In 1973, a fellow called Jerome Holtzman wrote No Cheering In The Press Box, an oral history comprising interviews with veteran American sports journalists, whose careers for the most part went all the way back to the 1910s.
The title of the book has been held up as a first principle of American sportswriting, before and since. Anyone who’s sat within 20 yards of Willie Hegarty of Shannonside FM when he’s commentating on a Roscommon football game would humbly suggest that something of this rule was lost on its way across the Atlantic … and it was hardly a loss, either.
I’ve been a Galway football fan for a lot longer than I’ve been a sports journalist. I was, funnily enough, in the press box in Croke Park for the 1998 final, gathering a few quotes in the dressingroom for the Tuam Herald as a teenager, but that’s the last All-Ireland football final involving Galway that I attended in a working capacity.
I was on the Hill, sampling a more typical teenage experience of an All-Ireland final, for Declan Meehan’s wonder goal in 2000. I was in the lower Cusack Stand for the 2001 final. I moved to Dublin for the start of my working life proper in 2003, and I haven’t had a chance to go back to a final involving Galway since then.
I will be there again on Sunday as a fan, not in the press box, and while Holtzman’s rule is not just a simple geographical statement – that one’s own personal feelings should be left at the door as a journalist whenever and wherever you sit down to record a podcast or write a column – it’s impossible to separate the simple fact of being a Galway person from how you experience this week, and this match.
Because these are the days you live for. The excitement and the energy at the end of the semi-final was as much about what was to come as it was about what we’d just seen. “We’re back,” Damien Comer said in the aftermath, and that’s what it felt like.
The ticket scramble has been hot-housed into a frantic two-week window, down from the lengthier three- or four-week break All-Ireland final teams used to get. But maybe it’s no harm – many people’s nerves can’t handle that sort of prolonged agony.
WhatsApp groups have buzzed with potential matchups, far-fetched tactical theories, and vague proclamations like “I think we’ll win this … am I deluded” (that last one was me.)
I was talking to my 47-year-old brother on Monday who told me that this will be the sixth All-Ireland football final he will have ever attended. He was hoisted over the turnstile in 1983, he went to the ‘98, 2000 drawn game and replay, and the 2001 finals, and he hasn’t returned for a final since then.
Maybe living in Dublin, and doing the job I do, has inured me in some way to the magnitude of All-Ireland finals, but that hit home – these days really don’t come around that often. Even Dublin and Kerry, in my lifetime, have had spells of over a decade without reaching a final.
Your family is your family, wherever they are in the world, but football is the most potent, emotionally-charged thing linking me to my homeplace. The Galway footballers going on a run is the simplest, most enjoyable, most satisfying way to stay in touch with the people you grew up with. And the longer you spend away from your county, the more you cling to the links that remain.
Paul Rouse recorded a lovely episode of the Irish Examiner’s GAA podcast with Leo Moran of The Saw Doctors this week in Tuam, and it captured beautifully what football means to the town I went to secondary school in.
The great GAA writer Raymond Smith wrote a book called Football Immortals in 1984 which described Tuam as “a town which throbs with a love of football as Thurles breathes the very spirit of hurling”. When I first read that as a child, I was far from sure. It’s only Tuam, like?
But the longer I’m out of the place, the more I’m inclined to agree. Throw a ring 10 or 15 miles around the town in every direction – the catchment area for the schools, the mart, and the shops – and you’ll harvest up a big, big majority of the All-Ireland football medals won by Galway players. That small constituency surely contains more All-Ireland medals than any rural part of the country outside of Kerry.
Saint Jarlath’s College in Tuam has won more All-Ireland colleges titles than any other school. ‘The Master’, Seán Purcell, centre forward on the GAA’s Team of the Century and Team of the Millennium, had a newsagents on the square for many years. Ja Fallon was the town’s postman, for God’s sake.
It’s a small town in the west of Ireland with the same challenges that every other town its size has had to face down over the last 60 years, but it’s covered in maroon and white this week. These things matter to communities, they matter deeply.
So any token resistance I might feel like putting up is futile – I won’t hear a peep from the ghost of Jerry Holtzman on Sunday at 5pm.
