Sideline Cut: It would be too much to hope that Mick O'Dwyer, the tireless survivor of Irish sport, will ever meet with Bob Knight, probably the most feared sports figure in America. But in a strange way, their paths did cross this week.
Most reasonable people probably asked themselves, "why" when news broke that Wicklow had become the latest county to secure the most famous football coach in Gaelic games history. The suggestion that, like many modern coaches, O'Dwyer is doing it for the mileage simply does not add up. His is a grander passion.
Indelibly linked to his native county through those simple, soaring years of the 1970s and 1980s, it is remarkable to think the Kerryman is pushing towards two decades of coaching teams beyond the Pale, pushing first Kildare and then Laois to unprecedented success and close enough to smell the intoxicant of true GAA glory. Had that fine Galway team not caught fire in the second half of the 1998 showdown, O'Dwyer might have guided the Lilywhites to All-Ireland glory. And, although they ultimately flattered to deceive, there were days when his Laois teams played blindingly attractive football.
By contracting his knowledge to the Garden County, O'Dwyer has immediately spiced up the state of football affairs there. O'Dwyer possesses the aura that separates great sports coaches from the masses, the gift of being able to make his players and athletes believe they are the best simply by telling them so. It is an indispensable gift, attributable partly to the legendary status the man built up both as a player and as a manager and also to his natural charisma, his confidence and likeable rogue turns and phenomenal energy.
It will be no great surprise if the Wicklow players respond to his arrival by posting radically improved results. But because Gaelic football has become strategically defensive, a sport dominated by primed and physically strong athletes as much as natural ball players, it becomes harder for an unheralded county like Wicklow to engineer a run in the All-Ireland championship. And so it is hard to see the immediate appeal for a vintage coach like O'Dwyer.
However, as he admitted shortly after accepting the Wicklow post, the thought of sitting around in Waterville or playing golf or indulging in other genteel pastimes actually frightens him. It could be the game itself has given O'Dwyer the elixir of youth he appears to possess. It could be that mixing it with the millennial generation, that coaching young men who turn up for the bus to away matches already lost in the sounds of their iPods or heads buried in PlayStation games is when he feels most alive.
Although O'Dwyer has always happily stopped to chat with the press, charming all and sundry with those twinkling eyes, he has, over the past 50 years, remained a slippery and inscrutable figure. Hence, people fondly refer to him as a "rogue" and, in the best Kerry way, as "cute". But he is also a dreamer and a romantic. He must be to take on Wicklow.
And deep down, it is the far-fetched notion of bringing his giant-slayers to Croke Park for a match against Meath or Dublin that will drive him as he puts his new boys through their paces on these January nights.
And perhaps that Wicklow are located so far outside the establishment football counties also appeals to O'Dwyer, who has always had a radical, agitator's streak in his personality and has, at times, been a thorn in the side of the movers and shakers within the GAA.
The nonconformist streak has also distinguished Bob Knight. As O'Dwyer met the people in Wicklow this week, Knight became the most successful college basketball coach of all time, achieving his 880th career win in the heart of Texas. It is difficult to convey the importance and popularity of the college hoops game in America to the unacquainted. The magic is similar to that of the GAA: it is amateur but the standard is frighteningly good and the commitment is absolute.
Of course, the college game gives the preternaturally gifted the opportunity to confirm their talents for the benefit of mega-rich NBA teams, but for every young player who makes it to that dreamland, nine other exquisitely gifted basketball stars play out their last season with the college, enjoy the standing ovation, graduate, begin their working life and, in many cases, never play again. So fans can believe at least in the illusion these players are killing themselves on court for a cause, an idea, for a team.
When O'Dwyer was doing his magic tricks with Kerry in the 1970s, Knight was busily asserting himself as one of the most forceful and innovative tacticians in American sport. First with Army and then at Indiana university - the state considered the spiritual home of basketball - Knight became a revered figure and won three NCAA championships, in 1976, 1981 and 1987.
Over those years, he fascinated the public and press with what appeared to be a Jekyll and Hyde personality. His darkest episodes included attacking a policeman at the Pan-Am games in 1979 and hurling a chair across the floor (in the general direction of the referee) after being angered by a call.
He was notoriously tough on his players - a famous 1985 essay by Frank Deford details him slapping the cheeks of two of his white players in practice, admonishing him with the words, "that'll put some colour in your cheeks".
He gave John Feinstein his first best seller by allowing him full access to the Indiana team and dressingroom for a year, which resulted in A Season On the Brink, the first (and best) of Feinstein's fly-on-the-wall accounts. Knight was profane, impatient, angry, hopelessly addicted to the higher possibilities of basketball, he was funny and childlike, generous and bullying. One of the most shocking and blunt episodes in the book concerns a former player, paralysed in a car accident and visiting the team changing room. Knight had gone well beyond the bounds of normal decency to help his former player and was delighted to see him. But when he saw the pair of flashy sneakers his ex-player was wearing, his mood blackened and he demanded to know where he got them. The player proudly informed everyone Michael Jordan had sent them, signed.
"Yeah, well, they make you look like a faggot," Knight said.
Over the years, Knight came to be portrayed as a militant boor ill-suited to collegiate life and eventually, after an incident in which he wrapped his hands around a player's neck (the player made light of the incident) and was involved in an altercation with a student, he lost his post at Indiana. He ended up in the heart of football country, coaching lowly Texas A&M to formidable respectability but a far cry from his halcyon days when he was the star of the NCAA March Madness tournament.
And it was in Texas a few nights ago that he eclipsed the long-standing winning record of North Carolina's Dean Smith, with victory number 880. In a 20-minute oration, the 66-year-old curmudgeon of the hardwood became misty eyed as he recalled the many players he worked with and he succumbed to a show of human sentimentality when they played Ole Blue Eyes singing My Way. Knight's public advocates wish that, in different circumstances, he could have passed this auspicious milestone in Bloomingdale, Indiana, where he remains a powerful presence. But it was not to be.
O'Dwyer and Knight are probably as different as any two men could be. But as we turn onto the clean sheet of a new year, it is difficult to imagine the landscape of their respective sports without them. And neither is showing any inclination to leave the stage.
