10 Irish sports books we need to read that haven’t been written yet
You might have gotten the memo last week about World Book Day, and that may have jogged your memory about the sports book you got for Christmas that year.
Who was it, your man who had a few issues with the drink but turned it around after a controversy involving . . . what was it called again?
A bit of variety would be no harm, would it?
I know you’re under pressure Christmas Eve and you’re grabbing anything you can from the shelves of the bookshop for (insert name of awkward relative here), so take it from me.
There are at least ten Irish sports books we need to read that haven’t been written yet.
Call this one the Moneyball of Irish sports books, a granular examination of the most marginal element of a sport that isn’t heavily interrogated at the best of time.
I’m not so stupid as to insult the devotees of a minority pursuit by naming it here, but a book devoted to this kind of byway — I hesitate to say dead end — could be a sleeper hit. Or just perish unloved in the remainder basket.
Bouton was the baseball player who outed his contemporaries — of the 1960s — for taking pep pills to keep their energy up and occasionally fooling around with women at away games.
Yes, people were easily shocked 50 years ago. Without being prurient about it, I think we have yet to hear a full-throated explanation of elite Irish sportspeople’s leisure habits, and I feel it only polite to leave the matter as blandly described as that given a) my understanding of some Irish sportspeople’s leisure habits and b) you may be having your breakfast.
The market leader in this genre is of course Nick Hornby, the man to blame for dozens of memoir-alikes back in the 90’s (about music, matchbox collection, trains, etc).
Hornby’s gifts weren’t shared by all, or many, of his imitators, but the field is open in Ireland for a Fever Pitch. . . I want to say homage, but would ‘straight rip-off’ be more accurate? I think so.
There’s a reason Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, about the Brooklyn Dodgers, is one of the sports books people feel warmly about. It’s one of the best ever written, and its premise, revisiting players 20 years after the writer first covered them as a daily journalist, has never been bettered in lightly disguised variations.
But the lack of Irish simulacra is surprising, all the same. It’s a template that’s easily repurposed, and it’s not like nostalgia is an emotion unknown to the Irish sports fan.
Participating in a sport and displaying minimal expertise while wittily delineating the godlike qualities of its top performers was a tall order in the sixties, but it’s practically impossible now.
The humourless louts who populate most of the top teams in the beloved sports of our nation would no doubt enjoy — for a fraction of a second — decapitating a slovenly hack who’d fallen in with them for the sake of some copy, but it wouldn’t make for an entertaining read.
This hardy annual in the American market is a byproduct of highways that literally stretch 3,000 miles from coast to coast.
Granted, regional differences are as strong in our green isle as anywhere else, but how significant can those differences be when you’re never more than a couple of hours from home?
A volume on the stark contrast between views and attitudes towards sport in one part of a county and . . . those in another part would be something I’d read. And I can’t be alone. Or too lonely, at any rate.
Too soon?
(Note: I reserve the right to copy the other three templates for my own particular purposes. I’m not stupid.)
US sport gets varsity blues
I don’t know if you were watching the college admissions scandal in the States unfold, but if you weren’t you’ve missed a beauty.
A brief and inevitably incomplete synopsis: wealthy parents paid thousands of dollars to get their kids into elite American colleges by . . . well, cheating is not too strong a term, given people are being charged by the FBI with fraud. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman are among the rich morons ensnared in this.
And why are you reading it here? Well, Loughlin’s kids were allegedly recruited for the University of Southern California rowing team despite not being rowers. At all.
Park for a moment or two the fact that the company engaged in this fraud got away with charging €500,000 and focus on what they did.
This from a report on the scam: the company found “photos of athletes on the internet, and either used those photos or used software such as Photoshop to insert applicants’ faces onto the bodies of legitimate athletes.”
If, like me, you feel a grudging respect for these chancers, consider the other side of the equation.
Didn’t any of these college coaches or sports departments use this modern invention called the internet to research these applications?
If they didn’t, it says something extraordinary about places like Yale, Georgetown and Stanford, to name a few implicated in this scandal.
Great to see the code name of the FBI operation too — Operation Varsity Blues. If you need it explained you clearly weren’t a Dawson’s Creek fan.
Perfect day to join walk for Kieran
Great to see the support offered all week to Kieran O’Connor of Aghada and Cork, who is fighting his third bout with cancer. A gofundme appeal has already raised over €275,000, and Aghada GAA club are hosting a walk in support of the family this afternoon at 2pm.
The club say buses will be available on the day to collect people from designated car parks and shuttle people to the GAA club and return them afterwards.
Stewards will be available to assist people and the club is inviting people to come early — a 1pm arrival is suggested — to enjoy the atmosphere. It’s a bank holiday. Do yourself a favour, and do someone else a favour along the way.
The Cork hurlers will play Kilkenny in a benefit match for the fund on Wednesday week at 7.30pm at Páirc Uí Rinn.
Lost for a good read?
A reader confronts me gently.
“Instead of all this nonsense could we not see something worth reading on the holidays or on the bus to Dublin, something enjoyable?”
Nonsense? I don’t know if this fits the bill but Jane Harper has (yet another) terrific thriller out,
The Lost Man
.
Her books are all set in a searing Australia — you find yourself sweating when you pick one up — and this one is unnervingly detailed on what happens when someone is stuck in the outback under the sun.
I recommend highly.
