Think twice before unleashing terrace torrents
Not for long: don’t bail out on account of that.
Anyway, over a couple of creamy drinks one evening a senior politician outlined the trajectory of his career for me.
He began as a councillor, and was stunned by the sheer amount of time that commitment took – phone calls about grant allocations, planning permissions, social welfare allowances, being stopped in the street, on trains, at matches.
Then he became a Senator, and contrary to general belief, he became busier: more calls, more demands, more interruptions at funerals, in the middle of family dinners, during trips to the urinal in the pub.
And finally, he found – I nearly said ascended, rookie mistake – his place in the Dáil, whereupon the workload seemed to quadruple, and at the first opportunity he got his wife to book a sun holiday. Anywhere, he told her, just get us away for a few days.
Upon arrival he dumped his luggage and hurried to the beach, buried his toes in the sand and stretched out under the sun . . .
. . . Until a shadow – literal, not metaphorical – fell across him. Opening his eyes, our hero saw a face loom in close to his.
“Well, any sign of that bloody planning permission?”
The fact that this individual was a former inter-county player somehow ties into our theme this week: the odd relationship between GAA players and their supporters, and that’s not a snide reference to recent pitch invasions, either, but the belief among supporters that they can say literally anything to inter-county players.
A copy of Lar Corbett’s autobiography landed on the desk last week, which gives plenty of examples of how this strange interaction bowls along. (There are plenty of other highlights as well – who knew that mouse racing held such a grip on Premier County minds? You live and learn.)
As a high-profile player – higher-profile than most – Corbett is accustomed to the kind of abuse that can pour down from the terraces, but at least a hurler or footballer gets to move around and away from the scholars and intellectuals trying to overcome the effects of a pre-match gallon of cider.
As a publican, Corbett is a sitting duck for those who wish to unbosom themselves. In the book he recounts the story of a gent, presumably from Kilkenny, who strolled into the bar one night, asked if a string of Kilkenny hurlers (named) would drink in the pub, and then left.
Corbett’s account of deadpan, affect-less responses to such sallies rings completely true. If you ever spend time with a famous GAA player – say, having coffee somewhere public – you soon clock their easy conversational parries.
On one occasion I remember interviewing a well-known hurler in the lobby of a Dublin hotel. It was in the immediate aftermath of an All-Ireland semi-final, and the recognition factor was probably higher than normal, but the string of greeters coming over for a handshake were kept circulating by a polished sequence of well-they-nearly-made-its and sure-safe-homes.
Until one man pushed the envelope.
“Well,” said the visitor, well refreshed, sticking out a hand to shake.
“Well,” said the well-known hurler, accepting same.
“You don’t remember me?”
“I don’t,” said the hurler immediately.
“You don’t remember splitting my brother open in the minor county final that time?”
There was a slight pause, and then the hurler frowned: “He had a yellow helmet?”
The man was delighted.
“He did. He did indeed. How well you remembered, fair dues, etc.”
When he left, I complimented the player on his memory.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’d no idea what the man was talking about. I never played in a minor final in my life.”
Just in case you think it’s all one-way traffic, I can offer testimony from the perspective of the supporter also. Not my own, strictly speaking (though I did ask Kevin Spacey if he thought Carrigtwohill would beat Na Piarsaigh in a hurling game, an event with several reliable witnesses).
No, here I rely on the person of my late grand-uncle, whose insistence on speaking truth to power, and everybody else besides, earned him the nickname The Cranky Man at a time when crankiness was as common as cholesterol in the Irish male.
My mother bumped into him one day shortly after a Cork loss in the championship, and he soon launched into a lengthy dissection of the Cork players’ weaknesses and infirmities: useless one and all was the general theme of the monologue. Eventually my mother butted in to point out that they were only human, they’d done their best, and even Christy Ring made mistakes, after all.
“And when he did, do you think I didn’t point them out?”
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
