LOCKERROOM/Tom Humphries: There's a story about a young Irish player who was at the time passably wealthy and has since become wealthier and far more celebrated. He was with a team in a poverty-racked Eastern European country, staying to his dissatisfaction in one of those dim-lit Eastern European hotels where he was required to partake of that grease-soaked Eastern European diet which the locals literally can't get enough of.

Every day, when the team would leave for training, their short journey from the hotel door to the steps of the team bus would be impeded by a horde of ragged urchins the like of which the players hadn't encountered since they'd read Dickens as children.

In lots of places where professional footballers travel to, local children gather outside the hotel, but generally they know their role in the scheme of things. They gather to touch the hems of the players' garments, to have their T-shirts signed with stout-black markers, to have their hair tousled by millionaire fingers and to dive out of the way when the bus speeds away seconds later.

In this particular spot, however, the children were charmless: they were just plain hungry, and when they put their hands out they didn't want them signed, they wanted them filled with spare change or bits of food. Finally our hero had seen enough, and one afternoon with time to spare he emerged through the hotel door carrying with him a wad of the local currency.

Keeping the kids at a safe distance by means of outstretched palm and barked orders, he spread the notes in a little pile on the ground and to their astonishment took from his pocket a cigarette lighter with which he applied flame to the money.

Being old and thin and wrinkled, the notes went up quickly. It's hard to imagine the look in the kids' eyes, but it must have been amusing because those who witnessed the little pyre first-hand note that the player couldn't stop laughing.

Journalists tell that story when they sit down to discuss how the lads now are different to how the lads used to be way back when. They tell the one about the Irish player who wasn't sure if he was going to go into town for the traditional walk down Grafton Street with the rest of the squad on the week of an international. Eventually he decided he would, because, well, he really had nothing better to do, and in the half-hour stroll down Grafton Street spent £12,000 and then came back to the hotel and booked £7,000 of first-class plane tickets to New York over the phone. His room-mate, a decade older and brought into the game when £19,000 was a lot of money, is not the better of it yet.

And there is the young fella who bought a £19,000 Rolex and left it in a tracksuit pocket after training. And there's the young fella who got his first move between clubs and celebrated by buying a top-of-the-range BMW with everything attached and driving it out of the garage and across England and onto the ferry and back to the estate where he grew up, where he showed it off to his happy parents and went in for his tea, only to come back out to find he had a top-of-the-range BMW with nothing attached.

There's a thousand and one stories about the disconnection between footie's astral travellers and the world they leave behind. They should be compiled in a book. Men are from Finglas, Footballers are from Mars.

Here's a bet. You could trace your finger down the index of just such a book and you wouldn't find Niall Quinn's name anywhere. It's old news by now that Niall intends to give the entire proceeds of his testimonial game this May to childrens' hospitals and developing world charities, but for such an astounding gesture the space it has received between the blow-by-blow accounts of the lifestyles of the Jon Woodgates, the Jody Morrises and the Lee Bowyers of this world seems scant.

Niall Quinn isn't the sort who'll feel comfortable making such a gesture if it is used to make others in the game look bad. He shouldn't worry. They make themselves look bad without the aid of comparisons with a man of uncommon decency. Nor is Niall Quinn one of those players who has made out like a bandit from the game. He's done fine, I'm sure, but his days at Arsenal came before Rupert Murdoch owned football and when George Graham was still in charge.

It's safe to assume that his time as a Gunner wasn't especially lucrative, and when he was let go in March 1990 it was for £750,000 and to Man City, those loveable paupers of the league. Niall must have looked on in wonder as his old mate from Arsenal youth teams, Paul Merson, developed full-blown drink and gambling habits. Man City wages would scarcely finance a pigeon fancying habit.

Later came Sunderland, with whom he earned non-Premiership wages for a while before the decent money arrived late in his career like a pay-out from a well-fed slot machine. Through all that he's played through gammy knees and a treacherous back and never once joined in the chorus of woe about how tough it is to be a professional footballer. I don't have an idea how much Niall Quinn earns today, but I'm sure £1 million would mean well more than a year's work to him. Nobody finds that easy to walk away from.

So a couple of things to hope for. That football clubs might restore themselves to a place of worthwhile relevance to the communities around them by following Niall Quinn's example. If testimonials are to be held for Premiership footballers, let the cash go to health and education projects and to kids' causes.

And if it's true that good guys don't finish last, let Niall Quinn's old bones reward him by staying in place until the World Cup is over. He had to spend USA 1994 on the press bus with us all, and while we like to think that all he learned about humility he learned that month, we know that more than anyone he deserves a final summer in the sun.

If you ever needed another reason to root for Niall Quinn, we'll, he's about to provide another million of them. Football's good news story for 2002. How lonely and splendid it looks.