YOU HAVE TO go back to the 2009 All-Ireland final for the last time that James Woodlock started a game for Tipperary in Croke Park.
He came on as a substitute two years ago on a miserable day for Tipperary at headquarters against Kilkenny but tomorrow is a landmark occasion for the 28 year-old.
He’s a key player on the main hurling stage for his county as they battle Cork for the right to contest the All-Ireland final. After the hard road he has travelled, he’ll savour every minute of it.
Rewind back to October 18th 2009. Woodlock’s club Drom-Inch were in action in the Tipperary county senior final. They lost out to Thurles Sarsfields and disaster struck for Woodlock during an innocuous collision with Tipperary team-mate Padraic Maher. He suffered a horrific leg injury as he broke his tibia and fibula.
“When I went for the first operation I was told I would never hurl again,” recalls Woodlock. “It was so bad. It was the tibia and fibia in my right leg. About three or four inches under the knee, one was shoved down beside the other because I had all my weight on it so it broke in seven places.
“I had years of building up the muscle and it was gone within three days of breaking the leg. It just faded away, it was just bone. It took me a long time to get it back right, it caused problems with my other leg because all the weight was on that.
“I remember cycling 20 miles a day during the winter. The leg that had broken, I tied it to the pedal of the bike with a shoe lace and cycled with one leg, all uphill, to try and build the muscle back.”
Woodlock missed the entire 2010 season and a chunk of the 2011 campaign. His inter-county career was put in hiatus but he made it back to at last win that coveted county medal with Drom-Inch in October 2011. It had been a long road to recovery.
“When you are on a morphine drip at home and you can’t go anywhere, what do you do? Once that was all off I used go to the gym at 6 o’clock in the morning at The Source in Thurles before anyone else was there, when the cleaners would open up I’d be there.
“My two friends would bring me in, and I did jogging in the pool, it was all upper body work and I was twice as big as I am now. Obviously when you go back running you lose it all again, I was double the size, I was a stone and a half heavier.
“It affected everything in my life, I couldn’t do anything for a long time. I was six weeks on a couch, I couldn’t go anywhere. I had constant pain in it.
Pin and Screws
“I still have a lot of stuff in the leg, that’s never going to come out. I have a pin down the middle of my leg from my knee to the ankle and I have two screws across. If you touch the ankle you can see the screws clearly in my ankle, they’re just like the screws into a door, they’re nearly out through the skin.”
One of his opponents tomorrow can relate to what Woodlock endured. Cork’s Paudie O’Sullivan suffered a similar setback last year.
“I was chatting to him last year when he broke his leg. I couldn’t do anything for him and nobody could do anything for me at the time, you either come back yourself or you won’t come back. You have to put in the work yourself, there’s no physio or anyone like that going to bring you back.
“You just put up with it. It’s in the past and that’s where I’ll leave it. If you thought it was ever going to happen again you wouldn’t go out and play, you wouldn’t go out and cycle a bike, let alone ride a horse.”
Woodlock has returned to fill a vital role in the engine room of the Tipperary midfield. His all-action style and insatiable appetite for work are vital ingredients in Eamon O’Shea’s team. It was tough to reclaim his place but now he’s relishing the game time that he is exposed to.
“I had played in the All-Ireland Final in 2009, and like every Tipp person I had no doubt we were going to win the All-Ireland the following year. That was the hardest part to take, when you couldn’t play.
“I had to work really hard on my own to get back there. I’m happy for myself that I was able to get back, and I’m happy to be involved with such a bunch of players out there. No player has ever questioned anything we were ever asked.”
