GERARD HARTMANN'S whole life revolves around dealing with world champions and elite athletes yet, in his personal pantheon of greats, Tony Griffin resides there alongside the likes of Kelly Holmes, Kiptanui, Sonia and Seán Óg. These days Griffin is 14 stone, an astonishing specimen, but when Hartmann first set eyes on him in 2001, the lad was only 20 years of age and barely 11 and a half stone. He didn't even have that much raw athleticism to work with. But he had this infectious, unbridled enthusiasm to be the best he possibly could. His eyes would be popping out on the treatment table, hearing and learning how Paula Radcliffe or five-time world triathlon champion Simon Lessing prepared. He'd want to meet Kelly Holmes, not to get his photo taken with her but to learn why she trained and rested the way she did.

What Hartmann witnessed over the next five years was an athlete, a human being, flower into all he could possibly be. This was a kid who at 19 was told by Ger Loughnane he'd "want to be doing a bit of weights" so one St Stephen's Day when Jamesie O'Connor was signing his name in the log book of the West County Hotel gym he noticed that Griffin had been there on 25 December. This was a player that calculated that he'd scored only one goal in his first nine championship games so duly consulted the leading goalkeepers in the county, including Davy Fitzgerald, and learned that they knew by his body shape where he was going to put the ball; instead of always looking to rifle the clean shot he should instead look to maybe hop the ball in front of the goalline. In his next 18 championship games, Griffin score nine goals, a rate only bettered by Henry Shefflin and Dan Shanahan.

Even when he was in Nova Scotia studying his degree in human kinetics, he persuaded a conditioning lecture to put him on a fitness programme and video his striking action from which they identified he was leaning back too far and tended to hit under the ball than strike through it; the result of that re-adjustment was that over the following two seasons he would average four white flags per championship game and, in 2006, win an All Star.

And then the very day he received that award, he decided he'd cycle across Canada in 50 days in memory of his father Jerome who had died the previous year from cancer. As Hartmann notes, he could have got the same kudos for just cycling from Mizen to Malin Head in a week. "You have to be part mad and part genius to physiologically and psychologically do what Tony did but he had such focus and perseverance he did it. He's now an incredible athlete – I took him out to the track one day and he ran the 400 metres in 52 seconds, straight after we'd done a three-mile run. But he's an even more incredible spirit and catalyst. If you put in place the proper athlete structure around him, he will only flourish, like he did on the hurling field in 2005 and 2006. He's the ultimate perfectionist. If 30 per cent of a set-up is missing, wrong, his whole vitality is drained. Tony is all about good vibes, good karma and Clare clearly no longer can provide that. They can bring in a mediator, make some kind of fudge and token gestures, but he won't be in harmony with it and himself. He'd be fighting his own spirit and he has so much life and energy to give to things far more worthwhile. What you have now with him and [the] Clare [situation] is this majestic vessel with no proper wind and no proper sea to sail in. Lough Derg is too small for Tony Griffin."

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As Griffin's ship now sets sail for waters and pastures new, namely his new sports management business that organised Muhammad Ali's recent visit to Ennis, he looks back at Clare not with any anger but a bittersweet sense of joy and disillusionment. Many of the best days of his life were playing and training with Clare but in recent years it had so little to offer him as a life experience it gave the impression he had little to give to it.

The day before Clare's second league game of 2009, manager Mike McNamara put the team through a two-hour training session. "We were doing this tackling drill where you stay in the middle until you win the ball back," says Griffin. "I was marking one of the Donovan brothers from the 21s who was just on the panel and absolutely bulling for road. So your competitiveness comes out and I went for it just as hard. I bought three bottles of water on the way home, sat on the couch watching the rugby, sipping my water, and I swear, I was so tired from going upstairs to the bathroom I got a water bottle, cut the top of it and used that to go to the toilet for the rest of the day.

"I was trying to fill up with energy for the game the next day but I went into that game empty. Brick Walsh went from wing to wing picking up every puckout and I was barely able to go after him. Now someone like Ger Hartmann would say I'm an athlete first, a hurler second, yet I could hardly move that day. After that game I found it very challenging to believe that management knew where we were going or how to take us there. We were later told it was a mental test but to me that was not the method or stage to build mental strength. If you're not physically right to do something, you can't achieve, compete. We gave ourselves no chance that day. None."

