The glorious birth of Irish sportswriting

The relationship between sport and the media changed in Ireland on Christmas week in 1880.

The newspaper Sport was launched in Dublin and, for the next 50 years, it offered a glorious, offbeat insight into Irish life.

In the half-lit hour before the full dawn of modern Irish sporting organisations, Sport was emblematic of the exploding interest in organised sport.

By 1880, in Britain, there were two daily papers dedicated entirely to sports reporting — the Sportsman and the Sporting Chronicle — and by 1884 a third, the Sporting Life.

In 1880, Ireland could not support a daily sporting paper — and so emerged the ‘weekly special’, published by the Freeman’s Journal, the best-selling Irish daily newspaper printed in Dublin.

Initially printed on Wednesdays, Sport was soon completed late on Friday nights and distributed across Ireland on the early trains of Saturday morning.

The self-styled ‘New Weekly Sporting Organ for the Million’, which also referred to itself as ‘The Irish Pink ‘Un’, totalled 28 columns across four pages and was sold for what its editor called ‘the people’s price’ of one penny.

The priority would be racing coverage but, its editor proclaimed, “no single branch of sport — hunting, yachting, shooting, cricketing, football or polo — will escape the constant vigilance of our staff”.

In keeping with the style of its era, its journalists were verbose, self-regarding and liable to slide off at a tangent to demonstrate their erudition and learning.

Educated men — always men — they produced dense paragraphs of elongated sentences. A prime example was the stellar columnist ‘Lux’ who wrote on horse racing.

He was an outstanding crank who operated on the principle that everything modern was wrong. For example, Lux informed all and sundry that he could not have cared less if a host of minor provincial meetings across the country collapsed once the old traditional racecourses such as Punchestown and the Curragh continued to prosper. The provinces were slaughtered at every opportunity and it made for wonderful copy. A meeting in Frenchpark, County Roscommon, was “a complete failure. No matter how praiseworthy the intentions of the promoters of them be, I cannot encourage these gentlemen to persevere with such burlesques on sport, and it would be better for them to abandon the attempt if they cannot improve on today’s exhibition”.

And when one reader complained of the severity of a particularly vitriolic attack, the paper’s editor was unforgiving: “We write of things as we see them and not as they ought to be.”

It can only have galled those whom he criticised, but Lux was able to match the arrogance of his reporting with uncommon accuracy in his tipping. As yet another of his successful predictions was greeted with the unassuming headline ‘Lux again triumphant’, he noted that 10 of his 14 tips had won at the Curragh on the previous weekend. He helpfully pointed out that on a £5 stake, a punter could have retired with a net profit of £61 6s. 8d.

If Lux drew wide popular appeal through his tipping, the paper’s intermittent editorials were also unashamedly populist.

When magistrates in Cork banned from sale all alcoholic drink at the forthcoming Cork Park race meeting, the paper was apoplectic. It denied that there was any evidence of drunkenness or disorder at previous meetings, claiming that magistrates simply “begrudged racing folk their glass of beer and sandwich between races” and were motivated by “a strong desire to impart a lesson in temperance”.

The editorial called on parliament to legislate on the right to drink at race meetings and issued a rallying cry for all to attend Cork Park with “a heavy crop” of hip-flasks.

The fear was that the banning of drink at Cork Park was but the first in a series of such moves was borne out the following month when it reported that a similar appeal had been made to magistrates in Limerick. In that city’s courts, Sub-Inspector Wilton applied to disallow the sale of alcohol at Limerick races “in consequence of the riotous conduct carried on by the roughs at the last races” and “the painful effects of men battering each other’s heads from drink on racecourses”.

In a reminder that the stories of the world turn and turn, the first issues of Sport

covered the debate on the dangers of sporting involvement following the death of several players in rugby matches.

The Honorary Secretary of the Irish Rugby Football Union, R. M. Peter, wrote to the paper and approvingly quoted from the medical journal, The Lancet, which had stated that while a sizeable number might be maimed or killed playing games, “the undoubted value of athletic exercises to the individual and the nation more than counterbalances the occasional mishaps which must inevitably occur”.

Indeed, the editorial in the paper agreed and noted that in an age of “gentleman’s corsets” and men writing “maudlin poems in praise of each other”, games were crucial in the ongoing battle to discourage effeminacy.

It was asserted: “Dancing night after night in crowded non-ventilated rooms is amongst the most unwelcome and dangerous practices of modern life and kills infinitely more persons than either the ‘rugby’ or the ‘association’ rules. The men who are killed by sitting in public houses or in club-houses, playing billiards or cards till the small hours, and drinking ‘B and S’, are not held up as warnings, while their fellows who happen to be killed while engaged in some sport which has in it a dash of nobility and pluck, are spoken of as ‘frightful examples’ of the evils of this or that amusement.”

Moreover, skills acquired on the football field were even more valuable off it — and in the most unique of ways — as a letter from ‘an old football captain’ asserted. Having almost been killed by a horse and carriage when crossing the road, he was saved only by “an old football dodge”. He ended with a truism that has echoed through the generations: “I am perfectly certain that football saved my life.”

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efore 1880, no Irish daily paper had consistently filled its pages with substantial sporting fare.

Exceptional occasions — boxing matches, race meetings and other such happenings — enjoyed some coverage, but there were no regular features to which the reader could turn.

Frequently, sporting events only made it into print in the event of the courts taking an interest. Dedicated sports newspapers changed that. That the public were interested in reading about sport was no longer in doubt.

Through the latter decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, daily newspapers greatly expanded their coverage of sport.

Ultimately, this brought ruin to those papers that had thrived from the 1880s onwards.

Nonetheless, such was the loyalty of its readers that Sport

even managed to survive the 1924 demise of its founding paper, the Freeman’s Journal.

It could not hold out indefinitely and in 1932 its presses rolled for the final time.