HALE a century ago, on Sunday afternoons in summer, I would walk the roads outside Mooncoin, pucking a hurling ball before me, and keep up with the progress of the day's big match as Miceal O'Hehir's frantic commentary poured out of one doorway after another along the way. Then, as now, the country was in thrall to Gaelic games, and I was one schoolboy among thousands day dreaming amid the cornfields about leading a Kilkenny team on to the greensward of Croke Park on All Ireland Day. Misty, water coloured memories, I am afraid, that smack uncomfortably of the cliched, sentimental cladding that has plumped up too many accounts of the sport down the years.
With Tom Humphries, we are at a different ball game. This is another place, another time, and he dissects it with fascinating effect. Yet what is remarkable about these modern pages is the extent to which they are haunted by the ghosts of Knocknagow. Outwardly, the games may have changed as inexorably as the society in which they flourish, but the soul of the sport seems timeless.
A lot of mileage must have gone into the making of this book. Humphries, a sports writer with this newspaper, has been to every corner of the country he calls Gaelic Town and has brought back reports that are startling in their freshness and originality. (They are complemented by 64 colour plates.) He is an acute observer of the relationships between local communities and their heroes, as their shared fortunes rise or fall, and he has clearly won enough trust to be allowed inside the minds of the players and their trainers at crucial moments.
Even more impressive is his thoughtful way with the overview. The GAA has three quarters of a million members and they represent only a fraction of the people who are touched by the games in their daily lives. He sees the association as more than a sports organisation, granting it the status of a national trust. No one before him has examined so scrupulously the intricate way the games are woven into the fabric of society and no one has identified as clearly the force that drives the phenomenon - our peculiar sense of place.
"When the GAA first ordered itself, almost by accident it stumbled on the key to its own success. Every player represents his own place: his school, club, county. The county, a concept born of an English administrative convenience, became the defining mark in the Irish mind."
The GAA, says Humphries, has a pull as definite and as constant as gravity. Two odd items illustrate the point. We hear of places along the west coast of Norway reverberating with the sound of Gaelic football as Donegal players, trawlermen out of Killybegs get in a bit of winter practice, and of the Roscommon All Star Dermot Earley taking a football with him on a stint of UNIFIL duty in the Middle East and giving a new edge to the meaning of the solo run, as he engages in solitary practice on the Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert.
"I'd go off on solo runs across the country on little tracks we knew to be safe. The Israelis would stop me from time to time to enquire what I was doing. There was an element of danger, but I understood when to go and when not to go. They got used to the sight of me as well, I suppose, I looked so strange I must be harmless."
Larteys story is intercut with that of Michael Colbert, a former Antrim footballer who lost fifteen years of his life after being plucked off the streets when internment was introduced ("Kafka Comes to Belfast"). Convicted by a Diplock court of murdering a UDR man, he served his term protesting his innocence with the support of Amnesty International. At Long Kesh he became the conduit through which GAA results were smuggled into the prison in cling film covered pellets, which he received in a kiss during visits and retrieved later - "up was quicker, down was easier."
Humphries' treatment of a quarter century of blight in the "fourth field" makes painful reading; meshing it with the blithe times of Dermot Earley movingly highlights the futile waste and suffering.
In Dublin football, the summer of 1995 belonged to Jason Sherlock, a superstar at 19 playing in a team that epitomised the modernisation of the GAA. It was managed by four men, each with his own specialist qualifications, and they had the back up services of a sports psychologist, an exercise physiologist, a physiotherapist, a medical officer, a nutritionist, a video services unit, and a masseuse.
With so much professionalism about, it could hardly be surprising that Prince Jason and his fellow players were flirting with commercialism. The author believes that the cash fuelled hype marked a watershed in the conflict over the amateur status of players. He also believes that the traditionalists will lose the debate, and is not worried: "Players will always love the game . . . reward will ease their way but not diminish their passion.
He takes a less kind view of developments at Croke Park and what he sees as a widening gulf between grassroots supporters and the suits in administration. Financing a spectacular new stand through the sales of corporate boxes provokes a mocking comment: "The only strand of Irish life hitherto immune to the charms of football and hurling had emptied its pockets for the right to sip wine and munch hors d'oeuvre while watching peasant games. He warms of the resentment that may be generated among men who have given their lives to the nurturing of young talents and who might now fail to get a ticket to an All Ireland final.
The Croke Park showpiece is certainly a long way from the pitch at Ballykinlar where Humphries began his journey on a freezing February night. He was there to see Down footballers regathering at the start of a new training season. They are the men he celebrates for keeping faith with the spirit of the game: "Bad nights in Ballykinlai have more to do with the soul of the GAA than bright days in Croke Park."
Humphries shows us how the games mark the rhythm of the seasons. A month from now the harvest moon will wax once more and the All Ireland finals will be decided. Whether you are passionately or only vaguely interested in their outcome, if you dip into this book you will be surprised at how much you discover about Gaelic games, and also about yourself, and the country, as time carries us all towards the cusp of a new millennium.