My
father once broke his ankle in a West Cork caravan park, following an abortive
attempt to show his kids how to perform the Johann Cruyff drag-back. He loved
that great Dutch team and for Christmas one year, he gifted my older brother
and I an orange football, a Johann Cruyff football. He swore to us that Wim Van
Hanegem was one of our distant Dutch cousins, that Germans couldn’t be trusted
after the great injustice of 1974 (never mind the wars), and that Shoot! was
better for our sporting education than Roy of the Rovers. He was that kind of
Dad.
Every
Saturday night so long ago, he’d carefully lift us from our sleeping beds and
place us sitting in front of the embers of the fire just in time for Match of
the Day. A few judiciously-located lumps of coal later, the flames would
re-ignite and the familiar theme tune, the soundtrack to so many of our
childish dreams, kicked into gear. Then he’d slip into the kitchen, and make us
sandwiches by cutting delicious slivers from the Sunday roast in the oven. No
meat ever tasted quite as good as the contraband cuts consumed on those
late-night vigils together. No televised football ever seemed so magical.
On
Wednesday evenings in winter, he played darts with us in the small bedroom with
the battered PYE radio tuned to the crackling signal of the European Cup soccer
being broadcast on what he still quaintly called "the BBC Light
Programme". Between trips to the oche, he’d sit on the bottom bunk and
regale us with a recurring tale of how his own promising arrows career had been
stymied by an afternoon spent road bowling before a crucial fixture.
Apparently, a few hours throwing the heavy iron ball along the winding back
roads out by Cork airport wasn’t conducive to a man retaining his crucial feel
for lightweight tungsten.
In
summer, he hurled with us on the hard, wet sand of every beach we ever visited,
beseeching his kids in vain to try to hit off our weaker sides, and always
refusing my blasphemous request to substitute a tennis ball for the sliotar.
Although there was no evidence he’d ever meaningfully held a hurley himself, a
lack of experience never diminished his enthusiasm for any game and didn’t stop
him serving as a hurling and football selector on several under-age county
championship-winning teams with Bishopstown.
According
to all available records, he’d never swung a golf club in anger either but,
during the brief, annual spell around the British Open when we’d embrace that
sport, he’d play putting games with us in the back garden for hours. Whether he
played or whatever he played mattered not a jot because he evinced a love of
every sport and evangelised about nearly all of them. Over the years, there was
nothing funnier than his repeated and forlorn attempts to explain to my
American wife the rules and the joys of English cricket, a game for which he’d
developed a passion sometime after multi-channel television arrived in our
house in the late 1980s.
The comfort
of that armchair from where he sat sentry on the sporting universe never
diminished his capacity for joining in with his kids though. His participation
in our every sporting misadventure was never measured by the clock because he
always seemed to have time to give. He was never too busy to attempt to coach
or, just in passing, to communicate an enduring love of all things Cork.
Blessed
with the native’s traditional mixture of confidence, expectation and
parochialism, his loyalty to the place so trumped everything that in the early
nineties, he broke the habit of a lifetime and began rooting for Manchester
United. He’d worked as a security guard with Denis Irwin’s father Justin back
when the peerless full-back was still in the youth team at Leeds United, and
had religiously tracked his progress through the years. He could hardly cheer
against him.
Some
years back, after my father had just started the depressing journey deep into
the fog of Alzheimer's, I wrote a book about the history of Cork sport. I dedicated
it to him because, through words and deeds, he’d spent all his life giving me
access to that heritage. His version of the local gospel extended far beyond
the holy trinity of Ringy, Jack Lynch and JBM, and like every man of his
generation, there was a special affection for the famine-ending Cork hurlers of
1966 and the nearly mythical footballers of 1973.
Anyway,
a couple of days after the book’s launch at which he had been an esteemed
guest, he sat in his armchair in the front room with his own copy in hand. From
time to time, he’d let out a little chuckle or a murmur of approval about some
paragraph. Eventually, he caught me looking at him and said: “There’s some very
good stories in this book. You can read it when I’m done.” One more horrible instance
of a cruel disease at its most darkly humorous.
He
finally passed away on the Monday morning before Christmas. During the dreaded
flight home for the funeral, all those hours over the Atlantic darkness spent
trying to remember everything we shared over the past 37 years, I realised how
much sport courses through that personal highlight reel. It is everywhere.
From
handing an impressionable young boy sports books like Mick O’Connell’s A Kerry
Footballer and Val Dorgan’s Christy Ring to clipping my first Sunday Tribune
bylines from the paper and laughing at the incongruity of his son covering
All-Ireland League rugby matches. From dewy Sunday mornings before street
league matches trying to teach an awkward 9 year old to put his toe under the
ball before picking it off the ground to nights two decades later that I’d call
him from some European city to chat about the international we’d both just
watched. Like so many men and boys in Irish households, the sporting world was
our enduring bond.
One
May evening in 1998, I phoned home from the Amsterdam Arena shortly before
kick-off in the Champions’ League final between Juventus and Real Madrid. I was
standing in the press room just yards away from where Johann Cruyff was holding
forth to a group of journalists. When I told him about my proximity to his
hero, he sighed contentedly and said: “Oh, he was the best, the best of all
time. None better.”
No,
Dad, that was you.
(First published
January 2009, two weeks after my father’s death.)
That is such a beautiful piece. No doubt he was phenomenally proud of you, and delighted that his love of sport passed on to you. Like you our lives revolved around sporting events, not just GAA and soccer but darts,basketball, snooker, pitch and putt, American football, golf.. I'm emotional reading it as it strikes such a chord with my own childhood. The passing the torch to our own kids brings it full circle, handing on the baton to them, a lifetime of sporting memories be it participating or supporting
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