LOCKER ROOM:The 2D folk are not bankers. They are the people who laugh vacantly and tell you that they know 'absolutely nothing about sport', writes TOM HUMPHRIES
THEY DON’T want your pity and they don’t want to be laughed at. They are among us all the time. In the home. In the workplace. On the bus beside you on the way to town. People with restricted forms of living. The people with a missing dimension. The people who still watch everything in black and white. They bring two bottles into the shower. The 2D folk. They are not bankers. They are the people who laugh vacantly and tell you that they know “absolutely nothing about sport”.
The tragedy of their condition is they are (in milder cases) oblivious to the fact of living half lives or (in those with chronic symptoms) perversely proud of their condition. They tell you of their handicap as if they have evolved further intellectually than the rest of us. I’m afraid I know absolutely nothing about sport! Run along! You’ll have to find another mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger like yourself to have a “discussion” with.
Aw. Of course it is politically incorrect in this day and age to speak of social retardation or to suggest that these poor misfortunates may never integrate fully into a healthy community. I thought of them this week, not unkindly. I vowed to be charitable toward them in the future as sport just seemed to burst back into life over the past seven days. After a few dark weeks sport hit us like a good dose of happy pills.
First a friend sent a moral conundrum via email. A link to a US army documentary called Two Fields, One Team. Or Two Teams, One Field. It’s the US army. Who’s going to argue? Take the two fields, lads.
There’s something happening with hurling in the United States, you know. The narrowbacks, as the old timers used to called the spawn of our emigrant stock, are taking to the game. Almost every week brings news or emails of teams sprouting in colleges or communities or (in this case and others) in the barracks.
There’s an opportunity here for the north American board to get some full-time coaches in and tap that enthusiasm for the world’s greatest game. We can give them the gift of hurling they can return the compliment with the gift of tourism. (Isn’t it odd, by the way, how incurious the neighbouring island is about hurling? Almost completely indifferent. Then again you’d think it would be a phenomenon which Bord Fáilte would be selling furiously.)
Anyway back to the moral conundrum. The forces of the infidel are learning to hurl. They have had Kieran “Fraggy” Murphy, a veteran of rebel wars, out to teach them their hooking and blocking. And you get a good day thinking to yourself. These are American armed forces. These are folks who brought us productions like Abu Ghraib. But hey, they like hurling, they showed this documentary about how much they like hurling on their own armed forces network, which reaches 30 million people around the world.
Running Dogs Of American Imperialism or favourites for the 2018 Liam MacCarthy Cup? Where does the good outweigh the bad? What are the moral equivalences here? Can any organisation which takes an interest in hurling be truly bad (leaving the Cork County Board out of it). These are things which never arise in the world of those who know absolutely nothing about sport.
How can they tell a good day from a bad one, these poor replicas of the living dead who know “absolutely nothing about sport”. For weeks we had only the weather and the water and the jobs and Seán Óg being taken out like a man in Béal na mBláth to be thinking of. But then? Then it was all on again. Light. Colour. Action.
The US army conquering the world with an armalite in one hand and a hurley in the other set us thinking about the meaning of life and then an Irish player went and scored a Premier League hat-trick. Life is good.
Leon Best? Never doubted you, boy. Trap apparently took a little turn at the same time. Why not? Most of us experienced some dizziness.
Then, to prove that God is in his heaven, the footballing Dubs are out training at 6.30am. And Conal Keaney, never an early bird, comes home to Dublin hurling. It feels bigger than Robbie Williams returning to Take That. Bigger than Michael Jordan returning to hoops from baseball. Bigger than Lazarus.
I explain this business of the city being en fete to a friend from one of the blue blood hurling counties. “ Really?” he says and gives a little laugh “go on! heh! heh!” Like Rodney Dangerfield used to grumble, take one step and they trip you up, ain’t getting no respect, I tell ya. No respect.
No respect, but these are the geopolitics of the world we live in, the shades and subtleties which we must interpret and then live with.
The rugby season grinds on relentlessly but a World Cup year always has that Hurt Locker type of tension built into it. This World Cup year has that tension but it also borrows from that other great movie genre (See! We like sport but can use a world like genre without making a fuss) the detective, the sergeant, the captain who has a week to go before retirement. You just know that’s going to be the busiest week of his career. The golden generation are facing into one of those weeks.
And then Keano loses his job and you’d worry about him because it seemed as if he was content living there in Ipswich with the family and the dogs and the gentle rural folk dotted around the place. Perversely it seemed like the sort of spot (unlikely at the beginning) where, if Roy had got it right, he might have built an empire. And you wonder will he stay out there, taking a little sabbatical and then moving to Norwich City with Delia and Stephen Fry and the superior brand of prawn sandwich. Roy as a regular guest on QI would wrong foot a lot of people.
Mainly it would wrong foot those people who end up on a pub quiz team with you and tell you, as if this was the round for “special people” that you should get all these right when the sports questions are called out. For the rest of the night they ignore your suggestions, exchanging polite and pitying glances among themselves.
They are the people you get left talking to at a bad party, the anoraks you get stuck in a lift with, the chatty yokes who sit beside you on long haul flights, they are the taxi drivers you get caught in traffic with, the zombies who get given the desk opposite yours in the office, the blind dates from hell, the bosses you can’t connect with.
They are here living among us. Those sport-free weeks we endured there? That diet of snow and bad news? All that was sent by the gods not to smite us but to remind us of them. Their plight and their wretched half lives fretting about Enda Kenny on the world stage. They don’t know they’re born, they don’t know the meaning of the O’Byrne Cup. Try to understand them.
