Looking past the obvious for the limelight

JIMMY BRESLIN had a problem in November 1963. A young reporter, he was in the middle of the biggest news story of his life — of anyone’s life — but he couldn’t get a handle on it.

When John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas every newspaper reporter on the American continent was mobilised, but everyone was drawing from the same well. Breslin showed the nous that would eventually win him a Pulitzer Prize when he decided to look beyond the limelight.

It’s seductive, the lure of a big name and a loud story. You don’t have to look too far for it, either — there was plenty of that around this week, too.

Sunday, for instance, crackled to life with an exhibition of fisticuffs in the Carling Cup Final.

Well, an exhibition of fisticuffs in the same way that the Jets and the Sharks have a knife fight in ‘West Side Story’. It need hardly be said that if a pair of GAA or rugby teams behaved in the same manner — necessitating a troop surge by both managers and sundry officials onto the field of play — we would be told that the end of the world was nigh, with accompany pictorial evidence. Ah well.

There was even more limelight shed on Wimbledon, even if it isn’t tennis weather just yet. The decision to award male and female champions equal prize money has drawn much comment, some of it unfavourable.

And quite right too: it’s inherently unfair to pay one set of players the same for less: if women play best of three and men play best of five, where’s the equality in that? Granted, on the world scale of injustice it’s not quite the same as the imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, but a challenge to the European Court of Human Rights isn’t far away, surely. To protect the innocent, as it were.

Casting a giant shadow over most of the sporting events of the week was last Saturday’s rugby game. And rightly so, given the behaviour of all concerned. However, the anthem issue — you probably thought you’d heard the end of that — rippled across Tipperary and Limerick in a couple of odd sideshows.

In the former case, guests at a wedding where the Tyrone football team were staying allegedly serenaded members of said team with a rendition of God Save The Queen and that old disease, scuffles, broke out.

Nobody had any problem believing the yarn, because baiting a collection of cheesed-off (they’d lost to Cork earlier in the evening) super-fit young men a long way from home would only resemble a good idea to someone who was well refreshed after a day’s celebrations. To use the title of one of our favourite books: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

The other anthem controversy revolved around someone using the mute button when the British anthem . . . oh God, who can pretend to be interested any more?

There was more reward away from the limelight this week, though that mightn’t be quite the appropriate description for an event covered by this newspaper, several radio stations and two television channels.

The occasion was the presentation of the Irish Examiner Junior Sports Stars, and it was refreshing to see real sports stories rather than over-hyped controversies, never mind elastic definitions of the concept of ‘equality’.

The sports stars on show in Dublin last Wednesday included a girl who puts down a five-hour round trip for every training session; a 16-year-old boy working to overcome a dislocated kneecap and torn ligaments; a girl who won three national titles in basketball in one weekend; the schoolboy who was man of the match in an All-Ireland club hurling final.

With that kind of dedication and talent your day in the limelight is postponed, of course, but it shows the rewards in looking past the obvious.

There’s a good example of that approach to be found in Jimmy Breslin, the man we mentioned at the top of this piece. To tell his story in November 1963, he simply interviewed the man with the saddest job in America at that time: John F. Kennedy’s grave-digger.

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