Carson a true reader of the game

Not every award-winning poet has played minor hurling for his county.

Ciaran Carson did, though. The Belfast native has collected poetry prizes over four decades but in the 1960s, he was a marauding forward in saffron and white.

“I was slightly unusual in that I was a reader and was seen as slightly odd on the team,” he recalls now. “To be honest, in terms of the team I didn’t care as long as I played okay. I was skilful, quick, played right-half forward or corner forward. Get a few points out on the wing, which I saw as, strangely, a skill on its own, rather than interacting with the rest of the team.”

It was a more physical game then.

“I remember the havoc in the square when a high ball went into the small square, the goalkeeper ending up in the net, dumped in there legitimately.

“To me, whatever about hurling being slower, it certainly seemed less organised. On the way down to Cork in the train, I passed John Doyle Park, and I can remember him playing: uncompromising wasn’t in it.”

Another Tipperary man — another Doyle, come to that — was Carson’s idol. When the northerner read that Jimmy Doyle practised frees by putting the ball through the rungs of a ladder, he emulated the Thurles man by trying to pick out riveted panels on the wall of Casement Park.

“I only saw him [Doyle] play once, at the end of his career, on a very wet March day in the Railway Cup, Munster v Ulster in Belfast,” says Carson.

“He was heavy then, and he’d slowed up. It was pouring rain and the pitch was terrible. But still, he did some beautiful, elegant things, despite all of that. He still had the space and time to get the ball and put it over the bar and that’s the skill, to create that time and space for themselves.”

It was a time when television barely existed, never mind Twitter. Players were truly remote.

“You didn’t see them and yet you felt you knew them. That got through to you from the radio and so on, you had it in your mind’s eye.”

Is that reminiscent of a writer using his imagination?

“I imagine so, and there’s the fact that I see hurling as an art form, and not far removed from writing.

“In hurling you must imagine space. What will happen if you go that way or this way, will that give you an extra yard, the angles are in your mind, the movement of other players, the goal... that forms lines of imagination and you don’t know what will happen next.

“That often happens when I’m writing, too, I don’t know what will happen next. When that happens, you invent from a stock of skills stored up. You can imagine if you’ve a big match the next day, you might lie awake and imagine how it’s going to work out.

“So already you’re forming a narrative of the match in your head, it’s unfolding — ‘he gets the ball and he steps right’, all of that, going back to where you’re a kid on the street, playing away on your own and enacting a game in your head. So it’s all about imagination, story-telling, and a good match is like an epic story unfolding.”

Carson is fond of other sports as well, even if he sometimes views them through the prism of hurling: “I watch a lot of sports — soccer, American football I watched for years.

“Ice hockey I’d watch the odd time, it’s not unlike hurling. Baseball is another game of angles, though I think to really understand it, you’d have to be reared with it. I know a lot of stuff is happening that I can’t really pick up on it. Cricket I’ve tried, but to me there’s something slightly not right — the way they throw the ball doesn’t look as natural, say, as in baseball.”

He has his favourites, among sportswriters and sportsmen alike.

“Roger Angell is a great writer, someone I think gets the atmosphere right when it comes to the games and the players.

“I’d like to do it [sportswriting], it’s occurred to me to write an essay about sport, or hurling. Seeing the hurley stick as a pen, maybe [laughs].

“Players... DJ Carey at his height, he could see things that other players couldn’t. I saw him score a goal when the ball was about to land in the square and he arrived just to tap it home.

“He could see a pass, and make the pass, in a way others couldn’t. I’ve seen Ring in the archive footage — the goal he scored while lying on the ground, somehow. A hardy man for someone who was quite small.”

In his memoir, Last Night’s Fun, Carson says, “I stopped hurling many years ago, but dream recurrently of hurling to this day.” Don’t we all?