Colin Sheridan: The sport I wanted was all around me — I just never chose to look
Tony Browne from Dublin preparing to dive into the sea at the Forty Foot at Sandycove in Dublin back in May when it reopened to the public after the first lockdown. When sport locked down, some turned to the sea as their outlet for activity. Picture: David Fitzgerald
“The days have no numbers…”
— Fionn Regan, Abacus
THE River Corrib is empty. No college crews rowing to the din of a cranky cox. So too, the Swamp. No schoolboys from the Bish, walking the town in their boots and gear at lunchtime, down to kick a ball before returning to class, filthy but happy, a contentment only teens can feel.
The playing pitches that stretch from the Claddagh to Mutton Island, normally populated by living creatures of every age, from the unsteady toddler trying to pick up puddles, to the pensioner working on his wedge play, lie idle. Dangan, too, sits silent; the clack of hockey ball on stick sadly absent. No Collingwood. No Sigerson. No Fitzgibbon. No City Harriers running fartlek on the floodlight track. There is nobody now, save for the walkers on the prom, themselves keen to be socially distant, and the journeyman runners, whose wink and elbow language of delight endures, though filtered through masks and snoods.
Sport in Galway is no longer the preserve of terra firma — it has gone the way of the fisherman, it has gone out to sea. Dozens of swimmers in the Atlantic, and a solitary paddleboarder with a dog riding shotgun. This is the landscape of lunacy that gives respite to those brave enough to leave their worries with their wallets on the beach.
More of that anon.
Ever the Mayo sceptic, I have long lamented the lack of chip on Galway’s shoulder. Happy to call it home, happier still to publicly malign the ease with which it conducts its business. A town that thrives on the promise of tomorrow. No guilt, no curses and, crucially, no memory. A bad Gaelic football season and a relegated Galway United are quickly forgotten by the Friday night of race week. There was no sporting loss too severe that meeting Paul Rudd on a stag weekend in the Kings Head wouldn’t cure. At least, that’s what I thought. I know better now; there has been no greater sporting tragedy to befall this town, or any in this country, than Covid-19 — a phenomenon so indiscriminate in its paralysation of places and people, it has even humbled Galway, the city that never weeps.
Kids change everything. My contrarian view of a town without a sporting soul was dismantled once I started bringing my two down the Swamp to play soccer on Saturday mornings with their local club, West United. It was their first exposure to organised sport in Ireland, and my first glimpse of what goes on behind the curtain.
The sherpa-like dedication of coaches and administrators, patiently guiding six-year-olds through well-thought-out drills, blew out the notion that this might be some glorified babysitters club.
I watched, dumbfounded, as my boy looked attentively at his coach — a man he had just met — with something resembling reverence and respect, a reaction I had failed to inspire in him in six years of trying.
My little girl, too, while much more tentative in her approach, watched wide-eyed as girls just like her got to kick the shins off boys for fun. She’d be ready next Saturday, she told me, three Saturdays in a row.
It was all too brief. Six and four-year-olds should not have to peddle in nostalgia; yet every week now, we reminisce about their time playing with West United as if they were Saint and Greavsie. All the hours I spent watching them, agonising over whether they were enjoying it or not; I needn’t have worried, for now, every time we pass the Swamp, we discuss what the first session back will be like. We set up drills in the back yard and we execute them just as Brendan (the coach he so respects) would have done. I get corrected regularly on my ball-striking.
If nostalgia is an unnatural fit for little kids, so too is hearing them discuss a pandemic in the language of a virologist. “Corona” is part of their vocabulary now, like Pokémon or Calpol. It’s too easy to forget how short their lives have been, and how much of those lives have been dominated by this insidious inertia that has afflicted their worlds.
Not only are the sports fields empty, but so too are the playgrounds and the skateparks. They don’t have birthday parties anymore. The saddest part is they don’t even expect to.
In some respects, they are the lucky ones. I have a nephew, just turned 16. He plays basketball for Galway district, Gaelic football for his club Killanin, and got hooked on golf last summer. What now for him and his peers? Where does all that energy go?
The sea. Sceptics such as myself could parody sea swimming as just another Galway fad, with dry-robes the uniform of a guerilla army of pan-generational hipsters, but, as these Covid days become weeks and months, the sight of Galwegians of every age, colour, and creed abandoning their clothes and walking with careful steps to the Baltic embrace of the Atlantic is a panacea for these tortured times. Some of them have been going all their lives, most of them recent converts to the life aquatic. There can be nothing contrived about such a naked act; if sport is a metaphor for life, there is no truer form than stripping down and submitting yourself to nature every day.
What is true in Galway is true in Bantry and Belfast, and while watching Connacht play Newport Gwent Dragons on a wet Sunday offers far more relief than I ever thought possible, it is not that, nor inter-county football, nor League of Ireland that we really need.
They help, sure, but what we need is our kids playing sports with their friends again — learning, laughing, falling, and getting up again. It turns out the sport I wanted was all around me — I just never chose to look. I will never take it for granted again.
