Patience proving a virtue for Gearóid Hegarty

By John Harrington

For Gearóid Hegarty, Limerick’s All-Ireland title triumph this year felt very much like the first one back in 2018.

The same sense of elation, the same scale of celebration, and the same overriding sense that he wants to do this all over again next year.

He’s a six-time All-Ireland champion now and yet he feels just as hungry when the prospect of a potential seventh is put on a plate in front of him.

The question he’s been asked most over the course of his inter-county career is where he and most of his Limerick team-mates get their insatiable appetite for success from, and he’s still no closer to an obvious answer.

“I suppose the easiest way to answer that question is it doesn't feel like we've won six All-Irelands,” says Hegarty who was announced as the PwC GAA/GPA Hurler of the Month for January today.

“And I'm always asking myself, will I ever be satisfied? Because very quickly after the All-Ireland, I don't know what day it was, but I was only saying it to (my fiancé) Niamh in a kind of a quiet moment one of the mornings, ‘will I ever be satisfied?’

“Because I was already starting to look forward to next year. But in a way, I suppose that's a good thing. It has to be a good thing.

"But, yeah, look, I don't know. I'm not satisfied at the moment anyway, put it that way. That's the only way I can answer that question.”

Perhaps a mixture of competitiveness and insecurity is Hegarty’s secret sauce.

Whether it’s a game of golf with his friends or an All-Ireland Final in Croke Park, he’s ferociously determined to win the thing.

But he’s also driven by an omnipresent urge to prove himself over and over again, because self-doubt is a constant companion.

“I'm always wrestling with that, always, all my career,” he admits. “I think everybody does, whether they're being honest about it or not, everybody has doubts, of course they do, it would be abnormal not to have doubts.

“Yeah, I always have doubts. I had doubts after last year would we ever get back to Croke Park, just get back to Croke Park. Now, these would be fleeting moments, I'm not saying that I'd be riddled with doubt, but I would have them.

“You'd have nerves before a game, you'd be doubting yourself, of course you would, but as I get a bit older you learn to not try to fight these off.

“I suppose curiosity is a big one for me as well in terms of being curious as to why you feel this way. You learn how to deal with these things, and that's what makes it all the more satisfying, I suppose, when you sitting here today talking to you after winning another All-Ireland.”

Hegarty’s championship form this year was arguably better than it’s ever been since he was crowned Hurler of the Year back in 2020.

He feels himself like he’s still evolving as a hurler, which he puts down in no small part to learning the power of patience.

“I'm on the panel since 2016, so 10 or 11 years. You pick up a lot of expertise over the years, you kind of figure out what to do and what not to do.

"I've relaxed a lot, that's probably the big one. I've tried to become a more patient person is a big one for me, because I suppose the world we live in nowadays everything is at the touch of a button and you can get everything so quickly.

“But if you want to achieve something so deeply and something that's so hard, you have to be patient. You have to wait. You have to keep putting in the work, you have to keep showing up, but you have to wait for it to happen. I'm not sure if that makes sense to you?

“I'm boiling that down to the smallest moments in game, I'm boiling that down into the week leading into the game, I'm boiling that down into the whole year. Patience is something that I've tried to work on a lot this year, I've just become a more patient person just in general, which is probably the one thing that I really went after this year.

“I always like to go after something, that's probably something that I went after this year. I can think of games, maybe the game in Ennis this year, I don't thinkI touched the ball for the first 10 or 15 minutes. Once upon a time when I was a bit younger I would have been panicking.

“But as you grow a little bit older, and, as I said, I've been working on becoming a more patient person, you realise that catastrophizing or freaking out definitely won't help.

“You've just got to keep making the runs, keep looking for the ball, and eventually you work your way into the game. You learn these things as you get a bit more older, a bit more experienced.

“When you look back on your career, you wish that you knew these things when you were younger.”