Legends: George O'Connor, Part 1

The GAA Museum Legends Tour Series has returned to Croke Park for a fifth season, and this Thursday it's the turn of Wexford hurler George O'Connor to relive some of his greatest moments in the Model County jersey.

George O'Connor played for Wexford from 1979 to 1996, and won the first of two GAA All Stars two years into his career with the county, in 1981. Incredibly, his last game for Wexford was 15 years later in the 1996 All-Ireland hurling final, when he won his one and only All-Ireland medal.

George knelt down on the Croke Park turf and prayed in the moments after that victory. It's one of the most iconic images in Irish sporting history.

This is Part 1 of an exclusive interview GAA.ie conducted with George this week. Part 2 will go online tomorrow.

I'M NO DIFFERENT TO YOU

The legend thing went in one ear and out the other. Past sports people have to be careful to keep themselves grounded. Words like that, while they are an honour, they can go very quickly. I'm no different to anybody else, I'm just a guy who played a little bit of sport and played it at a level that I trained for.

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It's a privilege to be able to tell people my story more so than the legend thing. If that story helps people in any aspect of their lives about striving and continuing on the road, of sharing experiences of disappointments on the way and keeping going, whether that be in sport or their everyday lives, well then that would be great. It's all about the journey in life, not about where I am going or where I have been. We all have our journeys in life.

People ask me all the time what was the most enjoyable part of my career and I say the 'the whole journey'. The few things I won don't make that much difference now. You might say that if I hadn't won an All-Ireland medal I might have ended up a different person altogether. There are a lot of guys who were never lucky enough to win an All-Ireland or to get the opportunity to speak to people. I think it's a great privilege to be able to speak to people. That's the main thing.

A SPORTING LIFE

There was a revival in hurling in the late 1930s and early 1940s because Wexford was a football county up 'til then. My father would have played with Nicky Rackard when he was 18, right at the end of Rackard's career, when they only had junior hurling in Wexford. My father was steeped in athletics and he was steeped in hurling and football. He would have played hockey and cricket, too, because the GAA didn't have as much of a hold on the community in Piercestown back then. My mother played golf down in Rosslare. I grew up in a community where sport was the thing.

St Martin's GAA club was only 200 metres down the road. At the time, when I was a young lad, there was no U12 championship and we would have been the first crew to play in that grade in 1972. We had a guy called Séamus 'Shanks' Whelan, who played at corner forward on Wexford's All-Ireland winning team in 1968, and he started underage hurling down in Piercestown, along with my father and guys like Eddie McDonald and Sam Dempsey. That's where it all started. The club became a place to go. It was very small and it continued on from there.But it was pure. There was never any criticism of chaps, the way they held the hurl, or any criticism from the sideline. You came to love the game at a very young age.

I was lucky enough to win a county minor title with St Martin's when I was just 14. I was called into the Wexford minor hurling panel when I was 16 before I broke my ankle. I got a call from the Wexford senior footballers when I was 18 and played with them until I was 24. I then continued on playing hurling with Wexford until I was 36 and three-quarters. That's the outline, but as I said it was all about the journey.

BREAKTHROUGH

I won a Leinster U21 title after a replay against Kilkenny in 1979. The following October I played centrefield against Offaly in an Oireachtas Cup final with a guy called John Fleming. By 1981, the year I won my first All Star, I was established in the team. That was the big breakthrough year for me.

THE HURT YEARS

We lost a Leinster final against Offaly in 1981 and that was the start of a great rivalry for us. I played in so many big games against Offaly and Kilkenny it's hard to recall them all. I do remember that it was a long sequence of losing, though.

If we had been a first division soccer team we would always have finished in the top three in the division. We were in the first division for most of the 1980s but we just couldn't make that breakthrough. I would say that if I hadn't come from the background I came from, and if winning was everything, then I would have given up. We were brought up to love playing the games and whatever happened happened. You were very disappointed, don't get me wrong. You'd be no good for a week, but you had the support of your friends and the club and family.

It was a bit like Waterford down there at the moment. Even though they haven't won an All-Ireland they continue to persevere. That Waterford team was acknowledged and admired. We were given plenty of attention and admiration for what we were trying to do. But it wouldn't have been on every paper at the time like it is today, that this Wexford were a bunch of bottlers. You have to keep yourself grounded, so I would just head back to the farm, where there was plenty of work to do, and you could be playing a club match the following weekend.

TRYING TIMES

I would say that in 1994 I was beginning to lose my appetite for it. We had played three league finals in a row against Cork the previous year. We lost after a second replay. We had an opportunity and we lost it. We went to the Leinster final with the same team that year and were beaten by Kilkenny after a replay again. The first game was an epic. We were gone into injury time and I remember saying to the referee when the ball was down on our forward line, 'Jesus, will you ever blow it up!' He didn't. The ball came back down the field with two strikes and Eamon Morrissey scored to level it. They beat us by seven points in the replay. I don't think we realised the physical toll playing three league finals against Cork had taken.

NATURAL FITNESS

I was lucky that I did a lot of athletics when I was younger. I did the long jump, the high jump and anything from 100 meters to 400 meters. My father would bring us to all the athletic meetings. The biggest thing of all was we had bicycles. We were on the go all day long and we were also working on the farm. That day there was no such thing as a straw bailer; everything had to be hand bailed. There was loads of physical work to be done and it was an adventure for us to be able to work on the farm and with my father. A lot of the lads playing hurling at the time were from a farming background. A farmer now is nearly like a UFO. Farmers are like leprechauns - if you find one, you make a wish on him there's that few of them around.

In the evening when you are finished work - and remember that work to us was like a hobby - we went and played hurling. It was an unstructured fitness regime. I never pulled a muscle or tweaked a muscle in my life. The only thing that happened to me was I broke a bone in my ankle doing a long jump into a saucer-shape sand pit. I got a few stitches and lost a few teeth, but the new ones were probably better than the old ones anyway.

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That's the end of Part 1. In Part 2, which will be published tomorrow, George talks at length about the 1996 All-Ireland hurling final, what it all meant to him, and of course, about that famous photo. Here's an extract, where George talks about how he felt when Liam Griffin brought sports psychologist Niamh Fitzpatrick into the Wexford dressing room, around that time:

At the time, I said to myself "He's really gone too far this time. He's some boll***s for bringing her in here." I remember she came into us in a pair of fancy boots. It was a woman. I thought "I'm not after hurling for the last 17 years to have this woman tell me how to hurl."

Read it tomorrow.

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George O'Connor's Legends Tours is on Thursday, 26th July at 7pm at Croke Park. All tours include a trip to the recently-refurbished GAA Museum, which is home to many exclusive exhibits, including the Sam Maguire and Liam MacCarthy Cups, as well as the new temporary exhibition 'GAA - A Global Phenomenon', which is now open running until Spring 2013. Booking for the 2012 Legends Tour Series is essential as places are limited. Click here for more information.

Other Legend Tours which will follow in the 2012 series include Liam Hayes, Jamesie O'Connor, Diarmuid O'Sullivan and Martin McHugh.