Tribal warrior Finnerty one of Galway’s finest ever

IT’S hard to picture the great Pete Finnerty – a five-time All-Star winner – as anything other than an uncompromising Tribal warrior in one of the great half-back lines of Galway hurling: Finnerty, Keady, McInerney. A mythical trinity.

Yet, it’s an image of a schoolboy in Mullagh that Finnerty conjures up in the early stages of this interview; of a boy in breeches idly dreaming that one day he may emulate the faces he stares at on a poster on the school wall. He zones in on one face, in particular, and whispers the name: John Connolly.

“In Mullagh National School, we had a picture on the wall: Carroll’s All-Stars. How ironic a cigarette company sponsoring the first All-Stars in ’71! I remember John Connolly and I can still picture him to this day,” begins Finnerty.

“I remember looking at that poster and wondering what would it take to get one of those bronze statues. It was something that people aspired to, although I wouldn’t judge a player by how many All-Stars he had. I’d judge him by his performances, the player he was, and his character.”

His hero Connolly, he remarks, had all that, and more. “Without a doubt. I still look up to him today. Look at the man, look at the physique of him, look at the way he carries himself, look at the way he represented the county and Galway hurling, the way his family have. They are just incredible people. So, he is an incredible man, absolutely.”

John Connolly was not the only one that inspired Finnerty to become the hurler he would be: a double All-Ireland winner in ’87 and ’88 and an all-time great. Closer to his home lived another legend, the great Iggy Clarke. “I remember Iggy playing for Galway and he would have been one of my heroes as well,” says Finnerty.

“In ’75, when they won their first league, he brought the cup to the national school and I got to see it that time. Then, one day, Brendan Hobbins, a neighbour of his, got a broken hurley of Iggy’s and I remember bartering for it with a box of crayons and a few shillings. When I got the hurl, I thought it could nearly hurl by itself. Iggy would have been another huge inspiration.”

Moved to emulate these men, Finnerty embarked on an underage career that culminated in an All-Ireland U21 victory in 1983. He graduated to the senior set-up the following year but injury hampered his involvement. “I was probably fortunate because Joe Dooley ran riot in a league semi-final and I would probably have been marking him if I had started.”

However, in 1985, a rejig was done and Finnerty, who spent much of his underage career at corner-back and full-back, was handed a wing-back berth by the management for the All-Ireland semi-final against Cork on a wet day in Croke Park.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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