The final chapter in sports books for the festive season
This was the autumn that saw the long-anticipated arrival of Brian O’Driscoll’s autobiography, as well as another volume in Roy Keane’s life story.
Big hitters, but the quality wasn’t confined to names that are usually picked out in the bright lights on Broadway.
If your tastes run to the less illuminated sports, then 2014 served you pretty well, too.
The traditional complaint about sports books is that they favour those headline-setters rather than the niche interests, though publishers are fond of pointing out just how popular those big names can be (the first instalment of Keane’s autobiography, for instance, was for some time, the biggest-selling book in Ireland. Note the absence of the word ‘sports’ in that sentence).
We’re not book publishers, though, so we had a broader sweep this year. Don’t be shy about picking up one or two of the recommendations here when you’re on that last-minute blitz through the shops.
Big names or not, you won’t regret it.
Authors: Ronnie Bellew and Dermot Crowe
Publisher: Hachette
Cost: 14.99
This is just made for Christmas reading — as opposed to just Christmas buying.
In recent years there’ve been some efforts where tens of All-Ireland or league finals are recounted blow-by-blow without any modern insight or context; just put a couple of photos of some hurling warriors on the cover and your relative who knows no better has that ‘hurling book’ for you. Hell For Leather is the kind of book a hurling fan should demand, not just be landed with. While the early history of hurling and the championship could make heavy, earnest reading, here those games and its characters are brought to life through the colour and verve of Bellew and Crowe’s writing.
They bring us right back to the first All-Ireland, played in a field in Birr where Tipperary showed up late to play Galway, who had retired to a local hotel for something stronger than tea.
And on it goes, right through to Shane O’Donnell hitting the Cork men for 3-3 15 months ago. A few trainspotter’s quibbles: there’s no Munster or league final featuring the Clare team of 77-78, or any of the Clare-Tipp epics down in Cork in the Loughnane years.
But, as Bellew and Crowe state at the outset, the book is just trying to give a broad flavour of how hurling has evolved through the years. In that it gloriously succeeds. Never has the history of the game been more accessible or fun. We’re already looking forward to a football equivalent.
Authors: Conor Mortimer with Jackie Cahill
Publisher: Hero Books
Cost: €16.99
The one book that will surprise you this Christmas for several reasons but fundamentally one: Conor Mortimer was and remains an athlete who took his football seriously.
To those closest to him, team-mates and managers from John Maughan to Mickey Moran, that much went without saying. However, for the wider public the perception was that the Shrule-Glencorrib man was more a playboy.
But read how he managed to put off cruciate surgery for years to become his county’s highest scorer of all time, how the brickbats and defeats affected him and you will appreciate there’s more to the man than the dyed hair.
Using the 2006 All-Ireland final defeat as a vehicle to punctuate the narrative, Mortimer, with the more than able assistance of ghostwriter Jackie Cahill, tells his story in a frank and at times unvarnished manner.
He was a sportsman who needed to feel some love coming his way. He responded to it. When it wasn’t there, he couldn’t reciprocate.
After finishing this book, you’ll have a deeper appreciation for Mortimer as a footballer and the fact he is a misunderstood character. Certainly a case of not judging the book by its cover in more ways than one.
Author: Paul Galvin
Publisher: Transworld Ireland
Cost: €16.99
Last month, Paul Galvin revealed in an interview that his first draft for “In My Own Words” was 120,000 words. “Transworld were worried because there was too much of it, and it was a bit scattered, and my brain was fried because I had been stuck into it non-stop. So I went to New York and distilled it, and put a bit of order to it.”
We would have liked to have seen those extra words. It’s not that this book isn’t written well — it certainly is — nor does it overlook the motivations of a footballer who broke the Kerry mould and succeed — it does.
But anyone who has tracked Galvin’s fine career with Kerry will come away from reading it feeling more teased than satisfied. There is nothing of the famous black book in which the man chronicled all of those who had slighted him.
We could understand if he didn’t want his autobiography to read like Father Ted’s Golden Cleric speech but it would have given the reader exactly what he or she wanted. As this has been shaped and sculpted all by Galvin’s own hand, it has to be understood that he is not going to give anything away that he doesn’t want to.
A ghostwriter may have been able to squeeze more out of him than himself. That said, it’s worth the purchase to discover something of a footballer who broke rules and defied conventions to achieve handsomely.
His face didn’t fit in Kerry but by the time he was finished he made it so that it was not only acceptable but lauded.
Authors: Anthony Daly with Christy O’Connor
Publisher: Transworld Ireland
Cost: €16.99.
Anyone who has shared Anthony Daly’s company knows how engaging and intoxicating a character the man is.
The challenge for ghostwriter Christy O’Connor was to convey that on paper. O’Connor delivers in spades, the drives the pair shared between Clare and Dublin and back providing him with ample opportunity to channel Daly’s voice into what can only be described as an exceptional autobiography.
Close your eyes after reading a passage or two and you can’t help imagining Daly tilting his head in his own amicable way, gritting his teeth and making his admission.
Brutal honesty fuels the chapters from the tragedies that defined the Clarecastle man’s personal life to his triumphs and trials as Clare and Dublin manager.
He doesn’t so much open a window into his soul to the reader as take the frame out and invite you in. It’s the coursing stories that we enjoyed the most and his tales of craic and camaraderie in pursuing a sport he holds dear. Such yarns are what sustains a man who even in his mid-40s has already had more heartache than most would suffer in a lifetime.
