The Silver Apples of the Moon...
Bartizan, 13/07/2015
"Early in November (1923) a journalist called to show me a printed paragraph saying that the Nobel Prize would probably be conferred upon Herr Mann, the distinguished novelist, or upon myself, I did not know that the Swedish Academy had ever heard my name.
"Then some eight days later between ten and eleven at night, comes the telephone message from the Irish Times saying that the prize had indeed been conferred upon me; some ten minutes after that comes a telegram from the Swedish Ambassador; then journalists come for interviews. At half past twelve my wife and I are alone, and search the cellar for a bottle of wine, but it is empty, and as a celebration is necessary we cook sausages."
(William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies: p. 533)
Make no mistake about it, winning the Munster Final on Sunday will have occasioned sausages rather than wine in Professor O' Shea's kitchen in his adopted Galway. Or abroad in Borris-Illeigh for that matter, where Brendan will exult in joining a list of Munster captains from his famous parish, but will not spend too long polishing the silverware. His every syllable in picking up the "Man of the Match" award on "The Sunday Game" spoke of unfulfilled destiny. Mention of sausages and Borris-Illeigh in the same paragraph remind me that Brendan's clubmen spent the day in Semple selling hotdogs to raise funds for their new facilities. At a euro returned per hotdog sold, they need to sell a lot of sausages, but best of luck to them in producing another All-Ireland winning captain to follow Sean Kenny, Jimmy Finn, and Bobby Ryan. Brendan doesn't need me to remind him that he was born the year the last Borris-Illeigh man lifted Liam McCarthy!
And so, to the notion of Province. It is a vexed subject. The people of Galway, who have never taken banishment well, from Cromwell down the years, have proposed an open draw in hurling from 2017. The Dublin football jackboot is proving equally persuasive. And while I know we do not need to see everything refracted through the Kilkenny prism, in the matter of provincial titles we seem to be taking our cue from the frosty reception given to Bob O' Keefe on the previous Sunday. Kilkenny showed little love for a cup named after a man from Mooncoin, and their body language reminded one of John (The Ginger Original) Power's line about "sticking another bale on the trailer" (except that 70 Leinster titles might occasion more than one trailer; it depends on the bale; and on the trailer, come to that.) Anyhow, the contrast with Holden's practiced September speech as Gaeilge was obvious.
And so, to Waterford: unerringly bracketed with the word "system" in all talk of this game. As if management were down in De La Salle fiddling with fancy Euclidean diagrams. One had a sense of Derek McGrath as a summer recluse staying awake by candlelight in a dim library, while Dan fetched DVDs of past Tipperary performances. There is a documentary called Stanley Kubrick's Boxes that featured over one thousand of said boxes, each containing snap shots, newspaper clippings, film out-takes, notes, and fan letters which the director used for research towards each of his films. Kubrick long wanted to make a film about Napoleon, and had a series of flash cards listing an incident or episode from every day of his life. Perhaps Bubbles merited a similar file in Derek McGrath's light-starved cavern?
In actual fact, it seemed to me before the game that Waterford had a callow centre-back that was being given protection fore and aft, a couple of galloping forwards who work best in space inside, a midfield that graft until exhaustion, allied to a couple of very tight man-markers too, perhaps the best in the game. It's not complex, said I. It's not a blasted "code" to crack. Well, ask me was I wrong! I was wronger than the wrongest man in Wrongtown. All they had was a system. A suffocating, unrelenting cyborg of a system:
Listen, and understand! That Waterford system is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
It took the hurling equivalent of the 1000-ton hydraulic press at the end of the movie to crush Waterford. But they will spawn anew in a sequel against Dublin, where 16 points may be enough to enough to prosper this time. And if you hated watching the fare on Sunday, wait until you watch Terminator versus Tyrellasaurus.
On the Friday before the match, Novak Djokovic cruised into another Wimbledon final. His French opponent, though beaten in straight sets, was so full of grace notes and unavailing artistry that he prompted a useful tweet (inasmuch as any tweet is useful):
If there is winning ugly, there must also be losing pretty.
Though it is not our default setting, Tipperary learned to win ugly on Sunday. And they did not think beyond Sunday. I brought my son to his first Munster Final, and was on a caution from home to cauterise my cursing. But some things are as eternal and unchanging as the Queen's haircut, so I figured he'd need to galvanise his ears as I did forty years ago at my first. But it was not a match for cursing, funnily enough. It was a match for headshaking and quizzical looks:
Did Paudie really do that?
Did Maurice think he was communing with the angels when he hit that?
When we walked onto the sward afterwards (the grass greener than a Johnny Cash lyric, the grass longer than might have been expected), and faced Brendan lifting the cup, I had a prevailing sense that life has moved on since Richie Stakelum, and we all know it. Sure, it is a second prize, and it beats a League title, but ask Declan and Tommy how much thanks they got for their double Munster. Even though we all grew up on "the glory of it", it only amounts to a plate of sausages now.
There is only one currency: the golden apples of September sun.
Every Saint Has a Past
Bartizan, 30/06/2015
It was fitting that they took his remains from a house in Bóthar na Naomh, the road of the saints; more fitting still perhaps that he lay in repose in the Social Centre of a club he adored and adorned all his life: Na Sáirséaligh, Dúrlas Éile. For Jimmy Doyle was in many ways a saint from a time when saints prospered little on a hurling field. And his life ended as it started: at the centre of his club; the name on all lips, the cynosure of all eyes. It was whispered around his coffin that when Jimmy Doyle bled, as he often bled on a hurling field, he bled blue, the colour of club and county. After word of his demise eddied in aching circles around the country on the day after the summer solstice, he was mourned across the town he was raised in and represented; mourned across an entire county for which he was the flourish on its very signature; mourned in living-rooms all over the country. This was about more than the death of a hurler. This was the lowering of the very emblem of all that is good about Thurles and Tipperary.
