Ollie Baker Clare

Thursday, 2nd March 2000

© Copyright The Sunday Tribune.
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Ollie Baker.

By Enda McEvoy
March 2000

............................................................................................................................................. Portlaoise was the venue for the first coming of Ollie Baker. He buried his granny on a spring morning in 1995, missed the team bus from Ennis as a result, thumbed to Roscrea anyway, burst in on his colleagues as they had their tea and sandwiches in Racket Hall, travelled on to O’Moore Park with them and proceeded to land five points from five attempts in a league match against Laois.

Among the meagre attendance was Johnny Callinan, the former Clare All Star, who drove home enchanted and who for days afterwards pestered his friends with the sensational news of his discovery of Clare’s Frank Cummins.

He pestered them right up till Tipperary visited Cusack Park a week or two later. Then Callinan’s pals trotted along and saw for themselves – and lo, it was not good.

Talk about male cattle and china outlets; Baker was all over the shop. Running here and there, cannoning into people, getting his hurley stuck in the ground. While opinion is divided to this day on whether that was the afternoon he gave John Leahy a kick up the backside (Baker says it wasn’t, that that was a different occasion), the passage of time has not cobwebbed the memory of how horribly removed from the pace of top-class hurling he looked or his early substitution. Frank Cummins? Frank Carson, more like. That was five years ago. Another country, a different Ollie Baker. If the construction and achievements of a successful Clare team will endure as Ger Loughane’s life’s work, no one individual serves as a more towering monument to Loughnane’s vision and coaching genius than the Ballinasloe-based garda. He’s Clare’s heartbeat, the human panzer who spent the dying summers of the century rumbling across the midfields of the land on short-stepping, tree-trunk legs. Twice an All Ireland senior medallist, twice an All Star, a shoo-in on just about everybody’s Team of the 1990s, and gunning for a second successive All Ireland club medal with St Joseph’s next Friday. Lives hard, trains hard, plays hard, everything hard.

As raw material goes, Baker was more raw than material. Big and strong, yes, and tough as an entire family of nails. But a hurler? Not in a hundred years, insisted the general consensus. Among the adherents of that consensus was Tim Kelly, the vice-principal in St Flannan’s.

Kelly didn’t doubt Baker’s guts or his staying power, but he did recall long hours in the junior field in Flannan’s, belting a sliotar at him from 40 yards in order to teach the teenager to run onto the ball, pick it up and belt it back. Sometimes Baker would throw the ball up and slap it 80 yards over the bar. Other times he’d throw it up and hit fresh air.

Tim Kelly now says it was clear that Baker was an untapped resource. Back then or shortly afterwards, however, he announced in one of his weaker moments in Ennis golf club that Ollie Baker would “never make” a hurler. Unfortunately for Kelly, someone remembered. The Monday night after the 1997 Guinness All Ireland decider (RTE man of the match: O Baker), the members formed a line on either side of the door and clapped Kelly into the clubhouse.

It wasn’t that Tim Kelly - and practically everyone else - was a bad judge. Ollie Baker did indeed not have an excess of basic hurling skill. But he did have Ger Loughnane.

Ollie and Ger, a pairing made not so much in heaven as forged in the laboratory of the cunning Dr Loughnane. All that golden summer of 1995, Loughnane moulded Baker on the training field. Driving him on in the skills drills, in the lines of three and four. Shouting, instructing, teaching. Constantly on his case, more so than on anybody else’s. “Too slow, Ollie! Too slow!”

“Ger must have seen the room for improvement in me. He worked so hard on me, encouraging me and criticising me at the same time. His hurling training was fabulous. I don’t think I’d be able to play at the level I am now but for him. Practise the skills is the advice you give to kids in national school, but it applies so much when you’re an adult as well.

“I know it’s a cliche, but I genuinely never dreamed of getting so far. Hurling in national school, trying to make the Harty Cup team in Flannan’ - there was enough achievement in that for me. Where I’ve been specially lucky is that I didn’t see the bad times with Clare.”

Within three months of the Tipperary false start, the second coming of Ollie Baker had materialised. The Baker who opened a new volume in the Clare hurling story when he connected with Fergie Tuohy’s lineball for the winning goal against Cork, the Baker who coped with Limerick’s midfield enforcer Mike Houlihan (“a desperate dominant force in those games between us,” according to Anthony Daly) in the Munster final, the Baker who popped up on the Offaly endline in the dying minutes at Croke Park in September to barge Brian Whelahan out for the 65’ Eamon Taffe netted. And an incident in that second half Clare people appear to treasure even more than the Whelahan moment: Baker chugging forward, the formidable Kevin Martin coming to meet him and Baker going through Martin for a short cut.

After 1995 Clare stepped forward into a different version of themselves, paupers turned kings. Nobody adapted more snugly to his changed clothing than Ollie Baker. In 1995 he’d been notable for his workrate. In 1997 he was notable for his hurling.

He wasn’t being hooked and blocked anywhere near as often as he used to be. He’d become “reasonably confident” of his striking on both sides, didn’ t have to turn onto his strong side so frequently. He cut immense lineballs. He scored points. In short, Ollie Baker had developed into a hurling force of nature.

Even when he wasn’t on song, his sheer presence rendered him an asset. Tony Considine shakes his head in disbelief when he wonders why the management decided to withdraw a below-par Baker in the closing quarter of the 1997 All Ireland semi-final. The move partly precipitated Kilkenny’s comeback. “We realised almost immediately we’d been lucky to survive. It was a huge lesson for us. It showed how important Ollie was to us simply by being there.”

Typical of the man, Considine adds, that Baker recovered from his disappointment to have a blinder in the final, wresting back the initiative so quickly after Tipperary’s second goal that the RTE cameras missed his equalising point.

“Pure luck, that point,” Baker says dismissively. “It was the only time in the game the Tipp backs made a mistake. One of them batted the ball down and it bounced up nicely for me.” Nothing to do with native instinct? “Not really. It was a case of getting the ball and getting rid of it as fast as I could. Another part of Ger Loughnane’s training. I don’t think he sees me as much of a playmaker…”

In line with Tim Kelly’s contention that he makes better use of the sliotar when he’s fit, Baker accepts that keeping his 6’3, 15-stone-and-upwards frame in shape will provide the biggest challenge of the remainder of his career. His daily routine - working in a physically undemanding job, eating at odd hours, driving miles to training – doesn’t help.

“I don’t have a weight problem as such, it’s just that when I’m not training I do put on pounds. I have to keep active the whole time.” His weapons in the battle include two or three visits a week to the leisure centre in the Hodson Bay hotel in Athlone, where he lives, and the occasional session on the bike, weights and treadmill in the gym they’re putting together in the station in Ballinasloe.

A more immediate task for Baker is the one which faces him next Friday. Louis Mulqueen, the St Joseph’s manager, reels off the specifications. To be his old Clare self and lead by example, to thunder back and forth between the two 65-metre lines, to destroy and create, to drive his colleagues on. “An anonymous Ollie Baker will give the balance to Athenry. We can’t afford that.”

Ollie Baker anonymous? Perish the thought.