He still stands, though, and O’Connor’s success is in presenting him as a hero you can cheer for.
Losing his father at an all too tender age, then his brother and his business and then having to endure his wife and daughter’s health difficulties, Daly is an example of resilience and steadfastness.
And yet losing matches affects him so greatly that they project him into temporary bouts of depression.
Everything counts for Daly.
In a world which has lost some much of its value, here is one man who knows what things are worth.
Author: John Scally
Publisher: Ballpoint Press
Cost: €14.99
John Scally, a Roscommon native, is uniquely placed to tell the story of the county’s most famous footballer because he forged a deep and lasting friendship with a man who lived an extraordinary life, by any standard.
From humble roots, Earley rose to become Roscommon’s favourite son and one of the most respected players of his generation. He was an iconic figure long before his untimely death in 2010.
His extraordinary playing career spanned three decades and although he never managed to win an All-Ireland in his beloved primrose and blue, Scally beautifully conveys the impact Earley had.
“From the dawn of time identification with heroes has been an integral part of the human condition,” Scally writes. “He will forever remain a true Roscommon icon.”
Earley lived an incredibly full life and his decorated military career is another fascinating chapter in Scally’s book.
At the heart of this updated biography is the story of a family coming to grips with the premature death of their father.
With contributions from Earley’s widow, Mary, and son, Dermot junior, Scally captures the heartbreak they endured as Dermot succumbed to a cruel, degenerative condition – Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
For all that he accomplished, there is an acute sense of loss that such a figure was taken from his family at just 62. His family’s loss was also the GAA’s but his is a life to be celebrated and Scally achieves that in some style.
Authors: Shane Curran with Tommy Conlon
Publisher: Penguin Ireland
Cost: €16.99
Most of us only vaguely knew Shane Curran as the madcap St Brigid’s and Roscommon goalkeeper. A smaller selection of domestic soccer fans would have been aware of him from his time with Athlone Town in the League of Ireland.
That extrovert nature, the penchant to say or do something straight out of left-field, gave a humorous but one-dimensional feel to a character who, in 217 pages of ‘Cake’, explodes that by saying more of value and interest than ten routine sporting autobiographies.
This is a far better book than Brian O’Driscoll’s, which was somehow voted the Irish Sports Book of the Year last month. It also trumps Roy Keane’s, which is a decent read, and yet ‘Cake’ wasn’t even nominated as one of the six contenders.
Ghostwriter Tommy Conlon has been widely praised for capturing Curran’s unique voice and he deserves every bit of it. Curran’s language is authentic and brilliant. Players aren’t injured, they are ‘creeled’ and ‘creased’. His tale captures brilliantly the dual life that top GAA players must lead so we are told of his lengthy career between the sticks as well as his life in business, which started with a milk round and currently involves his own start-up global flood defence company.
Funny stories are way too frequent to mention and, though Curran describes himself as a naturally happy and optimistic person, he has a serious side that manifests itself with pops at those injustices and problems he perceives in Irish sport and society at large.
A joy to read, it is an antidote to the inane.
Author: Michael Foley
Publisher: O’Brien Press
Cost: €16.99
Whenever you or the designated/inspired loved one that will get this for you walks into the bookstore, a word of advice: it might not necessarily be found in the sports section.
It could be in Irish history because it documents such an important period and day in Irish history.
You might find it categorised as a historical thriller or novel, because while it’s factual, it reads like the best of those.
But make sure it’s tracked down, because this is exceptional as it is important. The detail is so vivid, the research so thorough. Take those few devastating minutes as that field turned bloodied.
We learn the Tipperary goalkeeper, with his hands outstretched on the ground, was kicked by a policeman. “You’re one of those gunmen who killed our lads (earlier on that day).” Frank ‘Scout’ Butler looked up and rolled his sleeve to show a regimental tattoo. He was a survivor of the Battle of the Somme. “The last gun I fired was in Europe.”
He’d survive Bloody Sunday too but Mick Hogan was not so lucky. As he tried to roll to a nearby fence the opponent next to him could hear him grunt, “I’m shot.”
The mayhem of that day and those times is recaptured here, while also the value and the glory of the football and the GAA that helped sustain so many.
Already this sports section has ranked it one of the greatest 25 Irish sports books ever. Go and learn why and so much more.
The GAA – A People’s History by Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse (Collins Press, €15.99). Wonderfully illustrated and superbly researched it is a must read of history fans.
The Furlongs — The Story of a Remarkable Family by Pat Nolan (Ballpoint Press, €17.99).
The great Offaly dynasty was clearly a labour of love for the author and he carefully charters the highs and lows of a set of brothers who contributed so much to the Faithful cause.
A Season of Sundays (Sportsfile photographers, €24.95). Another memorable GAA season is beautifully and poignantly catalogued in vivid photography by those fine people in Sportsfile.
Author: Roy Keane with Roddy Doyle
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Cost: €19.99
You know when you’re at the cinema and you see an exciting trailer for a new movie? And then, full of expectation, you go to the movie only to discover that all the best bits were in the trailer?
Roy Keane’s autobiography could easily have fallen victim to the same syndrome. The inadvertently premature release of ‘The Second Half’ resulted in publication by a thousand tweets and the fear that, after such a wholesale gutting, there’d be nothing left to gnaw on bar the rotting head and tail.
