Sixty years on and McCabe's theatre no longer stands

Cavanman's Diary

Sixty years have now passed since Seamus McCabe of Clones became the first man to bring an All-Ireland senior handball title to Ulster. One of the sport’s great champions, he passed away in November 2008.

Unfortunately, I didn’t meet him personally but he was said to have been an interesting character, unique in ways (which I can tell you is not unusual in the sport) and a truly tremendous player who possessed a wicked left hand.

McCabe was renowned as one of the leading elite handballers in the country at a time when there were tens of thousands of active players.

As a sportsman, McCabe was one of the Clones and Monaghan’s greatest sons. Born in 1942, he lived in McCurtain Street all his life and was a talented artist. Shane Connaughton knew him well and has written about how he decorated his home with art, with blue and white crepe paper in glass jars in his garden; a singular mind, a typically left-sided creative.

At the end of October of ’66, there was a reception for him in the Hibernian Hotel, attended by the President of the GAA, Alf Murray, no less, who put his achievement in context.

“Mr Murray said this was Ulster’s first senior All-Ireland and it ranked in importance with Cavan’s breakthrough 33 years ago in senior football,” noted the Northern Standard.

“Also, with the other breakthrough in, he thought, 1941, when the first senior provincial championship was brought to Ulster. If it should ever come their way that similar honours in hurling would come to Ulster, people would also be talking about Cavan and Seamus McCabe. That was the historic importance of this occasion. When all of them present were gone, this victory would still be remembered as an important one for Ulster.”

In the ‘Monaghan Gael’ at the end of that year, Seamus McCluskey wrote that “time is very much on the fair-haired Clones man’s side, however. He is still in his early twenties and that coveted All-Ireland Handball Double cannot possibly elude him much longer.

“During the festivities (in 1966), the people of Clones presented Seamus with a very valuable VHF transistor radio as a token of their appreciation,” McCluskey recalled.

“As I spoke to him on that very happy occasion, Seamus explained to me that he had always felt much happier when in arrears and when the odds were really stacked against him. Looking through his games of 1966, this is clearly brought out – in all his great victories he came from behind to win while in the final that he lost (in the hardball code), he had been way out in front.”

This was backed up by Tom McElligot in his 1984 history of the sport, McElligot wrote: “Seamus McCabe came from Clones, Monaghan, where he learnt a lot from Gerry Moran, who was then a customs and excise officer on the border. He was a natural left-hander who never really mastered right-hand play.

“In his first All-Ireland final, he had the unnerving experience of being a game down and hearing ‘Look sharp’ called in the second game of a three-game rubber but he made up the aces from 12 to 19 and then went on to win 9-21, 21-19, 21-10.”

In the summer of 2015, a plaque was unveiled and a tree planted at Cara Street play park, where the back-to-back ball alleys used to stand. Karl O’Connell, that great Monaghan footballer and a grand-nephew of McCabe’s, unveiled the plaque.

Handball’s popularity has always been cyclical and the game has tended to be something of a renegade code, doing its own thing.

In a 2009 article on the history of the sport in Monaghan, Austin McKenna noted that activity in the 1950s and ’60s was centred on places like Ashburton, Bawn, Ballybay, Clones, Clara, and Monaghan Town. There had been a boom in court construction in the early decades of the Free State – Ballybay’s was built at Toy’s Green in 1954, there was one at St Davnet’s hospital and so on – but the game remained something of an independent republic within the sporting landscape.

“The courts (in Monaghan) were all open courts with limited viewing and no dressing rooms, toilets or other social facilities,” Austin noted.

“Each of the courts above had a small group of 10 to 20 players who were enthusiasts for the game. Otherwise the game had a limited following. Their links with the GAA in the county were quite tenuous and administration at club and county level was weak and spasmodic.”

Yet activity must have been limited by the time McCabe, at 24, acceded to the throne. At that function at the tail end of ‘66, Mick Duffy, chairman of Monaghan county board, also spoke.

“In Co Monaghan, the only place that handball is played and supported is in Clones,” he said.

Sixty years on, the game is now strong in the county – places like Truagh, Carrick, Bawn, Corduff, Monaghan Town have strong membership and a high standard of player and there were 180 juveniles in the county championships this year.

But in other areas, it is dormant; in Clones, to the best of my knowledge, the game is extinct. To mark 60 years since Seamus McCabe’s astonishing breakthrough success, maybe someone will revive it in the historic town of Clones.

In two years’ time, it will be a century since Clones native Dr Baron Glass, then based in Nottingham, donated £1,000 – Google tells me that is close to €100,000 now – for the provision of two ball alleys for “all the youth of Clones”., stipulating that it was regardless of denomination and appointing trustees of various faiths.

In March of that year, the Irish Independent reported on the good doctor’s largesse under the headline “Doctor’s Gift to Irish town”. In later years, there was an alley at St Tiernach’s Park, too, so the tradition is there and can be tapped into.

It’s sad to think that those old twin theatres of stone are no longer standing.

Maybe, some forward-thinking Clones people will give the place another gift 100 years on and honour Seamus McCabe and the sport in which he excelled, a sport, incidentally, which is on the rise again nationally – but that’s a story for another column.