Limerick goalkeeper Nickie Quaid during the 2023 GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship semi-final match between Limerick and Galway at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
By John Harrington
Pat Hartigan is 72 now, so at an age now where he can appreciate the passage of time and the threads that weave through it.
Ask the Limerick hurling legend for his thoughts on Nickie Quaid, and he can’t help but be struck by some traits that were also apparent higher up the family tree.
“Nickie is probably the best-thinking goalkeeper in the game,” says five-time All-Star Hartigan, who won an All-Ireland with Limerick 50 years ago in 1973.
“Limerick's success, in my opinion, starts on the goal-line and Nickie is like the quarter-back in American Football.
“He's planting the ball where it needs to be planted. There's no ball hit aimlessly and there's nothing done thoughtlessly by Nickie Quaid.
“He can play the way he does because he has such a cool temperament on the pitch. I hurled in front of his father Tommy for many years, and Tommy was the very same.
“I hurled against Nickie's grandfather and granduncle, they were twins, Jack and Jim Quaid.
“They were very cool players too, very smooth fellas, always focused and never got caught up in the rough and tumble of the game when the game was rough and tough. They just always played the game, maximised their ability, and utilised the skills of the game of that time.
“What the twins had, what Tommy had, Nickie has today. It's a pass on.”
Tommy Quaid was the Limerick hurling team's goalkeeper from 1976 to 1993.
The Quaid family’s service to Limerick hurling is a remarkable one that now extends to eight consecutive decades.
It began with Jack and Jim who won an All-Ireland Junior title with Limerick in 1954 and a Munster senior title the following year with the famed ‘Mackey’s Greyhounds’ team.
The twins played for Limerick into the sixties, then Jack’s son Tommy established himself as the county senior goalkeeper in the 1970s.
He played from 1976 until 1993 when he was succeeded as Limerick’s custodian by his first cousin Joe, who’s a son of Jim.
Joe hurled into the noughties and then in 2010 Tommy’s son Nickie made his senior inter-county debut and is still going strong 13 years later.
The Quaid ‘pass-on’ is a poignant one, because Nickie’s father Tommy died tragically at the age of just 42 after a fall at work.
Nickie was just nine when his father passed away and it’s been striking the extent to which his own career would mirror his father’s.
Just like Tommy, Nickie was an outstanding outfield player for his club, but fate decreed he too would wear the number one jersey for his county.
Joe Quaid in action for Limerick.
He was initially called up as an outfield player in 2010, but the following year Donal O’Grady took charge of the Limerick team and asked him to follow in his father Tommy and cousin Joe’s footsteps.
“Nickie spoke to me the night Donal O'Grady rang him and asked him would he play in goals,” Joe Quaid told GAA.ie.
“He asked me what I thought, and I said, 'Would you prefer to play outfield'? He said, 'I would, but I don't know if I'd make it outfield and he wants me to play in goals'. I said, ‘Well then go play in goals. It's an honour to play anywhere on a county team and you're a great goalkeeper.’
“I’ve always said this to people who don't know too much about the game that you need one of your best hurlers in goal. In goals you have one touch, you don't have a first touch, you have one touch.
"Even more so now from when I was playing and Tommy was playing because puck-outs are so important now. In our day you lobbed it down and it was every man for himself.
“Any attack now starts with the goalie so that's a completely different aspect to the game. Nickie is a great hurler as well as a goalkeeper, and hasn’t put a foot wrong for Limerick.”
Nickie Quaid followed in his father Tommys footsteps from a young age. Here he is playing for Irelands U-12s in a hurling-shinty challenge against Scotland.
There’s no-one better qualified to judge just how good a goalkeeper Nickie Quaid is than Barry Hennessy, who was Quaid’s number 2 for most of his career until he retired from inter-county hurling after last year’s All-Ireland win.
“From watching Nickie over the years, it's his basic fundamentals that set him apart,” Hennessy told SportingLimerick.com this week.
“The saves he does make, his hurling intelligence and goalkeeping intelligence is so good that he puts himself in the right position to make what looks like an easy save.
“It's actually quite a difficult save to make but it looks easy to him because from how good he is.
In an interview with Newstalk earlier this year Hennessy also made it very clear he has just as much admiration for Nickie Quaid the person as he does Nickie Quaid the goalkeeper.
That’s a sentiment you’ll hear time and again from those who know him best.
“He's an outstanding lad, he's teaching in Patrickswell and is wonderful with the kids,” says Pat Hartigan.
“As a guy, his temperament is just so nice. He has a word for everybody. If you meet Nickie on the road you'd never think he was a Limerick hurler if you didn't know it already.
“He's such a humble guy you'd never guess he's a man who has four All-Ireland medals and who, arguably, after the passage of some time will be recognised as one of the all-time great goalkeepers, maybe the greatest of them all.
“When Nickie eventually retires from inter-county hurling I've no doubt he'll be involved in coaching in a major way and will leave a significant mark there too. He has so much offer.”
Nickie surely has a good few years left in him before retirement beckons. And by the time he eventually does hang up the hurley, there might be another Quaid to fill the breach because Joe's son Killian was sub-goalkeeper for the Limerick U-20 team this year.
There's even chance then the Quaid 'pass on' could serve Limerick hurling well into a ninth successive decade. Quite the family tree.