The next day out his faith in management was further eroded. It was a league game against Tipperary and the first thing that struck Griffin driving up to Semple Stadium was the Tipperary team getting off the bus with identical togs, shorts, wetgear, everything. "Our wetgear still hadn't arrived. You might say that's a small detail but when success is built on detail that's a big detail; as Johnny Wilkinson says, things like gear and meals are merely oxygen that allow a team to breathe; the next level again is to have systems that allow you to be successful. We didn't have the oxygen. We went out warming up that day looking like the league of nations and I remember looking down at Tipp at the other end and knowing the way [from his NUIG days] Eamonn O'Shea prepares his teams, saying to myself, 'We're so far away from where they are.'

"People will say 'Jesus, it's only gear' and 'Sure Griffin has only played a couple of decent games in two years.' But if you dig a bit deeper you'll see why. In 2009 what player from Clare played well? James McInerney was about the only one; John Conlon maybe – when he got any gametime. Gerry O'Grady didn't have a good season. Diarmuid McMahon didn't. Brendan Bugler didn't. That says a lot, when so many good players all play poorly. I went back and played well with my club, because I felt good about myself and the setup there.

"I remember our first game back after the Galway game [qualifier defeat] and our [club] coach Michael Hehir talked about not compounding a mistake with another; if you had an arm on your man's back and the ref blows for a foul, accept your mistake instead of berating him and having the ball moved metres forward. And I said to myself, 'You know, I've learned more there than I have all year with Clare.' With Clare we had to listen to the same old rhetoric. 'We've got to hate these feckers because we're from here and they're from there. Be a real man.' You need something a bit more informative and clinical than that to compete in 2009."

He stresses he has nothing personal against either the management or the county board. The board chairman is a fellow Ballyea man, Michael O'Neill. In fact he practically grew up in O'Neill's house. And Griffin quite likes Mike Mac the man, having seen that below the gruff exterior is really one big, well-meaning individual. Team selectors Ollie Baker and Alan Cunningham were also selectors in Anthony Daly's set-up in which Griffin flourished, in no small part because of their contribution. But in Daly's set-up, Baker was an advisor, cajoler, motivator, not physical trainer; Johnny Glynn took care of that. Cunningham, a skills coach, was underutilised and probably overruled in Mike Mac's reign. Griffin's issue isn't with personalities in Clare. It's with the structures and culture of Clare.

"At this stage of my life I can't be involved if I don't think we're going to compete at the highest level. There are a lot of things opening up in my life, at work, in a very good relationship with a great girl. There's more to me than hurling, and if time is a 24-hour resource, then I can't justify spending so much time to something I don't believe in. The talent is there in Clare to be winning Munster and All Irelands in the next five years. The structures are not."

He accepts Clare reached a Munster final in 2008 under McNamara but says, "Coming off the Tony Considine situation, anything would have been better and fellas were just fierce enthusiastic to do well." And he knows Mike and the board are looking for dialogue and compromise, but, he says, "We revert to type under pressure." If Clare lose a league game to Wexford, Mike is unlikely to resist the lure of Crusheen.

"Some of the blame for last year has to rest on the players in that we weren't strong enough to say 'Look it, this isn't good enough. Crusheen – that's gone.' But fellas were afraid to speak up. They feared Mike. If we suggested something we'd be told, 'That isn't the way Clare were successful.' So we were doing the same things we were doing in 2000 which even then were starting to crumble; the long slogs; the two-hour sessions, the long sprints at the end of training. I spent four years studying this in Canada, periodisation. We were overloading in training, overloading in duration to the point fellas were wide open to injury."

It got to the stage where Griffin had to work around the management setup and trained by himself for championship games. Before the qualifier against Galway, he told management he had the flu, so he wouldn't be subject to the three gruelling sessions that he knew the group would be put through. "I could feel myself with no real zip so I took that chunk of time to train by myself." Instead he just played in the two training games either side of those sessions, played well in them and duly started in midfield against Galway.

In Clare's next game, Griffin had one of his best games with the county. It might only have been a meaningless relegation play-off against Wexford but for Griffin it was significant. The team had only trained once over the previous fortnight. "I mopped up a lot of ball that day, and was able to power box to box, box to box. I was well rested, in between just going to the alley a few times and going for a few jogs."

