Fallen giants leave Ireland a poorer nation for 2011
The writer himself would hardly admit to being in the first flush of youth, and in the course of a long and varied career he’s had occasion to pitch up in some fairly far-flung fields.
Proving that not all journalists spend their time at the mahogany ridge of the local hotel, however, he was able to detail the final resting place of many a childhood hero from the sporting fields. He’d even managed to unearth the location of the grave of William Webb Ellis in France, where he’d sipped a Ricard in memory of the man who founded the game of rugby.
Such a piece would give an Irish journalist a fair amount of petrol to buy this year in particular, never mind the drink-driving implications and forgetting, if that were possible, the new ice age everyone is suffering through.
Quite a few giants fell in 2010, and few were bigger than Moss Keane.
The big rugby star’s departure certainly created a lot of room in the pantheon of latter-day sporting icons. Keane had the particular gift of appearing so familiar to thousands of sports fans – not even rugby or GAA supporters in particular — that many of them felt they knew him: a natural affinity that can’t be faked no matter how hard you try, and God knows how many sportspeople and sundry other ‘celebrities’ have tried it.
A first step on a ‘Keatingesque’ journey around Ireland, then, would bring you to the quiet surrounds of St. Michael’s Cemetery in Portarlington, where a man intimately identified with Kerry, and Lansdowne in the capital, is lain.
Another man who personified his own place also sleeps now in a different county. Dermot Earley, not unlike Moss Keane, was a larger-than-life figure. He personified old-fashioned football virtues: high fielding. Clean kicking. He ended a lengthy career without an All-Ireland medal, but some men don’t need a trinket to endorse their greatness. Dermot Earley was one.
Yet the man who carried his county on his shoulders for almost two decades was laid to rest in St Conleth’s Graveyard in Newbridge, quite a distance from Roscommon, which idolised him.
Only fitting, maybe, given the efforts of his son for the Kildare footballers in the last two decades.
Keep heading north. A sports star who didn’t stir from his own even in death was Mick Higgins, the star of Cavan football, who passed away last January.
Higgins took a series of records with him. The last survivor of the county’s All-Ireland winners in the Polo Grounds in New York, back in 1947, Higgins was also the last man to captain Cavan to an All-Ireland final, back in 1952.
If you’d said then that they’d be over half-a-century waiting for their next title the laughter would have echoed from Bailieborough to Cootehill and back.
In one of his last interviews Higgins said he wished to be remembered as a clean player who was never put off: duly noted. You’d have to point the car to Virginia to pay your respects at his graveside.
While you’re in that neck of the woods you could keep going, to just north of Belfast and Carnmoney Cemetery. Alex Higgins is there and hopefully is more at peace now than he was towards the end of what lazy journalists like to call a colourful life. If Frank Keating’s Ricard would be apt anywhere, it’s here.
There are others, of course, not all of them Irish.
Only the other day Enzo Bearzot died, and if that name doesn’t jerk you backwards in time to the early eighties and the days of Conti and Altobelli, I won’t embarrass you. A few days before him Bob Feller passed away: as a seventeen-year-old Feller walked into the major leagues in baseball in 1936, threw out seventeen batters – and then headed back to finish high school. Sixty years afterwards he said he knew he was good, and had a fair idea of his chances of making it big: “I didn’t exactly fall off the turnip truck.”
You don’t need to head to Italy to sip a glass of Verdicchio to pay homage to Enzo, or kill a cold Pabst Blue Ribbon in memory of Rapid Robert, the Van Meter Heater.
They have their own to remember them, and you have your own to remember here.
Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