Fortunately for all concerned — not least the discerning reader — there turned out to be much more to Keane’s book than those initial headline-grabbers about Alfie Haaland (“Did I try to injure Haaland? Definitely not. But I did try to nail him...”), Peter Schmeichel (“Anyway, Peter had grabbed me, I’d headbutted him...”) and, of course, Alex Ferguson (their falling-out a genuinely raw nerve in the book which Keane’s subsequent publicity blitz did nothing to heal).
In many ways, ‘The Second Half’ is at its most interesting when Keane deals with the move from playing to management at Sunderland and Ipswich, his insights and admissions about the highs and lows of a multi-faceted job all the more arresting for the sense that they quite often seemed to have come as a surprise and sometimes even a shock to the man himself.
Where the overall tone of Keane’s first book, ghost-written by Eamon Dunphy, tended towards the shrill, the sequel — without ever shirking on plain speech — has a more thoughtful, reflective quality which probably owes much to the input of Roddy Doyle.
Keane, by his own admission, is not one for baring his own soul in public but there are times in these pages when he comes closer to revealing his inner self than ever before as, for example, when he says of what he calls his self-destruct button: “(It’s) definitely there. And I suffer for it. With my drinking I used to go missing for a few days. I think it was my way of switching off, never mind the consequences. It was my time. It was self-destructive, I can see that, but I’m still drawn to it. Not the drink – but the bit of madness, the irresponsibility. I can be sitting at home, the most contented man on the planet. An hour later, I go, ‘Jesus – it’s hard work this’.”
The other thing to say about the Roy Keane who comes across in the this book is that, as Doyle has pointed out, he doesn’t “fume” and “blast” and “lash out” half as much as the popular caricature suggests.
Indeed, a lot of the time, the barbed tongue that Ferguson charged was the hardest part of Keane’s body is actually firmly in his cheek, making the ‘The Second Half’ not only an eye-opening and occasionally jaw-dropping read but also, betimes, a genuinely funny one.
Are you reading, Robbie Savage?
Authors: Alan McLoughlin with Bryce Evans
Publisher: Ballpoint Press
Cost: €14.99
Just like his career, Alan McLoughlin has produced a solid, highly respectable, understated and likeable autobiography.
And its opening chapter is much more than that, just like the goal in Windsor Park it recounts was so much more than a goal.
Weaving the low of his cancer scare with the high of that night in November, McLoughlin and ghostwriter Bryce Evans capture our attention immediately and sustain it pretty much all through.
The schoolyears are interesting – he grew up on Maine Road though he’d support and play for United, future Oasis superstar Noel Gallagher was a mate and a classmate – as are his apprenticeship at Old Trafford, playing for — and sometimes standing up to — Jack Charlton, while his account of joining Portsmouth from rivals Southampton and the days and years that ensued illustrates just how pathetic and fickle supporters can be as well as McLoughlin’s own resilience.
Some themes could have been explored more, like how humbling and even humiliating McLoughlin found it encountering the public while working as a delivery service man as his football career wound down. But others are excellently investigated, especially McLoughlin’s Irish identity.
In all the book is well measured; while other sports autobiographies can tend to pad and drag, McLoughlin doesn’t try to build up his story and career as more than it was, weighing in here at a lean, zippy 80,000 words. Over a few hours he’ll provide you with a grin and a pleasant evening, just as he did in Belfast 21 years ago.
Author: Marti Perarnau
Publisher: Arena Sport
Cost: €18.99
In one sense, Pep Confidential could only disappoint. So great is the promise: unlimited, uncensored access to the standout, transformative coach of the era; eyes over his shoulder as he dismantles the European champions to put them back together again.
With that build-up, almost anything Spanish journalist Perarnau could have produced might have left us feeling shortchanged. And I was, a little. Which might be unfair, because there’s some enthralling stuff here, particularly at first as Pep gets his ideas across.
He has already mastered German, but it’s the Bayern players who must learn a new football language. As assistant coach DomEnec Torrent puts it: “It’s like we’re showing them the numbers first, then the days of the week, then verbs, etc.” As the season progresses, there’s frequent insight into Pep’s attention to detail. “I’ll have to speak to Kroos because against United he definitely won’t be able to try that move where he controls and turns to the right, because they’ll anticipate, rob him and start a counterattack.”
Nor is Pep afraid to take responsibility for “the biggest fuck-up of my life as a coach”, admitting he changed his mind twice about Bayern’s formation before the Champions League exit to Real Madrid.
But despite the writer’s unique access, we never truly feel immersed in Bayern’s season.
Inevitable, perhaps, since this is Pep’s story, not the story of his players. Buy it as a primer, a crash-course, in the language of Pep’s football, but not if you to expect the kind of behind-the-scenes frankness where you can smell the dressing-room deep heat.
This isn’t another Only a Game? or The Glory Game.
Author: David Goldblatt
Publisher: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books
Cost: €22.00
David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round is often cited as the most comprehensive history of football written. In The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, he examines whether there is anything to Eric Cantona’s contention that “when you arrive in England for football it’s paradise”.
It certainly isn’t if you’re a member of the Royal family – Goldblatt points out that Prince Charles is a Burnley fan; his son Prince William is an Aston Villa supporter. Goldblatt excels at unpicking the socio-economic forces that affect the game.
