Tommy Martin: Farewell stars of '22, we hardly knew ye

HEROES RETURN: Kerry captain Seanie O'Shea and Stephen O'Brien bring the Sam Maguire through the streets of Kenmare. Picture: Mary O'Leary

Freya the walrus has much to teach us about celebrity culture.

The 750 kilogram pile of blubber is a star in Norway thanks to her recent antics in Oslo harbour. Having wandered many miles from her Arctic Circle habitat, Freya became a social media sensation after footage went viral of her wrecking small boats in comedic style.

Hoping to enjoy an afternoon sunbathe, she would clamber aboard some Norse bank manager’s weekend pleasure craft and duly sink it under her massive girth. Naturally the general public found all this adorable, though the bank managers were not best pleased.

Freya illustrates that fame is not just about what is being done, but who is doing it. Dog bites man - not a story. Adorable walrus larks about in Oslo harbour – hold the front page.

The adventures of Freya came to mind while watching Kerry celebrate their All-Ireland success. Talk of a famine being over for the Kingdom provoked eye-rolls throughout the land. Everyone knows it’s not a famine unless Éamon de Valera was alive the last time you won and there is some sort of curse involved, ideally featuring a crazy priest or a banshee.

Still, though many wait to get an ingrown toenail removed longer than Kerry have waited for an All-Ireland, the joy of the young Kingdom stars warmed the heart. One by one they came forward to spill their happiness into microphones. On TV and radio programmes in the days afterward, they chatted amiably in the afterglow of success. A startling amount were carrying their nappy-clad offspring, testament to a lack of alternative night-time activities over the long Kerry winter.

What was striking about all this, the walrus-on-a-speedboat newsworthiness of it, was that here were intercounty players being relaxed, normal – themselves – in the national media. For example, as he gassed away on the Sunday Game, I realised that between his captain’s speech and various interviews, I had heard Sean O’Shea’s voice more in one day than in his previous five seasons of inter-county stardom. This is one of Gaelic football’s biggest stars, not Greta Garbo.

They were all at it – Stephen O’Brien, Graham O’Sullivan, David Moran, David Clifford, Tadhg Morley, Jack Savage and more, on various outlets and in print – all being funny and interesting and intelligent, displaying that traditional Kerry canniness shot through with a modern, self-aware sensibility. And it seemed a shame that it took a rare day of, ahem, famine-ending jubilation, for them to be allowed to share those personalities with the rest of us.

An intercounty star doing an interview may not be a sensation on the scale of a blubbery beast causing wreck in Oslo harbour, but things seem to be going that way. Those on the GAA media beat have bemoaned this season as the worst yet for access to players during the championship. The GPA expenses row, the tight turnaround between games and the hyper-sensitivity of managers to the dangers of loose talk have meant ever fewer interview opportunities with players.

Most previews to big games this summer featured disinterred stories from the past or old players taking up the slack, in the absence of fighting talk from the actual protagonists. To some, this is the kind of shop talk whinge that should be kept to the canteen, like the plumbers’ union complaining about a lack of spanners. But it means that there has never been a generation of GAA stars less known than this one. That’s despite there being more games being televised and more general GAA chit-chat to consume than ever before.

In some ways we have the mirror image of professional soccer, where people complain that there is too much confected controversy and too little proper tactical discussion. By contrast, in GAA you can listen to hours of podcasts dissecting kick-out strategies and deep-lying half-forwards, but you yearn for a managerial spat or some tittle-tattle from the camp. No wonder everyone went gaga over the Cody-Shefflin handshake affair.

Does any of this really matter? I am reminded of one of the Dublin footballers’ something-in-a-row celebration nights a few years back. As the victorious team spilled off the bus with Sam Maguire, I was accosted for a chat by a roaringly drunk member of the Dublin starting 15. Though he had a solid 20 hours boozing done at this stage, it was obvious that this fellow, who I had previously thought of as one of Darth Gavin’s faceless stormtroopers, was a thoroughly good chap with real human thoughts and emotions.

Of course, the fact that the wider Irish public was unaware that the Dubs squad was full of jolly banter-merchants didn’t stop them harvesting a pile of All-Ireland medals. Same goes for the great Kilkenny hurling team, whose personalities were stored away during their glory years like some sort of dangerous radioactive material. So what if the fans don’t really know the players. Don’t big crowds at GAA matches speak to a product capable of selling itself?

Still, at a time when many are worried about the effect that shortening the intercounty season will have on the promotion of Gaelic games, surely the games themselves could be better promoted when they are actually on?

If the fear is that the GAA is acting like a cuckolded husband, clearing off in August and September to allow a batch of leering suitors have it away with the general public, then why not use their best asset – the players themselves – to better effect? Especially when the new championship arrangements mean there will be more games to talk about next year. There are only so many legends of the 1990s to go around.

So then, farewell stars of inter-county GAA, we hardly knew ye. Which is a shame, as most of you come across quite well. And while it will not be your main goal, if you are looking for some more media coverage next season, I hear there’s a walrus in Norway who’s an expert in these matters.