Sport: A few years ago, quite a few years ago now, myself and a friend spent many winter weeks trying to write, at the behest of a glamour-spangled production company no less, an original script for what was going to be , after a suitable period of gestation, the first great GAA film.
It was difficult. More than that. We were limited. Sport is best approached from a tangent. We found the tangents far too diverting and ended up sending away a wodge of half-developed ideas for several other types of film, as well as one rather watery GAA script. Suffice to say that our doors were not darkened again by producers or their cheque-wielding henchmen. We still have the day jobs.
All the more understandable then that in terms of literature, sport, with the exception of boxing (which has its own knotty genre), is one of the least examined human endeavours. Despite the hypnotic effect games have on a large proportion of the population there is apparently something the sensitive literary soul finds deadening about the repetitive choreography of the field and the pat philosophies which define the winners and losers of the sporting arena. Something too black and white, too, about the outcomes. Something necessarily irony-free about the best participants.
So sport is generally scenery, sometimes sub-plot, often back history. And yet it is unignorable. Sport pervades modern culture and every so often holds it in thrall.
To spend time in the US during the summer of 1998, for instance, was to live under the reign of two men, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two baseball pitchers who battled it out from April through September for baseball's fabled home run record. An entire country spoke of little else. People defined themselves in terms of their affiliation to the fortunes of one man or the other.
Times like that stir something. One of the more successful of the slew of books which that summer prompted was Mike Lupica's Summer of '98. Lupica's party trick was sentiment. He viewed the summer through the prism of his young son's eyes and placed the summer in context by remembering the season of 1961 when Roger Maris had broken the old home run record and Lupica's own father had left notes by his son's bedside every night when there was a development at the ballpark. As such, the book fitted into its own little sub-genre, sport as an arena for the investigation of relationships between parents and offspring. Even the poet Donald Hall has been drawn to that one. His book Fathers Playing Catch with Sons is one of the progenitors of the genre.
The summer of 2002 was just as memorable to Irish people as the summer of 1998 was to Mom's apple pie America. Just as memorable and more screwed up. The Summer of Roy. The Football War. The poet Conor O'Callaghan found himself drawn ineluctably to the topic and Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Football War is his account of being an innocent bystander when it all goes off.
Red Mist is a valuable (and timely) addition to the burgeoning library of books on Roy Keane or Keanology in general. O'Callaghan, a fan without being obsessive or anoracky about it, and a writer who is, in the words of Lorrie Moore, "fancy without being schmancy", presses his young son Tommy into service early on. Of all the children who have taken the field in the form of literary device, Tommy is the most articulate and amusing. He asks the questions a kid would ask and seldom says anything so precious that you feel the need to be sick.
Red Mist is a memoir, based on not a lot more than a passing acquaintance with Steve Staunton, the business of having a football fan for a son and the experience of having lived in Ireland in the summer of 2002. It doesn't sound like the list of ingredients for a good read but O'Callaghan makes something useful out of it. We can best gauge the perspective and nature of that chaotic summer by standing quite far back from it. O'Callaghan does that well.
There is a convincing sense of the babel and din of the time, of the failure of sports media to do anything that summer except add noise, smoke and fireworks to the business. The story never moves on. Everyone has an opinion which they hold like a cudgel. Nobody ever sheds much light on what's happening at the centre. In a way it was a summer of gazing at ourselves as much as it was a summer of gazing at Roy and Mick. O'Callaghan stands out in the middle of a deluge of useless information and wears a suitably bemused smile.
Even simple things like the detail of that meeting which the Irish team started with 23 players and ended with 22 players remained shrouded in mystery and contradiction. Perhaps the only definitive account is this one, O'Callaghan's version, that of the intelligent bystander who absorbed everything avidly and found that in the end there was no definitive version.
O'Callaghan's observations, particularly regarding Keane and the influence of figures such as Eric Cantona and Bob Dylan on his life, stand up well. In the end, as the world gets back into kilter and young Tommy O'Callaghan scores his first league goal, Keane still stands above it all, craggy and lonely and wrapped in an odd fatalism. We all move on to the next distraction.
• Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist. His most recent book, a selection of his writing, Booked! (very carefully), has just been published by Townhouse