There's a dying cliche which should be put on the endangered species list before it leaves us entirely. It's the one where the old codger sits the grandchild on his knee and tells about the time oh, when he was just about the age you are now, and he saw . . .
Well, take your pick what he saw. He was in Dalymount in that unholy crush when Brady made his debut and Givens scored his hat-trick. He was in Croker when Foley saved from Ring. He was there again when Ali fought Al Blue Lewis. He was in Santry for the Morton Mile. Dammit, he was in Ebbet's Field when the Brooklyn Dodgers were more than a sentiment.
He sat on his Da's shoulders and Ring tossed him a sliotar or Ali gave him a wink or Brady signed a programme. Whatever. He was there and it mattered. He connected. Being there shaped the sporting prejudices of his lifetime and his sporting prejudices likely shaped lots of other prejudices.
That time is leaving us. Sport is making our senses redundant. It is merely a matter of visual gorging now, a function of the remote control, a matter of being on the right channel at the right time. We don't taste it, smell it, hear it, touch it in the way we used to. And we won't remember it and pass it on the way we once did either.
I used to think that you'd have to care about sport to know the tragedy of that passing. Ain't necessarily so. The denial of sport as a community experience will shrink us all. We don't have any other forums like it, any other places to go as real people where we can press against each other, shout and holler and express emotions without irony or reticence.
Back, way back when this century was a toddler and organised sport was growing up, Jack Johnson was making himself rich. Looking back now Johnson's story had all the wonder, lucre and scandal that would characterise the modern sporting tale.
His accession to the heavyweight boxing championship of the world was the wonder, the scandal of the age. A black champion! Without humility! It engaged people to the point of there being riots in cities across the US whenever he beat a white man.
Johnson, the son of Henry Johnson, a slave, finally lost to Jess Willard in Havana in 1915 and stayed away from the US for a further five years, returning one day to shake hands with the sheriff of Imperial County before crossing the border from Mexico into California where he would begin a sentence of one year and a day under the Mann Act. He had been convicted in 1913 for taking white women as his lovers.
In Johnson's story you can find some trace of all aspects of the sports century that followed but most significantly perhaps, with the advent of Johnson came the arrival of his shadow. Tex Rickard, the promoter and dealmaker, was probably the first guy to see what sport could become.
Tex was the P.T. Barnum of sport. He saw percentages, ticket sales and deals where other people saw just sweat. He saw the market value of Jack Johnson, the man they loved to hate. And just as the people who set athletic records back then would gawp at the marks being set now, Rickard would be stunned at what his descendants have been able to sell us.
Sport, which has been a valve to society for so long, is scarcely recognisable from the form it had at the beginning of the 20th century. It is sanitised, wrapped and perfumed. Trivialised. De-authenticated. For the benefit of television and sponsors, everything has been neatly whitewashed. No more sawdust.
The race to catch drug cheats is deliberately handicapped to favour the stars. You want to see how it works? Go back and read Gary O'Toole's writing on how RTE decided it would cover the swimming events in Atlanta in 1996. Imagine bigger stakes and greater money. Any wonder that what we get these days is often a facsimile of sport.
There is reason to fear that, if change continues at the same rate, sport as we have known it will either be lost to us entirely or we will faced with having to re-invent it by the middle of the new century. That's OK.
I saw a discussion on TV the other night. A man was railing against the oppression of the computer age, wondering why it is that of all the educational tools available the computer was being imposed so relentlessly through classrooms. Was it big business perpetuating its own market?
Another man took issue with him. This man's seven-year-old had been asked to prepare a school paper about his Russian, longhaired hamster. The child had been able to go to the Internet on his PC and access two sites dealing with the furry little rooskie rodent, sites crammed with detail and history. That, he said, is the value of the computer in the classroom.
And what, said the man, would have been the value to your seven-year-old of writing about what the hamster makes him feel, what he sees when he looks at it, what he has observed the hamster doing? What if he had written about those things instead of regurgitating unverified Internet bumph?
And nobody had an answer for the man.
Sport has been roughed up in the past 20 years by men who came offering gifts of mirrors and beads. Sport has been turned into the whore of the marketplace. More and more you can't see sport unless you pay. Lots. Yet you can still play for free. You can still dream for free.
