He’s still the last man to captain Cork to a national senior hurling title, having made the journey from Fiji to Sydney to the steps of the Hogan Stand to lift the Liam McCarthy in 2005. And he was also part of the last Cork team to win a national league, having in another final against Waterford back in 1998 worn the number 7 jersey he’d make his own for a decade and more. Seán Óg Ó hAilpín though is looking forward to when another Cork captain and team can claim similar distinctions, just as he’s content to have transitioned from being a once demi-god to a self-confessed ‘gofer’ and ‘Joe Soap’.

For so long on the big match days you knew where he’d be: right there in Thurles, Limerick, Croker or wherever it was, in the thick of it or on the wing. Plucking a ball from out of the sky or being the first to scoop it up off the ground. Bursting out, using that immaculate frame to break the tackle. Taking a small tap of the ball, a sideways glance, then offloading it by hand or by bás to launch another Cork attack, score, win. It seemed like he would play forever, live forever, forever Seán Óg.

Now, 10 years on from his last league final and season with Cork, you’re unlikely to find him in Thurles on a day such as this. Instead most weekends he’ll be well off Broadway, on the side of a road in his wife’s old hometown of Innishannon, behind the counter of the cleverly-named the Quirkey Kitchen, the coffee and food mobile truck business Siobhan Quirke set up during lockdown.

Can he make a mean cappuccino? No, not the way Siobhan can, though he’s meant to do one of those barista courses soon. “I always say to her I’m only there out of love,” he smiles. Love of her and love of being still out on the field up in Na Piarsaigh, only now coaching instead of playing. With the games still taking up so much of his life, the least he owes Siobhan is to forsake the big ones so he can spend some time in literally her company.

“I’m just a gofer to be honest. When the queue gets quite long I’ll hop in and take the orders, put them into a cup beside Siobhan so she knows what she’s making, take the payment and then serve out the goodies. As a customer said to me the other week, ‘Where did it go all wrong, Seán Óg?!’ From captaining Cork to cleaning tables at the Quirkey Kitchen!’ Sure you had to laugh! So typical feckin’ Cork!”

Hearing and talking to him after all these years, it’s clear that he’s still the same Seán Óg – open, warm, self-depreciating, exceptionally eloquent and quotable either side of the pausing and innocent profanity – but Cork and especially Quirkey’s Kitchen has a way of reminding him that he’s not so óg anymore.

Next month he’ll officially enter the ranks of the middle aged, turning 45. He still keeps in better nick than you or me but no longer subjects himself to the training regimen that produced that ripped body famously captured in that Tribune pic with him and the body ball in the basement of Ger Hartmann’s old clinic. (“For a fella who used to pride myself on self-training, Jesus, I’m poor that way now. I still watch what I eat and if I have a half-hour spare I might bang out a workout in the backyard or front room but I’d say it’s three years since I went out for a proper run or headed to a gym. When I’m packing the gear bag now it’s to train teams.”) And conversations like with some of the customers down in Innishannon that can really make him feel his age.

“Sometimes when I’m talking to another adult I forget that they can still be a good bit younger than me! Like, you could be talking about some music that you liked back in the day and they won’t even know who or what you’re talking about. Last year when the Euros were on I was in Quirkey’s Kitchen chatting to a couple of fellas in their late twenties before the Germany-England game and I said, ‘God, if it goes to penalties, the Germans will win anyway. They always win penalties.’ And they said, ‘Why do you say that?’ And I said, ‘Sure look at the record. The ’82 World Cup against France. 1990 against England. England again at Euro 96….’ I was rolling off names like Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Lothar bloody Matthaus and they were looking at me as if I was stupid, like someone from Jupiter. I asked them, ‘What year were you born?’ ‘1992.’ Sure that explained it.”

They’d be doing well to even remember and name the mid-noughties halfback line of Gardiner, Curran and Ó hAilpín, let alone the 98-99 triumvirate of Landers, Corcoran and Ó hAilpín.

A week such as this though invariably triggers memories of those men and years for anyone the same age as him or older.

It all began in ’98. That Cork team and the run they had and the roots of a rivalry with Waterford. The previous two years, his first with the seniors, it had been, as he says, “all doom and gloom”. 

