This class act ticks all the right boxes
Last Tuesday evening, your columnist was preparing to shoot off the following day for a friendly sit-down with a well-known GAA player, an arrangement put in place the previous week.
On Wednesday morning, right in the middle of Dora The Explorer’s mambo dance — which is about eight o’clock if you are familiar with the Nick Jr programming schedule — a text arrives from the same player: his manager has put the halters on. No sit-down.
Cue your columnist steaming slightly as Dora and Boots dance their way to Daisy’s birthday party.
This is the kind of thing that messes up the day rightly, the last minute change of mind. Creates a mess of breakfast and leaves you in bad humour until at least the late afternoon.
What made things worse was the fact that the book on our bedside table for the last few nights was Jon Ronson’s The Pyschopath Test. Subtitle? A journey through the madness industry.
While we can’t recommend it highly enough as an eye-opener about what is, as Ronson puts it, an industry — where else are you going to learn exactly how many significant mental illnesses were catalogued in a single noisy back room in the 70s — it’s dangerous reading for one simple reason. Ronson outlines how one man, Bob Hare, came up with the Hare PCL-R checklist: the psychopath checklist which is now used all over the world, a list of qualities which confirm or deny one’s inherent psychopathic tendencies.
The only trouble is, as Ronson says, once you’re familiar with the basic tool of psychopath-spotting, you’re inclined to use it in many and varied social settings. (There’s a hilarious interlude when Ronson has a disagreement with a hotel concierge while waiting for Hart; when Hart arrives and is told of the contre temps, he instantly says, sight unseen, that the hotel worker is a psychopath.)
You can see where this is going, I’m sure. Don’t be surprised to see me lurking on the sideline in Thurles or the Gaelic Grounds with a long sheet of paper, ticking boxes quietly as a manager explains away a defeat with classic notions of a grandiose sense of self-worth (item two) and a parasitic lifestyle (item nine).
I’m just warning you.
That was Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday yours truly trucked away down to the Rochestown Park Hotel for the Cork footballers’ press evening, meeting up with a couple of dozen other reporters.
The worth of the press evening is at once completely worthless because it’s a) very unusual for any player or selector to say something worthwhile, and utterly invaluable because b) at least someone is saying something and you don’t have the experience described at the beginning of the column.
Cork invariably lay on some nice finger food as well for their press conferences, which is more than can be said in some counties. (The Kerry County Board usually roll out a fine buffet for All-Ireland final pressers, in fairness, though few if any can hold a candle to Kilkenny, where the press night is always held in Langton’s. The stupefying carbofeast that precedes the inquisition probably has something to do with the banality of the copy that emerges.)
At the Rochestown, however, a quick few words with one of those in attendance wasn’t getting this columnist’s full attention, and not due to the crispness of the cocktail sausages either.
Even though the conversation was perfectly anodyne, my nods of agreement/approval/annoyance were in fact indications that I was subconsciously ticking off items.
Did a footballer’s casual hello mean he was displaying glibness/superficial charm (item one)? When that member of the backroom staff put down a chicken nugget and failed to return, was I seeing failure to accept responsibility for his actions (item 16)? Come to think of it, what had Bob Hart said about hotel staff?
And so to Saturday, and Cork-Offaly in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Joe Dooley broke my dependence on the Hart checklist. The Offaly manager’s transparent decency in the stadium boardroom as he fielded questions was sobering. Not long ago Dooley released his frustrations about Offaly’s preparations into the public domain when this newspaper got a copy of a letter he’d sent to his own county board — a gesture clearly at odds with his own nature and therefore a fair indication of his unhappiness. His side had just ended one point shy of Cork, missing out on a win that would have given a lesser man a platform to cut loose at those who have hamstrung his team. Even yesterday he’d have been forgiven for letting fly, but Dooley was more interested in talking about his players and the disappointment he felt for them after their efforts. Saturday was the 100th time they had gotten together, and despite the loss, he still believed in them.
No checklists necessary.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
