For several minutes I have been sitting here, my mind mimicking the blank screen, the cursor flashing expectantly, as though it's jumping up and down in excited anticipation. I envisage it, any moment now, stopping and standing there, waiting impatiently. Perhaps, tapping its foot? Or worse still, rolling its eyes. There is a perception of the writer as piper, the words dancing to his tune. This, of course, is a fallacy. But there is a hierarchy and if the poet is king, is the sports-hack the peasant?
If asked to sum-up an Irish summer in two words (rather arbitrarily), I would respond without much thought, thus: rain and hurling. Yesterday, the first Sunday of September, we had both. (To those of you who would enthusiastically point out that September is no longer termed summertime, I say to you, piss off!)
The All-Ireland Hurling Final, where the continents of culture and sport, traditionally separated by the chasmic oceans of class and prejudice, come together, not in collision, more of an unfamiliar, estranged familial embrace. The All-Ireland Hurling Final, diminished only by the plethora of unimaginative clichés that define it.
Admittedly, sport such as this, with its Shakespearian tragedy and heroes forged from Achillian moulds, lends itself to the Grecian heroic tradition. It's how we think of our sporting idols; as warriors on the field of battle. In recent times, our sporting conversations have become more sophisticated. We have borrowed terminology, if not understanding, from the fields of medical science and psychology, and a transcendence of the aforementioned class boundaries has widened our sporting lexicon. But not so much that trite and banal analogies no longer fill our airwaves or newspapers. This is not an attack on journalists per se, but on the culture of the sporting "expert." That we are all experts, armchair (perhaps the pseudo-psychiatrist's couch) or otherwise, has done much to dilute the term in this context.
What good is a painter who merely paints a landscape as it is? Is the real challenge not to show us his vision of the world beyond our own verisimilitudinous imaginings? Should it not be the same for those who are paid, ostensibly to talk? Should their words not echo Homer in density and scale and resonate with us viscerally, as sport itself can. Why, when the oral and written traditions (read: words) have been the lifeblood of Irish cultural life, do we define such a unique and indigenous sporting occasion so prosaically?
One thinks of Micheal O'Muircheartaigh and how, with his imaginative use of metaphor and his innate splashes of linguistic colour, he overcame the limitations of radio to elevate the picture beyond a dull monochrome. The sliotar "never being more than the height of a daisy off the ground" is just one such flourish.
"Pat Fox has it on his hurl and is motoring well now...but here comes Joe Rabbitte hot on his tail ...I've seen it all now, a Rabbitte chasing a Fox around Croke Park."
But why stop there? Why not replace the inane Pat Spillane with Seamus Heaney? Maybe he didn't play corner-back for Derry but when Beowulf says, "Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark," he could have been speaking of the Kilkenny hurlers.
For we all saw the fatal slip, the full-back beating his man to the ball, the nervous debutant rising to the challenge, the goal scored with quickest flick of the wrist and the near misses. We saw it all. It's stories we want to hear and it's stories we want to tell. It is the esoteric truths we want revealed, not those that are self-evident. Or tactics, for that matter.