In ’96 Limerick had trimmed them by 16 points in the championship. In ’97 they had operated in Division Two, playing the likes of Meath, London, Kerry. “Then we got glimpses of the big time from the league run in ’98.”

Clare were the reigning All-Ireland champions but on a sunny early May afternoon in Thurles Cork beat them well in a league semi-final in front of a large travelling crowd, setting up a novel decider with Waterford at the same venue.

Ó hAilpín had seen plenty of their core younger players from underage encounters – McGrath, Shanahan, Bennett – and while he rated them individually, as a collective he couldn’t say that he did.

“To be blunt about it, you couldn’t say it was a rivalry because we had always beaten them comfortably. And even when they were linking up with exceptional senior players like the Framptons, Hartleys, Flynns and Brownes, we still felt: Look, no matter what they throw at us, we can handle it. And that’s how it worked out in that league final in ’98, and again in the championship in 1999. They were becoming a formidable team but we felt we had that psychological edge on them. But then that changed in 2002.

“That for me was the beginning of a different Waterford team. They still had their key men but they were now bolstered by a better calibre of player – John Mullane, Eoin Kelly, Eoin Murphy, Seamus Prendergast. It became a proper rivalry then, one where they’d beat us as often if not more than we’d beat them.”

Whatever about being the greatest rivalry of the noughties – arguably that was Cork-Kilkenny – it was undoubtedly the most satisfying: every game between them seemed to be a sweeping epic.

“You hardly had a second to think or breathe in those matches. People talk about how fluid the game now is but to be fair to that Waterford team, they were doing that back then: one minute you could be on Dan Shanahan on the wing and then the next thing he’d be ghosting in to the full forward spot and you wouldn’t know if it should be you or Sully [Diarmuid O’Sullivan] who should take him. Against anyone else you just played on stationary forwards, whoever came over to your spot, but Waterford’s fluidity and movement back then was so different.”

Probably their one forward he ended up spending the most time on was Dan. And while he’ll admit that at times he wouldn’t have liked that Waterford team he couldn’t help but always like Dan. He was a character, funny, talkative. Usually Ó hAilpín didn’t like to engage in conversation on the field but with Dan you couldn’t help getting drawn in. When Cork came out late for the second half of the immortal 2004 Munster final, Shanahan was waiting for Ó hAilpín with a big grin. “What was keeping ye, Seán Óg? Were ye talking tactics, were ye?” Seán Óg could only nod. “That’s right, Dan. Tactics.”

When Paul Flynn was lining up that free Dan was giving a running commentary for Ó hAilpín and everyone else in their orbit. “He’s going for my head, lads, I’m telling ya, he’s going for my head!” Only for Dan then to duck that head and the ball dip into the net.

It was such a frenetic game that towards its end Shanahan had trouble telling what the score was, so he asked the man beside him for clarification. “Is it level now, Seán Óg, is it?”

“No, ye’re a point up, Dan.” 

The same as Waterford would be when Ken McGrath caught that ball and then the final whistle sounded.

Cork would still end up winning that year’s All-Ireland and the following year’s too whereas the likes of Shanahan and McGrath would never get their hands on that Celtic Cross. But what they did win was the respect of Ó hAilpín for the team and hurlers that they were. To cite something Dan said about him and Cork in a Final Moments documentary many moons ago, it was an honour to play against those fellas – and to bate them.

“A few years ago I was listening to the radio where they were talking about that Waterford team and some contributor on it dismissed them on the grounds they never got over the line. To be honest I turned the radio off there and then in disgust. That fella didn’t have a clue. He’d never been in shoes like mine where you’d have to mark these fellas. I’d have nightmares, or sleepless nights at least, trying to work out how to mark the likes of Dan Shanahan.

“And Ken McGrath. Jesus, what a player. The only two other players in my living memory that mastered both sides of the pitch were Brian Corcoran and Brian Whelahan. I look at some other players and think, Yeah, they’re an excellent forward but if you put them in the backs how would they do? Like, I wouldn’t how to play as a forward. You’d have to take me off. But Ken McGrath could play anywhere, any way, do anything.”

He’s seen that even now extends to the coffee game. How he and his brother Eoin have gone into it and are flying at it; Siobhan in particular is an admirer and follower of their operation. And in his other line of work these days he’s also leant on some wisdom from another former Waterford warrior and adversity of his.

