Sporting stars who are always heroes to someone
The former is celebrated all over the world, but the latter, I suspect, is accepted with gritted teeth. It’s laudable that a relatively obscure book commands an annual celebration, so long as you don’t have to, you know, endure those celebrations yourself.
Ulysses has something to say on every matter under the sun, so it’s no surprise there’s a hot take on fatherhood (“Noisy self-willed man, full of his son,” thinks Bloom of Simon Dedalus, “Quite right too.”).
Stephen Dedalus is the son in question, of course, but Simon is an interesting character in his own right, based on Joyce’s father, John. Both the real and imagined fathers are Corkmen, but intriguing though that is, it’s not what interests me about Simon. When Stephen accompanies his father to Cork in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the two of them end up in a pub, where Stephen is held up as the youngster coming into his own, meaning it’s time for Simon to take a back seat. Simon’s response?
“I’ll sing a tenor song against him or I’ll vault a fire-barred gate against him or I’ll run with him after the hounds across the country as I did thirty years ago along with the Kerry Boy and the best man for it.”
It’s interesting that Simon feels sport is the best way to establish himself as the alpha dog — for once an appropriate term, given the reference to the hounds (For natives of a particular Cork suburb there’s an eerie foreshadowing of Val Dorgan’s ‘Blackpool I dread ye’, and its ‘hound at a five-bar gate’, which conflates two of Simon’s obsessions). Father’s Day, Bloomsday: how the two of them overlap.
For most of us, the struggle isn’t nearly as Oedipal, of course, because the pride a father and a family takes in a relative’s sports success is authentic and deep. For instance, I enjoyed a chat with Tom McGlinchey last week, and the Waterford manager — one of the sharpest observers of Gaelic games you could meet — chose that specific way to articulate the joy in the Déise camp when they beat Wexford for their first senior football championship win in seven years.
“You’re meeting the mothers and fathers of the players out on the field at the final whistle,” Tom said.
“They’re the core support, the families, and the wives and the girlfriends. Up to that, all you might know about them is a phone call from one of the lads, who can’t make training because the girlfriend has something on, and then you meet them. You see who they are. You see they’re all delighted. They’re thrilled for the lads, because they’ve put so much into it.”
It wasn’t only the players, either. Tom’s parents came from Mourneabbey to Wexford for the game. So did his own kids. Safe enough to presume that they also made their way out onto the Wexford Park playing area at the final whistle.
Which, of course, is a roundabout way of getting to the point I wanted to reach all along. One of my favourite sports photographs of all time is from the Roscommon-Armagh All-Ireland semi-final of 1980. The photograph doesn’t come from the game itself, which I doubt leaps to mind among even the hardest of hard-core Roscommon and Armagh supporters, but from the aftermath. Taken by Ray McManus of Sportsfile, it shows the iconic Roscommon player, Dermot Earley (above), surrounded by well-wishers at the final whistle, but holding one of his sons, David, a toddler clearly overcome by the noise and heat and emotion, a protective hand cradling his head.
It’s one of those images that always reveals something new when you look at it, but which also says the same thing every time.
Happy Father’s Day.
You too can live without the World Cup
Hey, I’m living my best life with no interference by the World Cup. It’s great altogether. I don’t get nostalgic about the Peru jerseys from 1978, for instance.
Neither do I wax lyrical about learning the score from an Ireland World Cup game while I was doing a State exam, unlike approximately 84% of Irish media personalities, who all appear to have been in the one exam hall when Robbie Keane scored against Germany.
Granted, that’s probably because I did my State exams at a time when there were two Germanys, though I am too young to have been around for Jurgen Sparwasser’s goal for one Germany over another.
The point remains that you too can live without the World Cup. You don’t need to claim any familiarity with the Colombian first division, or with the Croatians’ technical ability. Look at me: I’m living proof that there’s a life beyond those pronouncements which are oracular and vague at the same time, pleading to be taken seriously, teetering always on the verge of exposure as a charlatan.
You’re better than that. Join me in my blissful ignorance, you won’t regret it.
The best of times for some...
I note that a hurling team from Hartford in the US are touring Ireland, playing challenge games.
This evening, they take on Passage West in Cork, Mungret in Limerick on Wednesday, and Killaloe in Clare on Friday.
I wish them all the best.
Many years ago, I had occasion to visit Hartford on an almost weekly basis, because I was living in nearby Windsor, and though all I remember about Windsor was the exit from the highway (no 38), Hartford seemed a nice spot. Apart from the time I got sick in a taxi, but nobody wants to hear about that, I’m sure.
There was also the time we ended up playing a team from Hartford in a Gaelic football game, and by ‘we’ I mean the team in Worcester, Massachusetts, an hour to the north.
That didn’t end too well, either, as I recall, largely because of a Hartford defender’s tendency to put his foot over the ball.
Or because one of the Worcester forwards took immediate physical umbrage when he saw the Hartford defender putting his foot over etc etc.
Anyway. All forgotten now. Just in case any of the Hartford lads heard their dad, the cabbie, talk about the Irish lad who had something that disagreed with him that time: Statute of limitations, you feel me?
Blown away by detail in Beevor’s book ‘Arnhem’
I know there’s a tendency to see some military history books as Andy McNab with extra syllables, but the master returned this year with another classic.
This corner of the paper is a big Anthony Beevor fan and, from what I can see so far of Arnhem, his account of that pivotal battle in the Netherlands, it doesn’t disappoint. Beevor never lets you down when it comes to the illustrative anecdote.
In a previous book about the Second World War he told the story of a Russian veteran loaned, after D-Day, to new US soldiers. The Russian saved officers’ lives by telling them to stop saluting, and he saved soldiers’ lives by getting them to rub dirt on their uniforms. Their tunics were so new the buttons glinted, attracting the attention of German snipers.
Detail is everything, as you well knew.
