One man epitomises the Irish character - and it's not Roy Keane. In this highly personal essay, Tom Humphries celebrates D.J. Carey, the inspirational champion hurler whose passion has helped the ancient amateur game to thrive in a modern nation

14 September 2003

He stands on a platform within one of the great stadiums of Europe and when the moment comes he lifts the trophy above his head and shakes it at the big blue sky. There are 80,000 people here and they've waited for this. Before he can speak they start to chant his name. DJ! DJ! DJ! DJ!

And that's it. The laurels are all cut and given. The season passes with the summer. Another year dies and he remains at the pinnacle. D.J. Carey says a few words, goes down into the throng and with his young sons tugging his sleeves he goes to face the media. It's Sunday afternoon. The greatest hurler of his generation has just won his fifth All Ireland medal. He thinks that, maybe, he'll take next week off work.

You don't know him do you? Who he is or what he stands for? He ain't on Sky Sports. He has never appeared on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here. He has no existence outside his domain. You don't know him.

You are missing something.

It's as simple as this. Hurling is a game for gods played by men. D.J. Carey straddles the gap between gods and men. Hurling is an unlikely experiment, acts of balletic beauty conducted in the face of war. It's about timing and bravery and passion. Carey is the master and the inspiration.

Simple and uncomplicated. When they were younger, Jack Carey and Denis Joseph Carey would head out to the farms and woodlands of south Kilkenny or Laois and look for ash trees. Down near the root, in an area just a couple of metres long, the ash tree yields a harvest of hurleys. The boys knew what they wanted. Something with a nice sun-ripened grain, not a tree that's been gnarled by frost. No knots. As little sap as possible.

They would take the ash home to Kilkenny, dry it for nine months or so until they knew its personality to be reliable, and then Jack would carve D.J.'s hurleys, implements of magic thirty five and a half inches long.

D.J. went out and saved hurling with what he was given. When he first came to national attention on underage teams back in the 1980s, he wore scratchy jerseys, which he changed into in damp, dark dressing-rooms. All Ireland finals had all the colour, the excitement, the sense of duty, of your grandmother's funeral.

Now? Hurling has its superstars and its cathedrals. Jack Carey can find no more native ash. Hurling has devoured all the trees and a state agency must import ash from Sweden. The All Ireland hurling championship has become a triumphant marriage of sport and culture, an event which dominates Irish summers.

It should be extinct. By now hurling should be dead and there should be no D.J. Carey. The notion of men playing a game for the mere love of it should never have withstood the sudden arrival of money into hurling. The game has no right to survive against the bloated, all consuming hype of the Premiership. The PlayStation generation should have no time for the patient practice of old arts.

Hurling is the last difference, the last visible point of distinction in a country that has pimped itself so enthusiastically to the homogenisers, franchisers and corporatisers of the big world. The game is nourished by history and culture and the Irish sense of place. In some parts of Ireland hurling scarcely exists. In other parts, it is the best part of living, a formula for rootedness and community.

In Gowran, Co Kilkenny, from where D.J. Carey springs, there is nothing else. Hurling is the alpha and the omega. Religion. Philosophy. Music. Bread of life. You don't go bowling in Gowran. Nor do you readily develop a taste for independent French cinema or expensive gourmet food. There's no opera. No museums. No malls or tapas bars. What you do is you go to the field and you hurl. You dream first in red and white, the colours of the club, and later in black and amber, the colours of the county. Then you go back to the field and you hurl some more. The game, the fastest and most skilful field game on the planet, requires such devotion.

Its history is long, stretching back further than memory. When D.J. Carey lined up in September his counterpart in the right corner forward position for Cork was a young man called Setanta. The name is mythological, Setanta having slain a wolf by driving a hurling ball down its throat.

The drift of the modern world is towards disconnection and isolation. Hurling is an adhesive, one of the last excuses for people to gather and bump shoulders and celebrate themselves and the place they come from and the history they share.

In Croke Park last month more people than ever before watched the newest episode of Kilkenny and Cork's eternal rivalry. Outside every television was tuned in. In Irish bars from the Bronx to Brisbane they gathered to watch.

During the game Carey was quiet but, as he would say himself, he 'needed watching'. Though Cork kept him under surveillance, Kilkenny won their second title on the trot, a record equalling 28 in all.

The next day Coronation Street and the dulling misery of EastEnders were back. But for 70 minutes on that Sunday in September D.J. Carey of Gowran, Co Kilkenny ruled; the old country had a soul that was different. The globe's last great amateur game had another good day.

As a child, when Carey wasn't in the field, he was pounding his ball up against a wall of his home. The gable end of the Carey house, the scene of this decade long shellacking, has become something of a hurling landmark, a sacred spot photographed and worshipped at.

