When England's rugby team run on to the pitch at Croke Park next Saturday, the spirit of my father - while hoping, of course, for an Ireland win - will bid them welcome. He will regard the staging of the event, unthinkable at the time of his death in Belfast 30 years ago, as an affirmation of the cultural, political and religious tolerance he believed in.
Yet that belief was sharply at odds with his own most vivid memory of Croke Park. He was a 23-year-old bank official when he made his way there on Sunday, November 21st, 1920 to watch Dublin play Tipperary. There were rumours of imminent retaliation for the killing of British intelligence agents that morning. But surely not at a football match?
Almost as soon as the Black and Tans began firing on players and spectators my father was knocked over in the stampede for safety. He tried to get to his feet but couldn't. Then he realised he was safer where he lay. "I was young and fairly fit and I could put up with being trampled on. At least I wasn't going to be shot."
He never told me that story until he knew I had already learned about Bloody Sunday at school. Apart from describing his own experience, he would say little about the atrocity in general and in what little he did say it was compassion for the 14 innocent victims rather than anger at the perpetrators that I remember.
Yes indeed, John Tuohy was young and fit. He was a keen and skilful hurler who played for two counties in his time, neither of them, to his regret, his native Clare. When he joined the National Bank, Clonmel was his first posting, before Dungloe, Co Donegal and then Belfast. He represented Donegal and Antrim at different stages of that career and reached an Ulster final with each of them, only to finish on the losing side twice. Although he also had his moments of personal glory, he endorsed Kipling's view of triumph and disaster and the need to "treat those two impostors just the same."
Sadly, he had retired from hurling by the time I came along, though in his later years as manager in Derry there were some younger members of the bank staff who would tell me tales of his former prowess. So too would one of the Christian Brothers at my school. He was the most zealous corporal punisher in the place, which is saying something, but his respect for John Tuohy
the hurler tended to quell, at least occasionally, his urge to beat me.
I did see my father once on the field of play, but in a different game. His first appointment as manager was in Manorhamilton, where he began to suffer from hurling withdrawal. On learning that there was a hockey club in the town he decided to take up what he felt would be a less taxing alternative.
Unfortunately, several decades of wielding the hurley had not equipped him, technically or temperamentally, for this different code. Crucially, he could not adapt to the rule against raising his stick above shoulder height. And the harder he played, the more often he infringed. The crunch came one Saturday afternoon when, before my bewildered six-year-old eyes, he was sent off.
That disgrace, together with persistent disapproval from the local rector's wife, herself a dedicated hockey player, compelled him to call it quits. The role of caring bank manager, he reckoned, could not be reconciled with a reputation for barbarism.
He was delighted when I took up cricket at Clongowes. Although he had hardly ever seen it played, never mind taken part, the game intrigued him. He was particularly fascinated by the exploits of Don Bradman, the record-breaking Australian batsman, whom he could briefly glimpse on cinema newsreels. In the back garden of our home he would pick up my bat and ask me to bowl. He was then in his fifties and in the early stages of Parkinson's, but he took great pleasure in hitting a hard ball once again with a piece of wood. He still had strength in his wrists and the power that comes from timing.
In the Belfast hospital bed where this once athletic man was to waste away, physically, for far too many years, he never lost his wide-ranging interest in sport. It became so hard for him to move his facial muscles that you had to lean close and wait for the words to come out, slowly and often painfully. But they always made sense, whatever the topic - the All-Ireland hurling prospects of his beloved Clare, back-row problems in the Irish rugby team, the shortage of soccer goalscorers, north and south, or how England's cricketers might fare against Australia.
It seems unlikely that this ecumenical outlook was shared by all his GAA friends and former fellow-players, but he never talked to me about the politics of sport, only about the pleasure it can provide, in all its many forms, for those who play and those who watch.
My father was a witness on the day Croke Park was cursed. Saturday, for him, will offer hope of a blessing.