Finding common ground in the GAA’s great divide
We were assembled for the Kilkenny hurlers’ pre-All-Ireland press night, with a tasty feed the traditional preamble to same. Between mouthfuls of a terrific-looking apple tart and custard, my colleague had a simple question.
“Well, Sunday. I suppose you won’t even turn on the television for it?”
“I’m not sure yet,” was my considered response. “I have Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue on the nightstand, so I might read that. And keep those apple tart crumbs to yourself, like a good man.”
I’m not sure where the reputation as a Gaelic football agnostic came from (several years’ worth of columns — ed.) but I was exaggerating for effect.
If amazon.com hadn’t come through with that box set of The World At War, I might even have given the All-Ireland football final five minutes between DVD changeovers.
Again, I exaggerate.
Nowadays even if you’re a hurling obsessive, you need to pay attention to what’s going on in Gaelic football because of its tendency to infiltrate — ‘infect’ was my first choice, admittedly — hurling in terms of tactical ideas.
In recent times you’d be inclined to wonder: if an enterprising TV technician were able to remove hurleys and footballs through digital trickery, would the eddy and flow of player movement be all that different in hurling and football? Is the push and pull of defensive alignment creating oddly similar on-field patterns, a curious amalgam of both hurling and football set-ups? Ironically, that Michael Chabon novel expresses this neatly enough. Telegraph Avenue is the kind of book reviewers routinely call ‘sprawling’, and it covers a vast hinterland, ranging from blaxploitation movies and home births through northern California politics and the rise of Barack Obama.
It also touches on what Chabon sees as a borderland between the city of Oakland — blue-collar, hard-working, unglamorous — and the city of Berkeley, its immediate neighbour hard to the north: esoteric, exotic, mythic.
The border area is summed up in Brokeland, the record shop at the centre of the novel, where the tensions between the two collide. Take hurling as a Berkeley-type sport, and Gaelic football as a classic Oakland pursuit — in real life, the Oakland Raiders NFL side perfectly reflect the city — and perhaps there’s an element of Brokeland about hurling and football at the moment.
(Though given the threat of closure looming over Brokeland in the novel, perhaps this train of thought should be shunted onto a siding somewhere.) Thoughts of Gaelic football’s influence on hurling weren’t the only item of discussion in Langton’s, by the way. A few reporters spoke about the new administrator post on offer in the Cork County Board, remarking — as many readers have, no doubt — on the fact that the county secretary will remain in place and retain responsibility for financial issues, for instance.
However, this is a very difficult issue to write about because any reference to the workings of this organisation which is not fawning in tone and content is regarded not as criticism, which would be fair enough, but as personalised invective. No-one writing about the workings of the Cork board is regarded as playing the ball, in this reading; we’re all playing the man.
And yet the irony here is that the board itself is responsible in large measure for the hospital passes which put the man in play. Certainly the job specification published last week was bound to provoke comment, as board officers surely guessed, particularly the section outlining the way the current county secretary will retain those financial responsibilities and will be working on the redevelopment of Páirc Uí Chaoimh, a massive financial undertaking. These provisions have surprised many observers. (As an aside, wasn’t part of the resolution of the last strike a commitment to furnish the agenda of county board meetings in advance? Just a thought, as the announcement of this vacancy seemed to catch most people off guard.) We’ll be coming back to this one.
Finally, last week’s trip to Noreside came on the same day that news broke of the untimely death of Paul O’Connor. Many people have commented on his stellar career with an outstanding UCC side in the Fitzgibbon Cup, as well as his late-80s career in the red jersey of Cork. We go back a bit further, to the great North Monastery teams of the very early 80s on which O’Connor starred in Emly and Bansha, in Kilmallock and Buttevant.
In the blue jersey with the white hoop, O’Connor was one of the Mon boys who would downface Alexander himself, as his clubmate, the poet Theo Dorgan said.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh sé. * michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