And when it got dark he came in and played hurling games in the bedroom with his brothers. Once Mrs Carey needed the bedroom window fixed. The glazier was surprised to discover through rudimentary forensics that the ball had passed through the glass from the inside out, more surprised perhaps that this was considered normal.

For 13 years at senior level, D.J. Carey has been the centre of the hurling universe. He is a Kilkenny man, which in the lottery of hurling life means that certain advantages were conferred at birth. He went to Ireland's top hurling academy, St Kieran's of Kilkenny, where he was discovered to be the sweetest of hurlers. So good, in fact, that the school took the precaution of employing his mother just to make sure that he always had a lift home after training.

Since his arrival, back in the late 1980s, Carey has played in eight All Ireland finals, the Superbowls of the game, winning five and living through an extraordinary period of change in the game.

You may not know him, yet the video of his life is the bestselling sports video of all time in Ireland. He has socialised with Tiger Woods and golfed with Harrington, Montgomerie, Woosnam, McGinley and others. He travels quietly with aid agencies to the bleakest corners of the world. He has been recognised on the street in Calcutta, demonstrated hurling in villages in Africa. He trains five or six times a week and, for sustenance, does a job that requires him to drive 75,000 miles a year.

Oh, and rumours follow him like stray dogs. Once he went to the hospital with stomach pains and had to sit and wait for a while near the oncology ward. Within a week the world of hurling was convulsed with speculation about how long Carey had to live and just how big the tumour was. Once, in 1998, he retired and a rumour galloped around to the effect that he was about to become a pro golfer. He received 25,000 letters within a couple of weeks begging him to come back to hurling. Eventually he did.

'Back then I would have let the criticism get in on me, the backstabbing etc,' he says. 'I don't allow it any more. I don't like it. I suppose that's where I've changed. I've learned to live with it. A certain amount of people won't like you. It's hard to get used to. You think you're an ordinary person going around doing your business but once you have a profile a certain amount of people just won't like you. When we weren't winning all the time I was always blamed. If I didn't go well there had to be some sort of reason. That's been hard to learn to live with.'

But he learned. He started out as a spring-heeled kid, having enough originality to rejuvenate a senescent game. Thirteen years at the top and he hasn't lost his respect for the gift. His signature has been the late goal. He has the burst of pace of a scalded cat and the occasions in a summer when he sends the ball scudding low to the opposition net late in the game are a reliable index of his wellbeing.

His celebrity is all so improbable in a nation so culturally porous. Hurling seems particularly overmatched in its battle with soccer, the world's greatest professional game. Yet in the form of Croke Park and the sporting infrastructure of Ireland, hurling and Gaelic football have won. Soccer has no home of its own, renting out the spectacularly dowdy Lansdowne Road for its home internationals and playing out its vapid domestic league in near privacy in tiny grounds dotted mainly around Dublin. Every summer, regardless of World Cups or nuclear wars between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy, the amateur games of the Gaelic Athletic Association move from strength to strength.

Lately, though, hurling has been bodychecked by the modern world. Croke Park has a lucrative layer of corporate boxes the occupants of which haven't been slow in realising that a sport which so reliably abducts the Irish imagination can also be a fine marketing tool. D.J. Carey's face sells a lot of things in Ireland today.

The tabloidisation of Irish culture hasn't necessarily meant the trivialisation of Irish culture, but there is a certain coarseness now that scarcely existed when D.J. Carey first illuminated the game. Every English tabloid has an Oirish edition and if the sports sections of those papers have upped the ante in terms of news gathering, the failure of Fleet Street to grasp the ethos and the vernacular of Irish games is often amusing. A player injured in Kerry transforms the county team to 'Crisis Club Kerry'; the hurlers of Limerick have often become 'The Lims'; hitherto ordinary players have become adept at walking in and 'dropping bombshells'.

There has always been the sense, though, that the tabloids were itching to do what tabloids do, to go further, to push aside the boundaries between public and private life. In a way D.J. Carey should have seen it coming. His summer attracted too many headlines along the way. First, Charlie Carter, a team-mate since Carey was five years old, dropped off the Kilkenny squad in controversial circumstances, leaving Carey to take over the captaincy. Then, in August, Carey was involved in a bizarre incident when his car was stolen while at a petrol station and he gave commandeered another car to give chase. Captain Courageous! Have A Go Hero! The redtops were always going to be itching for more. They went after his marriage, long rumoured to be fractured.

You don't know him, but you have to understand the nature of his celebrity. Great hurlers don't graduate to gated communities and drive smart cars with frosted glass. They live where they always lived, walk the streets they always walked, have the friends they always had. What happened to D.J. Carey and his family last month was new.

