A labour of love for hurling star
It’s a typical Saturday evening in Dublin, as below the TV, revellers in a heaving Temple Bar hostelry swirl happily through the lounge and glassed smoking area. A trio of musicians feed the tourists a diet of Irish music to complement the half pints of cold Guinness, while colourful hen parties funnel through the swinging double doors.
At the bar, at the centre of what is an unusual cast of characters, uninterested in the televised action, is a Wexford senior hurling star (who has ‘hurled on Canning before’) – but is, at the moment, much more engaged in a very different sport.
Meet Stephen Nolan, a 23-year-old UCD graduate and Model County centre-back. The Faythe Harriers clubman is chief executive of Kama Lifestyles – a company with the stated aim of teaching Ireland’s men how to ‘attract and meet’ their opposite number – women.
Nolan towers over 6’2” tall, his cartoon biceps test the sleeves of a fitted black shirt and for the past eight hours he’s been teaching these lucky guys – who’ve paid €300 for a two-day boot camp – how to approach and, with some luck, seduce women. Game on, Ger.
IT’S lunchtime, earlier that Saturday, in a busy city centre hotel as those same hen and stag parties noisily drag their bags though the automatic doors to reception. My new classmates and I, seated under a banner which embarrassingly screams ‘Kama Lifestyles – Dating Training Company’ are led to our make-shift lecture theatre upstairs.
Nolan – a teacher by training – established this innovative venture with 33-year-old Turkish business partner, and fellow PUA (pick-up artist), Emre Ilkme earlier this year. “We train people in how to make a good first impression. It’s like sales because sometimes you go up to a woman and they might reject in the first three seconds,” Nolan says.
Dating coaching has meant big business globally since the publication four years ago of what has become a chat-up line bible, The Game, by seducer savant Neil Strauss. And though Nolan insists his courses are geared more towards relationships, if we’re not playing The Game, it’s certainly a similar code.
The first seminar with Emre – or Blue as he’s known in this milieu – begins with some pop psychology. He tells us, importantly, that we are the ‘winning sperm’, taught about the changing politics of sex as tribal roles become irrelevant and quietly reassured that we won’t get our teeth knocked out by upset boyfriends.
Furrowing our brows, we attempt to understand ‘the inner game’; how to look after yourself, spirituality, what it takes to be an alpha male. When we’re shown National Geographic footage of a gorilla invading another’s territory, as the impressed females look on, I know I’m not in Kansas anymore.
After a pleasant half-time tea break and chat with the rest of the group – these normal lads have travelled from Sligo, Galway, Meath, and beyond – Nolan takes the class.
If Blue revealed the theoretical table of elements on which this science was founded, then Nolan has us gamely decanting love potions over a Bunsen burner.
We’re shown, comically, a clip of Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis in Top Gun to illustrate a point in asserting power. But Nolan is yet closer to Cruise as the sermonising Frank Mackey in Magnolia. He demonstrates how to initiate a conversation with a group of women (known as a ‘set’ interestingly, as if they’re badgers), how to ‘build value’ in their eyes, stay out of the dreaded friend zone and get into a position of power, physically. This is an expert at work.
Questions are patiently answered and we play out different situations amongst ourselves like teenagers at a slumber party practising how to unclip a brazier. The instructors replay past glories and nervous students scribble furiously on notepads.
And they better, bloody, scribble. Within a few hours we’re led like a well turned-out chain gang down Dame Street for ‘in field’ training. It’s all well and good twirling each other around Jury’s Inn of a Saturday but this will road test our newly-acquired skills in front of an unforgiving live studio audience.
THE hurler with a National League medal in his arse pocket – but whose season this year has been scarred by injury – has also known ridicule of course, especially since he was outed as a relationship guru. “You always get the slagging; but most of the lads I hurl with are my friends and they know what I’m like anyway,” he shrugs.
Nolan was with the county panel at a training get-away, however, in the west during the winter when, one night as he made to leave the table, manager Colm Bonnar broached the unusual subject for the first time. “Stephen?” the he deadpanned, “when’s the next boot camp?”
Now, we too were to have the darkest corners of our character crudely illuminated by the UV light of a mocking public. Split into two groups we head, nervously, to city centre pubs. And we’re a good looking shower, no doubt. Differing wildly in age, background and style of clothes we look like the most diverse group of friends since Ghostbusters 2, shuffling over the threshold of The Temple Bar before each buying a drink for ourselves.
I, not unusually, hug the bar counter like I’m lost at sea, gripping some deadwood. But within minutes, Nolan jockeys me through to a snug where I’m confronted with the terrifying sight and sound of five leering, boisterous Liverpudlian women, in Dublin to celebrate a 40th birthday amongst their number.
The hurler confidently drags one from her high stool, twirls her on her toes and sits himself in the puzzled tourist’s chair, while exclaiming that she must have once been a ballerina. This is a well-rehearsed manoeuvre that we’ve been taught earlier, designed to embed oneself in a set. But I can’t help but cringe and hurriedly make an ill-advised joke about Lily Savage and the Nutcracker.
I’m supposedly in the vital wingman role and as Nolan – who doesn’t drink – turns his back on the rest of the group to isolate his mark, my sole purpose is to keep her bemused looking friends occupied.
Now is the time to feed them pre-fabricated tales, display positive body language and ‘pump positive energy’. Now is the time to be a man.
The on-screen timer indicates it’s coming up to half-time in the match in Semple. Canning plucks a sliotar from the Thurles horizon on the edge of the square, evades Eoin Cadogan’s close attention and releases a typical arrow goalwards, only for Donal Óg Cusack to parry miraculously at the town end goal. The pitch-and-yaw of white-hot championship hurling is not unlike this dating game, I idly ponder, absent-mindedly abdicating all wingman responsibilities, as the Scouse women start to dance while gently teasing their friend who’s pinned against a cigarette machine by an intercounty GAA player.
“Sport takes balls,” says Nolan afterwards, “and so does this. But the thing is the more you practise something like hurling, the better you get. And that’s the case too with relationships and approaching women especially. It’s about practise.”
Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter @adrianrussell
* Kama Lifestyles will hold a boot camp in Cork on August 29 and 30. Visit kamalifestyles.com for details.
