BENEATH the barn’s corrugated iron roof, Conor McElduff can hear every thundering drop of rain rebound away, feel the rare rays of sunshine fighting their way down through.
When he was 18, his uncle fed and watered the nephew’s growing obsession with handball by constructing a wall, sixteen foot by twenty.
A lick of white paint, a bit of fresh concrete in front, painted white lines on, from the width of the wall running to thirty-four feet out.
His own handball court.
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For the next six years, Conor spent twenty hours a week out at it.
Just a man, a ball and his wall.
He has lost one game of competitive one-wall handball in Ireland since 2014. Went three years unbeaten in Europe, rising to number one there too.
In 2018, he went to Minnesota and won the World Championship.
“From just training outside the house to becoming world champion is pretty f***ing sick.”
On Sunday, he begins his quest to win it for a second time, only this year it’s on his patch in Limerick.
Will he win it?
“Aye. Put your house on it. Put your f***ing house on it… Actually, just in case, do not put the house on it, I don’t want to be liable.”
The laughter jumps out of him.
Meet Conor McElduff.
Read more: Conor McElduff among talent-rich seam of Tyrone handballers
Fainting at home led to a diagnosis
HANDBALL’S attempt to seduce him had washed over him until he was in the middle of his high-school years.
He’d have gone and watched his father and his uncles playing but never really took any great interest in it.
They were Beragh people living at the very fringe of the parish, geographically closer to Loughmacrory’s pitch. So that’s where he went to play his football. That was all he wanted to do.
Then a few of his friends picked up handball and started going to Breacach (pronounced Breaky) club.
They’d been at it a few months when he gave in and went down a night to play a game. Won.
From that very night on, he became obsessed.
At 19, he won his first major title, the national crown at that age grade.
The following year he entered his first men’s open, delighted just to get in. He won it.
It wasn’t like he didn’t know the drill.
Nineteen was a big age in the family’s history.
His grandfather Mick Kerr founded the Breacach club in the 1950s.
Granda Mick was 19 when he played corner-forward on the first ever Tyrone team to win an Ulster title in ‘56, propelled into the team when he came off the bench in the semi-final against Monaghan and scored 1-1.
He would give so much of his life to the Beragh Knights and the handball club he helped build until he passed away in 2021.
“He only died three years ago so he would have been through the journey with me. We’d have been very close when I was growing up.”
At the wall in the barn he’d spar off plenty with his cousin Sean Kerr.
They’d have played hundreds and hundreds of times against it.
Two years ago, they met in the Irish National Open final. McElduff won.
The only game he has lost in either the national or All-Ireland championships – in which he’s just completed five-in-a-row having missed its inaugural year because he was playing in Holland – was the 2016 national final.
Martin Mulkerrins beat him in a tiebreak.
“I took that loss really, really bad.”
Conor McElduff didn’t play for a whole year after it.
Part of it was that he hadn’t really learned how to cope with defeat.
But the week after that loss, he fainted at home. Split his eye off the fireplace.
Stitched up and readying for home, a nurse suggested an ECG to see if there was any clue as to why he’d fainted.
“I wasn’t going to bother but my father was with me and said sure there’s no harm getting it done. Got the ECG and my heart rate was up at 214 beats per minute.”
He was kept in hospital for two weeks and discovered eventually to have tachycardia, a condition where your resting heart rate is untypically high, and PoT Syndrome, which causes the heart rate to spike from standing up or sitting down.
That was seven years ago and he’s told very few people the full truth that ever since, he’s been operating at three-quarter pace.
“People would say the last two years especially that I’m playing like I’m going easy or I don’t look like I’m trying.
For you:
“I know there’s a point I can go to in terms of outbursts of energy or going too hard where I know what’s coming on.
“I’ve had to keep an eye on it that way, just in terms of the amount of training compared to my early 20s.
“I’m able to keep a calm mindset when things aren’t going well, figure something out. I can never go crazy or go all-out.”
You’d think that in a 10m x 6m court, the physical output would be limited enough.
But in one three-hour spot, he covered 8.6km and burned 2,100 calories.
His metabolism is faster than he is. At six-foot-two, he was delighted the day he stepped on the scales and weighed in at 12st 4lb. It was the heaviest he’s ever been.
He took virtually a whole year off after losing to Mulkerrins but returned right on the eve of the 2017 tournament with no work done.
Conor McElduff won it.
Meet Timbo Gonzalez
WHEN Timbo Gonzalez sent him a congratulatory text after his World Championship success in 2018, it read like it was through gritted teeth.
Gonzalez had pulled out of the tournament just before it started.
He’d suffered a fractured thumb on his right hand in the King of the Courts final, clipping Tavo Ruiz’s body on the follow-through.
He finished the game using only his left hand but won anyway.
Gonzalez is the star attraction in New York, a very different home to handball.
Attached to the GAA in Ireland, it is a game of the streets in the Bronx.
He grew up in one of its toughest neighbourhoods.
His father abandoned him as a young boy.
While attending Junior High School, he was stabbed.
Handball gave him a way out. He turned professional, made a living, earned a sponsorship deal with Red Bull.
The man with Puerto Rican blood is almost unrecognisable physically from a decade ago. He looks ten years younger now than he did then.
