Then the wry twist: “I had no interest in doing a book on my own. It’s funny, because after the podcast I did with Thomas Niblock [in March 2022], I got two phone calls from two publishers, out of the blue. And those calls were however long after I’d retired from hurling with Kilkenny. Six years after, in fact.

“Suddenly, the little bit of juice you can put into the book, they thought they had found it. They were looking to maybe piggyback on top of it, what I had said on the podcast about gambling. But I said: ‘No. I have no interest.’ I left it politely at that.” 

He continues: “It’s a family book, which is the key aspect for me. Why should there be a book about me alone? I’m not the only one of us who hurled for Kilkenny. Dad hurled for Kilkenny for over ten years.

“My brother John and myself won two Senior All-Irelands together in 2014 and 2015. Our older brother Jamie won an U21 All-Ireland on the goal in 1999, with Dad as manager. There’s more than enough to write about without ever coming to me.” 

Richie Power Sr offers the same emphasis: “All the family have an input in it, every one of them. Even Suzanne, who’s living in Melbourne, Australia, came in on a Zoom call, near the end of doing the book. And we are delighted any proceeds are going to Cois Nore and the Carlow Kilkenny Home Care Team.” 

Their story is remarkable from many angles. The Powers are in that rare category where father and son both won a Celtic Cross as a starting player. And doubly so, because of John Power’s start in the replayed 2014 Senior Final, when Kilkenny overcame Tipperary. Again, all three men goaled in a Senior Final.

Are the Powers unique? Has any other hurling father with a Celtic Cross had two sons who repeated the feat? The achievement is there in football, as with the Brogans. But in the other code?

Tom Cashman and Jim Cashman both won Senior All Irelands with Cork. Did Mick Cashman, their father, receive a Celtic Cross in 1954? Even if he did, Cashman was an unused sub. Which or whether, the three Powers in total won 20 All Irelands, intercountry wise, at Minor, U21 and Senior.

A respect for family amplitude shaped Richie Jr’s thinking in thoroughgoing ways: “The book we did with Dermot Keyes and Liam Hayes is a hurling book, a Kilkenny hurling book. Yes, I go to my GA meetings. I have great parents, a great family, great friends. I have Maria and the three boys. I have been blessed, in so many ways. Ten years ago, I never thought I could have the sort of life I have now.

“So I don’t want the gambling angle, the juice of it, to obscure the fact that this publication is first and foremost a hurling book about one particular hurling family.” 

Go back those 10 years. Richie Power Sr is walking Tramore Strand, needing the Atlantic’s boom. October 2013 and solace being sought. He keeps walking and walking.

Obvious reason, over a pressing uneasy glimmer.

The obvious stands as a result: Clara 1-15, Carrickshock 2-10. A march got stolen via Clara’s late goal and point. A cup got lifted by the opposite crowd. The ultimate cup, for a Kilkenny club.

“It was a real sickener for us,” Richie Sr states, sitting in a Kilkenny hotel. “We had control of the thing. We were two points up, with time nearly up. We’d been the better team on the day. Carrickshock were looking to win their first Senior Final in 62 years. But…” 

Richie Jr nods: “Carrickshock were beaten by O’Loughlin Gaels in the 2010 Senior Final. Look, we had no big argument about that result. I don’t think we’d have won that match however many times it was played. We hadn’t enough big game experience at that stage. But 2013… We had it in our hand.” 

Not just a result, that morning on Tramore Strand. Not just that result. Another frequency kept up an insistence. Something was whistling to Richie Power Sr from within the boom, something quiet and thin and deadly sharp.

“I just knew something wasn’t adding up,” he summarises. “I was in a heap about losing that final, but it wasn’t just the final. That morning, I drove down out of our house in Lawcus, down to the cross in Stoneyford. I didn’t really know where I was going. I was meant to be going to work, but I just had too much on my mind. I said to myself: Tramore.

“I must have spent five or six hours there, in total. Did a bit of work stuff first on the laptop, got what I needed out of the way. Went for a long walk. Came back, got fish and chips. Went for another walk. It was a tough day. I knew something simply wasn’t adding up.” 

He clarifies: “This lad [gestures across] hadn’t gone well in it, but I knew there was more to the issue than his form. There was something more. I just sensed it. So we asked him out to the house on the Friday evening, myself and his mother. I asked him not to tell us anything if he wasn’t going to tell us the full truth.

“It all came out, then. Where the gambling had taken him. It was tough, very tough. But it had to be done.” 

Stand again on Tramore Strand. Now head back inland, as the land improves until you arrive in South Kilkenny. The club is Carrickshock. The village is Hugginstown and the Powers’ native townland above it is Condonstown.

