[ Home ] [ Club Info ] [ Fixtures/Results ] [ LocalNews ] [ Teams ]

Two Kerry Sports Heroes to be celebrated in Waterville

Two of Kerrys great and unsung sporting heroes are being honoured in Tech Amergin, Waterville, on Friday July 2 nd.

Legendary Kerry cyclist Mick Murphy is the subject of an exhibition of photographic and video work by Cork artist Chris Hurley. In the 1950s and ‘60s the Rás Tailteann attracted bigger crowds than any other sporting event in Ireland. To compete was a great achievement, to finish it a greater one, to win it a monumental one. Occasionally a win became the stuff of legend. Mick Murphy’s win in 1958 did.

In an era of hard times and hard men, Kerry cyclist Mick Murphy was known far and wide as ‘The Iron Man’. In his case, the truth exceeds the legend: he trained with weights made from stone; he made a living as a spalpeen and circus performer; on one stage in the 1958 Rás, after his bike had broken down, he ‘borrowed’ an ordinary bicycle from a farmer and chased down the leading pack; he rode for three days with a broken collar bone; and he drank cow's blood and ate raw meat. It was said that he was indestructible.

The exhibition takes us back to that time with a film, which retells the story by the hero himself, while intimately portraying him through a series of stunning photographs.

Equally monumental in its scale and achievement was the success of local mountaineer John Dowd, who in 2008 became the first ever Kerryman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Echoing the teak-tough nature of Murphy’s cycling style, John Dowd’s feat of endurance and both physical and mental courage marks him out as one of Kerry’s great unsung sporting heroes. Following the exhibition opening John will give an illustrated talk on his experience, with a slide show of photographs he took himself on his grueling climb.

Renowned ex footballer and radio broadcaster Weeshie Fogarty will be on hand to open the event, which takes place in Tech Amergin, Waterville, on July 2nd.

The exhibition will run until July 14 th.

For further information contact:

Tech Amergin, Waterville – 066 9478956, techamergin@eircom.net

Filmmaker / Artist, Chris Hurley – 021 4316033, chris@corkfilmcentre.com

www.techamergin.com

THE IRON MAN

Banteer is a small village, west of Mallow in County Cork, where the rich farmland
of the Blackwater Valley meets the Boggeragh Mountains. Two miles from the village,
where the road to Cork city begins to rise for Nadd mountain, lies the crumbling
and ivy-covered remains of a ball-alley at the side of the road. Here, in the
rural and parochial Ireland of the 1950s, the local men gathered in the summer
evenings when the day’s farm-work was done. Life didn’t change much in rural Ireland
in those times and anything out of the ordinary was a source of local interest
and speculation. In the spring of 1958, the curiosity of this gathering was aroused
by the regular appearance of an unknown cyclist, head down, and heading south
towards Nadd mountain. While his unfamiliarity was of interest in itself, the fact
that he didn’t return intensified the curiosity. Some, it is said, remained later and
later, until well into the dark of the night, but still, he was never seen returning.
The mystery rider was Mick Murphy, a 24 year-old migrant farm labourer from an
impoverished farming community near Cahirciveen in south Kerry. He was unknown
to the locals as he had come to Banteer to prepare for the 1958 Rás Tailteann,
and his regular evening spin past the ball-alley took him over the mountain
and back to Banteer, via Mallow, on a 50-mile (80 Km) circular route. However,
within a few weeks, local curiosity was to be satisfied when Murphy become a
national sporting sensation by emerging from nowhere to win the 1958 Rás in
such spectacular fashion that it created one of the most enigmatic legends in Irish
sporting history.

(The Rás: The Story of Ireland’s Unique Bike Race, Tom Daly, The Collins Press ©2003)