Hard to beat early season local fare
I beg to differ. Last Saturday, yours truly was in Ballynoe for a Cork Senior Hurling Championship game between Killeagh and Youghal, and all the constituent elements for a GAA occasion were on hand.
A rural setting on a beautiful summerās evening, with a jet trail scrawling a white line diagonally across the sky. Hundreds streaming down a narrow country road to the venue. A derby between two clubs just a few miles apart.
More detail? A professionally produced programme. Plenty of stewards on hand from the local club, St Catherineās, whose first impulse was to help rather than to ask what people wanted. Parking right next to the playing field.
You can read about the game elsewhere in these pages, but there, too, the experience held up. The full spectrum of player profiles was to hand. A current Cork senior player? Yes. A former Cork icon? Present. Powerful veterans? Available on both teams. A few keen teenagers? Also present.
The game wasnāt the case of bottled lightning we were expecting, but it was tough and competitive and neither team could seize the initiative until the dying minutes. Two well-coached teams operating sophisticated game plans, countering each otherās approach until the dying minutes, when the finishing line was in sight. And once we got over that finishing line, you had the delight that comes with a win, with a man in a Youghal GAA polo shirt hanging over the wire running around the field to tell me the scorer of the winning point wasnāt going to be doing his Leaving Cert until next year.
A Sunday in September is great. Thereās a reason nobody ever woke up the morning of an All-Ireland final and wished it was the next day. But a Saturday in June can be a fantastic experience too.
The fact that that experience is replicated in hundreds of other venues around the country all through summer only reinforces the point.
The discovery of the weekend may be that Max Mosley, once head of Formula One, is a hurling fan.
Having spent time as a child in Galway during the fifties he gained a keen appreciation of the sport and in his new book writes: āItās extraordinarily fast and, since there was no head protection in those days, quite dangerous. Iāve always thought it the best ball game ever invented.ā
So far so good, and everyone can agree that this is a little better than some obscure English comedian celebrating the mad Irish in a tweet.
Then, however, Max falls into the classic trap: ā(Iāve) never understood why it did not achieve the international recognition of soccer, rugby and cricket.ā
Though to judge by a conversation I had years ago with Tom Bowers, who wrote a jaw-dropping biography of Bernie Ecclestone, if Bernie ever discovers hurling I would advise you all to liquidate your assets and corner the market in ash, pronto.
When yours truly was a child, back in the last century ā literally ā we had a little bath toy, a Kornelia Ender doll. This was a wind-up swimming toy whose arms rotated furiously, like those of Kornelia herself, a gold medal winner at the 1976 Olympics for East Germany.
Such a toy would now be the height, or maybe depth, of bad taste, given what we know about the chemical abuses forced on athletes in that country; youād be a little queasy to have anything in your house celebrating a regime that took performance-enhancing drugs to such extremes.
But back then we had no idea, literally. There were jokes about Soviet shot putters and so on, but little hard evidence beyond what you could see. Supposedly events of recent years have told us to be less gullible and more questioning when it comes to athletes and their coaches.
Thatās why there was a wearying tinge to the Mo Farah furore last week, from the statements of innocence to the blaming of the media by members of the media ā special mention here to Steve Cram, who works for the... media.
You canāt help feeling thereās a touch of payback here for the instantaneous consensus in 2012 that the London Olympics was a storming success (largely due to interesting personalities in two of the most discredited sports at the Games ā sprinting and cycling). Something that caught my eye regarding Farahās missed tests, though, is the evidence of the drug testers that they called to his house and rang the door bell āat least seven timesā. At least seven? They might be good people to get a tainted sample from an Olympic athlete, but I donāt know if Iād trust them to get a junior team out the morning after one of its players got married.
All Joyce and Yeats all week of course, as you probably saw. Bloomsday came this year, as it does every year, and Yeatsā 150th anniversary was an excuse everybody availed of to pull out the couple of lines they learned for the Leaving Certificate that time.
The obvious mention here would be Joyceās flaying of Michael Cusack in Ulysses, though I think his most telling GAA reference comes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the creepy story his college pal tells about coming back from a match late at night on the Limerick border, where he meets a mysterious woman.... Iāll let you read it yourself.
Any time I ever picked it up I struggled to get the music from the TV series Tales of the Unexpected out of my head.
But one of my favourite Yeats stories comes from a time in his youth when one of his mates - it could have been George Russell but Iām not sure - insisted he go through a rite of passage followed by almost every man at some stage, and a couple of times a week at that.
He brought Yeats to a pub. The popular mythology has it that WB sat in the snug in Tonerās bar in Baggot Street nursing (you just knew that was the cliche to be used) a drink for a while until he spoke up: āI have been to a pub, Russell. Can I go home now?ā See, we could all have written screeds of immortal poetry if only weād been able to leave the pub.
