David Kenny with his hands on the Nickey Rackard Cup at Croke Park. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
By Paul Keane
The Mayo hurlers held a meet and greet in Adrian Freeman Park in Tooreen last Sunday, a rare promotional opportunity for hurling in the county ahead of the Nickey Rackard Cup final.
"It was one of our first times doing that for Mayo hurling," said team captain David Kenny, a Tooreen clubman himself.
With just three senior clubs in the county, or four if you count the freshly established St Ciaran's amalgamation which picks from over half a dozen junior clubs, it was a great chance to spread the hurling gospel.
Kenny doesn't sugar coat the fact that it's predominantly a 'football county, it's well known that we would probably be playing second fiddle'.
But he's happy to celebrate the little wins. And there are more and more of them. Like on training nights in Tooreen when the place is packed with underage players and teams.
"On a Tuesday evening when you go down you could see nearly 60 to 80 kids on a pitch, U-6s, U-8s, U-10s, U-12s, they'd be off in their corners working away," he smiled. "It's brilliant to see.
"That would be an improvement on the past for sure. For starters, we would have trained on separate nights whereas now we have big numbers on one night down there and there's an incredible buzz on those nights. It's like, I don't know what you'd call it, a busy headquarters of hurling down there, like a hub of hurling."
A Nickey Rackard Cup title success for the flagship senior county team at Croke Park today would be a significant boost to the cause.
After last year's final defeat to Donegal, Mayo are desperate for success and their Round 1 group win over Roscommon, whom they'll face all over again, bodes well.
The bigger picture for Kenny is that he'd love to get Mayo back up to the heights they were at when he first joined the panel, over a decade ago.
He was a terrific football talent at the time, lining out for Mayo football teams in All-Ireland minor (2013) and U-21 (2016) final wins.
But hurling was embedded deep in his heart and, still a teenager, he threw in his lot with a county side pushing hard for success in the second tier of the small ball game.
The Christy Ring Cup was the second tier competition at the time, before the Joe McDonagh Cup was established, and Kenny recalls playing against Kerry in the 2014 Ring Cup semi-final.
"We were up at half-time," recalled Kenny. "The game was in MacHale Park, so we had home advantage, I can't remember why that was for a semi-final but it was the case. We just lost out on that one in the end."
Kenny's recall isn't entirely accurate. Kerry were well ahead at half-time but Mayo did outscore them in the second-half by 1-13 to 0-6.
Kildare went on to beat Kerry narrowly in the final and subsequently played Westmeath in a promotion/relegation game to see who would compete in the 2015 Leinster SHC.
Just over a decade on, Mayo hurling has slipped back considerably from those heights. There are all sorts of reasons for that, one of which is the natural pull of football for talented young dual players.
Whilst Kenny was happy to stick with hurling, other talented stick men opted to go down the football route. It's a tale as old as time in football dominated counties.
"Shane Boland, our corner-forward, his brother is Fergal, who is with the footballers," said defender Kenny. "Fergal's a brilliant hurler too. Jack Carney is another man who was a brilliant hurler growing up. Jack Coyne, corner-back with the footballers, he's a very good corner-back, still plays hurling. He'd be extremely sticky. It's hard to see, as a hurling person, that quality and that talent not being available but it happens all the time, not just in Mayo."
The great Keith Higgins managed to straddle both codes for a while. When his football career was over, he returned to hurl exclusively and captained Mayo to the 2021 Rackard title, their last at the grade.
Kenny could be the man who gets his hands on the silverware this time.
"We'd absolutely love to go back up to the Ring Cup but obviously Roscommon are thinking the same thing," shrugged Kenny, a schoolteacher at St Jarlath's College in Tuam.
"Roscommon are a great side, physically very strong. They're also very good in the air. They have lads like Brendan Mulry and Sean Canning inside, speed merchants. They've got a lot of threats but we'll do our best to hold them down."