It is against him that McElduff measures everything. They’re on opposite sides of the draw this week, their only potential meeting in a final.
“He’s the only player with a winning record against me, he’s 2-and-0,” says the Tyrone native, dipping into American sporting vernacular.
For the record, the two were the 2015 world semi-final and the Belgian Open final two years later.
When McElduff won his world title in 2018, he had spent the fortnight before travelling bed-bound with a bulging disc in his back. He almost didn’t go but figured he’d put too much into it to stay at home.
The message Gonzalez sent McElduff after his 2018 success congratulated the new champion but reminded him that he still wasn’t number one.
“There was a bit of trash talk at that time. He pulled out with a sore thumb and I was there with a bulged disc in my back and I just told him there was a difference in attitudes, nothing was gonna stop me. For me, he took the easy way out.
“I won the world championship but I’ve never, ever called myself world number one. For my own self, it keeps me motivated to get playing these players.
“I know it is possible but I want to show the people in Ireland that this myth the New York one-wallers are the best and can’t be beaten, for me it’s just bullshit. It’s the limitations people set.”
Away from the 30-degree heat and the outdoor concrete courts of New York City, the travelling Americans will be the ones having to adapt to the timber-framed flooring and wooden walls in University Limerick.
Handball in Ireland as you might know it has changed. The traditional four-wall court, where players are enclosed in a box and use the back and side walls as part of the game, is being spurned by one-wallers.
When he took into it at school, McElduff and his friends would play off the canteen wall with a tennis ball.
It’s just more accessible. A ball and a wall.
“A four-wall court, nowadays you’re talking €80,000 to €120,000 to put up a decent one. With one-wall, €500 to €1,000 and there’s a wall thrown up that can last you for whatever length of time as long as it’s taken care of.”
He knows the cost of things because it’s his job to know.
When the previous incumbent of the role as a GAA Handball Development Officer was leaving, he recommended McElduff should go for it.
He spends his days either in Croke Park or helping various clubs and counties throughout Ulster and Leinster.
When he was in his late teens, McElduff broke away from local attachments that told him you couldn’t achieve these things coming from wee Beragh in county Tyrone.
He isolated himself in the barn, created an environment that was lonely but that fed his own addiction to the game.
That has fed into a lot of his self-worth, too much of it, being wrapped up in the game which is why he took losing the Irish Open final in 2016 so badly.
“I loved football, it was my first love growing up, but being a solo athlete, you do have to have a sick or crazy attitude to persevere. There have been times when it’s tough. It is lonely.
“I’d be very hard on myself, put a lot of pressure on it. It’s the thing that gives me the most thrill.
“But losing is a dark, dark place for me. In my early 20s, I thought I was being a wee bit huffy but when you dissect it, I put my whole ego on being a handball player and being the best.
“In my mind, if I lose to this person when I’m putting all my efforts into it, I’m kinda losing my whole identity.
“I’d be embarrassed to walk down the street or talk to anyone if I lost.
“They know me around here as the handball guy, and if I can’t even win that, what the hell am I? That’s the way I used to think.
“But you grow and you mature and realise it is sport. The best part of sport is losing because that’s when you lose the most and can make improvements.
“Every wee loss does kill me but you do learn a lot and come back stronger. It was just that losing felt like my whole ego was at stake and I was losing my whole identity, which sounds very dramatic.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
ON the strap of McElduff’s gloves, you’ll see the letters TGO.
“The Great One!” he laughs.
It was something that he took on in his early 20s when a few friends suggested he played like his hero, David Chapman, who was known simply as TGO.
Now 30, such ego has to do more wrestling. But it wins because he lets it win and, truthfully, he likes it to win. Needs it.
“In your early 20s you think this is class but now that I’m 30, I will play to it but it is slightly embarrassing.
“Back in the day in my 20s I was loving that stuff whereas now it’s like ‘agghhh’. But it’s all a bit of craic.
“It [the ego] definitely been under control the last while. I’ve matured big time but you still use that or need that. I am still as confident going into tournaments, I might not be as loud or as trash-talky, but I still fully believe in myself before a tournament.
“I wouldn’t trash talk on the court but if someone asked me before a game what I thought, in my early 20s people were gunning for me and it was just a bit of craic but I wouldn’t be afraid to tell them ‘you’ll be lucky if you score five points’. And then be looking at them on the court, cracking a smile and a joke if I was beating them by that much.
“I put the gloves on and see that, if I’m in a tough spot it does help me fight through, the ego comes through and you think this is who you’re supposed to be, whatever’s going wrong, suck it up and get the job done.”
It’s all part of the game.
His full-time job is to grow the sport and his part-time job is to stunt that of his opponents by winning everything around him.
But he’s obsessively passionate about it and within that, there’s a recognition that being a bit out there is about more than his own profile.
“I’d be loud and think there’s a bit more craic if you do get involved in trash talk or have a bit of personality and don’t be shy about what other ones think of you. I’ve always been kind of a loud mouth, or not too shy to share my opinion.
“It might piss some off but it’s more fun for outsiders to get involved with a character like that. I think handball needs a few more characters, in my own opinion.”
In the 34-foot-by-20 space in front of him, the wall 16-foot high, he scales the world.
For you:
