For 47 years, the GAA’s unblinking eye
When Kilkenny greeted the press at training before the 1971 All-Ireland final there were just five reporters to consume their thoughts.
The mood was relaxed, the access was easy, paranoia and suspicion were absent, or at least not an intrusive presence. One of the five was Jim O’Sullivan, in his first summer as GAA correspondent of this newspaper.
From those days to this he was a faithful witness to the GAA’s everyday life, domestic rows, occasional revolutions and blinding glory. A cool, unblinking eye.
So much changed, but not Jim. This business is a breeding ground for cynicism and all of its by-products but O’Sullivan’s enthusiasm was never corroded or diminished. A couple of days after he formally retired as the Irish Examiner’s GAA correspondent in June he reported for freelance duty in the Gaelic Grounds press box with the same bounce in his step and smile on his face that all his colleagues have known as long as they’ve known him.
The values he brings to his work underpinned his reputation and set an example: accuracy, balance, fine judgment and empathy are as precious in a reporter now as they ever were.
His position had a certain status from which flowed a degree of influence. He understood that responsibility and discharged it with an even hand. For many years of Jim’s career as GAA correspondent the Examiner was far more Cork-centric than it is now which meant that his previews and reports of Cork matches and club matches had a role in forming local opinion.
Cork players wanted to be portrayed positively in the Examiner and in the interests of fairness Jim couldn’t always facilitate that wish. In the course of his work he would have had regular dealings with a lot of Cork players and built up relationships but in print he resisted the temptation to be a sycophant or a cheer leader and that resistance served his readers well.
“I cringe now when I look back on 1978 when Cork won three-in-a-row,” he says. “Cork were lucky enough to win and I got stick for my report. Back in those days video wasn’t yet available to the general public so the teams used go out to RTÉ on the morning after the All-Ireland to watch a re-run of the match. I got bad vibes from a few of the players. One or two of the lads that I was friendly with said they expected more from a Cork paper. That I didn’t give them enough praise for winning an All-Ireland. There wasn’t a big deal back then about completing three-in-a-row.
“It was the reverse then a year later when Cork were going for four-in-a-row and Galway beat them in the semi-final. One of the players said to me, ‘I thought you’d go to town on us’. There were times when I travelled on trains with Cork teams and I soon realised I was better off being detached. The occasional player, if you were friendly with them, might be sensitive to criticism. I always maintained if a guy was honest with himself he didn’t need to read it in the paper.”
O’Sullivan’s initial grounding in journalism was far wider than sport and that broader experience gave him the tools to deal with anything the GAA could throw at him. He joined the Examiner straight from school in the summer of 1962 and spent more than 18 months as a proof reader which was a common introduction to journalism at the time. When he got his break in 1964 he was expected to cover everything and anything.
“You could do a Corporation meeting, a match, a priest’s funeral. Priests’ funerals were a big thing and the priests were nearly queuing up to give you their name. In the report then you had to run off a list of priests’ names.”
His father John had worked for the Examiner too, mostly as a court reporter, and in the early days he was a trusted critic. Jim remembers covering the 1968 Dr Harty Cup final when his alma mater Coláiste Chríost Rí beat Limerick CBS, giants of the competition in that decade. Jim allowed his heart to rule his copy and his father had a word in his ear.
That was 41 years ago. He only needed to be told once. For one of those years in Críost Rí he sat next to Billy Morgan which was a handy introduction to the most influential Cork football man of the last 50 years. What it didn’t grant, however, was permission to take liberties. “By and large it worked great but we had a few run-ins. On one occasion I made the mistake of trying to interview a player down in Páirc Úí Rinn while they were training.”
You can imagine Morgan’s reaction.
Interviews with leading players can be difficult to arrange these days, depending on the time of the year and the controlling tendencies of the manager. For much of Jim’s career, though, those barriers didn’t exist. Players didn’t have mobile phones but they were easier to reach. In Kerry’s glory days under Mick O’Dwyer, for example, the phone system in Templenoe was poorly resourced but if he wanted to meet any of the Spillane brothers he went through Denis P O’Sullivan in the Kilgarvan post office and the outcome was the same as direct dial.
