A dreary, grey cloud filled with a steady drizzle of abuse blew across our happy sunlit path after last week's toedip into the green waters of Irish swimming. Dropping out of the sky, too, came a curiously rambling missive from Galway which gently chided us for excessive use of quotes from famous American sports journalists, and warned us not to be duped by Clare people - whom our correspondent knows from personal experience to be uniformly stupid. (Such an astonishing slander could only have emanated from the other side of a county border.)

This is what is known as bad timing. It has been our intention this week to talk about the business of GAA teams and the media, and the ball will be thrown in with the help of a quote or two from the late but eminent Jimmy Cannon, who was asked at the end of a long career of unspoiled cantankerousness if he knew how fortunate he was to have met all the famous sportspeople he met.

"I think," growled Jimmy Cannon, "that the famous athletes are fortunate that they met me." Good man Jimmy.

Another thing Jimmy Cannon said: "One thing I know about ball players: they never thank you for the praise. But they really complain if you rip them. They think they are entitled to good notices."

Players should bear all this in mind next time they sneak out the back door of some establishment to escape our searing questions. They are truly fortunate to be meeting us.

Fortunate, not because we are simply the most charming group of individuals summoned to one vocation since the cavaliers waxed up their moustaches (we are), but fortunate because meeting us is part of the package that comes with being at the top of the greatest field games in the world.

Relations have soured between the media and a couple of county teams in the recent past. The management of the Clare hurlers, whom we loved without reservation just two years ago, have been expressing reservations about aspects of coverage. Mayo have been bolting out backdoors, leaving Captain Maughan to pin down the enemy with machine gun fire.

On a broader level, the business of getting quotes from players after matches becomes more difficult every summer.

All these people are fortunate to be meeting us because their games and their skills have a connectedness to their culture which all of the more relentlessly hyped professional sports lack. Within that culture, the stars are elevated to the status of icons yet suffer none of the remoteness otherwise associated with such standing. Football and hurling are unique not just in terms of their amateurism, but also in terms of their rootedness in our community.

The GAA is lucky. The media and the money which follows it have inflated the importance of professional sports to such an extent that the values that underpinned those sports in the first place have become grotesquely distorted.

It is a ratchet process. There is no way back. The wages and the glitter remove the stars more and more from our shabby orbit, and in the end Alan Shearer is to be found down in a patent office registering his name and every variation of it he can think of.

He does this so he can exploit all those customers who would use his name. We will worship Shearer. Yet, what do we know of Alan Shearer except that he is good at scoring goals, good at selling merchandise? We don't look at Alan Shearer and see much of ourselves in his character or in his life. When Alan Shearer plays in opposition grounds, people shout "Fat Cat" at him as if he were a Tory MP or a former taoiseach.

GaelicTown doesn't reward its heroes with big houses and fast cars and dates with the Spice Girls, but it gives them something more special: Gaelic players don't outgrow their homeplace, they enhance it.

The games they play have their flaws, but are closer to the idealism of sport than any of the big businesses which Shearer and his brethren represent. (This is not to knock Alan Shearer: it illbehoves any Leeds fan to speak ill of goalscorers, one of whom we hope to attract to Elland Road when George Graham goes.)

The idealism which is at the heart of sport isn't just some frivolity ritually peddled as a self-indulgence of fathead columnists. It is the basic selfpreservation device without which sport will become meaningless and die. Look outside. From Diego to the Dallas Cowboys the world is full of professional sports stars gone awry.

The GAA is spared most of this. It would be a pity if people in the organisation began taking the media as seriously as we in the media take ourselves and continued to act huffy.

For starters, freezing the media out doesn't work. Look at Clare and Wexford's All-Ireland wins of the last two tears, relentlessly positive affairs when all and sundry just took the media business in their stride as part and parcel of the big day. Look at Meath's footballers, who despite critical press attention about their style of football over the space of a decade or so have always welcomed journalists whenever they called.

Loosen up out there folks. If lads can't trust themselves to hold a conversation with a journalist, how can they trust themselves under a greasy ball in front of 65,000 people and a live TV audience. If they say something to a journalist which they can't explain face to face with their team-mates or their rivals, then the problem isn't with the journalist.

On the good days, the county finals and the provincial finals and the All-Irelands, the heroes are embraced and hoisted high on shoulders. But on the bad days, if their effort has been true, they are cherished by the communities they represent. Rightly so. The players give us a passive and healthy way of expressing our culture and our sense of place.

This is a good time for the GAA, and one part of what keeps Gaelic sports alive and vital and healthy at present is the media. Some piece of the process of giving back - which top players owe their game and their community - is letting the media into a part of their lives. Not for the benefit of the media, but for the benefit of the GAA.

Certainly, the media doesn't always get it right, but the world keeps turning anyway. Nurturing small grievances changes nothing.

Hurling is bigger than a squabble over headlines. Football is worth more than an undignified escape out a back door allows it to be. In the aftermath of their win yesterday, Mayo were sensibly making light of the great escape business. Their approach was the correct one and went a long way towards the restoration of cheery relations.

Not talking to the media doesn't really bother the journalists concerned. Alan Shearer just moves in to fill the space.

Jimmy said it. You're lucky to know us, boys, you are lucky to know us and you'll miss us when we're gone.