Tommy Martin: Sporting artists like Richie Hogan allow us to say ‘I was here. I was alive’

Watching Hogan and the other virtuosos in action last weekend was to make you feel something, the basic requirement of art and something we are rather in need of at the moment. If that’s all that sport is for now, art for art’s sake, then that’s enough

Richie Hogan’s four touches in the 57th minute will be remembered long after the destiny of the 2020 Leinster hurling title is forgotten. Photo by Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

“The true artist,” George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at 70, sooner than work at anything but his art.”

I’m not sure whether this is true, but it does make artists sound appealingly gangsta. Pottering with paints or scribbling short stories in your spare time? An enthusiastic hobbyist you may be, but unless your mum is down a coalmine, an artist you are not.