After working for Ulster Bank for 20-plus years – ever since he came out of DCU with his finance degree and had just played in both a senior hurling and football All Ireland final the previous month – Ó hAilpín at the turn of the year made the big if inevitable call to change employers and careers: with the bank winding down its operation in the south, it was time to look elsewhere. So in January just there he started as a sales rep with Ross Oil, based mostly in the west Cork region. And only a few days into the job the phone rang with an oddly familiar voice at the other end: Dan Shanahan, a rep with their sister company, Comeragh Oil.

Just wishing him the best, hoping he was settling in well, telling him that they were a fine crowd to work for, and that if he ever needed to know the score in this particular game, he knew who to ask.

Just as Scarlet O’Hara could always go back to Tara, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín has always had Na Piarsaigh. All these years on and it still remains a constant, his home, his refuge.

After he finished up with Cork – or rather Cork finished up with him – at the end of 2012, he continued to hurl with the club for another three years and play football with them for another year beyond that. Then he was a coach and a selector with the seniors for three years before taking the minors these past three seasons. How does he find it, tutoring and dealing with a bunch of teens who would hardly all be as ravenous to learn and work as he was at that age? Frustrating and liberating. A curse and a privilege. A form of therapy that requires further therapy.

“I tell you one thing, it’s not for the glory anyhow! I mean, God, every time I go up to the club I always think of the men that coached me back when I was the lads’ age. Aibe Allen, Tony Hegarty, Christy Kidney, Billy Clifford. I used to look to them as dinosaurs, they were that bloody ancient to me, like. But by my calculations they were only the same age as I am now. So I keep wondering do the young fellas I’m coaching now look at me through the same lens as I viewed Aibe and the lads?!

“But to me I’m giving back to the club the same way Aibe and those fellas did. And as much as I love Siobhan to bits and she knows me better than anyone else, she finds that hard to understand and I find it hard to explain to her. I need to be up in the club every Tuesday and Thursday because others did it for me. And if I don’t go I’ll be cranky whereas when I do go I come back and I’m chatty and I’m in a good mood. Because when I’m up in Fairhill for that hour and a half I’m in a zone. I’m not thinking about the Ukraine or Covid or anything else.

“It can be challenging though, I’ll be honest. I mean, trying to get the lads to do any kind of physical training involves negotiating like Kofi Annan – not that they’d know who he is either! And I’m not talking about laps – the days of them are long gone. But just trying to say, ‘Right, lads, we’re going to do a quick 10-minute block of physical training so we’re at the top of our game for championship’, well, you’ll see the shoulders slouching. I’d say that’s who some of them see me as – this slave driver who likes them to give them running! A few of them wouldn’t have a clue who I was or what I did. Every now and then alright one of them will come up and say ‘My dad told me that you played with Cork back in the day.’ And I’ll say, ‘Go back to your father and tell him he’s a good liar.’

“Being involved at club level humbles you big time. You’ve to lower your expectations. And I still find it a challenge in my head to marry competing for cups along with the development and enjoyment of players. It’s a constant arm wrestle. Definitely my experience at intercounty hasn’t helped me that way.

“I mean when I was in there with Cork, I was absolutely ruthless and relentless about it. A dip in performance and you were seriously under the pump or at least you felt you were. But to be honest, I was almost too relentless about it. Putting myself under so much pressure to get back on the saddle straight away. I tend not to take things or myself so seriously anymore. I wish I had my time back again. To savour it and the wins a bit more instead of being all about the next day, the next year.”

He’s not talking about when he went for that run the morning after the 2004 All Ireland final, the one some of his critics and even the Kilkenny boys interpreted as an extreme act of not just self-motivation but self-mythologising. He never volunteered that story; just someone else must have seen him in the lobby of the Burlington that morning and the story and legend grew. How while a few of his teammates still hadn’t gone to bed from the night before, Seán Óg was already pounding the roads getting ready for the upcoming International Rules series and county final he’d play and win with his returning brother Setanta. But it wasn’t quite like that. It was just that he was still awake and still high from the adrenaline of winning and meeting friends and family. The sun was rising and so he had the thought, why not go for a bit of a stroll outside and have a bit of time to himself and clear the head?

