John Mulhall has one All-Ireland medal, he could just as easily have six or seven but he wouldn’t change a thing.
Always one to take the road less travelled, the former Kilkenny forward comes across as a man that never really knew what stress was.
We could all learn a thing or two from John Mulhall, the man who you could throw anything at without getting so much of a flinch in response because he’d always be there just tipping along, just taking it all in his stride.
But don’t mistake this happy-go-lucky personality for a man who doesn’t care. If he didn’t care he wouldn’t have got nervous before his club St. Martin’s played in a County final in the mid 2000s, if he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have been forcing it at the end of his inter-county career in an attempt to reclaim the starting place that was escaping from his grasp.
But when it did get away from him and he was dropped from the Kilkenny panel at the age of 23, never to be seen in the black and amber again, he wouldn’t be getting too bogged down to it. Life’s too short and too full of possibilities to get worked up about something like that.
Widely known for his performance on the back of an Arctic Lorry in the Dunnes Stores car park in Kilkenny in 2011, Mulhall is honest enough and man enough to realise that if he was hurling well enough in the years that followed his famous offering, that it would have faded into a distant, but still fond memory.
“I just wasn’t hurling well enough, that was it,” he said to the GAA Hour Show this time last year.
Five years out of intercounty hurling, former Cat John Mulhall finds Kildare operating at even higher level #GAAHourhttps://t.co/iLcdgDq6SD
— GAA JOE (@GAA__JOE) February 16, 2017
The Muckalee man was on the G’day GAA podcast recently and he told one belter of a story, among others, about his Fitzgibbon Cup days with UCC when he was struggling under the tutelage of former Cork hurler Mark Landers.
“I got dropped before the Fitzgibbon (weekend) both years,” began Mulhall.
A clash of personalities existed between the player and his manager, and the straw that broke the camel’s back on the second of those years and saw Mulhall dropped, was a crime that you couldn’t imagine any other hurler committing.
But John Mulhall could never be accused of being someone else’s man.
“I remember one day we were playing Portumna in February time, before the Fitzgibbon and he brought me on. Portumna were going well at the time.
“He brought me on, and I was wearing a hoodie under the jersey and he was going mental, so I ran on anyway and I threw it over a lads’ head after I’d scored. I just threw up the hurl and shouted ‘that’s for you Landers.’
“I was dropped after that then, and then he called me a monkey. We moved on from back then,” laughed Mulhall.
It’s like something you’d see an under-8 suffering with the cold do, but the Maths and Business teacher in Dublin never took things too seriously.
He got on a bit better with Paul O’Connor the next year, and his Fitzgibbon memories are fond ones.
“We were very lucky in 09, the great Paul O’Connor of Cork city came on the scene. He was an unbelievable manager. He’d won five Fitzgibbons. He was an unbelievable man. He was sound, a great man and you’d die for him.
“His thing was that he didn’t look at the ‘county stars,’ he was looking at the ethos of the team, looking for lads who were into it.”
That meant lads like Mulhall got the chance.
“We won, we bet UL in the final. We beat UL in the final, it was just a gel formed between those different characters…That was a great day, and it was a great week after it as well.”
And he took that chance.
This cool cat is out on his own.
The interview is well worth a listen.
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