Michael Moynihan: Johnny Pilkington and hurlers shooting from the lip
Johnny Pilkington of the Offaly 1994 All-Ireland winning Jubilee team as the team were honoured in 2019. 'Nowadays it just seems to be a little bit dull,' he said of the lack of characters in modern GAA
Thanks, then, to Johnny Pilkington of Offaly for appearing on Laochra Gael last week and reminding us all of ourselves in the nineties, when we all thought we were bould out, with that the preferred spelling.
The nineties, eh? Even in the Offalyman’s own sport few decades seem to have lasted so long: Cork opened the decade with the first leg of the Double, but the game that team played looks a century removed from the game being played by the next Cork team to win an All-Ireland nine years later.
Looking back now Pilkington’s career appears to show the fork in the road, the cigarette-puffing wizard coming up against the new physical regimes, the last free spirit before the erosion of personality.
In a pre-programme interview Pilkington made some astute points, even if he was (understandably) a little weary at having to skewer the notion that he and his teammates were 24-hour-party-people (“To play in the games we played in and to play as long as we did,” he said, “You’re just not going to do that with the supposed social life”).
He referred to the general lack of personality to be found in the modern inter-county player - or, in the interests of accuracy all round - the lack of personality as revealed to the general public. Pilkington pointed out correctly that these players are no doubt full of character within the team environment, but the personae presented to the outside world . . .
“Nowadays it just seems to be a little bit dull,” he said.
“Ye’re the reporters, maybe ye’ve a different output on that than I would have but there doesn’t seem to be those characters but no doubt there are, no doubt they are. But they’re just not coming across in the media.”
Why is that? Can we put it all down to autres temps, autres mœurs? Are we wrong when remembering the nineties as an era of GAA stars unburdening themselves of their deepest thoughts to a soundtrack of Oasis (or Blur) while drinking Caffreys and wearing boot-cut jeans?
Well, we may be. But the obvious point made by many viewers of the programme, and a few of its participants, was that even in his own time there were few personalities as vivid as Johnny Pilkington.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be as hard on the modern-day player then, given that the vast majority of those who preceded them weren’t as voluble as we might like to think. What made Johnny Pilkington stand out was his inclination to say what he thought - as rare a starting point then as it is now.
We might be viewing some of the question-and-answer routines of the past through rose-tinted glasses as well, come to that. Everyone chuckles at the famous ‘put me down for what I said last year’ line Ger Power dished out at a Kerry press call decades ago, but was it all too cosy?
Compare, for instance, the press launch for Cork GAA’s new sponsorship deal last Thursday.
The deal with Sports Direct has drawn what might politely be called an adverse reaction in some quarters, given the company’s terrible reputation on workers’ rights. The deal has also drawn praise for being brokered at all, given we are in the middle of a pandemic.
Yet the only person who has addressed those issues, even semi-officially, was Cork hurler Patrick Horgan at that launch last week. At the time of writing, I saw nobody else in a position of power in Cork GAA addressing concerns raised about the partnership on the record.
His football counterpart at last Thursday’s launch, Ian Maguire, also fielded questions on Sports Direct - only a Cork person would say he knew the brand as “a shop in Blackpool” - but he had his hands full with the Cork footballers’ excursion to Youghal beach, and the proposed suspension for manager Ronan McCarthy arising from said trip.
Those interviews were Thursday morning. Laochra Gael screened that night. Interesting to see decades of the player experience compressed into a 12-hour span.
Even as you read this the Super Bowl will have come and gone, so you know the result.
What you don’t know - and what I want to know - is whether Americans really ate 20 million pounds of cheese yesterday watching the game.
This fact does come with something of a health warning (though not as much of a health warning as 20 million pounds of cheese, ho ho), given it was widely publicised by the organisation Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin. This is the agricultural equivalent of a group called Catholics of Rome praising the Pope, but that is a lot of cheese, no matter how you slice it (stop - ed).
A US media report explained that this quantity is “enough to fill every NFL field with an enormous cheese board, before even including crackers, charcuterie or other snacks, according to the farmers group. It’s also 1.7 million wheels’ worth of cheese.” This is a level of writing so far beyond my reach that all I can do is applaud, though it also raises an interesting question.
What is the mass digestible consumed more than any other on big sports days here? Having lived through a Super Bowl or two in the States, I don’t think there is an Irish equivalent, a sports day where you chew your way from morning to night.
Or maybe I’m wrong? If you have a sports event that only works if you eat your own weight (in solid dairy products or otherwise) by all means let me know.
A by-product of the lockdown (see elsewhere) has been a serious deterioration in my trackie-pants game: I am now down to a battered Gap effort and a weary O’Neill’s.
A genuine question, then: what is the appropriate sportswear-pants for the likes of me?
From my morning walk I see those in their twenties favour the Gym + Coffee look, while fitter thirty-somethings opt for tight-tight leggings (black) as they know it’s their last shot at that style.
The roaring forties wear something branded and comfortable (Man Utd, Munster) while the older cohort are left with . . . what? Adidas classics? North Face technical pants? Farmer’s overalls?
All advice gratefully received.
Because we face another few weeks of Level Five, I felt entitled to get a couple of books online that I was hankering for.
One of them is Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association by Terry Pluto, one of the funniest sports books of all time. I flicked through it one day about 25 years ago and fell around laughing: it’s only taken quarter of a century to catch up with it.
The other is I Want To Thank My Brain For Remembering Me by the great, great Jimmy Breslin, which is half-memoir, half-account of an operation on his brain. The asides about New York in the seventies I expected from Breslin’s book, and they didn’t disappoint. A lengthy paean to the joys of Bantry and the Anchor Bar in particular was more of a surprise.
JB Number One. Still.
