You can hardly turn around in the reception area of Waterford IT without seeing Noel Connors.
There he is on one wall, a bullet of blue through a dark Fitzgibbon Cup night, leading a jailbreak out of defence. There he is on another, the college captain, standing in for a coin toss. Here he is walking in through the side-door with his hand offered out, a 5ft 8in rubber ball of a man.
In another life, in another place, he’d have been perfect raw material for a sprinter. In this one, in Waterford, he’s a corner-back to his toenails.
This is his fourth year in WIT and there could be a fifth yet. Not that it was ever planned this way. When he fell across the line of his Leaving Cert in 2008, it was on the back off two years of Harty Cup and All- Ireland success with his school De La Salle.
Get trades
By then, a lot of his friends had long left to get trades for themselves and were earning readily and happily in a world that hadn't yet fallen off a cliff. The idea that he'd be still in college come 2013 would have seemed ludicrous had anyone brought it up.
Yet here he is, elbow deep in a dissertation for a masters in Business Management that he has half a mind to maybe try and turn into a PhD some day. The working title is “Leadership Styles in the GAA’.
The other day he ran into Michael Fennelly – himself a student of Sports Conditioning in UL – and the pair of them broke bread on what it is to be immersed in an academic world where your own life is daily case study.
It certainly makes the library hours easier to take on sun-soaked days like this. However longingly his classmates gaze out the window at the good weather, none of them get to end their week on the pitch in Semple Stadium.
“One thing I found that was very interesting is the evolution of what leadership is,” he says. “How it began in the 1930s and was wholly focussed on one leader. That has changed over the years to the roles of the subordinates becoming more important. Initially, they were just there to do a job and to carry out the leader’s vision.
“But that has totally changed and come full circle and the leadership role is more based on a team now. To the point where you would no longer call them subordinates because they are all leaders. They are given more responsibility and authority and as a result their levels of commitment increases. They become leaders in their own right. That stuff is kind of fascinating to me.”
None of which is entirely surprising obviously. Connors has always been a first-man-over-the-top kind of player. A Waterford minor at 15, an under-21 at 17, he was in the senior panel in his first year out of school.
He was an All Star nominee in his first season and an All Star winner in his second, taking his place in a defence that was filled out by Jackie Tyrrell, Paul Curran, Tommy Walsh, JJ Delaney and Brick Walsh. He hadn’t yet turned 21.
Even his missteps were taken for the right reason. A couple of years back, he did a Q&A for the GAA website and his A to the Q of who is sporting idol was came out as Lance Armstrong. He had the wristband and everything in those days – and this was only in 2011.
"Jesus, how wrong was I?" he laughs now. "One of the reasons that I looked at him was I thought that he was a prime example of what a leader is. Someone who was successful and driven. It was the amount of torture and pain he went through, the sickness and so on. To do that and still rise to the top in such an intense sport was amazing.
Taking drugs
"It was a total shock when it all blew up on him. The way I looked at it was that there was no way he could be taking drugs because it was a huge professional sport with so much continual testing. I'd take back whatever I said about him. That's obvious. I don't think I'm the only person who saw him as someone to look up to."
If asked now, he'd plump for Paul O'Connell. When he was growing up, it wasn't John Mullane or even Ken McGrath that he'd pick as his favourite Waterford player. Connors loved them too obviously but his eye roamed easily, usually to fall upon the more earthy type.
“The flair factor always attracted other fellas but I always looked up to the Brick Walsh or Séamus Prendergast. Just fellas who went through so much torture and pain and who took so many belts. There was never much talked about them but they were my favourite players.
“I suppose it’s a corner-back’s thing to enjoy being in the thick of it. You have to relish the physical contact, you have to be in amongst it. Because you’re not going to be here for long. I was only thinking about it the other day, the cycle of intercounty players is getting smaller and smaller.
“Even when I started off, players were hitting their peak at 28, 29. Now it’s more like 26, 27 and fellas are retiring nearly as soon as they get to 30. It’s so much more professional now and the training and matches are constant. So when you’re in it, you have to go at it.”
Connors grew up in a time of plenty. Like his father, Noel snr, he got to see Waterford win a Munster title at the age of 12. Unlike his father, who slogged away for Waterford in the 1970s when the county won just a single Munster Championship match in the whole decade, he came into a set-up that had kept flourishing. He picked up a Munster medal himself in 2010.
Because four Munster titles in nine seasons did more than just put medals in pockets – it laid yellow brick road for those coming behind. De La Salle had never won the Harty Cup before Connors and friends won it twice, Dungarvan CBS have just repeated the trick these past two years.
When he hears people say Mullane’s generation failed because they never lifted the Liam MacCarthy, he bristles on their behalf. For him, their legacy means as much as their labours.
“When you’re in the limelight, everybody wants to be associated with you. But people forget very quickly the minute you’re gone. People don’t care at that stage how much effort you’ve put in or how much of your life you’ve given up.
“The likes of Ken and Eoin and John, they were some of the best hurlers Ireland has ever had, not to mind Waterford. But now some people talk about them as if they did nothing just because they never won an All-Ireland.
"That's just completely unfair. What those fellas did was put their life on hold for 10 years or more and all the time they were doing it, they were inspiring people of my generation.
Not right
"We grew up watching Waterford playing in Munster finals and All-Ireland semi-finals and that led on to us winning Harty Cups and all the rest of it. Now you might talk to a seven-year-old and he's never heard of Ken McGrath. That's crazy and it's not right either."
Tomorrow they and Clare will launch another Munster campaign out of the cannon. The sides have met seven times going back to and including the 1998 Munster final.
Tot it all up and you find three wins apiece with one draw. Aggregate score? Clare 12-113 Waterford 8-124. Or 149-148 if you prefer.
Cheek by jowl by cheek.
Connors hasn’t lost to Clare yet in the championship and doesn’t intend to start at the age of 23. He doesn’t mind Clare carrying the mantle of favouritism. Quite likes the sound of it, in fact. You fight harder into the breeze.
“It’s good for the younger lads to get used to being written off because that’s going to happen. You have to relish it. Train as a champion but embrace being the underdog, that has to be the mentality.”
A leader’s mantra, if ever there was one.
