Monday, January 03, 2011
GIVEN IT’S the first week of January we thought we’d spare you the usual – looking back at 2010, looking forward to 2011, you know the drill – and talk about aging a little bit.
Come back, come back. It’s not going to be depressing, promise.
Over the Christmas we dipped into a book by one of our all-time favourites, Roger Angell, a New York fiction editor who sometimes writes about baseball. You don’t have to be a slave to the American game to appreciate Angell’s fluent essays and sharp descriptions, though, and he often leavens his writing with ingredients from his own life.
For instance, he talks about a recurring dream he had in his mid-thirties, in which he’d awake in the middle of the night, walk out of his house and find, in a tangle of undergrowth, a gravestone. On the stone was his name, birth year and the then-current year: Roger Angell, 1920-1955.
He mentioned it to a psychiatrist, who asked him to describe the stone in more detail: Angell said it reminded him of the memorial plaques to great players of the past in Yankee Stadium.
"Then I stopped and cried, ‘Oh . . . Oh," because it had suddenly become clear," wrote Angell. "My dreams of becoming a Major League ballplayer had died at last."
Everyone – or everyone who’s passed their mid-thirties – has had that epiphany, the realisation that no matter what the set of circumstances, the day will not come when the planets will align and your hidden talents will be recognised. The day comes when you have to accept that you will remain forever with those who only stand and watch.
Angell’s piece came to mind on a trip into the 12th circle of hell, the one populated by last-minute Christmas shoppers which Dante found too frightening to contemplate, when we spotted a large poster featuring Ryan Giggs of Manchester United, a blue and black running shoe in his hand.
Giggs is one of those people to give even frustrated middle-aged men a straw they can clutch at – why, if he can survive at 37, then surely etc. etc. True, to paraphrase Andy Reid’s favourite writer, his face is no longer the face that once adorned a thousand bedroom posters, but he contributes his fair share in a merciless professional sport, and has become such a part of the collective consciousness that he figured in a David Lodge novel a few years ago.
However, what really chimed for your columnist when the poster loomed into view were a couple of interviews the Manchester United winger gave earlier this year,
In one, Giggs spoke at length about his career at United, Alex Ferguson and so on, with the benevolent presence of his long-time agent, Harry Swales, chipping in with an occasional opinion.
There was an implicit invitation to make a comparison between the mature adult on show with some of the . . . less mature players that the Premier League has to offer.
Then the interviewer raised the Glazer situation at Manchester United, a source of some controversy, as most people know, asking Giggs if he’d like to see the American financiers leave United.
"Would I?" said Giggs – ‘with a gulp’, according to the interviewer – only for Swales to interject: "Nothing to do with him."
Giggs then got back on-message with the usual: "As players, you just play for the club. I love Man United, I’m going to play for Man United, and that’s what my focus is on."
Disappointing? A little, maybe. Because Giggs is a man approaching 40 you would perhaps expect him to have opinions that stretch beyond the whitewash bordering the Old Trafford field.
That doesn’t mean adopting a strong position on whether Estonia was right to adopt the euro, but the matter of the ownership of a club he’s spent his professional career with is surely something he has a viewpoint on.
It’s a case to spark the imagination of the German philosopher who asked if army generals who had a well-rounded personality and views on many subjects were better leaders than army generals who had a narrow-minded focus on military matters alone.
To survive in professional soccer for as long as Giggs has means opting for the latter case, methinks. The other interview we read with Giggs this year was conducted in Africa, where the player does charity work – another indication of maturity, in fairness.
A reporter who accompanied Giggs met him for breakfast one morning during the trip and pushed the toast and butter down the table to the footballer.
No thanks, said Giggs. He’d have the toast but not the butter; if he did he’d be feeling fuzzy for a couple of hours. (Clearly this anecdote would want for nothing if the reporter had confessed to softly belching bacon odours across the table in response).
Now you know, Roger Angell. If it hadn’t been for smearing butter on your toast, you could have been a contender.
Now that we’re discussing age, a story told by Fr Ray Reidy at the funeral of his brother-in-law, John Doyle, last week comes to mind.
Doyle’s mother died a few weeks after he was born and he grew up without brothers or sisters, but he sometimes visited relatives in Dungarvan as a child, greatly enjoying his times in the Waterford town.
Before he died some of the Waterford hurlers who would have come up against him in his pomp – the likes of Frankie Walsh, Austin Flynn, Mickey O’Connor – arranged for Doyle to pay a last visit to Dungarvan.
They met up for a drink and a chat in a pub in Abbeyside and then went round to see the house where the Tipperary man had been so happy as a youngster.
Fr Reidy didn’t overdo the details in telling the story. He didn’t have to.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
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