SIDELINE CUT:THE NOUGHTIES. Ten years: that is a lot of ball games. It is hard to sum up a sporting decade that began with Cathy Freeman running the race for her race on a broiling afternoon in Sydney and finished with Tiger Woods yachting around the Bahamas and reading Keats aloud to the dolphins and the whales.
Those Sydney Olympics were fuelled by localised energy and international goodwill to create an atmosphere that few future sporting extravaganzas can hope to replicate. For whatever reason, the Australians managed to make the entire shooting match feel as intimate as a seaside funfair. Ian Thorpe was the new name in swimming.
Freeman was tasked not just with the pressure of winning gold in the 400 metres to verify her own athletics career but to provide some sort of symbolic redemption from all the wrongs done to the Aboriginal people, whom she represented. And Marion Jones waltzed in to Sydney exuding a charming brashness that had its own sunny, indestructible title – the Drive for Five. Jones provided athletics with two commodities it desperately required, saleability and professional charisma, and the entire world believed in her act.
Well, almost the entire world. One recalls a night during which Ms Jones was almost casually holding all of Homebush Stadium spellbound. Perfect temperatures, balmy evening and the millennium still young and innocent. Everyone in the universe happy.
Except for Mr T Humphries of this pamphlet. The man resembled a storm cloud hovering over his laptop. For a few seconds, we figured Dublin were losing/about to lose/had lost unexpectedly in the All-Ireland football championship. But it wasn’t that. Sooner or later, the conversation turned to the Drive for Five. When someone asked Tom if he thought Ms Jones was, as they say, “clean”, he turned to us with the sad, benign look that one might reserve for a 14-year-old who comes asking for verification that the bearded man in the sleigh is for real. Tom sighed and looked troubled and gazed for a few seconds at the idyllic spectacle of athletes warming up, of shot putters sending orbs into the evening sky, of huge Coca-Cola signs burning small holes in the ozone layer. He fixed a clear gaze on us and gently but firmly explained the nature of the world in one devastating word. “No.”
Then, invoking Judge Danforth in The Crucible, he added: “This is a sharp time, a precise time – we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.” (Either that, or he added something libellous: we were too shattered by his cynical view of the world to take it all in). “Right-y-oh,” we mumbled. “Might see ya later for a pint.”
In the decade that unfolded, Tom’s judgment was proven to be right and to be prescient by about six years. The storm clouds had transferred themselves from Tom to Jones by the time she next came in to our orbit, in Athens in 2004. By then, the allegations about her use of performance enhancers had become a deafening whisper and Jones’s personal form had dipped dramatically. But she brazened it out, competing in the long jump and the 400m relay, completing her fall from grace by missing a baton pass in the final.
In scenes of unforgettable bedlam in the narrow corridors underneath the Greek stadium afterwards, Jones stood in the hot light of the cameras, caught between not wanting to be there and not wanting to leave and was reduced to tears as she tried to defend the impossible.
In retrospect, that last act was not so much a defence of what had happened before as a premonition of the disgrace that would follow: the discovery of the real goings-on at the Balco Laboratory, the FBI investigation, the court case, the loss of her Olympic medals, bankruptcy and the time spent in prison.
Weirdly, as the decade ends, Jones’s sporting life is back where it began, on the basketball court. At 33, she is beyond realising her potential in her first sport but is naturally talented enough to maybe get a spot on an WNBA roster and to try to salvage something worthwhile from her athleticism.
Go back to the early part of the decade, too, and you might recall a feverish day at Lansdowne Road when Holland came to visit. It was the day of Roy Keane’s tackle on an indignant Marc Overmars and Jason McAteer’s goal for the ages. Trigger! That day against Holland, his goal was an unequivocal glory. U2 played Slane that afternoon and Mr McAteer was name-checked by none other than Bono himself, in the middle of New Year’s Day. When you are Irish, it does not get any bigger than that. The date, incidentally was September 1st, 2001. Bigger stuff lay ahead.
The win over Holland thrust Ireland forward to the World Cup in Saipan. And all that followed. (Come to think of it, wasn’t it Mr Humphries of this pamphlet who caused that entire row? Man’s a bloody jinx!). The sporting Civil War. The psychobabble. The quotes (“Take Me Back! What Do You Mean Take Me Back!”) The endless bloody poetry.
After Saipan, the decade gathered pace. We saw the ghost of Mike Tyson finally exorcised by a big amicable Irish man named Kevin McBride on a steaming night in Washington. The Clones man beat Iron Mike, then met Ali, his hero, and later sat smiling in disbelief as Tyson gave one of those strange, rhapsodic reflections that can silence a room. True as his word, Tyson never stepped into a ring again.
When the decade past began, Henry Shefflin had yet to win a senior All-Ireland medal. No Armagh man ever had, no Tyrone man ever had. When that decade began, Sonia O’Sullivan finally won her Olympic medal. By its end, she had been named as Ireland’s chef de mission for the 2012 London Games. That is sport, always pushing on, relentless, and, for all the sentiment it evokes, unsentimental in letting its stars know their time has past.
Who were the saviours of that messed up decade? What were the outstanding moments? In years to come, the hypnotic, twilit game of tennis between Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer may well come to be regarded as the apotheosis of sport in the decade. The sheer perseverance and indestructibly of Alex Ferguson will be recognised as extraordinary.
In football, the beautiful game, it was surely the decade of Zinedine Zidane, from that immortal Champions League final goal in Glasgow to the equally immortal decision to defend family honour by nutting Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final. It was the decade in which Michael Jordan finally said goodbye to basketball. A decade, too, of sadder goodbyes: to the young jockey Jamie Kyne, to sometime Dublin basketball player Dan Trant, to the peerless David Halberstam – three among the many lights who, in their own way, lit up sport. And good night, too, to Darren Sutherland. Was there a more hopeful smile in all of sport? You think about a full 10 years of sporting achievements, disappointments and con tricks, and the faces come teeming down.
There is no doubt Thierry Henry has entered the popular consciousness in Ireland, and, because sport has such a wicked sense of humour, you can bet for sure he will do something special, something ridiculously beautiful with the football in South Africa next summer. By then, the brave new decade will truly have set sail.
The next generation of stars, the brightest and the best, are out there, household names in waiting. They have their dreams and ambitions and cannot know what is going to happen. Ask Tiger Woods. One refrain that has recurred during the (gleeful) hurricane of coverage that has accompanied Woods’ descent is that he cultivated a “squeaky-clean image”. But that is not relevant.
What Woods cultivated – what made him such a cult figure to the audiences on the golf course and watching on TV – was the image of a cold-blooded, rapacious winner, a man who murdered all others in his sport and did so without shedding a single bead of sweat, let alone a tear.
Back in 1996, in a famous essay (written by Gary Smith) that presaged Woods’ transcendent journey (he won the US Masters as an amateur a year later), Woods’ late father, Earl, anticipated at an awards dinner the influence his son would have. “He will transcend this game . . . and bring the world . . . a humanitarianism . . . which has never been known before.”
It has not quite gone to plan.
The stars of 2010-20 would do well to consider the current fate of Tiger Woods, the athlete of the decade, floating alone in tropical waters as the decade that he helped to define fades into perpetuity.
Onwards we drift.
