Egomaniacs have not taken over just yet
It’s time to cast away the John Terrys and Kobe Bryants who cloak themselves in their own stage curtains, sheltering their primitive prejudices.
Now is as good a time as any to rejoice in the Mario Balotellis and the Cam Newtons, flawed masters of two very different footballs, relentless creators of smiles. Yeah, we’re all worried. It’s been a brutal year.
But for every Roman Abramovich there’s a FORAS, the supporters who own Cork City.
For every England rugby team, there’s a Munster, relentless creators of miracles and drops-at-goal.
It’s a bumpy road right now and we followers of sport need its stars along for the ride as much as they need us. It’s a cliché to look to athletes for refuge but there you go.
We lost Gary Speed and Socrates, two sides of the same coin, two less soldiers on whom we could rely should we ever get to purge sport of its vapid megalomaniacs, those men at the top who turn Rigor mortis into an advantage, tightening their icy grip on so many powerbroking institutions instead of being humble guardians of our sports.
Not all the old guys let us down. Darren Clarke made our summer, winning his first Major in tandem with the erstwhile young pretender who’ll keep us entertained for the next couple of decades, Rory McIlroy.
It was Frankel’s year too: he had them swooning in Newmarket in April and again in Ascot in October. But the three-year-old is in peril of being put back in his place by steeplechasing’s veteran hero, Kauto Star, who stole in at the finish.
The breakthrough of Tipperary’s minors and Dublin’s seniors will bolster football no end but the rest of hurling was cast back out into the wilderness by Kilkenny. Sometimes it’s good when the kings get their throne back, no matter how greedily they hold onto power.
The greatest players and teams of any sport will always thirst for one more hour of glory, one more day of dominance. They constantly strive to justify their lofty responsibility. The rest of us should just try to enjoy being alive along with them.
And anyway, better the devils you know than the suits you don’t. Sport gets its comeuppance when we watch people fight against suffocating dictatorships (real consequences and real victories) but those struggles are also a lesson for the type of people who run FIFA. Denying personal failings and clinging to the throne despite crumbling credibility, that’s a surefire way to threaten the very structures they profess to protect.
Maybe it doesn’t sound like it but I enjoyed 2011. It was my first full year in New York and it has been this column’s first 52 weeks. There was the Lombardi play on Broadway and a handball exhibition in Hell’s Kitchen. There was John Duddy retiring in January and acting Off Broadway in December.
When I met Syracuse basketball coach Jim Boeheim in February, I didn’t register the fact that I was yards away from Bernie Fine.
I didn’t care. Now it stuns me. Boeheim’s trusted lieutenant would end the year as public enemy number two, his lurid past sparking the second sexual abuse scandal to rock college sport and the US in general.
Penn State stands alone, however.
I spoke to an alumnus of that once proud university on Christmas Day. I broached the topic with little or no tact.
The conversation was short, her view was concise: “I hope they all rot in hell.”
At the risk of wallowing in home comforts, America’s GAA scene has been a life lesson. I took a bit of heat for concentrating a little too much on the exploits of the New York Ladies football team who made it to the All-Ireland Junior final.
But it was reassuring to know that I couldn’t annoy all of the people, all of the time.
I didn’t expect to be so enthralled by the rest of the ex-pats who wrap themselves in the association’s flag. But the summer threw up an unforgettable mini-saga.
The misfortune of Mark McGovern, the Gaelic footballer who was felled by a sucker punch in San Francisco, was a stressful story to tiptoe around.
But from its dark moments, so many reasons to believe in humanity emerged. And, just last week, his friend Emmet Scollan wrote me a brief message.
It begun with a simple sentence that bulged at the seams.
“We finally got Mark back home to Fermanagh.”
* john.w.riordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
