This newspaper tries to speak to the minorities in our society, so I'd like to take this opportunity to address the man who gave me a sympathetic nod on Grafton Street at 4.30 p.m. last Saturday - while Ireland scrummaged and rucked and lost possession to Wales in Lansdowne Road. His nod told me he was one of those sons of Adam who were not glued to TV sets that day, because they have no interest in, knowledge of, or talent for the sporting life.
Maybe the Lord's old hamstring problem was playing up, maybe he took his eye off the ball for a second, but when Jesus tried to drop-kick me through the goalposts of life, he fairly walloped me off the cross-bar instead. Ouch! If I ever had a predisposition to learning the rules and general background to the games my peers played, the instinct was blunted - along with the ones that govern ball sense and hand-eye co-ordination - at an early stage.
Brought up at the mercy of four older sisters, I was given little opportunity to practise the skills - kicking, punching, making sure the ref didn't see you - which form the basis of most competitive sports. Physical recreation never went beyond tennis and badminton, and rarely got uglier than the odd game of French cricket.
When I stepped outside this maternal environment, I compounded my burgeoning social handicap by lying my way out of potentially rough situations: an asthma allergy was played up to get me out of normally compulsory rugby training at school; ingrown toenails exempted me from soccer; and athlete's foot (I don't know if that's technically an oxymoron, but my feet knew as much about athleticism as Ben Johnson knows about reflexology) was a passport out of swimming class.
Like most households, ours had male members too, but they didn't exactly mitigate the gender bias. My brother greeted the news that Ireland had been ejected from the 1990 World Cup with a sarcastic "Oh? Where did I put my black tie?" My father was even less enthusiastic, if possible. Whereas most men of his generation liked nothing more than to relax in front of Grandstand for a few hours, I don't think he'll mind me conjecturing that he would sooner spend the afternoon trampolining on a bed of nails.
The only time all three of us sat down to watch a sporting event together was, yes you've guessed it, the penalty shoot-out against Romania in 1990 (Ireland's equivalent of the Kennedy assassination as a "where were you when" question). Even then - proud moment though it was for Ireland - I was overwhelmed by shame at how amateur our efforts were at triumphal air-punching and roaring at the television. You have to go back quite a long way to find an ancestor who might have been turning in his grave, but the great-great-uncle who played for Louth in the first All-Ireland was doubtless doing somersaults.
Back in the real world of my early schooldays, I had been given the nickname "the puff" by my dear young friends. Later, when it leaked out that I addressed my parents not as "Mam" and "Dad", but "Mama" and "Dada", this was upgraded to "Puff of the Year". Being a victim of homophobia when you're not homosexual has problems of its own, but if you can't do your bit in a neighbourhood soccer knockabout you really feel the weight of persecution. And when the son of a local Dublin GAA coach introduced the game "Five-and-the-Bashings" (let in five goals, then try to run home before they catch you), I started to suffer badly.
Today, robbed of a common reference point with my fellow men, I try instead to draw them into conversations about politics, sex or life's little idiosyncrasies, but really all most people want to talk about is "our chances" in "the match". These words in quotes are established test codes. If you know what match is being referred to, then conversation can proceed as normal. Otherwise, the only way you can stay in the game is to ask a question that catches your co-conversationalist off-guard like: "Which? The match against the Old Enemy at Twickenham on Saturday at half-two, or the Sheffield-United game on Sky at eight tomorrow night?" The average Irish male can while away hours with this verbal sparring, and can get quite affronted if you disqualify yourself early by telling him bluntly you're a sports ignoramus.
I committed such a crime of conversaticide during a recent session at the barber's, an experience more akin to an interrogation by the SS. "D'ye follow League of Ireland?" asked the man bearing the cut-throat razor. "Do you like being a barber?" I countered, hoping to throw him off the scent. "Why d'ye not follow ih?" he persisted. "No Oirishman shubbe watchin English sogger. You should be followin yer own." I couldn't have agreed more, I told him, a clear departure from the rules of this kind of encounter. He looked stung. "Furthermore," I said, "I think your arguments are well-thought, cogently put, and have an appealing ring of patriotism about them."
Disgusted at this dirty play, he descended into a sulk before eventually appearing to concede defeat with the innocent-sounding question: "Whaddiya do yerself? Aw a journalist? That's what yer woman Veronica Guerin was, isn't ih?" he said, twirling the razor menacingly. This was a direction I had not intended the conversation - or this article - to go, so I paid and left, wondering how much simpler and safer life would be if only I knew a little about Bohs, Shels, and Pats.
There is the odd silver lining, though, to the cloud that hangs over Homo Nonsporticus. As I wandered, lonely as a native Irishman on a Jack Charlton team, down Grafton Street last Saturday, I reflected that I had only single-sex shoppers to negotiate in Grafton Street for those few hours - though they constituted quality opposition, compensating for their lower physical strength with skill and natural reflexes. You can also occasionally make a virtue of your ignorance by clocking up sympathy points with members of the opposite sex, but most of them just write you off as pathetic.
And despite the non-nurturing environment and the dodgy genetics, I've found it's possible to work up an interest in sports after all - albeit fairly linear ones such as swimming and running (for which Five-and-the-Bashings was the perfect formative experience) and others suitable for a "Puff of the Year", such as cricket and softball. I also have a rudimentary understanding of the rules of rugby - mainly due to having operated a bus-tickets scam during schoolboy matches - and once thrashed one of Ireland's top-seeded tennis players - in a game of draughts.
Best of all, all that early victimisation seems to have given me a hypersensitivity to the feelings of my fellow beings. I now delight in little acts of kindness such as, when I sit down at my desk abutting the Irish Times Sports Department on a Monday morning, instead of tossing the Sports supplement - lovingly compiled, beautifully produced but, alas, Greek to me - unceremoniously into the bin first thing, I leave it on the bus on my way home in the evening, so as not to offend my colleagues. I bet they really appreciate that.
