Walter Payton, the former Chicago Bears running back, died last Monday. Whatever eternity he has gone to won't drag on quite so much as the week of conspicuous, media-led mourning which Chicago has indulged in since.

Payton was known as Sweetness, and in his death the nickname has been appropriated by every headline writer and news anchor to corny effect. It has been a week of Sweet Sorrow and Sweet Farewells. Chunky newspaper supplements dropped on porches. Television newsreaders began almost every sentence by telling each other what they would miss about Sweetness.

To the outsider it was all unspeakably vulgar and crass. Since the great ratings bust that was the death of Diana, Princess of Ritz, the media has been looking for ways to repeat the experience. Mourning has become a celebrity art. From JFK Jnr, through Payne Stewart to Walter Payton, the revolving doors of the network TV stations have been choked up with shiny people anxious to get their faces onto the crystal bucket and explain that the lustre on their sleeve comes from rubbing shoulders with the pals of the rich and famous.

In the case of Payton, a genuinely talented and seemingly a thoroughly decent man, much of the media bonfire of inanities has been fuelled by his accessibility. In a sports universe where even nonentities charge cash to sign autographs, the notion of accessibility is a novel one.

Accessibility is a rare commodity in American society. You can't live in the ear-hole of your senator or congressman, you can't pass into the gated communities where the impossibly rich themselves.

Accessibility is what makes Irish sports so special. We feel real connections. We all grew up with somebody who made it to our version of the big time. We knew them when they had no arse in their trousers and we take greater joy in reminding them of that than in seeing them succeed.

The school I went to produced regular harvests of GAA notables and political luminaries, including many of the best Dublin footballers and hurlers of our time and, uniquely, two Taoisigh, even if one was Charlie Haughey, and most of the people he trusted.

We ran around with people whom we just assumed would play for Dublin and win bucketfuls of All-Ireland medals. Around St Vincent's we would get lifts off people who did play for Dublin and had pocketfuls of All-Ireland medals.

I remember playing hurling in Whitehall one day and Martin Scully got, well, he got skulled, and Liam Brady, who was watching, drove him to hospital. He returned for the last 10 minutes of the game, by which time we were virtually skulling ourselves in hope of leaving our blood on Chippy's upholstery.

Frank Stapleton came home and trained a bit with the seniors one summer. It was the Seventies, so we assumed he wasn't too overawed to be in the company of Hanahoe, Mullins and Bobby Doyle.

These are unexceptional stories (are there ever any other kind in this column, you ask). Everybody has a version of them. In America they miss that connection and they suffer for it.

All this is by way of preamble for a caveat concerning the new championship structures, of which this column is broadly in favour. Everything about the proposals for a new-style of football championship strikes me as exciting and worthwhile - except for the risk of creating a virtually professional class of players who grow apart from the grassroots of Gaelic football.

There will be players who will look at the demands offered by a long summer season and will see in them the opportunity to press the case for a form of semi-professionalism. Right now that isn't a scenario which is sustainable for many players, but with a little intelligence applied to the business of cashing in on celebrity it could become a possibility.

Rugby players in New Zealand and Australia, in the fusty old amateur days, used to set themselves up as little companies in order to market themselves and their names. A Gaelic footballer, given guaranteed exposure for most of the summer, should be able to manage the same thing.

If that is the inevitability of the present tide, so be it. The football championship, and indeed the entire GAA calendar, badly needs a shake-up. The idea of funnelling a big time league into a winner-takes-all championship stage, while retaining provincial competition, is an ingenious one. The challenge for the GAA is meeting the demands on the players.

The association has a choice. It can sit back and officially ignore what players are doing, just as it ignores the approaches made to players by boot manufacturers and the under-the-table wads being slipped to players to switch clubs.

Soon the ranks of clubs and county teams will be riven by division and jealousies, and soon we will find ourselves sitting in the High Court covering a loss of earning case or a restriction of earnings case brought by Jimmy Bloggs who wants to play for Dublin but is from Waterford.

On the other hand, the association can learn from other sports and (hands over your cloth ears, traditionalists!) be pro-active about the era.

Permit counties and clubs to cut their own deals with gear manufacturers, pay decent expenses, improve the lousy, naff merchandising operation which is the GAA, spend money on provincial grounds where executive boxes for at least a dozen guaranteed big games will be saleable. Renegotiate TV and sponsorship deals in accordance with the new levels of exposure. Take the cash and channel it, via players, back into the games.

If a player thinks he can make it as a semipro, get 16 to 20 hours a week of coaching out of him in schools and clubs. Get others doing promotional work. Milk them as they milk the system.

The immediate response is that there are good men and women who do these things for nothing but the love of the game right now. They are the real heroes of the GAA, but one way or another they are going to be isolated as the celebrity of the star player increases in the next decade.

The local hero is the greatest asset the GAA has. Preserving that endangered species will be the challenge of the new millennium.