In the long careers of great players there is so much to remember that it is natural to forget. Of the 32 goals and 683 points that Patrick Horgan scored in the championship, some of the mesmerising, weight-bearing, rapturous scores that you swore were unforgettable are hidden in the attic of your memory now.
What remains is a visceral sense of what Horgan did, as if everything has blended into a sauce. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said the American poet, Maya Angelou.
That is true of great players too. Without thinking about it, without it being acknowledged, Horgan moved the dial on the feelings of his audience. He had a panoply of shots that distilled his brilliance into stuff that made your eyes wide with wonder. Whatever else changed over the years, that feeling never dulled.
Horgan’s obsession was with the art of the game. Practice was his addiction. When Cork reached the All-Ireland final in 2013 – the first of four in Horgan’s career – he was in the habit of arriving at training two hours before the appointed time and hitting 100 frees or more before his team-mates started to trickle in.
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A few years later Cork had a team bonding day on Spike Island, where none of the activities involved hurling, and yet Horgan arrived with his stick, the only player in the group who didn’t leave it at home. Pat Ryan said once that if Horgan was just walking to the shop, he’d have a hurley in his hand.
“I’ve never seen anyone with his level of skill,” said Ryan, “but he has never stopped working on it. He never stopped his love affair with mastering the art.”
Horgan emerged on the intercounty scene – 17 years ago – at a time when the game was changing. Hurling had been invaded by strategies and systems and the tyranny of data, and, for years, Horgan was in denial. Classy forwards no longer had a license to be just finishers. Without so much as a referendum Kilkenny rewrote the law. Horgan struggled with the new value system.
He was asked once if he would like to have played in an era when forwards weren’t held accountable to their tackle count. “100 per cent,” he said. “Who wouldn’t? Feck sake. The poachers could stay in close to goal.”
Over the course of his career, though, his game evolved. There was a time when he seemed agnostic about goalscoring. He had such an array of shots at his command that points were always available and sometimes that was the handy option. There was one glaring stretch of 26 championship games for Cork, spread over six years, in which he scored just one goal from play.
He addressed that deficiency, though. In the following four years he doubled his career goal tally and in the last two seasons he averaged a goal every two games in the championship; before that, his career average had been one in three. Late in the day, it was a quantum leap.
Into his 30s Horgan changed his attitudes to fitness and strength and conditioning and sports psychology, all of it with a mind to extending his career. At Cork training sessions he never led the running, but there was a time when he was at the back of the peloton, dicing with the broom wagon. That changed too.
He worked with Deccie O’Sullivan on his explosiveness, one-on-one sessions where they focused on the first few strides after he gained possession. Like a wide receiver in the NFL, he was just looking for a tiny window of separation. For many years Horgan was more likely to court a dropping ball with his hurley than with his hand, but every inside forward is dealing with a time and motion equation, and Horgan eventually started to catch the ball as a first response. All he needed was an extra second.
Like all great players, he had faults too. Horgan was liable to drift out of matches. When he nearly won the 2013 All-Ireland final with a dazzling point from under the Cusack Stand, he hadn’t touched the ball in open play for 37 minutes. In the 2021 All-Ireland semi-final against Kilkenny he didn’t touch the ball for the first 18 minutes and still scored four points from play before half-time.
He was prone to those kind of power outages. Unlike other great forwards of the modern age, like Henry Shefflin or TJ Reid, he didn’t put himself under puck-outs or go tearing back into his own half, hunting and hitting. But he didn’t need a rolling involvement with the play to sustain his morale or confidence. As a mass producer of scores, Cork’s patience with Horgan grew in proportion to their dependence.
Summarising his career by the numbers that appeared in brackets after his name seems crude and reductive, but scorers are inevitably defined in that way. Horgan reached the top of the all-time scoring charts for the first time in the summer of 2022 and he finished his career at that summit – even if he is at the mercy of Reid on that score now.
When Horgan captained Cork in the 2021 All-Ireland final he equalled Christy Ring’s all-time record of 65 championship appearances in the red and white jersey and in this year’s final he took that tally to 90, a staggering number. Side by side with his longevity was his durability. In 17 seasons, Horgan never missed a championship game with Cork through injury.
The early signs are that there will be many changes on the Cork panel for next year, young players and new faces. If Horgan had not retired there is no guarantee that the new management would have brought him back. In fact, the opposite was far more likely.
He leaves a gaping hole and a glittering legacy. He was an ornament on the game.
