Year to remember sadly ends without a Hitch
Best newcomer. Most outstanding score. One to watch. Quote of the season.
And there’s a place for that. It’s just not this place.
Not everything you see during a season, or a 12-month stretch, makes it onto the page. For various legal, ethical and moral reasons, that’s not always a bad thing, but there’s also the odd quirky incident that doesn’t constitute a full story but has anecdote value which makes it hard to forget.
Nothing quite lived up to the time last year when I was locked into the press toilet in Semple Stadium. And thank God for that...
Most contradictory experience: A late entry won this category hands down. On the All Star trip to San Francisco your correspondent — an innocent abroad in these matters — was expecting debauchery and abandon of Caligula-shaming levels.
Hence the trepidation mixed with delight when, at nearly three in the morning, yours truly stumbled across a table with some of Ireland’s finest hurlers in a hostelry near North Beach in the city.
What was likely to be brought to the thirsty? Boilermakers all round? A dozen appletinis?
The house white, a full bottle per man? The order was eight milk shakes. And eight breakfasts.
I was so shocked I had the same.
Warmest welcome: a journalist soon learns to mark the occasions when he’s greeted by open arms rather than flying projectiles. The best céad mile fáilte this columnist received in the past 12 months came only last Saturday at the old Glash National School in north Cork, which is now the headquarters of Glenlara GAA club.
We started off with three in the main hall and within 10 minutes we were tipping two dozen attendees. You can read all about the heroics of the Duhallow Junior B champions in our end of the year supplement on New Year’s Eve, but the strength of the welcome made a long journey more than worthwhile.
Focus on the media: It was in the bowels of Croke Park — odd that everyone refers to the deep interior of a stadium in gastro-intestinal terms, as where there’s a bowel there’s usually a... (that’s enough of the logic — ed) Not long after the All-Ireland hurling final, and Kilkenny manager Brian Cody was fielding questions, and he opined that a headline used in a newspaper during the year which had been less than flattering.
Which provoked the usual head-scratching about managers professing not to pay attention to the media, yet being able to quote chapter and verse from various outlets whenever it suits.
Still, it wasn’t as pointed as the text sent by another inter-county manager to a writer of our acquaintance, asking for concrete examples of odd decisions he — the manager — had made. Sadly, the same manager has now departed the stage, so we shall never know where that exchange of texts might have led.
Most egg on face: there he was, your columnist, riffling through the choicest new books on offer in Hodges Figgis in Dublin, weighing up what he wanted for the train journey down to Cork, maybe that new Elmore Leonard thriller, having filed the interview with the top Ireland rugby international he’d come to the capital for.
Phone cheeps with a message from the sports desk: what about the question about your man’s contract?
Response texted: what about your man’s contract?
Phone cheeps: just the ongoing controversy that’s been the sole focus of sports departments for the last few weeks...
Cold sweat. A flurry of phone calls. Ass covered, eventually, thanks to the forbearance of someone in another paper who asked the only question anyone with an ounce of sense would have asked.
Still haven’t read that Elmore Leonard book: too many bad associations.
Saddest departures (1): Dermot Earley’s passing gave pause to a lot of people. The Roscommon man was more than an uncommonly good footballer, he was an uncommonly impressive man. The point has been made elsewhere that in a year when we saw a vomit-inducing race between nobodies to occupy Áras an Uachtaráin, Earley himself would have been a worthy President. Ar dheis De.
Saddest departures (2): Though it wasn’t as surprising as Dermot Earley’s passing, the death of Christopher Hitchens last week — prose stylist, heroic drinker, political maven — marked a sad day for your columnist. We won’t indulge in duelling quotations from the great man because there are so many (though certainly his line about the four most disappointing things in life is worth looking up on Google if you have the time).
This corner of the paper devoted a column to him a few months ago so we won’t repeat the dose, particularly as he wasn’t a great fan of sport. We won’t be wishing him any Ar dheis De either. He wouldn’t have appreciated it.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
