Like Ringy, Teddy Mac was taken from us far too soon

WHEN Christy Ring passed away after collapsing suddenly on the streets of Cork city on March 2, 1979, a whole county went into mourning.

60,000 lined the streets of Cork for his funeral. The great man had only been 58.
He had seemed immortal, almost superhuman, and yet he was gone, taken far too early.

Teddy McCarthy passed away last week at just 57. He was five months younger than Ring was at the time of his passing.

To compare Teddy and Ringy might seem wrong. Ring was the greatest, after all, and no one is saying that McCarthy was in that bracket, but there can be no denying that when it comes to Cork GAA cult figures they compare favourably.

The fact that both were instantly identifiable by the one name is a starting point – Ringy and Teddy – no other details are necessary. You also could not imagine either playing for anyone else except Cork. They both encapsulated the very essence of ‘Corkness’.

Of course, Teddy’s unique selling point is that he is the only man to ever win a football and hurling All-Ireland in the same year on the field of play, which was famously achieved in 1990. Two All-Ireland’s in a fortnight, and all that, it’ll most likely never be done again.

It seems apt that it wasn’t any ordinary player that achieved that feat either. Cork have had dozens of brilliant dual players down the years, and it was probably inevitable that one of them would be the first. That fact that it was Teddy, though, seems right.

And that is because Teddy was special. He could fly.

He was only 5ft 9”, which meant he had no business amongst the giants of Gaelic football, but he not only survived in the killing fields that were the midfield battlegrounds of football in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he thrived.

A quick Google of images of the Glanmire man and you are immediately confronted with some of the most breathtaking and most iconic photos in GAA history. In football, there is one of him levitating above Ambrose O’Donovan to catch the ball down in Killarney. There is another of him soaring into the air to pluck the ball out of the sky during the 1987 All-Ireland final against Meath.

Arguably the two most spectacular images of McCarthy were hurling ones though. There is the black and white one against Tipperary, where his knees are at the height of the heads of the other players in the picture, such is the explosiveness of his leap, while a similar one exists against Wexford, where it looks like he is actually going to jump clear over two players while grabbing the sliotar about 12 feet off the ground.

COOL

If you were a young fella in the late '80s-early '90s and you jumped in the air and caught a ball in your backyard or on your local pitch, it was Teddy you were pretending to be, because Teddy was bloody cool!

Until Walter Walsh was sprung by Brian Cody in the All-Ireland final of 2012 Teddy also had the distinction of being the only player to make his championship debut in an All-Ireland hurling final. The Sars man had done this in 1986 when helping Cork beat Galway by 4-13 to 2-15. Since that game also represented this writer’s championship debut, as an eight-year-old being flung over the turnstile to see a first-ever championship match, that has always been significant. 

Your first game, in what was Teddy’s first game, in what was also JBM’s last game for Cork. Gold!

On the day Teddy’s untimely death was announced I rewatched that game in its entirety. It was such a different and wonderful game back then. 

Michael Lyster’s dodgy jumper was the first sign that this was a different age. The shape of the hurleys is extremely noticeable too, with their tiny bás, as is the amount of ground hurling and lack of hand passing. There were certainly no controversies about the blight of throwing then.

LEGENDARY

Considering it was his championship debut and that he had just turned 21 it seemed a huge ask to throw him into the Lion’s Den that was the legendary Galway half-back line of Finnerty-Keady-McInerney. Teddy went toe to toe with Gerry McInerney and he thundered into the game early on, with the co-commentator Eamonn Cregan announcing that he thought this could well be McCarthy’s day. 

And it was. 

While Pete Finnerty and Tony Keady had huge games for Galway the swashbuckling McInerney was kept quiet, with Teddy revelling in the physical exchanges.

For the remainder of his career, he would never take a backwards step, which is why his passing came as such a surprise to all. 

Like Ringy, Teddy seemed immortal. 

Like, Ringy, Teddy was taken far too soon.