: Joe Canning, Vincent Hogan
: Joe Canning My Story
: Gill Books
: 9781804580844
: 1
: CHF 20.30
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 320
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The youngest of seven children from a hurling-obsessed Portumna family, Joe Canning was steeped in the game from birth. Regarded as a prodigy from the moment he stepped onto the pitch as a boy, he burst onto the national radar aged just 19, scoring 2-12 for Galway in a narrow defeat to Cork. But it would be another nine summers before he would lift the Liam MacCarthy Cup. Over the next decade, the whole country became fixated on Galway's quest for glory and the many struggles along the way: would Joe Canning be the greatest hurler never to win an All-Ireland medal? Pulsating with a unique sense of family and community in a place where hurling is a way of life, Joe Canning's memoir reflects on the standards of excellence he sometimes felt chained to, the suffocation of trying to meet other people's expectations and the personal battles that brought perspective to a singular focus on winning. Thoughtful and revealing, this is the remarkable story of one of Ireland's greatest hurlers.

Joe Canning is a five-time All-Star hurler. In 2017 he won a senior All- Ireland medal for Galway, defeating Waterford to bring the Liam MacCarthy Cup back across the Shannon into Galway for the first time in 29 years and earning the Hurler of the Year award. Joe won back-to-back minor All Irelands and an under-21 in 2007, the same year that he won a Fitzgibbon medal with Limerick IT. He also had a hugely successful club career with Portumna, winning four All-Irelands. He retired in July 2021 and now works in hospitality, enjoying his passion for golf in his spare time. He lives in Limerick with his wife Meg and daughter Josie. Joe continues to play for his club, Portumna, and is a selector for Galway's under-20 hurlers.

2.


Family


The butterfly was the gift.

That’s how I saw it. Her way of being there for us. Reassuring us. Settling us. At first, I wondered if I was the only one who noticed it, fluttering around the altar of the church in Monaleen. On 25 November 2022 – our wedding day.

The moment the priest mentioned Mam, the butterfly stirred behind him. And to me, instantly, that was her. Just letting us know that she was with us. Even the priest momentarily stopped, realising that everyone’s attention had been drawn to this tiny, winged creature. A butterfly in November. How often would you see that?

Maybe people will read this and think it silly. But I have faith, and if you ask me to explain that faith, that moment is where I’d go. Ten months after her passing, experiencing that profound sense of Mam’s presence on our wedding day.

She was with us too for Meg’s IVF treatment: three weeks of injections, and both of us acutely aware of a butterfly in the house. Then the moment Meg’s pregnancy was confirmed, the butterfly was gone.

Maybe believing in an afterlife is the only real comfort available to us after losing somebody we love. And I believe we’ll all see Mam again. I certainly hope so.

She had this deep equanimity about her. A calmness you never saw crumble. In many ways, I suspect that it fooled us into believing she was somehow unbreakable. The cancer coming back clearly wasn’t good news, but you never got that sense from Mam. Even as she became increasingly unwell and experienced a few fainting episodes, I think we always believed that she would pull through.

I know I certainly did.

Call it naivety, but when someone is so strong, it’s easy to underappreciate the seriousness of their predicament. Mam never really spoke about her cancer and certainly never betrayed any unease about the possibility of it being terminal. So it was all too easy to be fooled into believing that her condition was less serious than happened to be the case.

Even when she went into the Oncology Unit in St Joseph’s University Hospital that Christmas of 2021, you couldn’t detect even the tiniest sliver of self-pity. In hindsight, it was clear that she was very sick, and I don’t doubt she probably knew herself that she was dying. But that knowledge could never be allowed weigh on us.

That was always her mentality:my problem, not theirs.

By then, she couldn’t really eat as the cancer had moved to her stomach and, heavily medicated, she was sleeping a lot. But right up to the last few days, she could be extremely lucid too. It would almost fool you into believing that she was coming around and getting better.

Maybe on some level we all understood what was happening. I know for certain that my sister Deirdre did, but she’d only tell us as much as Mam would want us to know. And Mam was adamant that she didn’t want to go to a hospice, because to her, t