PAUL BRADY has been World Champion five times but if he walked past you in the street, you wouldn't even blink.

Four times he has returned to Dublin Airport with the crown in his hands - in 2012 the world handball championship was held in Citywest only a few miles up the road from his Cavan home - but scarcely ever has there been a welcoming posse to greet him off the plane. Save for immediate family and friends backing him, Brady's incredible journey has mostly been one in solitude.

He is 35 now and well into his final year as a competitive handballer, the greatest one in the history of the sport at that.

There will be no long goodbye, no elongated, Sinatra-like, curtain call. Once his days of competing professionally are over Brady says he will never play the sport recreationally.

Somewhere along the way his passion became a job. A means to an end. Maybe it was the constant travel, the time spent on his own or the insane preparation he demanded of himself. No matter what he is close to an end now.

Disappointingly, it has taken the outside world a long time to sit up and take notice of his achievements but at least as he enters the late winter of his career, his exploits have finally grasped peoples attention.

"He is an example of a lad who is 35 and has won so much," says Kilkenny hurler Richie Hogan.  "Yet, I still see him drive from Cavan to DCU to go to the gym because it's the best gym around him. I don't know how many miles that is but he does that three days a week or drives into Dublin to play someone who is pretty competitive in a challenge game.

"That's the sort of stuff he does. What separates these guys from the average guys. It's things like that. He's won ten All-Ireland doubles, 10 All-Ireland singles, five World Championships in a row - the first Irish man to win one, never mind five. But you see what he puts into it. Endless, endless, endless hours of work."

And most of it unseen.

Sure there have been flirtations with fame and brief cameos in the public eye, but Brady rarely saw the microscope shining on him and when he did he tended to turn the other way. It's not that he was uncomfortable with the attention, merely he had gotten so far without it.

A few weeks ago, leading US website TheSkinny365.com put him at number 14 on the list of top 15 athletes of all time. On the list Brady took his place alongside vaunted icons like Pele and Mohammed Ali.

"Most people are probably asking,”WHO”? But, Paul Brady is the greatest, and most accomplished handball player of all-time," the website wrote.

We pointed out to Brady the irony of a US media outlet having to acknowledge him before his home country did likewise, but he didn't bite.

"Nah, that little bit of fuss didn't mean a thing to me," Brady said. "That's just outside noise. I've seen it at various stages during my career where there's a hoopla over something like that You ignore it because it means nothing. If I wanted attention and hype I would have gone into a different sport.

"I really admire Conor McGregor and Katie Taylor because they come from minority sports but have gone global. But that was never going to happen with handball. So, all I could ever do was try to promote the game in the right way. You get single minded about it then. That's why I don't really listen to the outside world."

Why would he when so few were there to back him along the way. We asked if he ever attracted a major sponsor?

"Not really," he smiles. "But I wouldn't have pushed myself either so I have to take the blame."

He could have done with one.

At the start he had to scour hotel price-lists to find the best value. Up to a few years ago he remembers booking a ticket back to Dublin in a US airport and wincing when the desk official ran his credit card through the machine.

"I honestly didn't know if there was enough left on the card to get me home," he admits.

"I had a cheque for $200 that I had won from tournament prize money but that wouldn't have got me home either. I sweated as the card went through. It was tough going at the start."

As a pro handballer, Brady regularly appears on the US sports broadcaster ESPN but mostly remains anonymous stateside too. He says it suits just fine.

"I'm low key," he insists. "I'd rather live my life right for handball, recovering, diet and nutrition, massage than seek attention. Now, I would be a wealthy man if I chose the PR and didn't have the sports massages to pay for but those sessions have kept me healthy. I have spent tens of thousands on them over the years, but they are so important."

Last year, he won the World Championship for a fifth and final time. The competition rolls around every three years so he won't be competing again. In fact, in the coming 12 months he will bow out of competition altogether.

Life is moving on. He is job sharing as a teacher, working one week in school, travelling to the US the next to play. He is newly engaged to Shauna, and studying for a Masters in Sports and Exercise Performance in University of Ulster, Jordanstown.

"I've had to handle pressure for the past 12 years," he says. "But the pressure is off me now and there's going to be a new world champion in three years' time. I have done my thing."

Yet people at home, a minority it must be said, still don't get his achievements.

When the TheSkinny365 listed him, broadcasters of one Irish sports podcast contacted them to complain about Brady's inclusion.

Madness.

But Brady just laughs.

He laughs again when you ask if he will hang around to win a sixth title in Alaska in 2018. He will be 40, but he could still win it.

"Nah, I'm done," he insists.

We forget, too, that he also spent 10 years as a Cavan senior footballer, merging a fine Gaelic career with his burgeoning prowess on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Exhausting.

For the first time those monthly trips to the States are becoming a bit of a hindrance. So he is wise to exit stage left with his reputation fully intact.

"I wanted to live a world champion and I want to die one," he said.

Mission accomplished. Yet again.