Michael Moynihan: All good things must come to an end

MY LAST ONE: Michael Moynihan writes his final column. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

HERE’S a column almost twenty years in the making. My last one.

Don’t look so sad, as Kris Kristofferson said. I know it’s over. This old world will keep on turning. You’ll see me around the paper still.

As I duck out, some thanks.

Thanks to the lads on the desk for handling the copy. Which at times needed to be manhandled, in fairness.

Having a platform like this is a privileged position. A friend of mine said the stars were surely aligning in the cosmos when I was able to inflict my opinions on the population at large, a vile calumny that rankled even as I ordered him swept off to the dungeon.

He had a point, though. Being given this kind of pulpit would have corrupted a lesser mortal, but thankfully I was able to stay grounded even as I pointed out the errors that were obvious only to my eyes.

To quote Dr Con Murphy: they wouldn’t listen to me.

Thanks to all the people who chatted to me and helped me fill this space over the years, because a column is a lot like having an ungrateful child suddenly land into your house. It has to be fed but never says thanks or makes a cute face to make up for the crankiness.

The result is that most column writers have an existence rather like a shark’s, constantly on the lookout for material, an enormous snout sweeping from side to side trying to sniff out an item.

Because almost anything that happens is a potential snippet for the column: the time I got locked into the toilets accidentally in Semple Stadium wasn’t the most enjoyable half-hour I ever spent in Thurles — someone had to go down the town to get Philly Purcell, the groundsman, to bust me out — but there was one consolation.

I knew it’d be a cracking column.

In that sense the people who spoke to me were doing me a huge favour, even if they didn’t always know it. More than once someone said something in passing and probably didn’t notice my eyes glaze over as I went to the private spot inside my brain where I noted that comment down for future recycling as a column.

Most of all, of course, thanks to those who read the column, and in particular those who got in touch over the years. More often than not the people who did take the trouble to reach out were reasonable and/or informative — if I raised a question there was never a shortage of answers, for instance, and usually plenty of supplementary information as well.

Which of course generated more columns in turn. Much appreciated.

Writing so many of them over the years means there aren’t that many columns I didn’t get around to writing. I got to write a column in the style of David Foster Wallace complete with footnotes, after all. I got to write a column about buying my last ever pair of football boots — and then, a few years later, about buying a first ever pair of boots for my kids. I got to muse on why sports columnists are held up as the epitome of slobbishness, like Oscar in The Odd Couple, and then looked in the mirror and saw the essential truth of that characterisation.

And I got to write columns on the passing of both my father and mother, which was only fair given they bought the paper for over 60 years between them.

If you’re reading this you don’t need me to tell you that the sports coverage in this paper is the best in the country by some distance. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of different people.

It was a privilege to be part of that.

Pádraig Harrington: A winner off the course

Over the years a lot of people have asked me the same question.

Who’s the worst person you dealt with covering sport?

In vain I tried to turn that question on its head, striving to get them to be more upbeat — to ask me about the better examples, the positive experiences.

When they refused I usually dished out a few names such as the rugby player who laughed out loud at a question I asked, or the GAA manager who asked me if I ever wondered why he still spoke to me.

(On the latter occasion I did say ‘That thought has never crossed my mind.’ On the former I didn’t say anything. What would you expect from a pig only a grunt?) But I’ve always insisted on paying tribute to one of life’s gentlemen.

If you plotted someone’s sporting achievements on a graph cross-referenced with the ability to behave properly, then Pádraig Harrington remains in a league of his own: an international sports star with a level of modesty and good manners that would put some professionally ‘humble’ athletes to shame. The champ.

One last favour to ask

It wouldn’t be a column if I didn’t leave you all with some homework.

You may recall the documentary series The Game: The Story of Hurling show that RTÉ showed a couple of years ago, winning great acclaim.

Crossing the Line, the production company that made The Game is now making a similar series on Gaelic Football and is calling on people to submit footage – home movies and the like - of Gaelic Football matches, training sessions, cup presentations, home-comings and events from times past. They don’t have to be All-Ireland finals: league games, people taking the bus to matches, post-game chats on the sideline. Anything football-adjacent.

Yours truly was involved with the hurling series and is now involved with the football. If you have a box in the attic with film a granduncle shot while home on holidays from the States, let us know and help to tell the story.

Don’t - repeat, don’t - send any footage. Email a brief description of what you have and we’ll be in touch. This is the email address to use - [e-mail] - and this is the website (https://www.storyoffootball.com/).

Look forward to hearing from you.

 Sportswriters, folks. A breed apart 

I’ve mentioned books here for years, so here’s one more.

Years ago Rick Telander wrote a brilliant account of street basketball in New York, Heaven Is A Playground, but I mention it because...

A few years ago I spoke to the great sportswriter Steve Rushin for the paper and he mentioned Telander’s book, which he’d enjoyed so much he’d never returned it after checking it out of the library as a child. When Rushin went to work at Sports Illustrated, he told me, he showed Telander the book — the very same volume which had sustained his enthusiasm for the trade all those years, the book he’d never brought back to the library, and Telander . .. “He wasn’t happy,” Rushin said. “At all. Only 2,000 copies of the book had been printed, and I was depriving a lot of people of the chance to read it.”

Sportswriters, folks. A breed apart.

• michael.moynihan @examiner.ie