Michael Moynihan: What has happened to the sports-rumour industrial complex?

Raharney celebrate their victory over Clanmaurice to win the All-Ireland Junior Camogie Club Championship on Sunday. Picture: INPHO/Ben Brady

Introductory sentences which need to be retired with immediate effect: this pandemic has been hard on everyone, but here I need to make a special plea for my own tribulations, as no-one else will do it for me.

To wit, what has happened to the sports-rumour industrial complex?

For many years, this was a spontaneously self-refreshing zone, a perpetual motion machine which might have slowed ominously the odd time but always restarted itself and zoomed happily onwards.

Because of this I would have expected it to come through a nuclear holocaust, never mind the small matter of a global outbreak of disease. The resilience of unlikely stories and random speculations about sportspeople I instinctively classed among the few likely survivors after a Deep Impact-style asteroid collision, yet it seems the fragility of the outlandish-yarn ecosystem has proven far more susceptible than first assumed.

Unfortunately a general improvement in moral standards doesn’t seem to be the driving cause of this disappearance. A stroll through the city streets shows the real cause: the fact offices are shuttered, shops closed, and pubs padlocked reveals what were once breeding grounds for dubious stories are silent, sterile and still.

These were some of the best sources for sports rumours and we’re often interlinked: the sensational morsel of gossip gleaned in the pub on Sunday night might resurface when the carrier — patient zero, to use the parlance of our times — got his or her morning coffee on Monday morning before it was shared with colleagues at work an hour or so later.

Obviously if you’re only going as far as your own kitchen for a cup of Maxwell House before logging wearily onto Zoom for work, then the rumour mill has a hard time starting.

In the last week or so, your columnist has done his best, approaching knots of people blowing the steam off their takeaway cups at coffee trucks, trying to rustle up some sports-chat. Have they heard anything about this lad? How about that lad?

The only significant discovery was my surprise at how resistant people are to complete strangers approaching them to ask them questions.

The best I could come up with was eavesdropping on a couple who were working their way through the newspapers outside the Mardyke Arena last Tuesday; as I was sipping my latte in complete silence I strained my ears to pick up what they were saying about a Serbian tennis player and his plans for Australia.

The obvious problem with that kind of directly-heard chat is that the substance of the discussion isn’t filtered through the consciousness of others — some of them inclined to exaggeration, some to understatement, and quite a few inclined to completely misunderstand the story and to substitute random names into the narrative. Is it really even a rumour if someone doesn’t alter the story in a material way while sharing it with a third party?

I hasten to add this is part of my general contribution to the great human comedy, and not a plea for material.

Any honest reporter will tell you they print facts, not rumours, but any scrupulously honest reporter will go further and list the stories that would have shook the foundation of the State… if only they hadn’t been shown to be rumour and gossip, pure and simple.

For that reason alone, the sooner this pandemic ends the better. How else are we to revive one of the great domestic industries of the age?

Novak: The gift that keeps giving

In fairness, Novak Djokovic really is the gift that keeps on giving.

The to-and-fro about him trying to get into Australia is almost the least interesting aspect of the Djokovic story.

For instance, the Serb’s strange beliefs provide endless entertainment — take these quotes from June 2020: “This is something that is not linked to any form of official way of presenting nutrition and how you should eat and drink.

“I know some people that, through energetic transformation, through the power of prayer, through the power of gratitude, they managed to turn the most toxic food, or maybe most polluted water into the most healing water.

“Scientists have proven that in (an) experiment, that molecules in the water react to our emotions to what has been said.”

My favourite piece of the above is “scientists have proven”, though even this nonsense pales alongside the revelation that he cried for three days after having elbow surgery in 2018 — not because of the pain, but he felt he’d “failed himself” because he hadn’t cured his injury himself.

“I was trying to avoid getting on that table because I am not a fan of surgeries or medications,” Djokovic said.

“I am just trying to be as natural as possible, and I believe that our bodies are self-healing mechanisms.

“I don’t ever want to get myself in the situation where I have to have another surgery.”

I don’t reproduce Djokovic’s codswallop to make fun of him — well, not really — but to show that the best way to illustrate these lads’ sheer stupidity is by allowing them to provide the examples themselves.

You could call it the evidence-based approach, for want of a better term.

‘The Athletic’ versus newspapers

The Athletic is to be bought by The New York Times, I see.

There have been rumours circulating to this effect for a while, but they firmed into fact, and a hefty price tag of $500m (circa €657m).

How this works out in reality we have yet to learn, but if you’re not familiar with how The Athletic works, it offers coverage by sport and also by city — if you live in Miami, then there’s dedicated coverage of the sports teams of that city.

To show that irony still lives, though, in recent days, a few people have referred to a comment from one of The Athletic’s founders, Alex Mather, when the website launched back in 2017.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” said Mather.

In an interview with a newspaper.

The New York Times, as it happens.

Climb every mountain. And write about it

There are some top quality books about climbing to be found, from Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer to — a particular favourite — Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis.

Good company, then, for Time on Rock: A Climber’s Route into the Mountains by Anna Fleming. Her account of how she developed as a climber is an encouragement and a confirmation, as well as explaining exactly what the attraction of climbing is for the non-climbers among us.

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