Spirits lifted in Bantry – Hitchens would be proud
Our crises are usually brought on by a viewing of All The President’s Men, but restructuring the television package in the house recently meant Turner Classic Movies went by the wayside, so those agonies of worthiness have subsided more than somewhat.
However, we finally caught up with the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens during the week and realised the value that the great man — commentator, reporter, world-renowned atheist, bon viveur of some stamina and all-round intellectual — places on sport is roughly equivalent to the importance he’d assign to a quick decade of the rosary.
It’s not a matter of extrapolating his opinion from subtle hints, as in his dismissal of a minor titled gentleman as “an especially vain member of the Royal family”, an aside that covers all such creatures in a cloak of self-regard. However, if you find yourself inclined to draw dangerous parallels between Hitchens’ disregard for religion and his disdain for sport then the ground begins to shift a little under your feet.
With that in mind there was surely some sly cosmic joke being played when this column wound up in Bantry yesterday.
Ostensibly it was to write about wind-surfing there, but on a bright spring day, heading to the west Cork town there was enough evidence to convince even Christopher Hitchens of the value of sport, if not exactly the existence of God, in creating such a day. All the way down, as the sunshine lolled across the hillsides, the head was shaking in the car as we felt sorry for Hitchens and his short-sightedness.
That feeling of superiority lasted exactly until we fetched up at the site of the Irish Windsurfing Championships at the airfield outside Bantry, an event becalmed, literally, by the lack of wind. (No doubt Mr Hitchens would have appreciated the historical ironies: Bantry Bay, still as the surface of a mirror yesterday, was anything but a couple of centuries ago when an invading party of French soldiers and sailors were defeated by the strength of the wind and had to withdraw. A statue to the man who organised that expedition, Theobald Wolfe Tone, faces eternally down the channel from the town square in Bantry, with what a writer of bad thrillers might term an exasperated smile playing on his lips).
We were assured by the organisers, bigsurf.ie, that the wind had been perfect the previous day, and even as we write we know that the wind is no doubt perfect there today, but yesterday, with the mist covering the hills and reaching down between the trees to curl lazily through to the water’s edge, the scene was reminiscent of a freeze-frame from the movie Excalibur.
Unfortunately, the emphasis was on the freeze rather than the movie.
However, even someone with the exacting moral standards of Mr Hitchens would have found plenty to applaud in the weekend’s action. For instance, use of the airfield where the events are held is facilitated by Mrs Brigitte Wagner-Halswick, who is closely involved in fundraising for Bantry Hospice, and the windsurfers responded by raising money for the hospice.
The first port of call in a justification of sport over the weekend would have been one of the big beasts of Saturday or Sunday, a Heineken Cup or Allianz Football League game, with the crowds and hype. An event like the windsurfing championships — intimate, connected, friendly — wasn’t that obvious. For that reason it carried a lot more force.
Anyway. Home by circuitous routes, thanks to much of west Cork being shut down by a motor-cycling race (insert your own joke about karma). Back at base we duly rooted out the Hitchens book again, and stumbled upon this passage about the author and his father.
“We had a round of nine holes that somehow went well for both of us, and then he treated me to a heavy ‘tea’ in the clubhouse where, if nothing much got said, there was no tension or awkwardness.
“It was the closest I ever came, or felt, to him. There was a very soft and beautiful dusk, I remember, as we drove slowly and quietly home through the purple-and-yellow gorse of the moors.”
The man himself might think it a backhanded compliment, but what a sportswriter Hitchens would have made.
Scratch that. He’d think it a backhanded insult.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
