Kieran Shannon: With a new nut to crack, Cluxton emulates perfectionist Ring 

Aeons before Jim Gavin or Gary Keegan or Nick Saban popularised the term The Process, or before any sport psychologist coined the term process-oriented, Ring personified those terms in his almost-slavish yet also childish devotion to his sport.

He even articulated such concepts more eloquently than any academic or motivational guru could; as Eoghan Harris observed in the 2004 documentary Ringy, he was, despite his truncated education, a man of considerable intellect, reflected by his “power of crisp speech”. 

“It was never my ambition to play the game for the sake of winning All-Irelands or breaking records,” Ring once said, “but to perfect the art as well as possible.” As ferocious a competitor as he was, as much as a serial winner as he was, that wasn’t what drove him.

Cluxton, a man of considerable intellect himself though more taciturn than even Ring, always gave the impression of someone who shared that worldview. When Bryan Cullen was lifting the 2011 All-Ireland title, Cluxton was already in the dressing room, an arrangement you’d swear he would have liked retained for later Dublin victories only he was tasked with collecting the cup himself.

He was what the Danish psychologist Dr Helle Hein would term an introverted performance addict, as opposed to the more flag-planting, chest-beating extroverted performance addict. “They are classical nerds,” she’d explain at the 2017 Sport Ireland high performance conference which Jim Gavin was a fellow keynote speaker. Their kick came from coming up with creative and innovative ways of “cracking nuts of increasing difficulty”. Once the nut is cracked, you’re unlikely to see them in Coppers or at least in the middle of the dance floor, but rather sipping a few quiet ones in the Boars Head the day after, basking in the company of more jubilant co-workers and the satisfaction of having cracked that challenging nut.

Ring was similarly a seeker and gatherer of challenging nuts. Val Dorgan in his classic personal study of his Glen Rovers clubmate recounts a game when Ring at centre forward was regularly beaten in the air by Tipperary’s Pat Stakelum. Without any Hudl software in those days, Ring in reviewing and analysing his performance noted that Stakelum timed his jump better and took the ball at his highest point. Ring duly went away and worked on his aerial game for months afterwards. “I always learned more from an opponent than he did from me,” he once said. Like Michael Jordan with his quote that Donal O’Grady and other Cork coaches would cite, failure to Ring was the reason why he’d so often succeed.

That required an enormous amount of humility and almost boyish enthusiasm, as both confident and mature as Ring was. The filmmaker Luis Marcus would fondly recall going to a national league double-bill with Ring. Playing in the second game was Jimmy Doyle, who had just broken onto the Tipperary team. After Doyle pointed a free, Ring nudged him. “Did you see his follow-through? I must practice that myself.” Marcus was amazed, the most celebrated and decorated hurler wanting to learn from and emulate a rookie.

Maybe that’s what one of the reasons why Cluxton is back at 43 for another season, and gone to the bother having “a small little cleanout of the knee” in recent months according to Dessie Farrell.

When he played in the interprovincial sandbox games last October in Croke Park, it seemed at the time as if it was as a favour and out of respect for Jim Gavin. He also looked outdated: where for decades he was the exemplar of cutting-edge goalkeeping, now that belt belonged to Niall Morgan with his capacity to play up the field. The new rules appeared made for Morgan, not a stay-at-home keeper like Cluxton. But instead of the new rules making Cluxton seem old, they now appear to have rejuvenated him, presenting him with another challenging nut to crack. Just like he would religiously practise for that free and moment to win Dublin that breakthrough All-Ireland, or Gavin would see him out with the laptop and on the training ground after Killian Spillane’s goal on him in the drawn 2019 All Ireland final, rectifying his footwork and positioning, “a master of his craft”.

Dublin are not the force they were in 2023 when Cluxton and Michael Fitzsimons and James McCarthy won their ninth All-Ireland, surpassing anyone’s count in football and even that of Ring, let alone what they were at their peak in 2017-2019. But as Ring suggested, cumulating medals and records is not the primary motivator of process-oriented athletes, who studies repeatedly show stay in their sport longer than more outcome-oriented, extroverted performance addicts.

Ring was still hurling for Cork seven years after his last All-Ireland final appearance. There were times during that barren spell where it was apparent he wouldn’t get back to September again; as Dorgan would observe, he “battled on with increasingly weaker teams, sustained, one can only imagine, by his love of hurling”.

A couple of weeks after one particularly comprehensive defeat to Tipperary in which Ring in particular had been subject to considerable physical attention and punishment, a priest asked him in Dorgan’s company, “When will you ever think of giving it up?” Ring said the answer to that was “very simple” – “When I think I know all about it.” 

Ring stayed playing senior hurling with Glen Rovers until he was 46. He played his last game for Munster at 42, in 1963. Injury prevented him from getting any game time with Cork in that year’s championship, meaning the last time he wore the blood and bandage in championship action ended up being 1962, his 23rd senior campaign with the county.

Cluxton is now 43; like Ring he made his senior championship debut as a teenager. Yet while he is older than what Ring was playing his last game for Cork, he did take a two-year sabbatical (2021 and 2022). Should he play in the championship this summer – as you’d expect he will with all the games Dublin will have, regardless of whether he or Evan Comerford ends up being the primary number one – that will mean it’ll be his 23rd senior championship campaign with his county. One more than the remarkable Tony Browne and equalling Ring.

He clearly still doesn’t think he knows all about it yet.