By John Harrington
As someone who once took a year out of college to dedicate himself to being the best hurler he could for Clare and then a year later cycled 7000km across Canada for charity, Tony Griffin is a good judge of sporting obsession.
So, when he says he’s never encountered anything like the obsessive nature of Kerry football supporters, you take him at this word.
Griffin, who will feature in the upcoming series of TG4's Laochra Gael, is currently a performance coach with the Kerry senior footballers.
Last year he and his family relocated from their home in Ballymore Eustace in Kildare to Ballyferriter in Kerry from February until after the All-Ireland football final to take the arduous commute out of his life, and Griffin quickly discovered that football is far more than simply a sport in the Kingdom.
“It was such an education because you hear 'Football is a religion in Kerry, well not until you live there do you realise it,” he says.
“People come up to you in ALDI when you're only in the backroom, and I'm in the back of the backroom, and they tell you what they think of things and you've only moved to the parish.
“It's a different world down there. As someone said to me recently, the best analogy in any other sport is the All Blacks. It's the same for Kerry. At least in Dublin, players can be anonymous, in Kerry you're not anonymous, you're never off really and it's just a fascinating construct.”
Griffin can’t help but feel that it would suit him a lot more being an inter-county player now than it did in his own playing days.
Back then was something of an outlier in terms of how fastidious he was about his preparation, but now that’s the common culture of inter-county dressing-rooms.
Tony Griffin, Clare, in action against Jerry O'Connor, Cork in the 2008 GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Quarter-Final, Clare v Cork, Semple Stadium, Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Picture credit: Stephen McCarthy / SPORTSFILE.
The next best thing is to work with a group of players determined to extract the absolute maximum from themselves, which is what he now has with the Kerry footballers.
“When I first went in I said, 'I've been waiting for ye all my life, what took ye so long?!'”, says Griffin.
“Because every one of them wants to learn. In our first year when we won the All-Ireland they were so hungry to learn about themselves. So my role was often around how do we create a collective unit here that's stronger than anything we've ever had before. It's like a club set-up.
“Even though in an inter-county set-up panels change all the time, players are in or out, players retire, players disappear overnight and no-one says anything. There's so much in flux, it's not like a club team, so how do you create a club team quickly and you don't have three seasons to do it?
“We did that in '22 and I thoroughly enjoyed working with them all. You look at the likes of Seanie O'Shea, Tadhg Morley, Shane Ryan, any of these guys, first and foremost they are great people and they want to learn. So they have that humility to want to learn. That's a joy to be around.”
So, what does that process look like? How does someone like Griffin walk into an unfamiliar dressing-room as he has done with the Dublin hurlers, Kildare footballers, and Kerry footballers, and strengthen their bond?
Generally speaking, he falls back on his experience of working with young people through the Soar Foundation which he established in 2012 with Karl Swan, and which itself sought to replicate the success of Jim Stynes’ Reach Foundation.
“The funny thing was, everything I did with Kildare and Dublin, I learned from working with Jim Stynes and teenagers,” he says.
“If you go into a school and there's a hundred teenagers, how do you in three hours create a sense of understanding and empathy and it's not even soft empathy.
“I never really knew the life you've been living and now you're telling me you spent time on the streets, I never knew that, that level of honesty I suppose.
“In terms of the sessions with the players, we really just stripped it back to the humanity of the thing. 'Okay you're David Clifford but what does it feel like to watch your Mam dying?' or you're someone else, 'what does it feel like to watch your best friend suffering from a depression that you can't help him out of?'
“You strip things back to that level and that's not easy to do and it takes a certain subtlety but I learned that from working with teenagers and young people over ten years. It may be unconventional but it works and now all the research is telling us that it works, but intuitively, we knew it worked.”
Kerry performance coach Tony Griffin lifts the Sam Maguire Cup after the GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Championship Final match between Kerry and Galway at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile.
How easy is it to measure, though? To what extent can you draw a line between the work done with a group of players by a performance coach and an improvement in individual and collective performance.
“It's very, very vague and very tricky to define,” admits Griffin. “You can measure a guy's one-rep max, you can measure his VO2 but you can't necessarily measure how comfortable he feels in an environment, where he feels like he can speak up in a meeting, now it's coined psychological safety but how comfortable does a guy in his first year feel to call out a senior player because he doesn't think he's training hard enough.
“That's tricky to create but when you have that level of honesty and that sense of 'we're in something together', that takes a while to create. How do you draw a line between that and an outcome on a field, it's hard to know.
“Jack O'Connor used to always say that inthe '22 All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin there was moments where that team would have capitulated the year before that'.
“But we built up such a sense of...Paddy Tally brought a huge amount in this regard, a certain sense of being able to cope with whatever outcome happened, that there was a sense of calm when the worse thing happened.”
The reason the best players become the best is they have an insatiable appetite for self-improvement.
David Clifford is the most skilful footballer in the country and one of the most mentally tough too, but Griffin has seen at close quarters just how driven the Fossa man is raise his level even higher despite being so naturally gifted.
“I think some people are born with certain things,” he says. “David Clifford was born to be David Clifford. He's just, he's ice cold. The other part of it is, he's a young man. He's 24, he's going to be 25 next year.
“Last year was a big, big mental load for any human being. I don't care who you are, you can only push things away so much and try to perform and, you know, the All-Ireland final showed probably that David has areas of his game that need work. And maybe it's getting parts of his game where the mental and the skill intersect.
“But that's brilliant, that's good news because everyone says he's the complete player. He knows he's not. And he knows his 'complete' is different to most other people's complete. But that's what he's after.
“It's Michael Jordan-esque. It's how can I perform? And you know last year was a hard year for him. He's an exceptional person.”
Kerry performance coach, Tony Griffin, sits with David Clifford after their defeat to Dublin in the 2023 All-Ireland SFC Final.
2024 will be Griffin’s last year with the Kerry footballers. His gut feeling is that they’ll need a fresh voice after three years of listening to his, and perhaps someone with a more traditional sports psychology background.
He has other ambitions himself too, such as publishing a novel he has just finished the first draft of.
Such is his obsessive nature, you can be sure he’ll pour every drop of himself into this last season with the Kerry footballers to help them get back to the top of the mountain and win the Sam Maguire Cup again.
But is silverware the ultimate barometer by which they will all judge themselves? Or does he hope they’ll take something more long-lasting from the journey they’ve been on together?
“It is and it isn’t, it depends on what level,” says Griffin. “It's not a success for them (if they don't win the All-Ireland) because they want that feeling that they had in '22, they want that sense of 'we've won it'. But...unless they're alright on the inside...my role is a it longer term. It's like I'm investing in a long-term bond.
“If they're not alright on the inside, no number of All-Irelands is going to give them the happiness or joy that I'd like them to have in life. You look at today and Laochra Gael, a lot of players have multiple All-Irelands but they're miserable or they're deeply unhappy with their life circumstances or whatever it might manifest as.
“So for me it's a dual process, I'd love them to win the All-Ireland for them because I know what it means to them. But if they win it but they haven't developed as people then that's not full success, it's partial success for me.”
Tony Griffin's Laochra Gael episode will be broadcast on TG4 on Thursday, February 15 at 9.30pm.