Stepford Wives and Páirc Uí Corleone

NOW that the games have begun again, and the vapours have subsided for those shocked by the revelations in Donal Óg Cusack’s autobiography, we can focus.

Not on puck-outs or sideline technique, but on the Cork man’s telling characterisation of Kilkenny as the ‘Stepford Wives’ of hurling.

First off, credit the reference. You’re used to reading GAA players describe The Shawshank Redemption as their favourite movie, and while we share the general fondness for Andy Dufresne and friends, it’s far more refreshing to see one of those classic early-70s sketches in paranoia cited by a current hurler. (If you thought we were referring to the Nicole Kidman remake, away with you to find out the latest about John Terry’s love life).

The hurling isn’t an obvious fit here, because supremacy isn’t a hidden dividend for any successful sports team; it’s front and centre. For all that the satisfaction of a job well done may soothe the beast unseen, cups and trophies aren’t presented behind closed doors. Everyone knows who a winner is.

In that sense perhaps All The President’s Men would have been a more apt comparison for Cusack to use: a powerful combination which appears almost impossible to defeat. Though Kilkenny would then be viewed as a parallel establishment to the Nixon White House. And if you thought Brian Cody was annoyed by Marty Morrissey’s questions about that All-Ireland final penalty, consider his reaction to that.

Comparing the personalities of a squad of county players to female androids constructed to perpetuate male dominance isn’t complimentary, of course. Whether you feel it’s a fair description or not may depend on a number of factors, not least the extent to which your county has suffered at the hands of Kilkenny recently, and no county has been immune to that kind of rough handling.

But what’s sauce for the goose: if you wish to grant the validity, however limited, of the Stepford/Cat equation, then surely there are others we can put together ourselves? You look at the untrammelled chaos of a movie like Dog Day Afternoon, with shouting from all sides and a tense stand-off, arguing and negotiating and an uncertain ending.

Can a current parallel be found anywhere? Do I hear you say Limerick? You can try the same county and shake the ingredients for another result: take a melodramatic, brooding mystery, add in a watery locale and Gothic touches such as an atmospheric hotel, with a bad end for one of the central characters: it’s the Limerick hurling crisis recast as Don’t Look Now.

Warren Beatty trying to penetrate the organisation in The Parallax View, only to become part of it? Galway in the Leinster championship? Those attractive, aimless outlaws in Zabriskie Point? Waterford? A man looking for shelter in a hostile city, like Three Days of the Condor? Anthony Daly in Dublin?

Before the credits roll on those comparisons, there’s one more early-70’s movie-hurling county comparison begging to be made, of course. It is a county which has seen preening and posturing, betrayal and abandonment, and, of course, families split down the middle by various offers that couldn’t be refused. It’s epic. It’s operatic. It spans the decades. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Páirc Uí Corleone on the banks of my own lovely Lee.

WHETHER by accident or design, linking Kilkenny’s supremacy to the unseen powers which those great early-seventies movies hinted at is a compliment. It pays oblique tribute to the implacable power behind Kilkenny’s continued success, which is undoubtedly a power of will as much as it is strength of arm.

What we — and maybe those in Kilkenny — should really look at is what brought that era of edgy thrillers to an end. Any film historian will tell you that the death knell was sounded for the likes of Brian De Palma, Alan Pakula and Sidney Lumet by the spectacular success of an upstart which outflanked everybody in the middle of the seventies.

Its breezy confidence and brightness, though maybe not impervious to close examination, was completely disarming; the story was nonsensical but engaging; and the dramatis personae were irresistible. It was infantile, but it was shiny.

On all levels Star Wars was different to what had gone before, and its hairy, honking aliens would never have been mistaken for the rumpled sound technicians of The Conversation or those beautiful hipsters of Zabriskie Point, for instance.

For hurling followers nowadays only one county is a realistic challenger to Kilkenny this weather, which means only one candidate for the Star Wars role. Of course, that means ours is a universe in which Tipperary could be viewed as romantic rebel forces taking on the might of an Empire which cannot be defeated. For hurling followers of the last 126 years, that prospect would beat any fiction, let alone science fiction. But it should be thrilling to watch.