LOCKER ROOM:The great thing about sport is it matters mainly in the good ways and the good ways are generally the things which we don't see, writes Tom Humphries
MINI-ME ON Celebrity Big Brother ( I watch it ironically, that okay?) was commenting the other night that his lack of stature should in no way be considered a handicap. I identified immediately. Thanks to the understanding and nurturing environment fostered by our gracious and perspicacious leader, the Sports Editor, my lack of intellectual stature has never been a handicap here in the column-writing corner of Sleepy Hollow.
The Sports Editor, to whose lean and fragrant bosom we all turn in times of trouble or strife, has long made it clear he expects neither hard fact or opinion to intrude in this column. The bar is set low. He asks just that we be the best little "Lockerroom" we can be and to blazes with them that cavil about laziness or a crippling lack of curiosity or an inability to see the future of civilisation as hinging on the way the Premiership unravels. There hasn't been a definitive opinion trespassed in this column since about 1996 and that's fine around here. It's a form of assisted living, but there is dignity in it too.
On being presented, like a cat's owner receiving a dead rat, with another banal thousand-worder about some arcane piece of trivia, the Sports Editor is wont to offer a playful tickle under the chins and note that all knowledge is interesting to a wise man.
I feel guilt of course. Other columnists are on medication to keep them calm such are the outrages which offend and harangue their tender sensibilities on a daily basis. I try to keep up my umbrage levels by consuming Herbal Essence of Dunphy but it makes me bloated. A lot of these upsets are like having a pie thrown in your face and discovering you like the pie.
Take Manchester City. If a kindly god were to release me from my indentured slavery as a Leeds fan and let me start again I would support Manchester City. They are loveable even when owned by old duffers like Peter Swales or human rights abusers like Thaksin Shinawatra or massive ATM's like the Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment. City would still be charming to me if they were owned by the Third Reich.
However, I know full well that the end of the world as we know it will occur if they actually buy up every ambulatory footballer in the known universe over the next few weeks. I know that in my gut at this very moment there should be an acidic polemic churning up ready to be spewed out like a geyser in journalistic defence of the old game and its values. But I just want to see what happens really. I want to see them buy Winston Bogarde and never play him. I want them to pay Stevie Ireland tons of cash and then taunt him about his thinning hair. I want them to buy Maradona out of the unnecessary further personal catastrophe that managing Argentina will provide. Just pay him to sit on the bench and do coke. There would be more dignity in it for him.
I'd like them to look beyond the world of football when that market dries up. Leonard Cohen's ongoing attempts to earn back the money stolen by his management would be accelerated by a spell in central defence beside big Dunney. Saturday's FA Cup defeat to Forest for instance would be even more memorable if the veteran Canadian stopper noted afterwards to a breathlessly admiring Garth Crooks: "There is a crack in everything, Garth, that's how the light gets in." Cantona would be back out of retirement in a flash.
That's the beauty of sport. A great philosopher once held up a sprig of broccoli and, surveying its shape and verdant colour, noted sagely "it was like a tree but not a tree." So it is with sport. It's very like life but it's not life. Qualifying for the next World Cup would be great, but Andy Reid being on the X Factor would be diverting too. It's often been said that if Brian O' Driscoll was made of chocolate he would eat himself. But imagine if he actually did. There would be stern columns all round and calls for heads to roll or be bitten off. But to have lived through those times! Sure Irish rugby would suffer, but what goes around comes around. He could be replaced by a Cadbury's Cream Egg.
Or if Pádraig Harrington did actually grin himself to death this year. Or if Mickey Harte became so shrewd that people began calling him Roshi Mickey and there formed a devoted sangha of followers seeking knowledge and lessons in chin-rubbing and sideline seats in Omagh. These things would be grist to the mill for angry laptop jockeys but we'd all still be faced with earning a crust, so it would all contribute to the ongoing gaiety of the nation.
What will happen if the current scandalous treatment they are enduring is left unremedied and the Cork hurlers remain on strike indefinitely and become a tourist attraction. Seán Óg is no doubt chillingly aware of the mine workers in Fiji who went on strike in 1991 over low pay and bad conditions. After 13 years the Fijian High Court upheld a previous ruling and the striking miners were officially fired but over 300 of them consider themselves on strike to this day.
Their battle cry is Na Ma'e! Na Ma'e! (We Stand Until We Die!) The words, incidentally, are equally inaudible to Frank Murphy in either language. It's an appalling vista but there's great feature material in the Cork strike entering its 13th year and a very elderly Frank, kept alive like old Francisco Franco down in Spain, ceremonially slamming the door once again on a group of irate middle-aged men in retro Cork tracksuits.
Suppose the GPA performs a coup and pay for play is mandatory and the All-Ireland football championship becomes Gaelic football's lucrative equivalent of the Five Nations Champions and Roshi Mickey notes that the wise man solo runs for show but converts possession into scores for dough, while from the south the ever more inscrutable Bhagwan Jack suggests to an obviously troubled Marty Morrissey that "the mind has no inherent capacity for joy. It only thinks about joy." Sure there'd be some tut- tutting from this column but we'd enter into the spirit of it quick enough and once Dublin hurlers remained the favourites to end Kilkenny's long run without conceding a score in Leinster championship play, sure the world would keep turning.
The great thing about sport is that it matters mainly in the good ways and the good ways are generally the things which we don't see and report on. It's losing and friendships and delusion and communal suffering relieved by the odd outbreak of joy for which we have no inherent capacity anyway. It's life, but really it's the escape from life. It matters but it doesn't matter. It is like a tree but not a tree. That's what we tell m'lawd guru the Sports Editor when he comes graciously looking for his New Year's prediction columns anyway.
