A closer look at Tipp identity crisis

Mark Zuckerberg may be an unlikely port of call in a discussion centred on the Tipperary hurlers, but the Facebook guru, or Satan of social media, depending on your viewpoint,offers a good starting point in this particular debate.

“You have one identity,” Zuckerberg told his biographer a few years ago.

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends, for the other people you know, are probably coming to an end… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

Zuckerberg was talking about Facebook, which makes it seem more apposite, rather than less, when applied to a much-ventilated dissatisfaction with the Tipperary hurling team in their native county on account of a narrow defeat to Limerick last Sunday week and their socialising after that defeat. News and rumour blossomed on Twitter and other social networks soon about excesses real and imagined.

The trap to fall into here is to dwell on the perception that somehow such socialising is inappropriate. This seems a little harsh to this observer, though clearly “socialising” is shorthand for “drinking” in this context.

Still, this seems a bit steep: I don’t recall any great horror when a rugby player carried a bottle of beer into a post-game press conference recently (keep observations along the lines of ‘you’d need beer to face them creeps’ to yourself; the retort ‘you’d need more than beer to listen to some sportsmen’ springs to mind).

Larry Ryan touched on this issue eloquently in these pages last Saturday, but the notion of identity seems to this observer a particularly potent part of the mix. The Gaelic Players Association recently launched an initiative, wewearmore.ie, which shows there’s more to the intercounty player you see for 70 minutes every few weeks, that each of them carries a hinterland of worries and pressures commonly found in young adults.

Among many of the ambassadors spreading the gospel of good mental health for the GPA, there seems to a common theme of over-identifying oneself as an inter-county player, withproblems when that career ends.

But when the career is still extant, it seems many others see the player from that perspective first and foremost, to the exclusion of other aspect of their life.

In that sense is the unhappiness in Tipperary with theirplayers a tad excessive? Wecan say that it reflects thedepth of feeling within the county for its hurling team, but if the team had won, the criticism would hardly be as severe. It never is.

Given that context, whenpretext is the issue rather than the supposed transgression,who should really be indicted?

Getting up close and personal never an easy task

Access is everything these days, or nothing, depending on who you speak to.

I’m referring to access to sportspeople, a subject dear to my heart.

In the last couple of weeks, for instance, the draw between Cork and Waterford wrought havoc with many reporters’ plans as interviews were sought in the tight window between the two games.

Cork had a press night. Waterford didn’t. You pay your money, you make your choice, but if you did a bit of work, you got what you wanted. Or not. Many a county board PRO will ask you quietly about reporters who throw magnificent strops because player interviews are not granted in a bespoke, one-to-one fashion; the reason the officials end up asking quietly is because often when a press call is arranged, those reporters don’t show. Interesting, very interesting.

Anyway, the reason I bring this all up is because it was reassuring to hear much bigger names sometimes have a similar challenge when it comes to getting people to talk. A couple of weeks ago I spoke to the man universally acknowledged as the greatest long-form sportswriter of the modern age, Gary Smith, who recently retired from magazine writing for Sports Illustrated to focus on writing books.

Smith wrote such masterpieces as ‘Higher Education’, about the African-American basketball coach who took over a Mennonite school’s team, and ‘Walking His Life Away’, the story of a competitive race walker which finishes with one of the most devastating sign-offs you will ever read. Anyway.

I asked Smith if, well, being Gary Smith and being from Sports Illustrated and so on, access to people was really easy compared to us mortals. Surely he just dropped his name and watched the doors swing open?

“A lot of times, no,” said Smith.

“I wasn’t on TV much and I kept a pretty low profile with four stories a year. I was pretty unknown a lot of the time, though the internet helped with that.

“If people wanted to know more, I was always glad to send them examples to show them what they were getting into.

“Towards the end, as I say, the internet helped with awareness.

“For a good part of my time with SI, though, I’d walk in a bit out of the blue. I’d tell them it was very in-depth, but using my name as a crowbar to get in the door... that wasn’t the case. Here and there it helped, but not generally.”

The interview will pop up in these pages shortly and in it Smith told me where he got the ideas for the pieces I’ve mentioned above. Don’t miss it.

Ladies get benefit of better music

I was in Semple Stadium early yesterday, where there was an unexpected treat – Cork v Dublin in the Aisling McGing U21 ladies football semi-final.

Dublin won well, but what was particularly noticeable was the quality of music they played — while their male counterparts have that moaning dirge ‘May We Never Have To Say Goodbye’ to accompany the close of their games, the ladies football DJ gave us a few classics to keep us warm at half-time, such as John Fogerty’s ‘Centrefield’.

That is John Fogerty, once of Creedence Clearwater Revival, not the John Fogarty who writes in these pages. Who may have a fine tenor voice but is not, to my knowledge, the man who wrote ‘Fortunate Son’.

Getting down to business

I enjoyed the analysis of Sky’s analysis in the papers yesterday — how meta can you get — but I didn’t see the satellite broadcaster’s coverage myself: I don’t have Sky and don’t intend to get it, but if some generous benefactor wants to facilitate my views on Brian Carney, feel free.

I note, though, that the GAA is not the only organisation breaking ground in the world of broadcasting. A very interesting piece by John McDuling in Quartz on Major League Baseball’s online streaming video service asks serious questions about the sports organisation’s future as a key influencer in the business of television generally.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which runs the sport’s online video service, team websites and successful apps services, was worth $2.5billion a decade ago and is worth a lot more now. Something that caught my eye was an aside from the writer, John McDuling: “No other sports organisation I can think of has a thriving business essentially unrelated to the actual game it exists to run.” I can think of one not too far away, I’m sure.