Sport: Oscar Wilde was once asked by a journalist if he played outdoor sports. He answered: "I have sometimes played dominoes outside cafés in Paris". Had Tom Humphries been the interviewer, he would have batted back a funnier joke, before discoursing with terrifying erudition on the history of the domino, writes Joe O'Connor.
Sport gives rise to more ghastly writing than any other human occupation, with the possible exceptions of sex and wine-tasting. One feels for the fans, having to endure the foam-flecked gobbledegook pumped out by certain of their pastime's chroniclers. We all know the drill. We've seen it done frequently. Much blether about comradeship and passion and commitment, beslobbered with overstatement and pseudo-specialist gibberish. Boxing matches are epics; nag races are epoch-making; 22 pampered millionaires shifting an inflated bladder around a field is known, without irony, as The Beautiful Game. In a world that has more than enough real battles already, contrived ones are imbued by some sportswriters with significance they invariably do not deserve. But then, there is Tom Humphries. And the goalposts move. His flair could make a round of conkers seem Shakespearean.
Sport is revealed, not described, in his writing. He cuts to its essence, without ever showing you how. If it is true that our games are a barometer of national self-image - and it isn't true quite as often as the sportswriter would like - Humphries is our weatherman, wise reader of the dials. Loyalties that make no sense to the non-sporting outsider suddenly seem explicable, indeed coherent and logical. Somehow he manages that impossible job of translating into language what it is to be a contender, with all the many potencies and flaws of the breed, the venalities and greatnesses that make modern sport what it is. He is always sceptical, never cynical. Behind his analysis is a kind of love: a quiet faith in the notion that sport need not be a freakshow; that somehow at the core of the yearning to compete, with its attendant minority of graspers and drug-guzzling frauds, there still lies a modicum of relatively simple innocence.
Here is a word-wizard who describes the Munster hurling final with such dignified grace that the prose floods the reader's heart with joy. Other sportswriters make you want to hurl. Humphries makes you want to hurl. You feel a childlike, helpless glee, not just for the game itself, but for the fact that it's worth the effort of writing about so elegantly. The pieces on soccer and racing are fuelled by affection; his take on rugby is brisk and stinging. "That culture of hair-pulling, flesh-biting, stud-raking, testicle-squeezing and head-butting is a closed one, where you take your punishment and buy the perpetrator a drink afterwards."
Humphries is a comedian in the Bill Bryson mode, and his brand of hangdog self-deprecation peppers the book with laughs. But he is more than a master of lugubrious one-liners. The essay on southpaw Francis Barrett should be on the Leaving Certificate course, as a model of how to write, how to ask questions of power. And his feel for the tragic - there is none of that hogwash about calling a soccer defeat a tragedy - is as commanding as that of many a novelist.
He is also forensic when the story requires it; coolly sifting evidence, making measured assessments. The material about Michelle de Bruin will make uncomfortable reading to certain Irish journalists (and to many of the rest of us) who were dazzled by wishful thinking.
George Orwell dismissed most team games as war without weapons. But even those who agree with that one-time cricket lover will find pleasures galore in this sparkling collection. The single bad thing about it is that it doesn't contain an index. Then again, that's a good thing, because it means you have to read all of it.
If you buy only one sports book this year, it should be this anthology of delights. The author's royalties go to Amnesty, so it's a champion cause too.
Joseph O'Connor's novel, Star of the Sea, is published by Vintage paperbacks at 8.95
Booked! (v. carefully) Selected Writings. By Tom Humphries, Townhouse, 452 pp. €11.99