Someone like Mick O’Connell might have been more difficult to track down but it was a worthwhile pursuit: “I remember the first time I interviewed him down at a training session in Tralee the first thing he asked me was, ‘How’s the Dav?’ Dav was Carl Davenport who was playing soccer with Cork Celtic at the time. Famously, Mick O was photographed at a soccer match in Flower Lodge during the Ban years. One of the Dublin papers carried it. We had it but didn’t use it.”
The first GAA Congress that Jim covered was in Belfast in 1971 when the Ban on playing and attending “foreign games” was lifted. As a youngster Jim played hurling and football for Douglas but he also dabbled in rugby for a year with Cork Con and the embarrassing futility of the Ban was obvious to most people by that time.
He remembers saying in a television interview years later that the ban on playing soccer and rugby in Croke Park wouldn’t be lifted in his lifetime. He delighted in the error of that forecast. In the last 20 years the GAA has changed at a rate that was unimaginable when he started in this business.
Other things, though, have been constant. Jim was a founding member of the All Stars steering committee when the scheme started in 1971 and has been a pillar of the awards ever since. That was also the year when Frank Murphy was appointed as the first-full time secretary of the Cork County Board.
Given their respective positions in Cork GAA society their paths were bound to cross and for the most part they got along. He suffered a “feed of abuse” from Murphy over something he had written in his preview of Cork’s Munster championship defeat to Clare in 1995 but he can’t think of another episode of conflict.
“I always had a very good working relationship with Frank. I would say in some ways he’s a misunderstood man. He was an outstanding referee, no doubt about it. A bit school masterish. He’s a man that has come in for a lot of criticism in the last couple of years but he doesn’t help his cause then by not giving interviews.”
Jim always had a keen eye for referees and a paragraph of commentary on their performances was a distinctive element of his match reports for many years. Seven years ago he wrote an acclaimed book on the subject, Men In Black, which was a series of interviews with 18 top referees.
“From the earliest days I made a point of commenting on referee’s performances. I think the idea originated from what I considered a masterful display from the late John Moloney based on the view that he had made a major contribution to the entertainment value of a particular game and deserved to be credited for it.
The general tendency is to dam a referee on the basis of a handful of bad decisions. Naturally, I would have been critical where I felt a referee didn’t do a good job but always tried to be fair and balanced.”
As the world got smaller the GAA world got bigger and Jim was sent to every corner of it. He represented the Examiner in Australia, Canada, the US, Dubai, Hong Kong, Argentina and Singapore. He covered at least one match in every county in Ireland too and over time the written word, mercifully, sprouted wings. On the early overseas trips he would sent home his reports by Telex but 20 years ago the Examiner kitted out their reporters with laptops, the first in Ireland to do so. A pair of couplers, like ear-muffs, covered both ends of the telephone receiver and by this connection copy could be transmitted from the laptop down a phone line to the office.
It sounds primitive now but at the time it was life-changing. The alternative was writing out the reports in long hand and calling them down the phone to a copy-taker or dashing back to the office and typing them in on site.
There were other seismic changes too. The number of matches went through the roof and the volume of coverage went off the scale. The tone became harder: more confrontational, more challenging. But his love for it remained the same.
“I made friends all over the country. I enjoyed meeting people. It’s great to mix with guys who were iconic figures and know them as just ordinary people. I never had any thoughts about doing anything else. I loved the job.
“To my sin, I would have put the job before family here and there. Lots of times. For example, I was never around to see any of my three girls starting school because it was always the Monday after the All-Ireland final when you were still in Dublin. My wife Jo (Josephine) had to put up with a lot but she never complained. She was always very supportive.”
He’ll be around the place a bit more now Jo, but he won’t be lost to us either. That sounds fair.
* Denis Walsh is an award-winning senior staff sportswriter with The Sunday Times
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