Farewell to my father: my hero, my inspiration
He was the man who put a hurley into my hands as a child and tried for hours to teach me to take a sideline cut. He showed me how to approach a football at a time when you took free-kicks off the ground. When I got older, he brought me to Páirc Uí Chaoimh to watch Billy Morgan perform heroics in front of the Blackrock End and when I got my finger broken by a cowardly pull, he was the one who brought me to hospital.
He was a GAA man to the core, but there were exceptions. Decades before quarter of a million people saw Munster beat the All Blacks in Thomond Park, he and his brothers regularly travelled to Limerick to watch touring teams play rugby. Also lurking in his background were goals scored in Milltown and Flower Lodge, and despite loud disavowals, he was as proud of those as he was of two goals scored against Kerry in a Munster minor football final.
Well, almost as proud.
When I started writing about sport, he was encouraging. He reminded me that the people I’d write about had families, bosses and workmates. If I wouldn’t like my writing to be applied to my family, he said, maybe I should think again about what I’d written.
It wasn’t all proscription. He gave me the first example of what Sports Illustrated calls the “look-around”; recalling a minor All-Ireland final, he told me how the players running up the tunnel before him ducked their heads one after another when they got into the sunlight, and he understood why when he came out himself. The noise of almost 90,000 people rolling down on top of him was like a physical blow.
He taught me the most fundamental beliefs I have about sport: about fairness and effort and guts. He was the first person I heard describing Roy Keane as having “the cutting for it”. Perhaps you have to be a Blackpool man to say that. Or a Mayfield man to understand it. Honesty and decency marked the way my hero lived, and he didn’t warm to sportsmen who couldn’t show the same.
If that comes across as po-faced, that’s not how it happened in real life.
He found humour in sport as we all do. As a minor he was picked on a Glen Rovers senior team for a suit-length tournament in Waterford. He and his pals were delighted when Christy Ring was their chauffeur: if the great man lined out, they reasoned, his scoring prowess would have them decked out in their new gear by the following weekend. Ring, listening quietly, pulled in at a petrol station and discovered a limp between the steering wheel and the petrol pump.
“How did the game go?” I asked.
“Worst result possible,” he said. “We drew. No-one got any suits on either side.”
Only a couple of weeks ago, when he knew he was sick, he said he’d like to see the first rugby game in Croke Park. It appealed to his sense of the universe that the only man to score for Ireland that day was a Cork man, of course.
The kindness of a friend meant that nearly 50 years after his first trip to Jones Road, his last trip took him to the Premium Level, and a bit of comfort. I was working at the match, and we played a game that many readers have probably played in the stadium themselves. I rang his mobile and asked him to wave to me.
He came out to the front, near the advertising hoarding and waved his left hand, while he held the phone in his right and asked if I could see him.
I see you, Dad. I see you.
Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
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