Put yourself in a field on a Thursday afternoon in the summer of 1977. Ned Power and his son Richie are at the hay. The latter had hurled well in a Leinster U21 match the evening before.

The Powers’ home place in Condonstown is at the end of a long lane. The postman had already called but they could hear his Honda 50 coming back down the lane, all the way down to them. They worried he might be carrying bad news.

The opposite. That postman had been phoned by Paddy Grace, then the County Board Secretary, and asked to convey a request that the young hurler attend Senior training the following evening.

“That was the start of me with Kilkenny,” Power notes. “I was actually a sub for the 1977 Leinster Final, which I’d say not many people know. But it took a few years more before I truly got in there.” 

That moment arrived four years later. Glenmore beat Carrickshock in a replayed Intermediate semi-final. As Richie Power left the field, he was approached by Mick O’Neill, then the County Board Chairman. His question was straightforward: would he tog out for Kilkenny in the next day’s league game against Kerry?

Power was quick to agree. He curtailed his outing to a Hugginstown pub, where local sorrows were being drowned at pace. He took a soft drink so as to harden the next day’s possibilities. Early enough, he headed home. He ended up being started at centre forward. The journey had begun.

“I’ve often told that story,” Power says. “I tell it in the book. Those two Club Oranges were the most important thing I ever drank in my life.” 

There was only one Richie Power at the time. That version of himself, productively abstemious, found himself launched. He ended up trim for voyage, not for spree. If the journey from early 1980s to early 1990s eventually counted, in overview, as choppy, Power soon made Ithaca.

That place, traced on a Kilkenny map? Getting carried off the field after winning a Senior All-Ireland Final. There is the photograph.

Three of those triumphs inked the map. The two wins everyone knows? 1982 and 1983, when Cork got scalped in two different styles. An 11-point win as roaring underdogs in 1982, a two-point win under lashing rain in 1983. Richie Power scored the latter day’s crucial goal.

The difficult quiz question? 1992, when he was an unused sub, again against Cork, one of Ollie Walsh’s best managerial decisions. He valued Power’s good nature and experience as ballast for a young panel. Power got a few minutes in the Leinster Final but had to come off injured. The Carrickshock man bowed out, now 35, after 1992’s triumph.

He bowed out a tremendous hurler. He was all out and all in, all of the time. He hurled, in so many senses, like a needle. His upright stance sent him through many tackles and he could take a point with deceptive ease. Four of them, in 1982’s Senior Final.

The requisite years passed. Power led Kilkenny to that U21 title in the century’s last year. There is even a counterfactual narrative where he might well have become Kilkenny’s Senior manager. He remains admirably measured in his perspective on this road not taken: “It would have been a massive honour to get that job in 1998. But history tells us that the right man was picked. But who’s to say if you were in there, and had the right lads around you, what might happen. You would never know, but we will never know about that now.” 

Kilkenny hurling, as I watched it develop in the early 2000s, seemed pure April, nerving before May. Wonderful possibilities hung in the air. All of us knew the possible story. There was this group of young lads, born in 1983 or 1984 or 1985, and they were coming at serious pace. One of those lads was Richie Power Jr.

Did the name and his father’s career impose any pressure? “Not really,” Power answers. “Obviously, there was always the thought of playing Senior with Kilkenny in the back of your mind. We grew up looking up to Dad. I was very lucky because my own age group was so strong. We won a Nenagh Co Op [U16] Tournament, which was huge, in 2001. We went on to win a Minor All Ireland with more or less the exact same group. And the same group won an U21 All Ireland in 2006.

“I was extremely lucky to captain the Kilkenny Minor team to win the 2003 All-Ireland, because I couldn’t have done that if the club’s Minor team hadn’t been strong enough to win the Minor A County Final in 2002. The work that people like Dad and Jimmy Sheehan and Jimmy Dwyer had put into us, from U14 to Minor, had been phenomenal and really paid off.

“When you have won a Minor All-Ireland, and you progress on to the U21, the next step is obvious and natural. The next progression is to go into the Senior set up. You’re probably thinking in your own head: ‘It’s going to happen.’ When that happens, the real hard work starts.” He elaborates: “I got a taste of it in 2004, when myself and Jamie were brought in for a trial in [St] James’ Park. I was put corner forward, marking Tommy Walsh. What Tommy did to me that day was a real eye opener.

“Jamie hurled fierce well and scored four points off Peter Barry, who at that stage was a Kilkenny stalwart. I didn’t get on anything like as well as Jamie, but I was still delighted, coming out, because I was given a taste of where I needed to get in order to make Senior. And then, in 2005, I didn’t end up doing an apprenticeship, you could say. I hurled championship in ’05.” 

