Monday, January 02, 2012
HAPPY new year to all readers, and fear not.
I will not be inflicting my "wishes for 2012" on you, nor my "problems which simply must be addressed this year". Nor will I be invoking any odd sporting connections between this particular year and the lost predictions of the Mayans about a forthcoming apocalypse (next week, maybe).
I do want to send particular good wishes, though, to the man who texted to say he’d lost all respect for me after I wrote a podium piece in last Saturday’s paper explaining why Cork was the nation’s sporting capital (you respected me? Me? Respect?).
I held back, of course, in that piece. You only have so much room in the newspaper in which to operate. Talking about the sporting greatness of the Rebel County with any space parameters is a fool’s errand, to be honest. 700 words or so only really gives you a chance to clear your throat.
But something I should have included, which would have been particularly timely, occurred to your correspondent yesterday – namely, James Joyce’s endorsement of Cork’s pre-eminence.
The great man is always in fashion, but as of midnight on Saturday copyright on his works in the European Union expired, which brought him to mind specifically. For all intents and purposes you can anticipate pop-up readings from Joyce’s work all year — buy a straw boater now before they’re all sold out ahead of Bloomsday — but that’s not my primary focus today.
Joyce’s father and antecedents on that side were from Cork, and in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man there is an account of the visit the hero, Stephen, and his father, Simon, pay to the city, looking up some old haunts.
Sport bubbles along in the descriptions of the visit, though nothing quite equals the few words which conjure up an entire world of crapulence and post-drink horrors, the account of Simon Dedalus’s tea-cup rattling against its saucer (look it up).
On their way to UCC the Dedaluses encounter a sight which anyone visiting Cork in the summer can experience.
"The leaves of the trees along the Mardyke were astir and whispering in the sunlight. A team of cricketers passed, agile young men in flannels and blazers, one of them carrying the long green wicket-bag."
The Mardyke is still the cricketing hub of the south, but Joyce didn’t just focus on team sports in the real capital either. When Stephen’s father asserts his superiority over his son when in the company of old Cork friends, he uses terms any follower of the harriers in Cork would recognise: "I’ll vault a five-barred gate against him or I’ll run with him after the hounds across the country as I did 30 years ago against the Kerry Boy and the best man for it."
Most people, when asked about Joyce and sport, plump for the pretty harsh description of GAA founder Michael Cusack in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses ("(a) broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed hero"), though this seems a reasonably faithful portrait of many of the Clare people known to this writer.
Still, that isn’t the sports highlight of a Joyce book for this reader. There’s a haunting account later in the Portrait of something which has happened to one of Stephen’s student friends, Davin, who comes from Limerick.
"I was away all day that from my own place over in Buttevant," he tells Stephen. "I don’t know if you know where that is – a hurling match between the Croke’s Own Boys and the fearless Thurles, and by God Stevie that was the hard fight.
"My first cousin Fonsy Davin was stripped to his buff that day minding goal for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the time and shouting like mad."
After the game Davin – the student, not the naked goalie – can’t get a lift back to Limerick because there’s a mass meeting which everyone is going to over in Castletownroche, so he has to walk home over the Ballyhoura Hills.
Along the way he stops at a cottage and the woman of the house invites him in to stay the night but Davin, frightened and clearly anxious to make it back for the post-match analysis back on Shannonside, moves on pretty quickly.
The goalkeeper playing in his pelt. Mysterious succubi lurking in the Ballyhoura Hills.
Joyce weaves a picture of the GAA around 1900 that requires closer inspection, copyright or not.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
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