Lancashire’s two giants, Liverpool and Manchester United, thrived long after their cities’ industrial peak in 1930.
Why is this? Their prowess reflects a European trend. With the exception of Madrid and Spain, the capital cities of Europe underachieve when it comes to football.
Just look at the roll call of European Cup winners — the teams come from large, provincial cities, which industrialised rapidly, creating a strong working class identity and pool to draw players and crowds. The aristocrats all come from Milan not Rome; Munich and Marseilles rather than Berlin or Paris; Porto over Lisbon; Glasgow over Edinburgh.
And it is an illusion, notes Goldblatt, that football is “big business”. A small elite, core of players (and their agents) make decent coin over a short period, but the turnover of the average Premier League team is about the same as a Tesco store.
Author: Matt Dickinson
Publisher: Yellow Jersey Press, an imprint of Random House
Cost: €22.00
Matt Dickinson makes a telling admission at the end of his biography of England’s World Cup-winning captain.
He hoped he might find some hidden depths to Bobby Moore but speculated after two years of investigation that, as one of England’s 1966 team suggested, there wasn’t much behind that polite facade.
The journey to discover the nub of Moore’s ways is an interesting ride though. Moore was a gargantuan drinker. His motto, according to his old teammate Harry Redknapp, was “win or lose, on the booze”. Even George Best praised Moore’s staying power at the bar, marvelling at his ability to look so unruffled the morning after a session.
He had gravitas unrivalled by his peers. As Hugh McIlvanney once wrote, he left “the swaggering to lesser men”.
He was unusually vain with it. His wife scoffed at his habit of sunbathing with his hands facing the sun so the tan would show up well against his dazzling white shirt cuffs.
Dickinson explores all the mysteries of his life, including the cancer he kept secret from the footballing world in 1964, the preposterous arrest in Bogota on the eve of the 1970 World Cup for shoplifting, the affair which led to the end of his marriage and his decision not to tell his close friends that he was terminally ill with bowel cancer.
The man was unknowable.
Author: Michael Walker
Publisher: deCoubertin Books
Cost: €18.99
You might have wondered why England’s most passionate supporters come from the northeast of the country despite the clubs’ lack of success.
Michael Walker provides some of the answers in his enlightened, contrarian look at the culture and economy behind the region’s three big clubs, Middlesbrough, Newcastle United and Sunderland. “Up there,” as the rest of England calls it, was a frontier economy for two centuries. It had glass, Middlesbrough steel, Newcastle collieries and Sunderland – which used to be so profligate on the transfer market it was called the “Bank of England club” in the 1950s – was “the biggest shipbuilding town in the world”.
It also produced an inordinate amount of the best English football men, including Wilf Mannion, the Charlton brothers, Bryan Robson, Gazza, Alan Shearer, and its greatest managers — Brian Clough and Bob Paisley. It lost its swagger, however, when the shipyards closed and Margaret Thatcher nobbled organised labour and did away with coal. “Increasingly,” as former Sunderland chairman Niall Quinn, who is one of the book’s interviewees, said in despair, “the football club is no longer part of Sunderland’s identity. We are the identity.”
Author: Neal Horgan
Club legend Neal Horgan’s diary of the tumultuous 2008 season which set Cork City on the road to financial ruin, contrasts previous domestic and European highs with the bleak day to day reality of management and footballers struggling to maintain professional standards at a time they can’t be certain when, or even if, their next wage packets will come through.
Of course, City were not the only League of Ireland club to fly high before crashing down to earth so while this gripping read will mean most to the Turner’s Park faithful, both on and off the pitch, it will also strike chords for others in the domestic game who’ve suffered through the agonies of seeing a good club go bad.
This is an unvarnished, unsparing read but the camaraderie of the dressing room means it’s shot through with humour, albeit mainly of the black variety, while Horgan’s passion for the game and the club is also an uplifting thread. Fortunately, that passion would find its mirror image in the supporters who stepped in to rescue Cork City in its hour of need — with the result that, just a few years later, the club has re-emerged as a genuine force in Irish football.
And, after last season’s sensational push for the title came up just short, here is a timely and gripping insider’s account of how City died before it was reborn.
Neal Horgan’s ‘Death Of A Football Club?’ is currently on sale in independent bookstores and due to be available at Waterstones in Cork and Dublin. Also available as an e-book at www.sportsproview.com and via www.corkcityfc.ie
Author: Luis Suarez
Publisher: Headline
Cost: €22.00
When Luis Suarez sat down with a psychologist this summer to go through his issues, the sessions always started with the same question: “Why? Why, Luis, why do you do it?”
The answers he provides for his delinquent behaviour in his autobiography only tell some of the story. This is Luis Suarez Lite. He says he knows “biting appalls a lot of people but it’s relatively harmless”, which is an odd take on it.
He argues convincingly, however, that the suspension for racism in an incident with Patrice Evra in 2011 was harsh. Evra started the exchange in Spanish; Suárez replied, calling him “negro”, which is an accepted term in South American conversation, like calling someone “the fat one”. His own blonde-haired wife, Sofi, calls him “negrito” – the little black one.
The book is strongest on his upbringing. His parents split up when he was nine years of age; his father worked as a concierge and slept in the buildings he worked in. And there are passages during his years playing in Holland before hitting the big time with Liverpool and internationally with Uruguay that are laugh out loud.
