It's an episode that people of a certain age would scarcely believe but it says much about Liam Kearns and the levels of devotion that he engendered.
In early 2004, six Limerick dual players, Stephen Lucey, Brian Begley, Mark Keane, Conor Fitzgerald, Mike O'Brien and Mark O'Riordan, all chose football when an ultimatum was put to them by the senior hurling management.
Bear in mind that the footballers hadn’t won a Munster title in over 100 years, while big things were expected of the hurlers with the county having just won three consecutive All-Ireland under-21 titles.
In the history of Limerick GAA, before and since, a choice scarcely had to be made when it came to prioritising one code over the other - hurling was always going to win out.
Not on Liam Kearns’s watch, however.
“It was loyalty,” says Lucey. “The gun was being put to our head from one side.
“We had just come off the back of a Munster final against Kerry, weren’t too far away and we were being told, ‘No, you can’t play football’. There was no way of a compromise. None. Zero.
“You had to choose one or the other and Liam was the kind of fella who you’d follow. We called him the chief. That’s what we called him and as Michael Collins said in the movie ‘Michael Collins’ about De Valera, he’s always my chief, like. He’s always our chief.”
Later that year, Limerick went on to reach another Munster final, drawing with Kerry after Darragh O Se’s heroic catch over his own crossbar at the death denied them before losing the replay by four points. It was by far the biggest flirtation that Kerry had with defeat en route to that year’s All-Ireland.
Kearns later went on to manage Laois, Tipperary and was in the thick of his first season as Offaly manager when he died suddenly on Sunday. Had Limerick crossed the threshold back in 2004, it might well have given him enough gravitas to land the plum managerial post in his native county farther down the line.
“I always felt, and we discussed it, Kerry wouldn’t respect you unless you beat them,” Lucey noted. “We were like a stone in their shoe, I felt anyway, looking back on it but we gave them some of their toughest matches back then I would say.
“But, yeah, maybe Liam would have gotten a shot with Kerry but he never was… I don’t know what the story was down there, maybe he didn’t have enough medals in his pocket, enough of a profile to get the thing. Maybe he was seen as an outsider even though he was an insider.”
Failure to win major silverware under Kearns remains a huge disappointment, but Lucey is still warmed by the fun they all had together.
“We got a run in the qualifiers in 2002 and we drew with Cavan in Limerick and we had to go up to Cavan and we beat them. On the way down on the bus, we stopped in Ferbane to go into an off-licence. The off-licence was attached to a pub and we were all there now.
“This is the whole bus, the football board, the whole lot and some supporters were there as well. Instead of getting back on the bus we said we’ll have one while we’re waiting.
“Sure we were there for two hours and we’re still talking about that story of that bus trip, coming down from Ferbane.
“Anyone who knows him, all the tributes that are being paid, you can see his character, very warm, great personality but took the football very serious as well. We’re just shocked. Complete and utter shock.
“I feel so, so sad for poor Angela and Rachel and Laura. It’s dreadful. I was sitting on the chair last night and I was just sitting there for an hour, just reading, the messages were flying in and just thinking about your own mortality.
“We had our first baby there four months ago and that is life and then Liam dies but Tommy Moran, who was our sponsor from the Red Cow, he died on the same day.
“Sitting there thinking, ‘Jesus, you’ve only one shot at life, here’s your baby son and somebody who’s 60 is after dying, who was in the full of his health’.”
It’s only a few weeks since Lucey was last in his old manager’s company as they shared a table at a function, picking up seamlessly from where they left off and making plans to get the Limerick crew back together at long last.
“We were just saying, ‘Yeah, we should definitely meet up now, we’ve been talking about it for ages, we should all go and have a night out and maybe we’ll do it around the time of Championship’.
“We were talking about it for two or three years and with the pandemic we never got to do it, and now we never will. So it’s very sad.”
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