When we wonder where sport will go in the next 100 years, we have some signposts with the onset of digital TV. Manchester United might cease to be a matter of emotions. How big-time sport felt and smelt and sounded might be reduced to a matter of schedules, access and price elasticity.
THE latter stages of this century have been marked by the creation of a number of media behemoths ready to do battle in the new era. For News Corp or Viacom or Disney or Time Warner, sport is a battlefield.
Digital TV will hoover more disposable income out of the pockets of the middle classes and their leisure-rich bosses while leaving less and less sport for those who can't afford it.
Sport is being eaten away. Inside out and outside in. In England, Murdoch - not content with owning the rights to soccer - is relentlessly buying up shares of various top teams. In the US he already owns many of the pieces on the board. So too do Disney Cablevision, Viacom etc.
The question about the hamster might just as well be asked about sport. Therein lies the best hope. It will be asked. Sky TV and Internet sites and replica jerseys are no substitute for the authenticity of being there, doing that.
If there is one thing better than owning a Manchester United jersey it's working up a sweat in it. If there is one thing better than watching Jamesie O'Connor strike a sliotar, it is picking one up and striking it yourself.
The very nature of sport will save it at some level.
Sport has generally been badly served by its leaders but television and the great satan Rupert Murdoch must take a share of the blame. Taking advantage of the feebleminded might be profitable but it isn't honourable and may yet be its own punishment. In buying up every star and every league and every team perhaps Murdoch, who understands sport less perfectly than he understands Swahili, has missed the point.
The best sport is local. The GAA, more gloriously than any other example imaginable, has learned that. The organisation survived in Dublin because, at the time of greatest need, Dublin produced a team of unforgettable charisma. Hurling has flowered because the seeds sown at local level in places like Galway, Offaly and Clare have come through on summer days.
Sport changes the very air. I don't know how we would understand Meath or Kerry without their football teams. How we would see Tipp without hurling. There is no way of gauging it, but in your heart you know Clare is a happier, more confident place since 1995 and all that.
This has been a century when the communal experience of O'Hehir or O Muircheartaigh's voice punctuating the summer wind on a Sunday afternoon was our bond, when the communion of a Munster hurling final in Thurles was sacred, when the walk up the hill in Killarney to see Cork and Kerry play football was filled with anticipation, when even the rattling train to winter league games was a kind of excitement and the childhood penance of the Railway Cup on Paddy's Day would see you rewarded in the next life.
The crackling noise two computers make when they shake hands in telephonic greeting reminds me these days of reticent GAA men taking social co-ordinates. What county man are ya? What club? By any chance do you know that hoor . . .? Sport in Ireland, more than anywhere else I have seen, is the fabric of what is real.
FORTUNATELY for us, sport works on two levels simultaneously. Entertainment and exercise. We can watch an Italia '90, a Sonia O'Sullivan, a Catriona McKiernan, a DJ Carey and laugh or cry with them but it is no substitute for the engagement of playing. It is just fuel for the daydreams we have doing it.
One of the few consolations of moving through the wreckage of urban America is the manner in which sports have adapted to the environment. Basketball hoops can hang from any wall, kids can still slam home runs with their own fantasy commentary track looping through their heads. In a world without opportunities, a kid can still have daydreams.
Dublin is losing that a little. Traffic is so relentless and green spaces so rare that the old games of soccer played between two sets of posts marked by piles of coats and punctuated by arguments of what exactly constitutes "over the post" are dying out. Yet there is still the Saturday morning pleasure of seeing a field crammed with seven-year-olds learning how to swing hurleys, of watching kids knock themselves out having fun with a football.
We need the engagement which sport provides. Sport confronts us with fairground mirror reflections of our own prejudices. Hello again Jack Johnson. Hi to Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. Hats off to Frank Barrett in Atlanta and to all the dark faces in familiar jerseys. Paul McGrath, Jayo, Sean Og. Thanks for expanding our clammy notions of Irishness.
Sport has hard times ahead of it and great times behind it, but chances are people were saying that 50 years ago this week. They were right, and we will be right, but the core humanity of sports will outlive our pessimism. There's always another wonder, always another kid with a daydream.