“It's just a small rural parish, and it's the same for the seven other clubs around. There is no town team to pick from. We haven't Tralee, Killarney, or Listowel to pick from.

“So it's a very small rural area we're drawing players from. I'd say the population of Tralee alone would be way more than what we're picking from for the whole county team.

“That just shows you how shallow the resources are. So all things considered we're doing fantastically well really.”

Leahy has played a big part in Kerry hurling’s stubborn refusal to simply dim and die. But the idea that he is some sort of keeper of the flame is not one that sits easily with him.

“For someone to think that I've been responsible for all this would be madness,” he insists. “Because there's fantastic people in the clubs.

“It would be very easy for these clubs just to fade away into the football clubs. Ballyduff and Ardfert are very strong football clubs too.

“But that will never happen. It will never happen because there is such a passion for hurling in this area. People just love it. During those times when we've had the down-turns, it's the clubs that pull us back out of it again.

“A rising tide lifts all boats and everything comes up again. That's the way it's always been and it's great to be a part of it.

“I always say I was lucky to be born in this area because I played both hurling and football.

“Whereas if you're born in an area like Caherciveen you don't get a chance to play what's the greatest game in the world, hurling, and that's a pity and a shame.

“But that's just the way it is and that's the way they like it down there."

Leahy will be a hard man to replace when he does eventually step down as North Kerry’s hurling GDA. But he has no doubts himself that the game will continue to thrive in the county’s hurling heartland because it is in the blood of people who live in places like Causeway, Ballyduff, Ardfert, and Lixnaw.

“It means everything here,” he said. “In my own case, my Grandfather was a founding member of the Causeway club here. He was also Maurice Leahy.

“My father played for Kerry and so did my Uncle. I played for Kerry and so did my two brothers. My son played for Kerry and now my Grandson is on the Kerry U-16 team at the moment.

“That's the same in every Parish. You get a hurler, and you can trace his family's hurling tradition all the way back.

“I was talking to Ger McCarthy recently who's the officer in charge of hurling in the County, and he told me a good one about the Kerry goalkeeper last Sunday, Aidan McCabe.

“Apparently when Kerry beat Offaly last in 1956, it was his Grandfather who was in goal, which is amazing. The threads go through everybody around here.

“Éamonn Fitzmaurice, the Kerry football manager, his Grandfather was playing with Kerry when they won the All-Ireland Hurling Final in 1891.

“Éamonn Fitzmaurice is first, last, and above all, a hurling man. Himself and Paul Galvin are neighbours from Lixnaw and hurling was their first game and first love, but then they got good at the football.

“Paul was the best hurler in Kerry in his time. A fantastic hurler. A really better hurler than he is a footballer any day, because he had real skill at the hurling.

“But he got so good at the football and you wouldn't blame the fella for chasing the success that he chased and had.

“To me Paul would have made it anywhere as a hurler because he had that little bit of devilment in him and then the hurling skill to go with it. I’d always regard him as a hurler first and foremost.”

Leahy could go on and on about Galvin’s skill-set and the particular ability of countless other hurlers he has worked with over the years. His pure passion for the game flows through him like a torrent and will never dissipate.

These are good days for Kerry hurling, but he doesn’t savour them any more than the bad days he has known. Every day is a hurling day as far as Leahy is concerned, and that has always been enough for him regardless of the context.

“For me, for a fella who plays hurling and loves hurling, everything is an up for me,” he admits. “Even sitting down in front of the television in the winter months and watching TnaG and the games every Sunday, I'd be sitting in front of the telly and bouncing around.

“I just love hurling, full-stop. Whether it's Kerry or whether it's Kilkenny, hurling is hurling for me. At the end of every year part of my job as a GDA is to write a report for Croke Park and the Games Management.

“In the 27 years I've been there, ever since I wrote my very first report, I always finish by writing, 'PS, hurling will always be the greatest game in the World!'

“I know I was getting under a few people's skin here in Kerry when they'd read it. But I kept doing it, and I'll never stop. And in my last report I'll put it in extra-bold writing so no-one will be in any doubt about the game that I love most of all!”

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