Honesty the best policy from the book club
After a year outside the ropes, prising the odd lonely insight, suddenly we are scribbling bad dockets with Keith Gillespie. We are passing through the turnstile outside Sven’s bedroom or poring over DJ’s balance sheet.
We are standing by the side of a Sydney street with seven-year-old Seán Óg, watching his father’s car pull away and leave him there.
It’s almost a mantra; if you’re going to do a book, it should be honest.
Why? In nearly every other walk of life, the truth is habitually dressed up and brought out to dinner. How come the book writers are held to unfamiliar standards? And why do they oblige? Alright, you can see where Keith is coming from. His career fell short of box office, but he’s a funny guy with good stories. The lucrative British market is open to him and it sounds like he could use the cash.
Sven Goran Eriksson’s appreciation of cash is long established. But he has lost a packet too. Most of the ladies have already kissed and told. And it probably makes sense, when you get down to the nitty-gritty of achievement, that he doesn’t focus entirely on the football.
But Seán Óg. A career so rich. A background so storied. Entitled, surely, to nip and tuck. To piece together an easier version of the truth that would still engage. To favour, as he sometimes did when bursting out, his good side.
“You may feel as though you know me,” he opens, before pointing out the contradictions and complications you never considered.
It’s sad to say that the racism he endured is scant surprise. But the family stuff is.
Honesty spills off these pages until you can’t wash your hands of it. It’s raw and brave and it makes you consider all kinds of things. But it still felt like an intrusion.
I still didn’t get it.
“After reading it, I hope you’ll know me a little better.”
We do. But are we entitled to? Are we asking too much of these guys? They have turned it on day in, day out. Now, when they call it a day, we want them to turn themselves inside out.
We worry everyday about privacy, about what is being taken from us. Yet we expect our heroes to put it all on a record more permanent than Facebook’s servers.
Might there be regrets down the line? Eoin Purcell, who commissions books for New Island, has seen many people spill milk for him but he hasn’t mopped many tears.
“In many cases, I suppose, it is seen as part of the deal; you trade privacy for media and sales. Those who make that decision already know that. Whether that is a good deal or not depends on whether you value privacy over media and sales.”
A fair case. But any acquaintance with the Irish publishing market will tell you that value, in that formula, slaps a cut-price tag on privacy.
So I rang Michael Duignan.
Michael, too, says people think they know you. They come up to him all the time and tell him, unsolicited, that he looks fatter on the telly, or worse, thinner.
But he doesn’t mind that.
Anyway, people do know him a lot better after Life, Death and Hurling, the book he brought out two years ago. Another man who had done and won enough to make it about hurling. But life and death forced themselves on his story and he also felt obliged to tell the truth. About his wife’s passing and how he lost his way a bit.
It was a powerful, tragic, frank, brilliant book. But had he any regrets, now the buzz of launch has long faded? No. He confirmed you wouldn’t want to be doing it for the money, but he explained how, when you tell a story, you can’t soften the edges to suit yourself, or its credibility unravels.
And I still didn’t get it.
Then Michael showed me why I was looking at this all wrong.
He told me about the man in his mid-70s who came up to him at a match, whose wife had died eight or nine years before; who, in those years, hadn’t spoken to his children. Until the evening he finished Life, Death and Hurling, when he summoned the strength to open up to them about the pain.
He told me there were hundreds of people like that; letters, emails, messages. He recently spoke to a packed hall in a small village about mental wellness. The organisers told him later that three people presented to mental health services the next day.
He assured me that if people identify with his story in a hundred different ways, they will do the same with Seán Óg’s. Sons and fathers.
Michael has reflected on it himself. He enjoys a great relationship with his young lads, but when training them, he knows you are that bit harder on your own. He vowed to keep an eye on it.
Pennies were dropping. Rather than fret about what we are taking from men like Michael, Seán Óg, Donal Óg, Oisín McConville and many more, why not admire them all over again for what they are generously giving with their honesty?
I was beginning to get it.
Since the announcement came, you worried and wondered. The odd couple and Irish football. What will the dynamic be like? What intrigue might the next few years hold? What might we have lost?
And then, on Wednesday, after the Champions League, we found out. The new dynamic is much the same as the old dynamic. The pair who make unlikely pals since Eamon hammered Chippy in 1983 for his vanity, self-indulgence and ‘swagger of his gait’ are still at odds.
Except maybe they have swapped camps. The pro and anti switcharoo.
If we have become used to Brady standing firm behind a failing regime, it was a surprise to note quite how much venom there was in his querying of the Keane appointment.
But then you remembered where he stood on Saipan. And Chippy’s handbrake doesn’t accommodate u-turns as readily as Eamon’s.
As it is, the news has Dunphy spinning on a roundabout, the verdict lurching from ‘train wreck’ to ‘masterstroke’ by the minute. Perhaps the need to boil an argument will see him settle on the latter, for now.
At least approval of O’Neill unites them. But you suspect these two may yet fall out over the number two.
Once news was in Big J-Del and the boy Roy had patched things up, we still held out for word that Maria and Serena had put it all behind them. Sure enough, Sports Illustrated broke the good news this week. Next up, world peace.
Alessandro Nesta: More big boots hung up. The “Minister of Defence” banished every last cliché about pretty centre halves.
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“I don’t know about his reputation, but the referee is there and he gave it.” Like many men who have tried to face down Ashley Young, Moyesy found himself backtracking and ultimately made a fool of by another tumble.
Had the high moral ground over disrespectful treatment until he pulled the silent act and failed to muster a few good wishes for the new incumbents.
At the Brazilian Embassy in Paris, the French Sports Minister introduced the real Ronaldo as ‘Cristiano’. Governments have rightly fallen over less.
