LockerRoom: Anyone remember Sonny Pike? He was the prodigy of prodigies. We'll get back to him in a minute.

Isn't it sad when you reach that age when you realise you are too old to be a prodigy at anything? There's nothing that extreme old age has to offer that's worth being a prodigy at (he's been drooling and rambling since he was 45, prodigious really) which means that you reach a certain checkpoint in life and that's it. You'll never be a prodigy. You'll never have the world at your feet, or find when you look down that that world is actually your oyster.

Tragically, I was never a prodigy at anything. When I was a baby I drank on the hour and burped a lot, which many people said marked me out for journalism, but at that age (as now) illiteracy was a slight handicap and I never took advantage of my early promise.

I was tone deaf at music, slow as a wet week on the pitch, creatively stupid in school (in so far as I could see perfectly logical explanations for two and two making five, but none at all for two and two making four). And with women I was Nostradamus on a bad hair day. Prediction, I'd say, I'm better off staying in.

Yesterday, at Portlaoise, the rain came down like stair rods and there should really have been no hurling played. Dublin got into a dog-fight with Westmeath and didn't have the dogs to win it. Everyone was glad to get off the field without there having been a drowning.

Then the main event. Offaly and Laois. This was a festival of prodigies. Offaly fielded with Paul Cleary at full back (the very name causes us old and prematurely drooling fans of The Blades to begin humming "to be young, gifted and full back") and with Joe Bergin at full forward. Offaly are good at prodigies.

Being good at prodigies is one thing, but being able to stick a couple of teenagers into the central plank of a team is another.

Bergin and Cleary look like chaps who have eaten their Weetabix in industrial quantities. In an age when every new hurler seems too small and too light, they were good to watch, going about their tasks like men.

Offaly gave Alan Egan a run, too, and he scored a wonderful point, skimming rapidly across the surface of the water which lay on the pitch, ball on stick, and then - bang - without slowing for adjustment just driving it over the bar.

Offaly's second generation of All-Ireland winners were great men for being prodigies altogether. Yesterday, even out on the heath, battling away against the tempest, you could see that there is the makings of a good team.

As for Laois, they began with James Hooban of Castletown in the corner instead of his clubmate David Cuddy. We had no detail to hand of precisely how much of a prodigy James is, but he is certainly as diminutive a senior player as we have seen in a long time.

In the second half, Zane Keenan came on. Zane was described as a 15-year-old in the aftermath of last autumn's turbulent Laois county final when he appeared for Camross. Yesterday people were describing him as a 17-year-old, which seemed fine to my mathematical brain but which disturbed others who insist he is still 16. One way or another, senior intercounty hurling is a big step.

This discussion of prodigies is going somewhere, I promise. What prompts it is not just yesterday's washout of a day (welcome to Ryder Cup country!) and the desire not to write about the big match in Cardiff (we'll be back, fellow Leeds fans), but the fuss over Theo Walcott, Arsenal and Sven's untested teenage prodigy.

During all the back-and-forth chatter as to whether Walcott is an inspired gamble or just a bit of showboating by perhaps the only chancer which the eminently sober nation of Sweden has ever produced, the aforementioned name Sonny Pike came up.

Have a memory like a rusted sieve, but Sonny Pike rang a bell. His was one of those names which I wrote in a notebook years ago as "possible feature material". Sonny Pike (the name actually sounds like one which the Committee for the Design of a Modern Gold Prodigy might have rejected before settling on Tiger Woods) was the prodigies' prodigy.

Back just past the mid 1990s, Sonny came to prominence as an apparent symbol of all that was wrong with English football. Despite offers from many clubs (he was about nine years old at the time), Sonny had announced that he was going to go away to be part of the Ajax youth system.

Some of the handwringing coverage at the time pointed out that Sonny had a fabulously ambitious father who seemed to act as agent and PR man for his son, and that he had a mother who thought, oddly, that football was just a part of life and that her son should have a life instead of a career. They split up over the issue.

A lot of the coverage, however, centred on the fear that the progressive youth system at Ajax and places like it was going to be stealing away every youngster like Sonny Pike who came on stream.

The name came up during the Walcott business, and I resolved, fearless investigative reporter that I am, to find out where Sonny Pike is now. To begin, I googled the words Where Is Sonny Pike? A website came up called, helpfully, Where is Sonny Pike? Eat your heart out Woodward and Bernstein.

Anyway, here's a little of what it said.

"Sonny Pike is currently living near the Scottish town of Dundee, and is studying psychology at Dundee University. He found the pressures of top-class football too much, and in 2003 decided to pursue a more regular career - having been privy to sports psychologists, he decided to follow that path. Nonetheless, he still has a fervent passion for the game, playing Sunday league football for 'Dryburgh Saints', as well as weekly five-aside fixtures against other students, enjoying the, what he calls, 'Fag at Half-time' culture.

"He is currently training for a Scottish FA coaching certificate, and as part of this, he coaches two primary school teams in the area. Although he doesn't support a local team, he goes to matches regularly, purely for his love of the game.

"Sonny says that he's much happier away from professional football. He is open that playing professional football was his childhood dream, but the pressure placed on him by his club, agents, sponsors and, to a lesser extent, the media made him suffer a nervous breakdown in October 2000, while still part of the Ajax youth squad: 'I couldn't take it, and I got ill, really screwed up. I stopped going to training and stuff, because I was so screwed up I couldn't hack it.

" 'Looking back, it's amazing how low I was. Ajax completely forgot about me, they didn't want to know, but as soon as I was better they acted like they'd always been there for me. I realised how superficial it is at the level, and if I hadn't got back to form I bet they would have turfed me out. That's why I packed it in, it's so unstable. I guess it was during that period that I realised how much psychologists can help people, and I suppose I took it from there.'

"Sonny Pike says he is not currently considering playing professionally, but he says he is not ruling it out as a prospect for the future, especially at a lower lever. Before coming to university, he played some football in the English Conference. He does not keep any ties with Ajax."

So there you are. A brief word about Sonny Pike and a counted blessing that the prodigies of Portlaoise yesterday have real lives to be getting on with.