No crooked bough ever a straight lance made. To judge the worth of man or woman, look not to the words or the public deeds, but look instead to their children. It is people's offspring who unbidden and involuntarily speak the greatest truths about the nature of their parents; and the greatest and most unimpeachable truths about Noel Carroll are spoken when you meet his four children, in the physical tissue before you, in the unwavering eye and the steady handshake and the open smile. They were raised in love and discipline, and it shows.
Of course the world of athletics owes Noel huge amounts; in the long thin relay-race of success across the generations and through the decades, he ran a vital leg which connected Ronnie Delany with today's middle-distance runners. Athletics of any kind sorts the wheat from the chaff. It asks stern questions which in those pre-drugs days could only be answered by the ruthlessly honest, those who could interrogate the depths of their soul to see if there is further will to be summoned for this final bend, for this last straight to the tape. It goes without saying that Noel had that quality of honesty - otherwise he could not have been the hugely successful athlete that he was.
Uneasy with small talk
But we all know that professional honesty might not accompany a person home. The fearlessly scrupulous journalist might with wife or husband be disingenuous, scheming, deceitful; the revered charity organiser might in personal life be a cheat and fraud. Certainly, few of us are honest the entire time; Noel Carroll belonged to that few. He was unable to put a knife in the crack between the levels of integrity demanded of him in his personal and professional lives. For there was no crack, nor even a veneer covering a fissure, but a seamless deep of honesty.
Noel didn't smoke or drink, and he was not terribly at ease with small talk. At social gatherings one could see him blinking at the effort of keeping level with the prattle; but he was a good host, generous with the wine he was never going to touch, energetic in his duties, politely attentive to conversations he personally might find a bit of a trial. His was a courteous brand of honesty, considerate towards other people's opinions even when he disagreed with them profoundly.
But even as his personal and professional honesty were indivisible, that honesty could not be separated from his feelings for his wife Deirdre. He loved her, adored her, and the last time I had any conversation with him, the subject was Deirdre, of how much he loved her, of how much more he loved her then than he had done that first day he met her and fell in love with her on sight, and of how much he loved her even than he did on the day they married.
She adored him in return and in that shared love they raised their four extraordinarily handsome, limby young adults: good decent nice people, and cut from the same fine cloth that went into the making of their parents.
No opera lover
Noel was hugely proud of Deirdre's singing - she is of course well known by the name Deirdre O'Callaghan; but she is as close to the classical repertoire as he could take. Even his famed reserves of patience would wither at the prospect of opera, his small smile fading at the approaching din of an aria. Noel would prefer to run to Mizzen Head with his feet bound with barbed wire and his head in an aluminium bucket than to endure a night with his long lean athletic legs coiled around and up and over the cramped little seats of the Theatre Royal Wexford, while fruity sopranos bawled forgotten operas in Italian.
So he and Deirdre would accompany their friends, Mary and Geoff, to Wexford for a weekend at this time of year; and Geoff and he would repair to the cinema while their wives went to the opera. In the morning he would run; in the evening more opera/cinema. And so on.
To wonder what they would have done if the cinema closed down is rather like speculating on the outcome of a comet strike on earth. It didn't happen; and now it won't. Last weekend as always they should have gone to Wexford, and last weekend they didn't.
Love of running
Noel loved running next to Deirdre. Running was what he did, what he thought, what he was. Running defined him; it was the oxygen of his life, and the blood and bones of his existence. He ran every day of his life, and last Friday, after his normal run, he died.
He simply died, killed by one of those titanic coronaries which assail the very fit, the very athletic, almost as if the strength of the victim demands an extra herculean effort from that machinery which performs its daily cull through human ranks - for nothing less, of course, would do. So one moment he was alive in the company of one of the many young athletes he has helped and encouraged, David Matthews, and the next he was dead.
The huge turn-out at his funeral testified to the respect in which he was held, and the imperishable truth of Rabbie Burns's words: "Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, An honest man's the noblest work of God."