He never clicked with Marco van Basten, his boss at Ajax, who used to bring the team to art classes for bonding. The art instructor would shout random words and the players had to paint whatever came into their heads. “The only unifying feeling that created,” he writes, “was: ‘What are we doing here?’”
Author: Hugo Borst
Publisher: Yellow Jersey Press, an imprint of Random House
Cost: €10.99
Who is this strange man, Louis van Gaal? Hugo Borst, a journalist and broadcaster who has covered Dutch football for over 30 years, tries to understand what makes him tick in his book, O, Louis: In Search of Louis van Gaal.
Manchester United’s manager is aggressive with journalists, can be rude in public to his wife, according to Borst, and likes to refer to himself in the third person. Even when he’s in a good mood, his friends say “it’s a bit like having a laugh with Stalin”.
Van Gaal has also, of course, been a successful coach at Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern Munich, and more impressively he’s left a lasting influence at each of these clubs with his rigorous football philosophy. Borst has watched him since he was a teenager on the terraces of Sparta Rotterdam where Van Gaal ambled around as the team’s playmaker, so slow someone remarked he ran as if “he’d swallowed an umbrella”.
He admits his obsession with Van Gaal has “grotesque proportions”. Not a day passes when he doesn’t think about him.
The grotesquery has led to an engrossing read.
Review: Jon Spurling
Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
Cost: €22
A fine rummage through turning points in Arsenal’s history draws on 25 years of interviews with players past and present.
There is much of interest, including an asterix next to the 2004 ‘Invincible’ achievement, where Spurling dwells instead on the loss of the season’s biggest game; the Champions League tie with Chelsea, heralding an oil-fuelled power shift in English football.
But local Gunners of a certain vintage will flick first to Chapter 8: The Rise and Fall of the London Irish, a chronicle of the era when Arsenal often fielded seven players from this island. With Belfast man Terry Neill in charge from 1976, the emergence of an ‘Irish Mafia’ wasn’t universally popular.
Though David O’Leary dismisses the notion of a clique: “Frank (Stapleton), Liam (Brady) and I never really socialised together at all. Frank was teetotal and kept himself to himself, Liam’s best mate at the club was Graham Rix, and I was good pals with Pat Jennings. The “London Irish” thing mattered more to outsiders than it did to any of us.”
Sammy Nelson and Pat Rice were also regulars, with John Devine featuring too. And Spurling recalls an Ulster radio show after the 1979 FA Cup win suggesting if everyone “lived their lives like the ‘London Irish’ then the ongoing troubles would be a thing of the past.” Pat Jennings explained the harmony differently: “Footballers often aren’t all that interested in current affairs.”
Spurling sums up the three Republic of Ireland stars: “O’Leary; loyal to Arsenal almost to a fault. Brady; a passionate lover of the club but fiercely ambitious to play in a team which could genuinely challenge for the title. Stapleton; hungry for success yet something of a lone wolf.”
And despite the cup win, the book considers the era a missed opportunity, as Brady and Stapleton departed for greener pastures.
Brady blamed lack of ambition. “There was enough money in the bank to have signed someone like Bryan Robson and absolutely gone for it. We never did.” The more things change...
Author: Brian O’Driscoll
Publisher: Penguin Ireland
Cost: €19.99
Brian O’Driscoll had already played a couple of times for Ireland by the time Warren Gatland selected him for the summer to Australia in 1999, but he tells a revealing anecdote about the day the squad departed Dublin for Oz.
The callow centre was standing around in the departures lounge in Dublin Airport when RTE’s Colm Murray, a neighbour of O’Driscoll’s in Clontarf, approached and asked for a few words for the Six O’Clock news.
O’Driscoll gave the interview and made an inane remark about how impressive the turn-out was.
His buddies never let him forget it and, clearly, he never allowed himself scrub the memory either. In 15 or so years as Ireland’s most celebrated rugby player, O’Driscoll was the master in front of a microphone and he explains his poker face when dealing with the media further on his autobiography ‘The Test’.
It is a default setting that follows through into the book and the result is a read that throws up a few passages of interest but which ultimately flits all too thinly through the life and times of one of our undoubted greats. Momentous occasions, of which there many in his career both good and bad, are dispensed with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity meaning there is little or no light shed on key events.
That said, a picture of the man does emerge. His reluctance to dig too deeply or to wield the knife is punctured mainly with his dislike of the so-called Lunster fans who, he says, are in his little black book.
He is candid, however, about self-doubts he harboured about his form and his fitness, he opens up on the devastating loss of his friend Barry Twomey and also reveals the effect his subsequent arrest in New York had long after he returned home.
Ultimately, O’Driscoll always carried himself well during his playing days. The image that emerged of a decent guy who happened to possess phenomenal talent is backed up here, but this could have been so much better. There’s an apparent reluctance to prise open the dressing-room door that he regarded as his sanctuary for so long. You feel he has more to give. You could never say that when he walked off the field.
Author: Justine Kyle McGrath
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Cost: £13
Jack Kyle died in November, 2014, having just seen this timely and intimate study published.
His 88 years were each fully and decently lived, and he was a model of humility and civility, a cultured and gifted man.
His exploits on the rugby field in the 1940s and 1950s guaranteed him a sporting immortality, and as a surgeon and clinician he was lauded and decorated.
Jack Kyle had always demurred when encouraged to write an autobiography, or to approve a portrait of his life: partly because of an innate and winning modesty, partly because though rugby had brought him worldwide fame he was determined his sporting career would never define him.
