Proof honesty is the best policy
That’s the immortal Gay Talese, talking about the heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson. Talese wrote dozens of pieces about Patterson because he found the boxer such an interesting character — for the reasons cited above.
I was reminded of this description after the Ronan O’Gara documentary, which aired on Thursday night. Don’t pretend you didn’t see it; I doubt anyone within the jurisdiction was watching anything else that evening.
O’Gara’s way with a one-liner certainly caught the ear — “Jonny with the shortcuts,” he said with the faintest hint of an eye-roll as he drove J. Sexton Esq around the boulevards of Paris — but his candour was the headline attraction of the programme. That’s rarer than you might expect among sports people. If you are sportsman X, dreading an upcoming game, or even a training session, it’s clearly not something you’d like to share with the press — or, by proxy, the opponent you’ll face on Sunday. Or the coach holding the whistle for drills on Monday.
The Cork man has always marched to his own drum, though. In the documentary there was a fleeting reference to a Guardian interview when he was frank about the deficiencies of English club rugby; that interview appeared the week Munster played Leicester in Leicester. Of all teams, and of all venues. Inevitably, it ended with a potential game-winning kick from inside the Munster half; equally inevitably, O’Gara nailed it. As they say in the NBA, it ain’t bragging if you can do it.
That honesty is on show every Friday here, of course, as O’Gara writes his column. But it’s always been so close to the surface as to be clearly visible.
Bear that in mind when you slog your way through the polite cliches that serve as 90% of player interviews — in all codes – which seek to offend nobody and strive to offer nothing that can be put on the infamous opposition dressing room wall. (Small aside: has any article, photograph or quotation ever actually been pinned to an opposition dressing room wall? I ask because in all the dressing rooms I’ve set foot in, I don’t recall tell-tale pinholes in any of the walls, or shreds of newsprint on Blu-tack anywhere). It’s hardly surprising that he writes such a good column, by the way.
A few years ago, I chatted to him about a few bits and pieces, and the topic of media treatment of rugby in Ireland came up. “I’d have thought coverage of rugby was pretty aggressive,” he said. “But at the same time it’s a small circle, even though it’s a national sport. There can be a bit of ‘you scratch my back’, I suppose.” The awareness you take for granted from a man who survived the traffic at international level rugby for so long; the honesty is a bonus.
A pal of mine was fond of telling the story of how he became ensnared by Neighbours many years ago: the stealthy seduction. The eventual enslavement.
“The first day, Monday, I was just passing through the room and it was on,” he’d say. “The next day I slowed down a bit as I went through and heard a bit of the dialogue. By Wednesday I was addicted.”
I don’t mean to dwell on sports people’s soap opera fondnesses here, though I do note that at least one All-Ireland-winning hurler measures his days by the activities in Summer Bay, and holds strong opinions on Sally’s return. Or was it Pippa? No, I refer here to the darts, which cast a Neighbours-type pull over me this holiday season.
The attraction began at a fairly low level. Because I didn’t grow up with BBC et al, I missed out on the first flush of darts love, which had the likes of Eric Bristow and Jocky Wilson in its vanguard, and which ran in parallel with the great contemporary flowering of snooker talent — Kirk Stevens, Bill Werbeniuk and so forth.
My glimpses of the goings on at this season’s competition in the Ally Pally, (glimpses which stretched eventually to lengthy viewings), suggested a renaissance has occurred in the darts world, with the likes of Michael Van Gerwen and Peter Wright leading the charge, closely followed by the lads dressed as bananas in the audience (I wasn’t as sure about the chaps in the realistic bull costumes).
I don’t begrudge anyone a bit of fun following their sport — God knows there’s enough po-faced commentary around — but the point was made to me over the weekend that there’s a lot of ‘ironic’ watching of the darts; people enjoying it as they make those quote-marks in mid-air with their hands.
(I’d be inclined to point the finger at Martin Amis there as an arch-offender, with his darts novel London Fields, but that probably leans more on the old-school darts game than the modern phenomenon).
I’d agree on that general point, though: if you disagree, then consider that it’s only a matter of time before some preening aesthete or other proclaims his or her love of the darts in a Blur-go-to-the-greyhound-racing way, if they haven’t done so already. But that’s not the purpose of my piece: consider this my pitch for accreditation for next year’s darts. My banana costume is packed.
A few years ago I met up with a guy I worked with in Dublin for a drink. In Cork.
In the course of the conversation I referred to a GAA player in disciplinary trouble within the county, saying he’d be up before the green table.
“The what?”
“The... you know,” I said. “A committee meeting. Discipline. The green table?”
“Does it have to be green?”
“I presume it’s covered in baize, that that’s where it comes from. But I suppose it could be brown. The colour of timber.”
“Do they have an ascending scale of colour-coded disciplinary tables? Blue for a first offence, green for the usual and red for something really serious?”
Looking at these black cards, I’m reminded of that conversation.
I’d like to see a little more imagination in chastising Gaelic footballers, or at least a broader palette. Say, magenta for a body-check, hot pink for a foot-trip, cerise for cynical play, hound’s-tooth check for a jersey tug?
You’re laughing now. But keep this slip of paper. It’ll come in handy when you’re going through tweets appealing for the 2015 disciplinary system to be deciphered . . .
I read an interesting interview with movie director Steve McQueen over the weekend, the man who directed films like Hunger, Shame and now the much-garlanded Twelve Years A Slave.
McQueen has worked a lot with Kerry actor Michael Fassbender, pictured below right, one of the hottest talents in the movie business.
You’ve also seen Fassbender in movies like Inglourious Basterds and Prometheus, though I have to say I saw enough of him in Shame to last me a lifetime, no offence or anything.
What occurred to me, though, is that this is a creative partnership uniquely suited to creating a decent Gaelic football movie. Fassbender is from Killarney. McQueen knows sport, though this quote from the interview isn’t too promising (“Oh well, I gave up football. It affected my day too much. It’s just stupid.”).
What do you think? Twelve Years A Wing-Forward? Anyone? Anyone?
