It was a decision she dreaded making, having put it off for the last couple of years, but this week Gemma O’Connor concluded that it was “time to go”, and there ended her 19 years playing camogie for Cork.
In that time she played in 14 senior All-Ireland finals, her first when she was just 17, won nine of them, collected a record 11 All-Star awards, and was twice named player of the year.
In any poll asking who was the greatest camogie player of them all, she would garner a whole heap of votes.
She could also play anywhere – at the back, in midfield, up front. She filled most positions on the field at some point in her career, weighed down with player-of-the-match awards for the bulk of it.
The 36-year-old feels no little satisfaction and pride, then, in that record of achievement, but for now she is just trying to come to terms with the realisation that she won’t pull on the red shirt again.
“It was a hard day,” she says of when she made her decision. “I just feel very sad at the moment, to be honest, very emotional. It’s all I’ve known, really, all I ever wanted to do since I was young was to play for Cork.
“It’ll take me a long time to accept it, but I suppose I just have to be realistic too. I was at the end-stage of my career. I needed to make the call sooner rather than later– if it wasn’t this year it would probably have been next.
“But it’s kind of surreal. I think I’ll probably regret making the decision when camogie comes back this year, whenever that will be. It’ll be very hard not to be a part of it. But much as I’d love to go on playing forever, I know that can’t be.”
Aches and pains
Her final game for Cork, as it proved, was last November’s All-Ireland semi-final defeat to Kilkenny at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. It was O’Connor’s only Championship appearance in the condensed 2020 campaign, a punctured lung ruling her out of the group stage and quarter-finals.
“So I kind of felt, ‘I can’t finish like this’, but between everything, starting to feel niggles, aches and pains, the uncertainty because of Covid, I thought maybe it was time to go.
“If Covid had never happened then maybe I would have played again this year. But when you’re training on your own and you’re not surrounded by your team-mates, and when you’re feeling those aches and pains, they’re the people you need, they push you on.”
While she found the separation from her team-mates and the solo training a lonely experience, in her working life she has found herself on the frontline of the battle with Covid.
A member of the Irish Defence Forces for almost as long as she played for Cork, now with the rank of sergeant, O’Connor is a combat medical technician, a role that has required her and her Medical Corps colleagues to assist the HSE and National Ambulance Service at testing centres and nursing homes.
“We were all really thrown in at the deep end in the last year. It’s been a pretty hectic and an uncertain time for everyone. Work has been very busy, but it has been great to help out.
“I suppose the last year has given everyone so much time to think, to put things into perspective. And I certainly know there’s more to life than sport. But at the same time I can never undervalue what it has done for me, and what it does for so many people.
“I was just very fortunate to have been in the position I was, to have won what I won, to experience what I experienced through all those years. Sport is such a journey, and it affects everyone around you, your family, friends, the people who go to your games. We all have so many memories to share, from all the highs and all the lows, the good times and the bad.
“It was my mother who got me involved at such a young age,” she says of Geraldine O’Connor, who died in 2015. “And it’s because of her that I grew to love the game so much. It’s given me a fantastic few years. Yes, it can be tough for all of us juggling our sport with our working and personal lives, but what it gives you back far outweighs any hardship.
“You do it because you love it so much, and that’s just what it comes back to, the simple love of it. I wouldn’t have been playing for so long if I didn’t feel that way.”
Commitment
Still, the commitment meant missing out on plenty. Like in 2019 when a friend of hers in Galway chose her to be her bridesmaid. “But I ended up missing the entire wedding because we were playing Dublin up in Dublin,” she says.
Now that she is retired there’s one wedding she won’t miss – which is just as well, seeing as it’s her own. Covid-permitting, she’ll marry her partner Aoife in July.
“Whether it’ll be six of us or 25, we don’t know. The situation is just so uncertain. But, yeah, at least I’ll be there.”
Not that she has giving camogie up entirely – she will play on with her club, St Finbarr’s, and in the longer term she hopes to play her part in nurturing young talent in the county.
“I’d love that. I’ll probably take a break for now, step back from it a little, but some time down the line I’d like to get involved, coaching maybe in the club. And I’d definitely love to get involved with Cork at whatever level down the road, see if I can influence or help anybody on the way.”
Inhuman as it might be to ask someone who had a 19-year intercounty career... highlights?
She opts for the back-to-back one-point victories over Kilkenny in 2017 and 2018. “When I think of them, I just smile. We literally won by inches.”
Maybe the most iconic Gemma O’Connor moment of all came in the dying stages of the 2017 final which, having sustained ligament damage to both an ankle and a knee just three weeks before, she should have been viewing from the stands. Then Kilkenny manager Ann Downey still expected the “warrior” to play, though – “unless she’s after losing a leg”.
When O’Connor levelled the game with a point from the half-way line, Julia White getting the winner for Cork at the death, Downey would have rued the warrior’s ability to laugh in the face of pain barriers.
“Madness, the things you do,” O’Connor chuckles. “Sometimes you get a chance and you take it, sometimes you don’t. I’ve just been fortunate enough that they worked out a lot of the time for me. Yeah, blessed.”
