Fionnbar Callanan - high jumper, long jumper, long-distance traveller and lawyer - was also a superb photographer. A new book of his work, covering sporting events from the 1940s to the present day, will delight sports fans and nostalgists alike. Tom Humphries flicks through it
Some people live several lives simultaneously. Fionnbar Callanan was an athlete. A high jumper and a long jumper. When he was young and fleet he discovered he had a tendency to allow his lives to overlap. Not content to be a noted leaper, he became an athletics statistician and then, in 1949, having inherited from an emigrated uncle a Ciro-flex camera - a US version of the trusty Rolleiflex - Callanan began taking photographs at sports meets.
Between lepping and jumping in his own competition he would happily chase down other athletes and photograph them. Finally his coach insisted he leave the camera at home. His jumping improved. Those three interests - the jumping, the love of agate-type stats and the photographs - would determine a good portion of his subsequent life, however. Callanan became a one-man multimedia outfit and enjoyed a unique journalistic career, working for the Irish Independent, The Irish Times, the Irish Press and RTÉ.
In 1954, at the request of Mitchell Cogley of the Irish Independent, he previewed the showdown race at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, in Vancouver, between the great milers John Landy and Roger Bannister. He got it wrong but was invited back to explain how he did so. He never looked back. One night in 1960, from the Rome Olympics, he filed down the scratchy phone line some 11 feet of copy to a young copytaker at the Irish Press. The copytaker survived to become the great golf writer Dermot Gilleece.
At the same Olympics a friend loaned Callanan a 35mm camera. The business! Callanan took a curious photograph of Valery Brumel, the Olympic high-jump champion, playing Russian skittles. Only Brumel was in the shot, though, prompting a newspaper competition that invited readers to guess what Brumel was doing. Callanan was also invited to bring back more pictures.
So he began taking photographs for the newspapers as well. For a few years he illustrated his articles with images that he shot and chose himself. Then he dropped the writing and devoted himself to photography.
By the way, all the while that he was leading these lives he was also a full-time solicitor. Not just any solicitor. Senior assistant solicitor at CIÉ, a job that gave him free first-class travel around Europe. A photographer, writer and former competitor with free first-class travel around Europe? Callanan was a sports editor's furtive fantasy.
In his new book he has collected more than half a century's stolen sporting moments, and it is with envy and wonder that you flick through this personal scrapbook that is also a pictorial record of the highways and byways of Irish sporting history.
It's a little jarring, too, to be reminded by such a polymath of how much our sporting world has been narrowed by our endless high-carb diet of Sky Super Sundays. There was a time when we were catholic in our sporting tastes and every game had its season.
Apart from the inadvertently disgraced Waterford Crystal, there isn't a showjumping horse we could all name today - yet there is Eddie Macken negotiating a fence at the RDS atop Boomerang. You almost look for yourself somewhere in the photograph, so familiar does the moment seem.
There are more great images in the book that couldn't be reproduced here. There's Seve Ballesteros at 19, playing in the Irish Open at Portmarnock. I remember myself and a friend walking half the length of the beach before finding a suitable spot through which to crash the occasion.
There are a couple of shots of Tony Ward, the last Irish rugby player truly to capture the popular imagination. In one, he has the ball under his oxter and is about to be killed by a posse of All Black forwards. Or maybe not. His left leg is lifted and he's about to execute his trademark jink. One assailant has already bought into it and gone sailing past Ward with two armfuls of air.
There are one or two fascinating photographs of Belfield in the 1970s. University College Dublin isn't their focus, but its campus provides the backdrop as Donie Walsh of Cork splashes through mud and mire worse than that endured at the Somme. He is on his way to the 1975 Irish Cross Country Championships. The background of denuded trees and stark hills is the nascent campus.
Of GAA there is little recorded, but one shot in particular makes up for that. Callanan was dispatched after Kerry's 1968 All-Ireland semifinal win over Longford to shoot the Kerry side in training. One evening he ended up sitting in a car at Renards Point, looking out at the ocean. The clouds burst, the sea churned and the sky darkened. Suddenly, a small boat came into view, beating a path through the water and the mist.
Callanan's photograph of Mick O'Connell stepping out of the rowing boat on his way to team training before the 1968 football final is a thing of beauty. In the background is a ship, and O'Connell, dark and recondite in his features, looks like a resistance leader being put ashore.
There are three shots that Callanan is fond of in an old-fashioned nationalistic sort of way, as he puts it. John Treacy winning his first World Cross Country title, a moment that changed our perception of our national sporting possibilities. Paul McGinley sinking the putt at the Ryder Cup at the Belfry in 2002. And Sonia O'Sullivan winning Ireland's first European title, in Helsinki in 1994. Two of these are published on the previous page. They aren't the best photographs in the book, but they are the ones a true lover of sport would linger over.
A Sporting Eye: Fifty Years of Irish and International Photography, by Fionnbar Callanan, is published by Liberties Press, €25 from shops or from www.libertiespress.com. The author's royalties will benefit the Irish Hospice Foundation