Even in death, sport proves a true celebration of life
Even the mobile got left behind on the bedroom dresser for half a day.
The one newspaper bought, Monday’s Irish Examiner, lay unopened and pristine in a forgotten corner and the only person interested in anything the TV had to say was my two-year-old girl who watched her usual quota of Peppa Pig oblivious to the turbulence around her.
Bereavements do that. They demand a detachment from everyday life, a period of reflection to be observed while the rest of the world hurtles by, oblivious, without you.
It was Monday before word arrived that St Brigid’s and St Thomas’ had claimed All-Ireland titles, Tuesday by the time news of Everton’s defeat of Manchester City reached these ears and Wednesday morning before highlights of events from Rome, Paris and Cardiff last Saturday were consumed like cold cuts. Bill Shankly’s quote about football, life, death and their order of importance has long since been contested but it contains within it the inarguable fact that our passion for trivial games is a thread of no little meaning that runs through our lives.
What was noticeable this last week, as family and friends mourned my uncle Pascal O’Brien’s passing and celebrated his long and extraordinary life, was how sport still insisted on nudging its way into the narrative and the role it played, not just in recounting the man’s wonderful life but in helping cousins to reconnect after years and, in some case, decades spent apart.
Sporting conversations over the long weekend meandered from the prospects of the Laois senior footballers and Tipperary senior hurlers this summer to the 1982 World Cup, Christy Ring and Laois’s own hurling great John Taylor; Waterford’s old ground at Kilcohan Park, the Cheltenham Festival, Ireland’s World Cup qualifier in Sweden tonight, Lansdowne Rugby Club, Millwall FC and last Wednesday’s Leinster U21 football semi-finals.
It was an eclectic mix of sports, events and places entirely in keeping with a man whose own photo albums contain delightful black and white treasures of him lining out with hurling and Gaelic football teams, posing on the tennis court, playing golf in Nairobi and launching a shot putt at one of the three seminaries — Cork’s Castlemartyr, St John’s in Waterford and Loughrea in Galway — at which he studied before deciding that teaching rather than preaching was to be his life’s calling.
In his last years, when illness began to take its toll on his body, Pascal’s razor-sharp intellect remained for a long time undimmed and so, too, did his love for sport. Any visit to the old family home in Railway Street in Portlaoise would invariably touch on the latest efforts of the Laois footballers or the Irish rugby team but his conversations always had a tendency to take their own whimsical course, like a flooded river that paid no heed to mere boundaries such as banks or dykes, and you never knew where they would end up.
Time and again, talk would turn to his beloved Africa where he spent the bones of 25 years teaching children mostly in Nigeria, but in Uganda too during Idi Amin’s time and Kenya where he survived a kidnapping in the bush before a shorter, less fondly remembered, stint in Saudi Arabia. He spoke Irish, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Swahili and used to travel home for the holidays through destinations as varied as Cairo and Moscow and yet, by all accounts, he seemed to get just as much pleasure from chewing the fat ‘as béarla’ while travelling down the road to Thurles to watch Tipp take the field and, were he alive today, he’d have no doubt kept an ear out for news from Stockholm this evening.
He would have delighted in any missives of a positive note but were they of a more negative variety he might have consoled himself with a book of poetry or some music for, while sport was a passion, it was merely one of many, and it strikes me now that I can’t ever recall him losing his cool over something as trivial as sport. That seems now, like the hurls with the impossibly skinny bás which he and his team-mates held in those old snaps, a quaintly old-fashioned approach in times where we guzzle sports down like soft drinks. He will be missed, not least this summer when his favourites from Laois and Tipp go about their intoxicating business.
Contact: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie Twitter: @Rackob
