15 reasons why this is greatest week of the year
This weekend. It ends with Cork and Tipperary. If you need to know more than that then best of luck to you, sitting up there on Mars with Matt Damon. For anyone interested in hurling, this is it. Christmas.
The resentment. Obviously, it’s Christmas if you’re from Cork or Tipperary, rather than being from somewhere else. But that’s part of the enjoyment for those directly involved. It irritates those from outside those places that those on Leeside and in the Premier County make so much of a championship meeting between the counties.
The track record. There must have been poor or underwhelming Cork-Tipperary clashes in the past, but if there were, nobody is admitting it. The party line is the wicked chuckle of hurleys in the Tipperary square and nobody deviates from it. This is the crucible where men are made, etc. (See? It’s catching).
The personalities. Come on, where else do you have a pantheon like this? Babs and Jimmy Doyle, Seamus Bannon and Tony Reddin, Mickey Byrne and John Doyle. Jack Lynch and the Buckleys, Willie John Daly and Paddy Barry.
Ring. “There’s only one county you can hurl all out against, and that’s Tipperary.” He wasn’t talking about the national league, either.
The talk. From the Rattler saying to Ring, “We’ll have to shoot you,” (Ring: “You’ve tried everything else.”) to Babs talking donkeys and derbies, this is one long-running musical where the book matches the songs.
Talking of donkeys and derbies... it happens every now and again that the form book goes out the window with these two. Not every time, despite the myth-making, but on occasion. You don’t have to go too far back in the record, either — in 2007 and 2010 the perceived wisdom didn’t make it to the full-time whistle.
The colours. Nobody will ever mistake this corner of the paper for the fashion pages, but the contrast here is primal. Red and white. Blue and gold.
The hinterland. It’s an exaggeration to portray this as urban versus rural — there are plenty of examples of “a fine town” in Tipperary, and they’ve produced quality for the county team. Likewise, the green stretches of Cork have sent plenty of men up through the tunnel to wear red and white. Despite that, it’s an irresistible comparison.
The venue. They’ve played in Limerick, they play in Cork, they’ve even elevated Killarney. But there can be only one location, really. You can hear people praise Clones, and a weekend in Dublin is diverting, but there’s only one place that really counts, and that’s Liberty Square. Ask any Cork person.
The cuisine. Even the most refined palate regresses to tribal settings at this time. The Leeside gourmet demands ham sandwiches — white bread, butter (not Benecol) and meat preferably from Roscrea — for a Cork-Tipp game.
The context. Once again we had a low-octane launch to the championship, if by launch you mean an entirely unremarked take-off. Rumour has it there’s an eruption of pleasantries due in the Ulster championship on Sunday, but nobody wants their breakfast spoiled. See point no. 1 above.
The weather. It’s always sunny for Cork-Tipp. Always.
The road out of Thurles. I’ve written before of a vague longing for the days of an hour crawling through Fermoy on the way home. Nowadays you make it to the motorway heading south and one downloaded podcast of Larry David at the New Yorker Festival later, you’re at home.
The weekend. It’s even closer now than when I wrote this.
Proof everything is bigger in Texas
Texas voters approve bond that will help finance high school stadium for McKinney ISD that could cost .8 million pic.twitter.com/xQzuomwrrr
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) May 9, 2016
You might have read about the $63m being spent on a high school football stadium in McKinney, north of Dallas. This isn’t an isolated example of the regard for high school football in the state of Texas.
A stadium in the town of Allen cost just $3m less. Another stadium under construction near Houston is to cost more than $62m.
Clearly this is a little lopsided (kudos to the person who presumed aloud that those schools have libraries costing as much as those stadia).
It was interesting to me that the $63m stadium seats just 12,000 people, though it’s proposed to attach an events centre to the stadium.
Lumbering through Robert A Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson as I am, I was interested in the Texas-ness of this phenomenon. It certainly brought me back to the colleague in a San Francisco staff room, reminiscing about his time fund-raising for a school. He met up with one alumnus hoping for money and spent a tough hour shaking some cash out of his target.
“In Texas,” my pal said, “A place is on the map if it has a Dairy Queen at the crossroads. Somewhere the kids can have a milkshake and hang out. If you don’t have a Dairy Queen, you don’t exist.”
“And this guy owned a Dairy Queen?” “Nah,” he said. “This is Texas. He owned about 500 of them.”
How Katherine Dunn boxed clever
A word here on the passing of Katherine Dunn last week. Dunn made waves in the eighties with her novel Geek Love, a National Book Award finalist in 1989. Has it aged? Have any of us who made waves in the eighties not aged?
I mention Dunn here because she turned her hand to columns and reporting in Portland, Oregon — after a couple of years in her twenties here in Ireland — and among her areas of interest was boxing: she won an award for a book on America’s toughest boxing gyms.
As a clincher, though, the throwaway detail was in her obituary: having taken up boxing in her forties to keep fit, in her sixties she fought off a mugger half her age.
Travel light, Katherine Dunn.
Little has changed for Irish sportspeople chasing their dreams
Sad, too, to see the passing of Christy O’Connor Sr over the weekend, one of the background names of a youth spent watching Brendan O’Reilly on Sports Stadium. Interesting to hear suggestions O’Connor didn’t enter that many American tournaments due to sheer cost. Then again, given the fundraising lengths some of our Olympians have to go to, hardly surprising.
