The nationwide media blitz and open house on May 11th seems like a good idea, but the association shouldn't lose sight of what is has going for it already – tradition and stories, writes KEITH DUGGAN
AS plans go, the GAA’s recently unveiled blueprint to fight back against the international glamour and novelty of Euro 2012 and the London Olympics will hardly go down as the most cunning and dastardly. But at least it is an acknowledgement that the grand old dame of Irish sport and culture needs to powder her face every now and then and take a walk down the boulevard.
The big push comes packaged as an all-inclusive publicity blitz in which all counties have been instructed to participate. So on Friday night, May 11th, at exactly 7pm, county teams will – at least notionally – open their doors to the nation. The players will be there to chat with the public and to kiss babies and cosy up to the dreaded media to offer their views on everything from the likely winner of The Voice to how Trap’s boys will fare in Poland, to whether the GAA is in crisis.
The idea harks back to the days of Woodstock; a sort of almighty love in – but without the funny business. It’s not a bad idea, although it poses a logistical nightmare for many journalists and broadcasters. Starved of interview material from one month to the next, the news the GAA is holding a veritable Live Aid of interviews is at once tantalising and maddening.
Nobody – with the possible exception of the Messrs Carty and Morrissey of RTÉ fame – can manage the trick of turning up at 32 county grounds on the same night at the same time. Yup, the dreaded media will show up all right but I would be less sure about Ireland’s little darlings. It’s a safe bet Colm Cooper and Joe Canning have signed a shirt and hurl for every child in Ireland by now. It takes a lot to get the kids excited these days.
(At a recent match in Galway, the county board tried to lure the children in for the big Easter Sunday match against Kildare with the promise there would be an Easter egg waiting not, like the Late Late, for everyone in the audience but for the first hundred children to show up. Never mind that children have been seriously schooled to never accept sweets from strangers – let alone county board officers – the wheeze seemed a bit Spartan.
The intention was good but the prize seemed to belong to 1956: most kids had probably received a hundred chocolate treats each from relatives and friends by eight o’clock that morning).
Maybe if the GAA could arrange for Jedward to show up in Markievicz Park or have Bressie spin around in the bainisteoir’s chair in Portlaoise or have One Direction trot out wearing Dubs gear, then they could impress the Nintendo generation.
If a team holds an open night a week before it plays in an All-Ireland final, it will unquestionably attract a hysterically excited crowd – it is usually the kids who calm the fathers in that instance. But it is different in early May when the season is just beginning.
And the big question is what happens on May 12th? What happens when this magical night of glasnost is over and county teams return to their Trappist monk lifestyle and you can’t turn on the television without yet another interview with one of The Boys In Green or the radiant Italian himself?
Well, it could be they have already hung a massive banner in the foyer of Croke Park reading This Too Shall Pass. And it is true: by mid-August, the GAA will once again have the stage entirely to itself and the four-year wonder that is the Olympics will have just melted into the cosmos.
All it will take is a few classic August games and the full houses the Dublin football team guarantee to convince the GAA all is right with the world. The bigger question for the association is whether it is serious about self-promotion and competing with other sports for elbow room.
The association has made big strides to keep up with international trends in recent years but there is always a suspicion they have done so out of duty rather than conviction.
Views are split on the razzmatazz developments that accompany big games in Croke Park now – Rihanna at full volume on the sound system, Hector running amok with his microphone, falling streamers, rolling drums, fireworks. The GAA is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t here.
What it needs to remember is it has the most precious and easily marketed “commodity” of all: it has tradition. Whenever the annual GAA All-Star tour visits the west coast of America, it is customary for some of the touring party to “take in” a basketball game featuring the Los Angeles Lakers. The undoubted all-time high point of this meeting of sporting cultures occurred when former Armagh goalkeeper Benny Tierney, spotting Lakers regular Jack Nicholson rising from his courtside seat in outrage at a referee’s call, took the opportunity to jump to his own feet and shout down at Hollywood’s last rake: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.”
The Staples Centre – like the LA Forum before it – is the original home of sports razzmatazz. When the Lakers-Celtics rivalry was big in the 1980s, Los Angeles had the movie stars and the fabulous Laker girls. They had a phrase for it: Showtime. Boston had an old guy who played the Hammond organ.
The late George Kimball often said the old Boston Garden was the best sports venue he ever set foot in, precisely because it was a glorified kip and it had this smell of stale beer and old games and the odour left by animals from circuses that used to pass through.
The place had something that couldn’t be manufactured: atmosphere. Los Angeles needed that theatre because it was the Hollywood team – it was all about style and presentation. Gradually, all other NBA clubs adopted variations on the Showtime model and in more recent years, a similar theatricality has been introduced to the once grim football grounds of England and rugby has jazzed up its presentation and slowly but surely the GAA has fallen into line.
I have never thought it necessary – nothing will ever be as electrifying as those few seconds when the final notes of the national anthem sound on All-Ireland final day. But it’s no harm as long as the GAA remembers to trust itself to be itself.
If the old tradition of parading some historic team from yesteryear isn’t exactly fashionable, it is heartfelt. That oooooh of recognition when a Sheehy or an Earley steps out to take his bashful wave, the poignancy when a wife or daughter is there to fill the place of the departed full back, those moments cannot be faked.
Croke Park, Clones, Thurles, Killarney – these places have atmosphere that needs little adornment. The popularity of the GAA soared during the economic boom and with that came an anxiety among teams and administrators alike to be “more professional” – whatever that meant.
It could be the association is in for a few leaner years in terms of attendance and revenue. But it gives it a chance to take stock. The association isn’t in a bad place. The standard of hurling and football, for all the hand-wringing, is admirable. The GAA commands enviable space on the airwaves and newspapers and it needs to recognise that.
And it has stories. It is choc-a-bloc with rich stories. Having its players and managers lighten up and start telling those stories again would be a start and not just on the big night when the GAA takes on the world.