And, as his daughter’s loving and insightful chats with her father over the last two years capture so eloquently, Jack Kyle was, first, a doting father, then a peerless doctor in the most challenging of Asian and African environments.
Justine McGrath undertook this book in the full knowledge that her father’s body was being invaded by an insidious cancer, but she has beautifully celebrated his life with a literate and compelling account of their conversations throughout years of treatment on a range of subjects which the instinctively private Jack finally accepted could have a wider audience.
For the author, as the reader finds out, there was much about her father to discover. Born after he and his wife Shirley had quickly established themselves professionally in the Zambian copper belt town of Chingola, Justine’s memories of Africa were happy but skeletal as she was to be schooled back in Ireland, and then shielded, with her brother, from the fractured marriage which would cause her parent such private pain.
The Grand Slam-winning Kyle reveals himself as a sportsman who found he had a certain talent and worked hard to polish it, and shine it did for his club, for Ulster, and for a then record 46 times for Ireland until he embarked on the medical career abroad which brought him his greatest satisfaction and fulfilment.
This very personal and readable study of a truly great man of sport and medicine is an apt tribute to a vibrant, generous human being, someone who made and nourished friendships energetically, who read voraciously, loved poetry and music, and was inspired by the work and philosophy of Albert Schweitzer.
There are those in Africa still who regard Kyle’s 34 years of surgery and care as mirroring the work of his saintly mentor.
Jack Kyle could have commanded great riches in rugby today, and he never fell out of love with the sport, but he preferred his years in the amateur game, enjoyed every moment until the adventure which characterised his play took him into what he regarded as the most important phase of his life.
And what a life.
Author: Anna Gibson-Steele
Publisher: Hero Books
Cost: €19.99
“Do you want a drag?” These are the first words Peter Clohessy ever spoke to his wife Anna Gibson Steel. And they are also the first words in the book “A Life With Claw” which Anna has written about her famous husband.
Very few players have aroused public interest as much as Peter Clohessy, the famous Young Munster, Munster and Ireland prop forward.
So much about him was controversial that it is something of a surprise that he never joined the legion of those who have published their autobiographies “If I was to do it, I would have fallen out with too many people”, he explained.
“I made loads of friendships over the years playing rugby.”
To concentrate on the darker side of his career would be to do Clohessy a disservice.
By any standards, he was an outstanding player, one of the very few who built his reputation as a tight head prop only to switch to loose head with enormous success.
Having demonstrated his potential with Young Munster, Peter made his first appearance for Munster in 1987 and earned the first of his 54 Irish caps in 1993.
With her husband’s approval, Anna Gibson Steele decided to go the biographical route, prompted largely by one of their children, 8 year-old Harry, after he saw a clip of his dad scoring a try for Ireland.
“He never got to see daddy play,” says Anna in the introduction.
“The idea was to record it for them. It was written from a female perspective. It is light hearted.”
The couple have two other children — Jane, 15, and Luke, 21.
The book tells the story of their life together after that initial meeting at Crescent Comprehensive. Even then, “Claw” liked a cigarette and legend has it that he often had one in his hand just before going out to play a big match!
Given that few sportsmen have their careers and lifestyles detailed by their wives, this is a unique book. The author doesn’t pretend there weren’t difficult moments most
notably the infamous stamp on French lock Olivier Roumat which nearly ended his career and after which he was labelled “the most dangerous man in Irish sport”.
Author: Neil Sagebiel
Publisher: Macmillan
Price: €20.28 (for eBook)
A draw is anathema to many American sports fans but not even the most radical of them fail to be captivated by the story of the 1969 Ryder Cup at Royal Birkdale, where a Great Britain and Ireland side captained by the Scot Eric Brown claimed a hard fought halved match with Sam Snead’s USA.
It was the 18th match in the event’s history and it has gone down in history not for a series of controversies that would also mark future contests such as Kiawah Island or Brookline, but a sporting gesture by Jack Nicklaus on the final green in the final, crucial singles match.
Nicklaus conceded Tony Jacklin a two foot putt on the 18th green that, had he missed it, would have allowed the United States to win. Jacklin was something of a national hero at the time, having won The Open at Royal Lytham just a few months earlier and the Golden Bear was not about to do anything to ruin the life of a man who would become a close friend.
“The Concession” as it has come to be known, has gone down in history as one of the most famous sporting gestures in the history of golf. But the events of the 1969 Ryder Cup have been largely forgotten and in “Draw in the Dunes,” golf historian Neil Sagebiel has done a remarkable job in vividly recreating the scene and bringing the protagonists to life.
Author: Iain Carter
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson
Price: €18.99
Iain Carter is one of the finest sports broadcasters working today and his golf coverage for BBC has been obligatory listening with his broadcasts from The Open, Wimbledon and the Ryder Cup particularly enthralling.
His ability to paint pictures of sporting events with the spoken word is almost unrivalled but in chronicling Europe’s 2014 Ryder Cup victory at Gleneagles, he has proved that he is no slouch at a keyboard either.
Paul McGinley’s triumph as the first Irish Ryder Cup captain is a milestone in Irish sport and his forensic approach to the job is recounted in great detail by Carter, who also revisits the role played by Rory McIlroy in McGinley’s appointment as well as the frosty campaign with Darren Clarke.