Since then it's been a mixed bag for both Griffin and Clare hurling. For the county there was the high of the under-21s; for Griffin, the high of event-managing Muhammad Ali's visit to Ennis. Three weeks before the great man touched down, Griffin and his new company, Sports Academy International, contacted the local council, asking how many people would be in the council chambers for the ceremony. Forty, they were told. "What about everyone else who'd want to see it?" The council hadn't thought of that. Within three weeks Griffin had raised over €25,000 in sponsorship; arranged for Sharon Shannon, Mundy and even Marty Morrissey to warm up the house, and organised three satellite trucks to beam the ceremony to 8,000 people. Griffin never got to meet the great man but his wife Lonnie relayed to him a month later how it was the most alive she'd seen Muhammad in 10 years. Providing and sharing in life-affirming experiences like that is what Griffin is in the business of. The past few months have illustrated to him that Clare GAA is not.

"I don't think the board have performed brilliantly in all of this. They said they weren't aware after the season ended that the players were unhappy with the set-up. They knew but they took the view, if we leave it, it'll blow over. And that's still the view. The lack of communication has been the worst thing about this whole thing and that works for the players too, but the way the board have handled this, the players have become very distrustful of them."

So, he's leaving them have their ball, their way, if that's the way they want to have it. His new business meant committing to 2010 was always going to be tentative, though, he admits, the prospect of working with a Jamesie O'Connor figure would be "very appealing". Right now he just wants to support players that are entitled to a better set-up. They might have lacked conviction in their protest to date but only because they've lacked confidence.

"They're good, conscientious lads," says Griffin. "I think it is a miracle and a credit to them there was no split or defections during the season." There are no real "ringleaders" in all this, he says, just some individuals more vocal and articulate in expressing the sentiment of the group. And there is no drinking ring or culture in the team, he says. "Listen, ask anyone, the lads of '95 and '97 were better drinkers than is around now. The night of some games a few lads might go out and enjoy themselves but it was so blown out of proportion. The 21s are blamed for cultivating such a culture. If there was such a drinking culture, could they have won that All Ireland?

"There is a brilliant panel there, with players like James McInerney, John Conlon. But what happens is people start to settle for things. At the moment in Clare it's 'Jesus, you can't say that to the county board. What will be thought of us if we said that?' What is offered to the young players these next few years will become their version of reality. A lot of it comes down to the man who is asking for things. If they ask strongly enough, you'll get it. Anthony Daly says he had to threaten to resign four times to get sliotars but he still got them because he felt strong. This year we stopped asking."

And now Griffin has stopped playing. The board and Mac and the players might come up with some compromise – though he doubts it – but if they do, it'll only upgrade the disastrous to the mediocre and uninspiring and Griffin wants to be inspired. It's criminal in a way; a man at 28, qualified in human performance and kinetics, with Lance Armstrong and Hartmann on his speed-dial, choosing to just walk away from it all, but he does so with more good memories than bad.

"For the most part it was a joy. I feel blessed to have played with the likes of Seán McMahon, Jamesie O'Connor and Brian Lohan. I learned so much from them – to push your boundaries. In Seánie's last year he was still winning all the runs in January and February. You'd look over at Lohan glowering in a dressing room and think to yourself, 'God, I'd hate to be the opposition today.' I'll never forget the day we played Cork in the 2005 All Ireland semi-final, warming up around the golf course out in Castleknock, and Dalo addressing us and I'm thinking 'I've never felt more focused and more united with a group of players as I do today.'

"Memories like that you'll take to the grave. The look on my father's face when I came out of the dressing room in 2002 after my debut against Tipperary. He had been there for years, supporting, in his quiet way – driving me to the gym, to training when I had no car. Always waiting for me outside the dressing room, win or lose.

"And then there are the fellas in the dressing room. Laughing to Conor Plunkett taking off everyone, from me to Lohan – right in front of Lohan's face. Or even this year, having to do a group run in such a time and running back and actually pushing Nuggie [Barry Nugent] from behind. Great times."

But now it's time to leave Nuggie and all of them behind. He'll miss it alright, but not as much as Clare will miss him.

kshannon@tribune.ie