“So I put on a sweat top and some shorts and went for a walk up to the US Embassy but it was a bit cold so I decided to pick it up a bit and it became a jog.” By the time he arrived back in the lobby and a few onlookers were having their breakfast his top was drenched. That’s all that happened. Yet he can see how others thought he was half-cracked. Too driven. Because in a way he was.

“There were a couple of team holidays that I turned down because my thinking was, ‘No, we need to raise standards this year, I need to set the tone from the start so I won’t go to New Zealand.’ I mean, what a dope! To pass on that chance to spend time with my teammates. I’d love to have that time with them back.”

That’s why he jumped at the chance to team up with Tom Kenny and give a hand coaching the UCC freshers six years ago, something the pair of them still do. And to be a selector with Donal Óg when he was the Cork minor manager for the 2020 season. And help out Kieran ‘Fraggie’ Murphy with this year’s Cork U16s. It’s a chance to help out the cause that is Cork. And it’s a chance to be back around his boys.

“I still love and miss all those lads to bits. Any time you bump into them it always brings a smile and a laugh. Like, I met Niall Ronan there last year out in Bishopstown. I was coaching our minor footballers and Niall was coming off a field having coached his daughter’s Ballyhea camogie team. And the first thing he said was ‘God, you’ve let yourself go, Seán Óg!’ People think when you meet up you talk about this game or that game from your time playing but it’s not like that at all. When I told Niall I’d love to keep talking but I’d to get our team warmed up, the last thing he said before we split was, ‘No bother, kid, just remember to lay off the biscuits!’”

It was the same when he bumped into Fergal Ryan and John Browne last year. Towards the end of the club championship their Blackrock team were using Na Piarsaigh’s pitch and floodlights. Ó hAilpín is no longer a brand ambassador for adidas or anything else but still kits out in their gear, paying instead of being paid for the privilege. As quick as a flash Ryan spotted his attire and the chance for a ball hop: Jesus, lad, are you still wearing that gear they gave you 20 years ago?!

Things are civil, even friendly with some of those whose relationship with him would have been much frostier back in the day. It was a good few years after the last strike before he’d cross paths again with Gerald McCarthy and when they did it would be fair to say they kept their distance. But then they met at a breakfast place one morning and gave a respectful nod to one another. Then at the tribute night for Dr Con Murphy three years ago they found themselves sitting at the same table – one reserved for Cork All Ireland-winning captains only – and chatting away as the night went on. That broke the ice. Just the other week at the funeral of the late great Barrs man Donie Hurley, father of Seán Óg’s Cork minor teammate Brian, they again talked. For all their differences that horrendous winter, they’ve moved on. For the most part Cork GAA itself has.

“Anytime I go to Páirc Uí Chaoimh now it feels different. I don’t know if ‘welcoming’ is the word but you don’t feel that you have to look over your shoulder. It’s more now, ‘What can you do to help the cause now?’”

It’s not lost on him that since the Monday he lifted the Liam McCarthy Cup back in 2005, there’s a generation of Cork people who started primary school and have since graduated from college without knowing what it’s like to have a Monday off school because the Cork hurlers won an All Ireland. He contrasts that to the kid who first started school in September 1973: look at all the days off and September days in Croker they’d have, following the fortunes of JBM.

“It pains me when someone reminds me I’m the last All-Ireland winning captain because it’s so long ago; unfortunately in Cork we’ve had to draw too much from the past because we haven’t been that successful of late. That’s why it would be phenomenal if Cork win on Saturday and then go on to win an All Ireland.”

In the meantime he’ll keep coaching the kids in Na Piarsaigh and helping out in the Quirkey Kitchen. The days of adorning billboards are in his past.

“Look, when you’re playing and have a bit of a profile you can get some of the commercial gigs that comes with it. But when it’s over, it’s over. I’m well into the next phase of my life and I’m satisfied with where I am. I’m glad to have a few things to keep my diary busy. Sometimes when you play a sport at a high level people can view you as someone different or even extraordinary but at the end of the day you’re not. I’m just a Joe Soap. Every now and then someone might bring up your county career and some game or name from it and you’ll think for a minute, ‘Yeah, Jesus, Brian Corcoran was some player, I was fortunate to have played with him.’ But then it passes and you literally just get on with your life.”

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