Beyond the tribe, the game

Theo Dorgan, broadcaster, sailor and author, will receive the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish poetry in a couple of weeks in the United States: clearly he’s a man of diverse interests. When Michael Moynihan asked him about his sporting interests he revealed a keen focus.

THEO Dorgan’s enthusiasm for hurling isn’t immediate. It seems to precede immediacy, particularly when he talks about his family links to the game.

“It was an absolute passion. If there was a game on Sunday it would never have occurred to you to do anything else – that only came in when you were 14 or 15.

“It was a family thing, a tribal thing, all about unquestioning loyalty. I must have been 18 or 19 before I could watch a game and be objective – ‘ah, we shouldn’t have got that free’.

“And even then that objectivity only goes so far. I wouldn’t be very objective if Cork were playing.”

Dorgan’s father was one of the founders of Na Piarsaigh GAA club in the city.

“It showed great forbearance on his part that he never showed any disappointment that none of us were good enough to wear the jersey. And looking back, that must have been a disappointment to him.

“I remember going to matches when I was seven or eight with him: I could tell you how many bumps there are on the Centre Park Road because I’d go with him on the crossbar of his bike down to the Athletic Grounds.”

That family passion was one shared by the community.

“This was a complex thing. Growing up on the northside, I went to school in the North Mon with fellas who were great hurlers, like Donal O’Grady, and you mightn’t have been any good but you were proud of them for being good. There was a web of loyalties.

“It wasn’t like making a consumer choice, ‘I think I’ll support Leeds, or Arsenal’. I scratch my head at amazement at Dublin young fellas getting into passionate arguments about Everton vs Liverpool. What is that to you? Nothing.

“But the Glen and Piarsaigh when I was in the North Mon – that was serious stuff. We even had a Barrs supporter in our class, and to this day I don’t know how he got to and from school without an armed escort.

“It’s hard to convey if you’re unfamiliar with it. There was entertainment, at games in Ballinlough we’d move down to the gate at the end to see someone get stuck into the referee even if we won. Someone walking up the road who got 1-3 against the Rockies would say hello. That’s difficult to convey to people who see sport as a consumer attraction.”

He’s never seen his two interests, poetry and sport, as divergent.

“Not at all. I think if you have a passion for life you can weave anything into it, and everything feeds into everything else. I was commissioned to write a poem for Na Piarsaigh’s 50th anniversary (see panel) and in the poem I mentioned Pat Kelleher scoring a goal. I was away for the anniversary and my brother Jack read it out in the club, but a row erupted over which game exactly I was writing about!

“Jack hadn’t the heart to say it was made up of bits and pieces of a load of matches. But how many matches do you really remember anyway? They grow in the re-telling all the time.

“That’s another side of sport I find marvellous – the way people replay matches over and over. And when you tell stories about epic matches, you’re doing what a poet or a novelist does – you’re putting characters and passions out there, shaping the story – and it ends up being a story about you as much as anything else.

“I also love the fact that sport teaches us to have heroes. Nowadays people can be reticent about having heroes because they feel it lessens them somehow. But I knew Christy Ring was God – even though he played for the Glen – and I didn’t feel it lessened me. I felt it augmented me.”

DORGAN’S passion for other sports is selective – “golf does nothing for me” – while he sees rugby as a game appropriate for television: “Unless you can see what’s happening on the pitch, which most of the time you can’t if you’re at the game, then it seems pretty pointless to be actually at it.”

Soccer in Ireland he sees as suffering through commercialisation: “There was a time you’d know the players with Cork Hibs, say, but as far as I can see, if you buy players in something goes out of it. I presume now it’s less a sport than an investment opportunity for people.”

The club affiliation breaks out in Dorgan when asked for a sporting highlight.

“There’s nothing like being at an All-Ireland semi-final or final, seeing people you didn’t see in years, and you don’t care about anything other than the men in your jerseys.

“In that sense, one of the great moments in my life was seeing Seán Óg O hAilpín, in beautiful Irish, accepting the Liam McCarthy. To see a guy like that speaking such beautiful Irish – and you know if you asked him he’d have said ‘why wouldn’t I?’

Beyond the tribe, however, there’s also the game, as Dorgan says.

“One of the great contributions of the GAA has been to build a sense of common feeling with people. There’s something about walking out of a game and seeing supporters from both sides settle down to discuss the game. Two years ago after the All-Ireland semi-final, you had Kilkenny fellas saying ‘ye did well considering what ye put up with at the start of the year’, and Cork fellas saying ‘there isn’t a hurler in the country like Shefflin’. It’s a curious mix, sport. It teaches you first ‘your own at any cost’, but then, when the match is over, it’s all about the game.”