The Irish experience of tabloid intrusion into private lives has been largely vicarious until now, a flow of tittle tattle from across the water. The notion that the marriage of an amateur sportsman should be held up for public scrutiny shocked many, not least Carey himself. 'What was happening in September, and I still don't want to get into it in detail,' he said a week after the final, 'was that ... reporters and papers were on the streets and in bars offering people money for stories about me. Cash to come up with a story. I found that mind-boggling and scary. Billion-dollar corporations going after a small fry from rural Ireland because he has a profile in an amateur sport.'

For days before the All Ireland final people spoke of little else than what was going to happen to Carey when the Sunday tabloids 'did him'. There were little pre-emptive strikes and spoilers in other papers, attempts to run stories about his private life while pretending to be disgusted by the whole affair. One Sunday paper published a front-page picture of Carey's wife and children while, at the same time, commenting wistfully about media standards on its front-page lead.

'The whole business,' says Carey, 'was coming down to what they would write if I didn't tell my side of the story. What they could threaten me with. What came out eventually wasn't what I was being threatened with. Things are going through a legal phase at the moment so I can't go into too much detail.'

To stay somewhat focused on his hurling he diverted his phone to his office. His sister took calls at home and was widely misquoted. 'In the end, I looked at all in terms of if somebody went with a story and they had one fact wrong, they were going to pay."

He sent legal letters to that effect. There was widespread talk of boycotts of the newspaper most commonly mentioned in connection with the business. On the Sunday morning they backed off. Carey had sent a hurling ball down the wolf's neck.

'It's fine for them to have backed off, but the principle is the same,' he says. 'I live with whatever I have done in the past or the future. I make the best decisions I can for myself and those around me. That's all I can do. It's my business.

'My family was very hurt by this. Very, very hurt. A lot of people close to me saw what was going on. What can you do? There's not an awful lot of redress. You sit and wonder is this what people are paid to do? Going after as much dirt as they can, no matter who it hurts or what it hurts. I have two children. Adults will get over this in time; it's my kids who are going to be hit with stuff. It's not right.'

Hurling retreats in the winter. The game gets slow and brutal in the mud and rain. All attention is local. Winter belongs to the big screens in saloon bars beaming out the Premiership. For D.J. Carey winter is hurling; it is playing for Gowran and making road trips. He'll hurl for his club, playing with his brothers and with guys he's known since he was four or five years old.

He'll play and he'll travel, to this club and that county to present medals to these kids, and to coach hurling to those youngsters, to pose for a million photos and to sign everything they offer him. He never asks for a penny. 'Personally I don't know how much it's worth if you measure things in money, but seeing young kids being excited by your just turning up, that gives me great pleasure. Every hurler could do something else with his life. I've a talent I suppose. When I can help the enthusiasm is there to go and do it.'

The win last month gave his career longevity as well as startling beauty and secured his place in the game's pantheon. That's a small, good thing modestly acknowledged by Carey, but with it came something a little darker, a vulgarisation of the Irish public discourse, a glimpse of what the future might be.

That hurling has survived at all is a kind of miracle. That many Irish children should revere Carey above Beckham or Keane is an anachronism. Defiantly neglected by successive Irish governments, the game's local resonances keep it as rooted as the ash trees from which its tools are hewn. It is not reasonable to ask of most men what is asked of D.J. Carey. Yet hurling was never a reasonable game and Carey is no ordinary customer.

He rolls on. He is accustomed to the odd kind of celebrity that has accompanied him since his teens. A few years ago an arts festival in Kilkenny sought to honour Carey by parading a 20 foot-tall effigy of him through the old streets. D.J. Carey fancied he'd bring his young kids into town to surprise them. But he couldn't find a parking space and just drove home again.

· Tom Humphries's latest book is 'Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo' (Pocket Books/Town House)

Bluff your way in hurling

The earliest written record of the game is found in the Brehon Laws of the fifth century. It is believed to predate Christianity coming to Ireland with the Celts.

The English Crown banned the sport following the Norman invasion.

It was revived in the eighteenth century when foreign visitors noted its position within Irish culture.

This revival culminated in 1884 with the founding of the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association), which supports hurling, Gaelic football and other Irish cultural activities such as the traditional language, music and dance.

The ball, or 'sliothar', is similar in size to a hockey ball but has raised ridges.

Players can carry the ball by hand for four paces after which it must be bounced off the stick.

To score you must put the ball over the crossbar for a point or under the crossbar for a goal, worth three points.

Hurling - and Gaelic football - teams field 15-a-side.