News of Kevin Cashman’s death on Tuesday night sharpened due to Cork’s senior hurlers being mere days away from an All-Ireland final. Sharpened rather than made poignant, mind. Certainly one of hurling’s finest ever writers, Cashman prized exactitude and calm knowledge, same as he esteemed seeing a hurler’s correct technique create lethal elegance.
He revered the opening point of 2001’s senior final, struck by Tipperary’s Tommy Dunne in echt wristy style. No step sideways, a no backlift in the stroke. Just the gift of class to itself.
The poignant or the sloppy or the adequate? Never appealed. Said orientation remained in place even when Cashman’s prose, unique in its bearing, inclined towards the baroque. This writer’s prose style? A form of sifting, the mark of someone who felt knowledge had to be a form of savour.
Like Charles Lamb, one of his literary heroes, Cashman believed in taste, believed in an aristocratic emphasis of spirit. Suffering not fools, he thought people either get something or they do not. Cashman most admired hurlers, such as Christy Ring and Ciarán Carey, with what seemed snow melt in their veins and a tamped fire in their head.
He recurred often to Carey’s winning point in Limerick’s 1996 Munster Championship joust with Clare. Limerick’s centre-back, having stormed up the field at the death, gulled Clare’s defenders into thinking he would strike left, off supposedly stronger side. Carey bevelled right into trickster-created s.