Michael Moynihan: Garth Brooks, nineties sport incarnate

Country singer Garth Brooks on the skyline at Croke Park Dublin for the announcement of his concerts at Croke Park

Ah, Garth Brooks.

Thanks for reminding us of a far more innocent time. Not 2014, when everyone found out precisely what ‘subject to licence’ means, but his first iteration, when that urge to shout you got friends in low places seized 82% of the population at every social gathering.

Brooks’s reappearance brought back memories for this punter of a particular place (Dublin), and with some particular flavours, but above all a particular time — the mid-nineties.

In my mind the emblematic sports events of the time were oddly ramshackle, half-professional and half-disorganised. Take the departure of Jack Charlton as the Republic of Ireland football manager: I have a strong memory of being in the Baggot Inn on that precise evening and arguing with a drinking companion about the identity of two people at the counter.

One was Mick Byrne, the international team’s physio, but the tie-breaker was an off-duty RTÉ reporter who refused to acquiesce with my subtle prompting and pretend he was someone else entirely: as a result I lost the five punts being wagered.

Then there was the very late evening a few of us were queuing for a late-night establishment on the evening of an All-Ireland football final: a (now) well-respected member of society in my company insulted an entire county’s followers while jumping the queue and when his nose wasn’t broken for his cheek he predicted — correctly — that the county side would be as cowed the following afternoon as its supporters were when lining up for a bouncer’s approval. (Editor’s note: this is now so carefully worded, decades after the fact, that no-one knows what’s actually being discussed.)

The nineties ran along those lines, to the best of my recollection. We did our best, but it didn’t always work out. And sport was the same. The machine-tooled efficiency that we’re now accustomed to — that we now demand — wasn’t far away, but we hadn’t quite reached those sunlit uplands. Not at that point.

Garth Brooks materialises now again in our national consciousness as a vivid reminder of those times, a nineties sporting id incarnate, broad in the beam and full in the jeans. Significantly, he’s recognisable from his heyday quarter a century ago but he’s also different. In fact, something about his particular look, that fleshy healthiness, is strongly reminiscent of an intercounty wingback gone slightly to seed.

You know the type. A good man in his day to train but now devoted to his golf, making progress with his short game; did a bit of coaching with a different crowd but it didn’t work out and they put the run on him; unabashed, he likes to take up a prominent position on the bank when his own club plays championship, just where the slagging about his own days is audible. Any day now someone is going to pull out a match programme or clipping to recall a key game that was played all of 25 years ago: he’ll laugh along with everyone else about the boot-cut jeans and brown shoes they all sported that time but he’d wear them again in a heartbeat.

Brooks’s musical quality I leave to you and your conscience. If you’re going to one of the concerts, then enjoy it (despite the carping from the musical snobs, they spent the nineties bopping to the Vengaboys like everyone else, not touring with the Velvet Underground as guitar techs).

But his appearance in Croke Park squares the circle almost too neatly.

The stadium is twenty-first century sleek. The musician reminds us of a far more analogue age. The nineties, kid. Unlike the sixties, you can prove you lived through them because you remember them so vividly.

Great Madden documentary incoming

The documentaries keep on coming, I see. We had hours upon hours of Michael Jordan’s galactic-level petulance, and it appears that another well-adjusted individual is to launch a... look, I can’t even pretend. It’s Tom Brady, and our vendetta is well known to all.

Better news, though, if you’re a fan of American sports. A documentary about John Madden is on the way, apparently.

Madden, the bearish commentator and ex-coach of the (then) Oakland Raiders, will be familiar to many from the video game which bore his name for years.

However, I fervently hope the documentary traces the rise of the gourmet dish which Madden made famous over many years, the dish described by ESPN as “deboned duck stuffed inside a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned turkey, with a generous mix of cornbread and sausage dressings slathered throughout.”

I refer to the turducken — between the description above and the name you can work out what it is. Give me a couple of hours screen time on the evolution of this masterpiece over Tom Brady’s exercise regime any day.

League of (parts of) Ireland

Many thanks to the reader who got in touch late last week to make a telling observation about the League of Ireland.

Waterford’s defeat at the hands of UCD on Friday means that they play in the First Division next season - along with the teams from Cork, Limerick and Galway.

That seems extraordinary at first glance, that large cities (in the Irish context) don’t have teams in the top flight of domestic soccer. No disrespect to the teams which have managed to stay in the Premier Division on merit, and the point has to be made that if the four ‘city’ teams were good enough then they’d be in that division also.

If you compare this situation on the demographics alone, however, with those of any other country in Europe it’s doubtful you’d find a similar situation: the capital city providing almost one third of the participants in a country’s top league is not so outlandish, but the four next-biggest cities in a country not being represented at the same level?

Clearly 12 months can change a lot, and all or some of those sides could be back in the Premier Division next season — a week can change a lot, as we saw with the situation in Waterford in the days leading up to their game with UCD last Friday evening. But have we seen something similar anywhere in Europe? You know where I am.

Fleming again

As if the turducken weren’t bad enough, your columnist probably faces immediate cancellation by promoting this week’s book — The World Is Not Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming, by Oliver Buckton.

A few years ago I recommended a book of Fleming’s letters — fantastic, by the way — so long-suffering readers will hardly be surprised.

But what caught my eye about this book is not so much the subject’s snobbery, xenophobia, misogyny, complacency and privilege, but the writer’s clever identification of Fleming’s ability to fail upwards — in the words of one reviewer, a little like Boris Johnson. Recommended.

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