Locker Room:Like most journalists, I like when scribbling for pay to dress things up. My favourite frill is to refer confidently to a theory or notion the complexity and true meaning of which I haven't even the faintest grasp.
A few minutes ago I started this column with a reference to Occam's Razor and waded on in to the second paragraph, where I found myself completely out of my depth. My ankles were heavy with the lead weight of my own pristine ignorance.
Anyway, after extensive research on Wikipedia (science's gift to the lazy hack), I am prepared to hammer all the philosophical debate about Occam's Razor into a small theory about the current good times in Dublin hurling.
Occam's Razor states, according to the Wikipedia folk, "the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off", those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory."
Well, what's happening in Dublin hurling is a phenomenon and in explaining it or finding a hypothesis behind it the simplest explanation serves best.
Hurling is a beautiful game. People who love its beauty are making it grow in Dublin.
What a time to be above the ground! Next weekend Cork arrive (grumbling but welcome) in Parnell Park. Cork are weighed down by the worries of the world, a world they take to be set against them. So dark is their mood that peevishly they sought to have the game moved to a neutral parish. Their mere presence in Parnell Park in a serious summer game will be a boost to the city. They need to find a little joy in that.
Dublin hurling at the moment is full of joyful things. On Saturday in Carlow the minors beat a Wexford team sweated and worried over by men like Tom Dempsey, Liam Dunne and Billy Byrne. They beat them well, with skills and scoring the like of which till a few years ago you thought you'd never see from any Dublin team. Last Wednesday the under-21s beat Wexford in Parnell Park. So Dublin have reached Leinster finals at those grades and missed out on the senior final by the width of a point.
Most gratifying of all perhaps is what happened last weekend in Kilkenny though.
Castleknock won the All-Ireland Division One Féile, Dublin's second triumph in three years in this extraordinary competition.
It's hard to recall any other achievement on the Dublin club scene which has been greeted by such broad smiles in every other club in the county.
Castleknock are too young to have enemies, too great a story to have detractors. Not everybody was too pleased when they opened up shop nine years ago, and for a while they were treated like usurpers in a mafia turf war.
Since then though the club have lived and thrived on those thing which makes GAA clubs great: love, passion and enthusiasm. They aren't choked by their own history or weighed down by division or whispering caucuses. They just get on with it, doing things with the mad, generous energy which draws people in and gets the best out of them. You listen to them and look at their wonderful website and they give off the sense of community a rural village club would envy.
They are a lesson to us all as we get enmeshed and slowed by everything from snipers in the clubhouse to the disciplinary procedures meted out to star players.
Castleknock beat a slew of great and famous hurling clubs on their way to winning last weekend. Their best game, the Féile moment they'll always talk of, was the quarter-final win over Blackrock played in Tullaroan last Saturday.
Blackrock were being hosted by the James Stephen's club and Brian Cody watched the game. Afterwards he told Nick Boland, one of Castleknock's mentors, it was one of the greatest under-14 matches he had ever seen.
On Sunday last, before Castleknock's final with Ahane, Cody came and spoke to the Dublin boys. Boland recalls Cody's passion and the emotion of seeing the boys sitting there gazing at this genuine legend.
Cody said something simple every young team should have tattooed into them.
"What you have, boys, is the drive and passion and determination," he said. "You play as a total team. When you step back from that you are just an ordinary team. Play at one-hundred per cent."
When you step back you are just ordinary! In no game is that more true than in hurling.
Castleknock went on a great adventure last weekend. As Boland says, before you go to a Féile there is no benchmark for your expectation. Everything is a new experience. It's a long, emotional, draining and wonderful weekend.
There were 1,000 people from Castleknock down to see the final, twice that number out on the green beside Castleknock CCC to see the boys come home.
They had a police escort from the M50. Yesterday they paraded the cup in Croke Park. Some day if they stay away from being ordinary some of them will parade the Liam MacCarthy Cup in the same place.
To make things sweeter, Castleknock have just received permission for a clubhouse and grounds to be built beside the Castleknock Hotel and Golf Club. Till now the club have been operating out of two public pitches and a lock-up.
There's such a lesson there in the Castleknock story, Cody, the whole thing. Shave everything away. Subtract everything from the top. Start with the lather Cork's hurling regents are in right now and continue shaving down to the thickets of division and pettiness which choke so many GAA clubs.
The secret is uncomplicated: love the game; give it one-hundred per cent; stay away from being ordinary. Passion.
These are great times in Dublin hurling. For a gang of 14-year-olds from Castleknock to go to the home of the game and come away lauded as perhaps the greatest Féile winners ever is symbolic of the hope coursing through the game in the city. Success at senior level will come and that day will be joyful and great, but for now journeying in hope seems almost better than arriving.
There's a great beauty in all the success of last week. In a world made smaller and more homogenised by Rupert Murdoch and the other grubby merchants who rule the globe it is harder and harder to find any form of expression which distinguishes a Dublin boy from a Dortmund boy or a Dorset boy or a Delaware boy. They watch the same TV, play the same video games and are gulled by the same ghastly celebs.
But the thought of hurling, the hardest and most beautiful game in the world, flowering between the cracks in the city floor just makes you optimistic. Kids bending themselves to the hypnotic rhythms of the great game, to its myriad skills and challenges. It's a language, a music all of its own.
Players like Kieran Kilkenny, David Treacy and Alan McCrabbe illuminated the games they played in over the last 10 days or so. They came from different corners of the city but they can and will make Dublin different.
The day will come when we take it all for granted probably. Dublin's hurling manager, merely by dint of his title, will be a high-profile figure. The stars of the county team will periodically be involved in great and absorbing controversies and the websites and opinion columns will heave with the outpourings of people fed up with Dublin and their carry-on.
If we have a culture in the city though, a culture wherein the next Kieran Kilkenny, David Treacy or Alan McCrabbe goes to sleep at night dreaming of being a Dublin hurler, then the joy and passion will still be there and the city will have its own unique flavour, more than it has ever had.
On Saturday in Carlow a man with a big smile on his face tapped me on the shoulder on his way out. Jimmy Grey played in goal for Dublin in the 1961 All-Ireland hurling final. Forty-six years later we haven't been within a sniff of that place again. Jimmy's smile said it all. Occam's Razor. Cody's Theory. Dedication. Love. Passion. One-hundred Per Cent. Never Be Ordinary.
It's a simple game and beautiful. Cork are coming soon. So are the good times. The boys from Castleknock were the perfect corrective to Gerald v Nickey and that whole bottle of acrid smoke. The boys reminded us all last week to enjoy the journey. They put the grins back on our faces. Never be ordinary, lads! Long may you run!