I can remember hurling clearly from 1980 onwards, the year in which I was 13. DJ Carey, Richie Power Jr and Brian Whelahan seem to me the most naturally gifted hurlers of the following four decades. They all had perfect balance, perfect striking, perfect anticipation. They all had the knack of striking full power without needing to step sideways or use horizontal extension of their arms. And they were all brave to a fault.

If going to war for Planet Hurling, the first man you would ring is Henry Shefflin. But this judgement of the younger Power is echoed in Shefflin’s autobiography as well as in Jackie Tyrrell’s autobiography and Eoin Larkin’s autobiography. Pádraic Maher’s All On The Line (2022) nominates Richie Power Jr as the most difficult opponent he encountered.

Sport provides, because there is always a loser, many forgotten masterpieces. Item: Power’s goal against Tipperary in 2010’s Senior Final. Here he is, running left to right. Power takes a handpass from Eoin Larkin, his back to Brendan Cummins’ goal. Then a couple of steps. Then a ripping goal via a shot the equivalent of gunfire.

He struck leaning back, left foot planted, the ball released from within his own body space. The arm strength and the wristwork required to conceive such a shot? Off all charts. If Power’s masterpiece goals against Tipperary in 2014 rightly found renown, that one is their equal.

But Kilkenny lost in 2010 by eight points. Power’s astonishing effort might as well be  Cardenio, a lost Shakespeare play.

He smiles at my comparison: “That’s what happens after a loss. No one looks at the performances on the losing team. Stuff gets forgotten. I’m just glad 2010 wasn’t the end of it. My best year was obviously 2014.” 

To speak of someone who won eight Celtic Crosses, six as a starting player, not fulfilling himself seems daft. But that interpretation is there as regards this hurler. He possessed the equipment ― mesmeric skill, speed, height, courage, unselfishness ― to make himself the greatest of them all. Richie Power Jr is also crosslateralised, righthanded and left footed, same as Dan Carter, David Clifford, Diego Maradona and many other sporting geniuses But he often, before 2014, seemed to be hurling well within himself.

Power came to agree with this assessment. He effectively got dropped off the Kilkenny panel in late 2013, following a marked drop in form. His residual point of contact became Derek Lyng, then a selector. He undertook a gruelling fitness schedule with Mickey Comerford [no relation of former hurlers Andy and Martin Comerford].

As Power recounts: “There is a psychological strength in doing so much physical work, doing more than normal. Even though I got a bad knee injury in June 2014, and I would have missed a good bit of training in June and July, I still knew I had that work in the tank. That helped me no end against Tipperary.

“When you look back over the years that went previous, I was always struggling with niggly injuries. That’s probably the reason I picked up so many knocks, because I wasn’t doing the right things off the field. I have no problem saying that it is a regret I have.

“Unfortunately, I can’t do anything about it now. I have to accept it. That’s why 2014 was my best year. I had the work done.” 

Richie Sr cuts in: “We need to get that point through to club players that are struggling maybe to make a breakthrough, to put their hand up and be a force at whatever level. To me, the one thing you can never do enough is train. You can’t train too much, if your mind is right about it. People would say: ‘You’re burned out with training.’ I think all that sort of talk is stupid talk.

“The point I’m making, and I’d say it to any club player that’s out there: ‘Lads, the fitter you are, the more enjoyment you’re going to get out of it. And the better you’re going to play and express yourself.’ The psychological end of it is massive.” 

Richie Jr agrees: “I was hoping 2015 would be like 2014. I was looking forward to similar training. But 2015, after I picked up another knee injury on the first night back training after the team holiday, turned into a year from hell. From that night until the day I went in the following November to have the microfracture done in the Whitfield was… Those ten months were torture. The pain I was in with my knee was hell.

“The surgeon was in it three times. Being honest, if I had been told at the beginning of 2015 that I’d to take a year out, and that I’d come back in 2016 a lot fitter and stronger with the knee a lot better, I would have done it. And I know people will say: ‘Ah, would you have, really?’ But if I had known what was coming down the line, of course I would have done it.” 

Is seeing TJ Reid in his pomp at 35 going 36 difficult to watch? “Absolutely it is,” Power replies. “Not so much now as regards Kilkenny, because I’ll be 38 in December and even with perfect fitness I would have been retired a few years at this stage. Much more so as regards the club. I feel I should still be hurling, at 37, with the club.

“Jamie is still going with us at 43. Michael Rice is still going at 39. Physically, I’ve never been one to carry weight or put on weight. Fitness wise, it was always just a matter of doing the work and getting that right. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t still be hurling, bar the knee.

“But there it is.”