Dunlop boys all hot-wired to take risks
IN 1997 I finally tracked down Joey Dunlop to a small garage on the Isle of Man. Crouching beside his motorbike with a spanner in his hand, tapping at the back chain sprocket, the Ballymoney man said 'Naaah', he didn't want to be interviewed. The knock back to talk came as no surprise from what psychologists would have called a "risk taker".
Dunlop’s taciturn nature was born out of humility, his brilliance on a motor bike something a generous Presbyterian nature found difficulty in expressing. Dunlop was no self-publicist.
Voted the fifth greatest motorcycling icon ever by Motorcycle News, he died in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2000 when he lost control of his bike in wet conditions and hit a tree.
Joey’s younger brother Robert was hot-wired the same way. As a teenager he crashed a van driving home, was thrown through the windscreen and broke his neck. He spent six months in traction in hospital and when he rode in his very first bike race at Aghadowey in 1979, he was still wearing a neck brace.
In 1986 he survived a huge accident at the Isle of Man TT and again a freak crash at the same venue in 1994.
Robert’s death arrived in a practice session crash at the North West 200 in May 2008. Had the 47-year-old lived to see that day out, he would have witnessed his son, 20-year-old Michael, triumph in the 250cc race.
Michael is now in the family business. He won at the Isle of Man TT in June before breaking the metatarsal bone in his left thumb in a crash four months later. The injury has been problematic but he has planned the 2010 season around the NW200, Isle of Man TT and Ulster Grand Prix.
Michael’s older brother William is also hot-wired the same way. Last August William raced against Michael at the Ulster Grand Prix after he had survived a crash at 125mph in June, while testing a Honda 250 machine on open roads.
The third Dunlop son, Danny, never liked racing between the hedges. But at 16 years old he joined the British army and has toured Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps genetically disposed to it, Danny admits he is a risk-taker.
"In Afghanistan we were shot at quite a bit but it didn't bother me," he told the Belfast Newsletter. "In fact, I wanted to be in the middle of it all. People say to be careful what you wish for but it gets the adrenaline pumping. It's all good and well until it goes wrong. It's the same with motorbiking. You know the risks before you start. That's just the way it is."
In a study published in 2009 in Medical News Todayresearcher Eric Brymer conducted interviews with extreme sportspeople to find out how they felt. He found that risk takers fully comprehend the power of nature and have a sense of humility. They feel relaxed and they are focused and aware.
That describes Joey Dunlop and you would dearly hope it was that simple. You would hope that the next generation of Dunlops, Michael, William and Danny are not, like their late uncle and father, accidents waiting to happen.
Venter should target IRB, not whistlers
SARACENS’ SOUTH African coach Brendan Venter is a bright man. But is he missing the point by directing his ire at referees. His target should be the IRB.
But take on the governing body and at best you become the progenitor of another sub-committee in the administrative canyons of world rugby. No one will thank you for that. Best switch the machine gun to spray and take out the whistlers even if the real problem makers sit comfortably in Huguenot House.
Prior to this season beginning we spoke to Paul O’Connell in Thomond Park about the Lions Tour to South Africa, which had just finished. An obvious discussion point was the bemusement of watching the Lions set-piece demolished in the first Test. There were suggestions that Zimbabwe-born ’Bok loosehead Tendai Mtawarira, aka “The Beast” was scrummaging illegally but harvesting penalties for his side by the new time.
O’Connell’s attitude was candid and, as players often are, coldly pragmatic. Paraphrasing his opinion, his view was “Well, it should have been sorted (by Phil Vickery). Most of what goes on in the scrum is illegal anyway”.
For some people in the room that was a Eureka moment. The point is when a referee blows his whistle it is for what he sees at that moment and not for the other infringements that are simultaneously taking place.
In a typical Heineken Cup match, the referee is positioned on one side of the ruck or scrum. You, in your Premier Torino Electric Reclining sofa, see the other side through a telescopic Sky television camera. You spit out your popcorn because a flanker has ploughed in from the side on your screen but the referee blows a penalty for the other team for hands on the ball at the other side. What a plonker. Right?
The merry band of whistlers are the current plate du jour and the IRB should be worried. But compared to other team sports in this country rugby is a brand leader in how referees control a game in which extreme physical aggression is central.
Some referees are imperfect but they are hardly to blame for the minefield of interpretation and the current malaise.
Gossip mongers won't break Elin
TIGER WOODS’ wife Elin Nordegren was photographed this week skiing in Europe. From low profile mother (whose name few people knew outside of golf), she has become a celebrity gossip target. That won’t break her.
In 2006 we followed Tiger Woods around a rain-lashed K Club twice during the Ryder Cup. On both occasions his wife walked the course with him. We were all inside the roped off fairways walking at pace with the players, maybe 20 journalists and family members.
Apart from Tiger taking out a three wood for safety and then hitting into the pond on the left at the first hole, the other stand out memories are of Darren Clarke at the 16th hole on the final day and the crowd swarming around him in an unusual expression of communal empathy following the death of his wife Heather from breast cancer.
There was also the perceived mettle of a stoic Nordegren.
An American journalist who follows the PGA Tour in the US informed us during the 10 or so hours of tramping the sodden course of the sort of comments Nordegren had to consistently endure following her husband’s career, especially in some of the southern states in the US where, he said, she was constantly being taunted as a “nigger lover”.
Those who expressed the cowardly views will probably now glory in Nordegren and Woods’ demise. But her steely ability to endure such wilfully offensive comments in the past will surely stand to her now.
By extension, if the lukewarm acceptance Woods experienced on some courses in the American golfing world is as insulting as out right rejection, he will also survive his personally catastrophic own goal.
FINAL STRAW
Olympic medal could represent ultimate booby prize for Rawlinson
AUSTRALIA’S DOUBLE world 400m hurdles champion, Jana Rawlinson has had her breast implants removed to improve her chances of winning a Olympic gold medal in London. She said the larger size affected her running. “I loved having boobs but now I’m as flat as a pancake,” she chirped.
They say that hard cases make bad law. But is that legal? If an athlete changes his or her blood for a few pints of his or her refrigerated blood, well it’s illegal. Oscar Pistorious, the South African 400m athlete, was told he couldn’t compete in the Olympic Games because he was born with no shin bones and had prosthetic legs (the decision was then overturned).
Sprinters might soon whinge in London that they were unfairly beaten by a man with no legs, equally the women might also complain that they were bested by a a woman with no boobs.
Greystones council should reconsider selling rugby site
SHOULD SPORTING spaces be seen as functional, as the council in Greystones believe as they attempt to sell off part of the local rugby club? Are those spaces important markers of who we are and what the community is?
If the elected members of Greystones council were as perspicacious as Dr Eamon O’Sullivan was, the rugby club could rest easy. Dr O’Sullivan was the man who believed that when they were building Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney in the early 1930s the patients of his mental institution should be involved.
Health and safety regulations might scupper any such ideas these days and perhaps too accusations of slave labour but O’Sullivan saw the inclusion of patients from the local St Finian’s Mental Hospital in building the GAA ground as a progressive form of occupational therapy.
St Finian’s held 1000 patients and 50 of those were involved in the construction of the ground over a four-year period. Fitzgerald Stadium was finally opened for Gaelic Games in 1936 (one year before Greystones RC was founded) and one of the newer stands, erected in 1977, is named after O’Sullivan.
Greystones council could suffer the ignominy of Dún Laoghaire and Rathdown, when they attempted to sell off seafront space at the Dún Laoghaire Baths site, which forced thousands of locals to the streets.
What O’Sullivan understood 70 years ago, councils clearly do not-the price of everything and value of nothing.