The last four chapters deal with the matches themselves and the fallout from an eighth US defeat in the last ten editions with Phil Mickelson’s veiled criticism of Watson’s leadership in the post-singles press conference on Sunday evening arguably the biggest story of the week.
“…as the Associated Press’s Doug Ferguson pointed out,” Carter wrote, “‘It was like going on a date and raving all night about how great your previous girlfriend was.’”
As golf books go, “Showdown” is as good as it gets with all the background shenanigans as well as the golfing drama, brilliantly recounted by a gifted storyteller.
Author: Ross Biddiscombe
Publisher: Constant Sports Publishing
Price: €28.99 (eBook €9.04)
The human stories behind the Ryder Cup are well chronicled but Ross Biddiscombe pulled off a major achievement in researching the fascinating history of what is one of the biggest sporting events in the world.
Not only does he go into to all the behind-the-scenes politics that makes the Ryder Cup such a compelling spectacle, Biddiscombe also brilliantly details the 86-year history of the matches from both a sporting and business standpoint and explains how it grew from a friendly match between professionals from both sides of the Atlantic into the commercial juggernaut we know today.
The products of more than 100 interviews with the key personalities involved from business analysts and golf administrators to historians, agents and TV executives, he delves into the archives of the PGA, the USGA, the PGA of America as well as the Samuel Ryder Foundation to recount the key moments in the event’s history and what may lie ahead.
The book features some fascinating interviews with past players, including Brian Huggett, who says candidly, “Looking back, we had no bloody chance,” to triumphant 2008 US skipper Paul Azinger, who has no doubt what gives Europe its edge.
“I’ve always said that the Americans’ love for the Ryder Cup is in our heads, but for the Europeans, it’s in their blood,” Azinger says in the book. “There’s a difference. The Ryder Cup means everything to them.”
Author: Gary Witheford with Brough Scott
Publisher: Racing Post Books
Cost: €29.80
Gary Witheford first laid eyes on this exceptional yearling in the autumn of 2006. The Lambourn based ‘natural horseman’ was in Ireland at the request of John Oxx, who was testing Witheford’s assertion that he could ‘break’ a young horse intwenty minutes, a process that traditionally could take up to six weeks.
It took Sea the Stars about five minutes to cop on. Even then he was faster than everything else, and it immediately became clear to all present that this teacher had an unusual gift.
With the help of the veteran writer, Brough Scott, Witheford has committed his story to paper and that old truism in racing is again proven — the people are far more interesting that the beasts.
It is a brutally honest book. Here’s the tale; an insecure childhood, RAF parents, sexual abuse, school for troubled teenagers, drift into racing stables, obsession with winners, suicidal thoughts, then ultimately redemption and late-life balance mined from his deeply intuitive understanding of the language of horses, their hopes, fears, needs, rhythms and aspirations.
Witheford’s fundamental thesis is that centuries of tradition have bequeathed grave misunderstanding in how we interact with horses (and zebras, llamas). His job, he says, is not to “break horses, but to ‘start’ them, encourage their basic flight instincts, but harness it”. The horse is a herding animal. If it accepts your leadership you can channel this control into happiness and performance.
This book is an interesting examination on a lower lit corner of the horse industry and the dark corners of a once troubled human soul. Each chapter is enlivened by the inclusion of a short essay by the always incisive Scott.
Author: Nick Townsend
Publisher: Century
Cost: €22.35
The film ‘The Usual Suspects’ is built around the myth of Keyser Söze, a man whose reputation for ruthlessness keeps his enemies fretting well into the small hours, wondering when and how he’ll torture them next.
By the end, you are still unsure if he is man or legend. And that’s about the only difference between Söze and Barney Curley. Barney really does exist, and his enemies, the insomniac Bookies, lie awake, wondering.
His 40-year history as both designer and architect of complex betting coups are part of folklore and Nick Townsend dips in and out of them in a forensic dissection of the greatest win ever, the plot of May 2010. It’s a work rich in technocratic betting detail and colourful in character description.
Curley’s coup: sneak four long-absent horses unnoticed into moderate races and activate a small army of ‘putters on’ to bet them in complex multiples only in betting shops. The trick was, in an age where bookies can hear a digital pin drop, to go unnoticed and preserve outrageous odds until all the dosh was down.
Three of the four horses won, enough to lighten the tightest of satchels by over four million quid. The book rests on its fascinating protagonist, a daily mass-goer motivated mostly by the thrill of the chase. Curley these days gives much of his money to Zambian charities so the coup was largely an exercise in wealth redistribution, North to South. Once a clerical student, Curley still keeps his maker close. “The big thing He’ll be looking out for is how did we treat our fellow human beings,” he says.
Authors: Kevin Pietersen with David Walsh
Publisher: Sphere
Cost: €28.99
The second Test between England and South Africa at Leeds in 2012 was Kevin Pietersen’s finest moment on a cricket pitch.
It was also the match that first highlighted the deep divisions that existed between the mercurial South African born batsman and his less talented England team-mates.
Arrogant, self-centred and secure in talents, KP blasted 90mph deliveries all around the Headingley ground like a competitive father playing against his children in the back garden.
It was one of the finest innings ever by an England batsman.
Days later, it emerged that during the match he had been part of a text message chain with members of the South Africa team which included disparaging remarks about his own captain, Andrew Strauss.
