GPA beware to avoid blood and Gore

LAST week we happened to mention an old hero, one Gore Vidal — essayist, novelist, screenwriter, former homeowner in west Cork — and used one of his many bons mots in this very space.

This week, by coincidence, Vidal’s new memoir came out, a volume we picked up around the same time as the GPA-GAA detente was announced. Unlikely though it may appear, the two events are linked. And we don’t mean to draw a connection to Gore’s most famous gem: “It is not enough that I succeed; my friends must also fail.”

To backtrack a little, Vidal’s first memoir was called Palimpsest — as in writing material, like a blackboard, which gets used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. He was making some kind of high-falutin’ point about memory and inscription and such; our point in citing the book is to remind the GPA of three words: Players Advisory Group, and the possibility, however unlikely, of seeing their interests overwritten and wiped away, just as happened to the long-vanished PAG.

It’s likely that few enough people remember the Players’ Advisory Group, which came into being seven years ago and disappeared rapidly not long afterwards, but there’s a lesson in that. Anyone with an interest in the GAA would have to welcome the fact that everyone seems to be growing up a little and talking to each other rather than sulking at home.

(Though whether you could genuinely welcome any initiative which has a statement like “discussions which could potentially lead to formal recognition of the GPA as the principal body representing senior inter-county football and hurling players and both parties will prepare draft discussion documents to facilitate a process of engagement to proceed in a coherent manner”, acting as midwife is another thing altogether).

Back to the Players Advisory Group and the curious case of it being airbrushed out of history: that should give everyone pause. After overcoming the euphoria sparked off by the prospect of, er, sitting down to work on draft discussion documents and facilitating engagement processes, the fact that a parallel players’ group fell away so quickly shouldn’t be forgotten. Given the general resemblance of the statement to a thousand press releases from Stormont in the aftermath of real-world politicking, we’ll refrain from suggesting any parallels between the PGA and the Stickies and so forth.

There’s no point in warning the GAA hierarchy that it’s dealing with an organisation that won’t drown slowly in a morass of meetings and documentation. They’ve made that step. If anyone needs to tread carefully here it’s the GPA. Everyone wants to see intercounty players looked after appropriately. What nobody wants is a situation where the economic imperative develops a momentum all its own: if that happened, employment law and restraint of trade would obtain, and coverage would drift a page or two backwards in the paper towards the business pages.

We know that’s not the GPA goal, but could it be that the GPA is being given every opportunity to show its colours? If some elements within the GAA fear an apocalyptic outcome in the event of the players being given their heads, what better way to show the folly of that path than just allowing the players to say what they’d do if they were given their heads?

You could call it the Henry Kissinger approach to diplomatic negotiation; whenever Kissinger wanted a foreign country to do his bidding his MO was to portray himself as the voice of reason in comparison with the satanic Milhouse and his unreasonable demands back in Washington. In this scenario, the GPA could be linked to an end-of-days nightmare which the GAA could remove itself from.

Maybe we’re being paranoid. All things considered, though, some fun times ahead. For those outside the loop, the traditional putdown of academic politics — so bitter because there’s so little at stake — could be amended for application here. But for those within the loop, it’s hard to think of anything more important.

And hence back to Gore Vidal, and his second memoir. In between the gossip about lunching Orson Welles (sweaty) and the nocturnal activities of Tennessee Williams (unrepeatable in a family newspaper, particularly at this hour of the morning), there’s the title: Point To Point Navigation.

It’s a sailing reference from the great man’s time as a US Navy navigator during WWII: in the absence of maps, the sailors relied on fixed points in the memory to navigate from one’s port of origin in order to arrive safely at one’s destination.

Given the negotiations ahead, and what’s at stake, what could be more apt?

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