In GAA bars there is a little phrase which, when used in connection with a player, tells you just about everything you need to know. A footballer or hurler will be under discussion and somebody will lean in, wipe the froth from their lips and say "of course the father's a complete looper".

And there and then you get the picture. There is a large and unexplored data bank of yarns about players with fathers who are complete loopers. County players whose fathers get involved in on-the-pitch rows, who withdraw their son's services at strategic moments, who sweep the fruit of their loins away off the pitch if said fruit is being played out of position. Club players who would have been great if the "father hadn't destroyed him".

Players with obsessed, interfering fathers are usually a little flakey. So somebody will lean across and say "of course the fathers a complete looper" and we all will nod and somebody will say "is he as bad as so and so's old fella?" and the conversation will drift away till there is general agreement on who is the loopiest father in the world of the Gael.

Myself, I have very little experience of this. The local club often rang the house asking my parents if it were possible for me to be less involved. There would be terse words over the phone.

"Look, I'm not saying he's slow, but the phone always stops ringing before he gets there. Know what I mean?"

"Yes, but he's paid his subscription, where else is he to go? He needs the company. Don't you people have a remedial stream?"

Finally, in a reversal of the general practice, the club began flying me across the Atlantic on weekends just to ensure my unavailability. There were resentments, of course, but not as many as when I actually played.

There were plenty of others who, we noted as we mumbled through the ranks, were martyrs to their fathers' frustrations and ambitions. We used look at them with a mixture of sympathy and alarm. Rabid oul fellas gathered along the sideline like crows on a telegraph wire cawing their wishes and half-baked views across the field. Most of their sons quit playing as quickly as they could.

If only they had access to the remedy employed by Dominique Moceanu last week. Moceanu is one of those little pixie kids who won a gold medal with the US gymnastics team in the Atlanta Olympics. She was 15 then and at the high point of her life. Everything else was going to disappoint her. Well, if not her, certainly her parents.

The Moceanus decided early that their girl was going to be an Olympic gymnast. They started her in coaching when she was three years old. Last Sunday, some 14 years later, she ran away from home. On Monday she filed a suit in a law court in Houston, Texas, asking to be declared a legal adult so that her parents would no longer have control over her.

In court Moceanu succeeded in getting a temporary restraining order keeping her parents away from her. The trust fund in which the Moceanus had been keeping their daughter's earnings is allegedly empty. More than that, Dominque Moceanu has been learning that something more valuable has gone missing. Her childhood.

She recounted this week how the endless cycle of gymnastic competitions which comprised her childhood ran in parallel to the endless cycle of arguments with her father Dumitru. Both her parents gave up working in 1996, not long after the Atlanta Olympics, in which she competed despite suffering from a stress fracture in her foot.

Her parents are both Romanian, but Moceanu was born in Los Angeles in 1981. When she was nine the family moved to Houston so that she could be coached by Bela Karolyi. In gymnastics terms the move worked. An Olympic gold medal hangs above the family mantel. The kid who won it has fled, never having been on a date, never having been allowed make calls to her friends. Last summer she made a call from a gymnastics competition in north Texas to ask her mother about the state of her finances. Her father jumped into a car in Houston and drove all the way to Plano to drag her back.

Movingly last week the same Dumitru Moceanu gave a press conference at his lawyer's office in which he expressed the wish that his daughter would "come home and start training again".

His public utterances suggest he is a man who is not quite getting the point. Apart from the allegations that he hit his daughter on occasions, questions have been asked about the precise nature of the trust fund set up to deal with his daughter's earnings. Under its auspices, Moceanu was not to receive any money until she was 35. Some of the money was invested by her father in property which turned out to be on polluted land, another significant portion of it went into building a gym in which her father works. It is also alleged that he has created a brand of sports wear using her name without permission.

For his part Dumitru Moceanu points out that his daughter got a Mustang convertible for her 17th birthday. Nothing says "I love you" in quite the same way. Moceanu says that yes, indeed, she has a convertible. She makes the payments on it every month.

Moceanu's professional career began when she was 10-years-old. It probably won't end any time soon, as she knows no other life. She is staying with friends at present and her coach is supporting her through one of the more painful leaving the-nest episodes we are likely to hear about.

It is jarring sometimes to peel back the glossy cover of sport and examine the lives underneath. The strange and disturbing things which fathers in particular make their kids do often reduces the world of sport to a class of psychological freak show.

There is the bones of a study in there somewhere. Roy Jones' father shot his dog. Ben Hogan's father shot himself through the head in front of his family. Steffi Graf's old man is a major taxation scandal unto himself. Mary Pierce's father is barred from coming near her. You get tired of reading the biographies of famous sports people who transpire to have had dysfunctional parental relationships.

Many of those who make it to the very top of the sport are being driven by somebody else's obsession or failing. Hounded to swimming pools before dawn, driven to gyms while everyone else sleeps, or being chased around football pitches while they should be doing something healthy like watching The Simpsons.

Philip (not Philly) Larkin had it right.