And so began the long estrangement of Pietersen, the “disruptive influence” eventually sacked from the England squad in February after the Ashes humiliation in Australia.
The Scottish footballer Steve Archibald once described team spirit as “an illusion glimpsed only in the aftermath of victory”. Pietersen’s book, written by the award winning Irish sports journalist David Walsh, confirms the former Tottenham and Barcelona forward’s maxim in 324 pages of scoresettling, character assassination and angry selfjustification. Writers of sports books often talk of trying to capture the “voice” of their subject, and David Walsh has certainly managed to do that in KP: The Autobiography.
But is anyone bothered to listen?
Author: Emma O’Reilly
Publisher: Bantam Press
Cost: €19.99
She was there for the rise and the fall of one of sport’s greatest ever fraudsters, so if anyone is qualified to talk about what went on when the curtains were drawn and Lance Armstrong plotted victory, it’s Ireland’s Emma O’Reilly. She is the woman who witnessed Armstrong’s indomitable rise from unknown Texan to cancer survivor to global superstar.
She is the woman who knew him — and still knows him — better than most others, having spent over a decade working closely as a team soigneur (servant, or assistant).
O’Reilly was part of Team Lance, Planet Armstrong, a place where lies were frequently told, the rules were often broken and with little repercussion.
O’Reilly despised what she saw the deeper she delved into this land inhabited by Lance Disciples. She gave an interview to The Sunday Times voicing her concerns about Lance’s victories and she paid a heavy price for it.
This section of her life is charted in phenomenal detail — Armstrong called her an ‘alcoholic’ and a ‘whore’ and even suggested she had ‘interfered’ with riders.
Throughout it all, O’Reilly stuck to her story and was vindicated when Armstrong’s lie was made public — by himself.
He confessed to Oprah Winfrey that O’Reilly was telling the truth, that he had been cheating, as she said, for years. O’Reilly was one of the few people to come out of the saga with her reputation intact.
What’s amazing, to this reader anyway, is how O’Reilly actually forgives Lance. The man himself writes the foreword, showering the Irish woman with praise. This man tried to destroy her, but she has risen above that, extended her hand of friendship to Lance again.
It tells you an awful lot about O’Reilly; impartial, honest, brave. This is the definitive account of those years.
Author: Herbie Sykes
Publisher: Aurum Press
Cost: €27.50
The cyclist Dieter Wiedemann was a star of the Peace Race and a pinup for East German sport. But the 23-yearold was also in love, with a West German girl on the other side of the Iron Curtain. East Germany was not recognised by the International Olympic Committee until 1968, 19 years after the formation of the state.
So for the three Olympic Games between 1956 and 1964, a mixed team of Eastern and Western athletes represented Germany.
The top Eastern and Western cyclists competed in a home and away trial race, with the fastest selected to represent Germany in the Olympics. Wiedemann resolved to reunite with Sylvia, and saw the 1964 Tokyo Olympic qualifier as his chance.
On a training ride ahead of the trial race in West Germany, he turned a corner and just kept on cycling until he reached Sylvia and her family. Herbie Sykes’ remarkable account of Wiedemann’s life contains a happy ending. Wiedemann married Sylvia, and rode the Tour de France as a professional in 1967.
But Wiedemann’s family back in East Germany paid the price for his disloyalty. His father lost his job, while his talented rider brother was never allowed to race in the Peace Race, the Eastern Bloc’s equivalent to the Tour de France. Sykes, who has previously written three books about Italian cycling, intricately weaves the first-person testimonies of Dieter, Sylvia, friends and family, teammates and opponents with newspaper cuttings, photographs and the family’s declassified Stasi files.
The Race Against The Stasi highlights the petty bureaucracies and paranoia of the East German state, and how totalitarian regimes use sport as a political tool. It is a love story, a sports book and a history lesson in 399 pages.
Author: Killian Jornet
Publisher: Penguin
Cost: €12.99
There’s something about Killian Jornet’s writing that makes his feats seem possible to every one of us. It’s easy to see ourselves in him; he’s a normal guy from a normal family, but the difference between him and others is his sheer desire to break every single record going with regard mountain running, endurance running and ultra-marathons.
We all have bucket lists, but Jornet’s are all endurance ones. One of them happens to be running up Everest next year without an oxygen mask. He’s already ran up Kilimanjaro in the fastest ever time.
What keeps the reader intrigued is his constant quest for improvement and how he goes about that.
For amateur sports men and women, there’s a lot to learn — especially if they feel they’ve reached a ceiling in their own chosen pursuit.
It was little surprise to see the book nominated for the William Hill sportsbook of the year award and it was even less of a surprise to see him named Adventurer of the Year by National Geographic magazine. He’ll make his way onto a lot of coffee tables this year.
Scribe: My Life in Sports (Bob Ryan, Bloomsbury) recounting the glory days of a legend of American sportswriting. Everest: The First Ascent The Untold Story of Griffith Pugh, the Man Who Made it Possible (Harriet Tuckey, Rider Books). The type of book you’d expect Bear Grylls to have on his bedside locker. You Can’t Make This Up (Al Michaels with L Jon Wertheim, WM Morrow). The life of a US sportsbroadcasting icon who uttered the immortal line: “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” as the amateur US students shocked their USSR opponents in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.
Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sport (Rob Steen, Bloomsbury, €27.00). Rob Steen’s charming, 500-page book on why we are obsessed with sport and its offshoots like gambling.
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