Everyone had a glad word about Jimmy Doyle. Even Cork men. Especially Cork men, in fact. I remember meeting Jimmy Doyle once, before a Tipp-Cork match in Semple. It might have been the mid-1980s. My father made tracks for a slight man walking towards the gate of the greyhound track, grabbed his hand, and pumped it vigorously as if he was drawing water from a village well. When my teenage gait caught up with his gallop, he was shouting at me to meet the one and only Jimmy Doyle. My father was more than fond of Jimmy. A prince, he used to say; a noble hurler. My father spoke of battles past, epics that Jimmy must have been more weary of hearing about than living through. But Jimmy batted away all flattery, and wished the man with the Cork accent and his starstruck gom of a son all the best of luck. With that, he slipped into the crowd like an eel among the weeds.
That was the Jimmy my father saw play: elusive and classy. Jimmy Doyle never did it by the numbers. He was more off the cuff, a floating, flamboyant genius. But when it came to numbers, he had the full set; he had more numbers than an entire series of Sesame Street.
Consider the following:
1: Hurler of the Year award
2: All-Ireland Senior Hurling titles as captain
3: All-Ireland Minor Hurling titles
4: County Minor Hurling titles
5: All-Ireland Senior Hurling championship top scorer awards
6: All-Ireland Senior Hurling titles
7: National League Hurling titles
8: Railway Cup Hurling titles
9: Munster Senior Hurling titles
10: County Senior Hurling titles
If you smelted down that lot, you'd have a decent-sized battleship. Sure, Jimmy could also lob in a County Senior Football medal from 1960 as a makeweight. Instead, Jimmy gave them all to the Tipperary GAA Museum, Lár na Páirce.
Mention of medals reminds me of the story of another Munster hurling legend, Jack Lynch. In 1996, Lynch gave all of his medals to another GAA museum in Croke Park. When the GAA officials called to Lynch's home to collect the medals, his biographer movingly records: "Lynch, now enfeebled by serious illness and only a shadow of his former self, betrayed uncharacteristic emotion as he handed the unique collection to his visitors. 'Take good care of them. They were hard won', he said".
And if Lynch's medals were hard won twenty years before, even he cannot have suffered the attrition Jimmy endured. The clip shown on the main evening news on the night of his death showed Jimmy soloing through the Kilkenny defence (was this the 1967 All-Ireland?) before getting an unmerciful slash from the opposing centre-back that smashed his hurl and damn near broke his arm as well. Jimmy kept moving, and defiantly attempted to hit the sliothar with the foot of ash he was left holding (it's a wonder he didn't score all the same!) He got a free (when frees were hard won too.) But what the clip also showed was that Jimmy strode up to the Kilkenny man and put him right. In a Tipperary team that could and did dish it out, Jimmy would rather a reproving word than a vengeful swipe. Indeed, his father Gerry offered his now slowing son some advice as his third decade with the Tipperary senior team dawned: walk away before you hurt someone, he said. And Jimmy was never minded to hurt anyone.
But maybe too much is made of his size in any event: while he would never be used as a model to cast a statue of Fionn MacCumhail, he was no flat jockey either. And as Babs Keating tells it, he was more in the style of Messi: the man who made it happen despite seeming to lack either size or notable speed (another contemporary on the fringes of the Tipperary team for a fair portion of the 1960s says that he expected Jimmy to be faster than he turned out to be; John would be by far the faster of the pair, he said.) But you had to catch Jimmy first...
And in this regard, a contributor to a Clare hurling website makes a very telling contribution by way of tribute.
I had a great chat with a fella (in a pub in Sligo of all places) a few months back. He was telling me that he marked Eddie Keher and Jimmy Doyle twice each in Schools hurling. He said that Keher was good, but you would get some bit of change off him. But Doyle when he marked him last, in his last year in school, was just unmarkable.
He got loads of advice before going out, pull on him, grab a hold of his jersey, give him a dig etc etc etc.... but that was all fine and well.... if you could catch him....!!!!
He said a ball would be dropping and he would be still sizing up his options, and Doyle would be gone with it.
He told me he played a bit of Senior for Laois afterwards before going to London and playing rugby for years but he was never as utterly knackered after a match as he was after the last time that he marked Doyle. He never ran so far on a field in one day and yet as he said himself, he hardly touched the ball.
(Thanks to BNA)
On the Premierview site, there are three Tipperary hurlers immortalised (to which pieces this column owes a debt): The Doyles, John and Jimmy, and Jimmy's Sars teammate Mickey "The Rattler" Byrne. Only The Rattler fights the good fight still, birdcage or no birdcage. Born in 1923, it would be a brave man that would bet against him seeing out his century. But the field of mythic Tipperary figures of our past - of our parents' eras - is thinning out.
The immortals are being made mortal.
Bartizan Column 20/06/2015
It is the Thursday before Tipperary's championship opener. The week has been the backyard snarl of a lawnmower through triple-glazing, but today Woody Woodpecker is going full bore in your brain. There is nothing for this drizzling tension but time; even Nurse Ratched doesn't have the drugs you need.
My mind goes back to another summer Sunday from the time when children still looked out car windows. A red Renault 12 estate noses its way to Ballyheigue. A small boy in blue shorts sits in the back behind his mother, coolness flurrying in her window. A smooth-haired terrier running to fat hunches on his lap, claws insistent. In an irony that escapes the four children sticking to the plastic seat, she is named after a character from the American TV series, "Roots": whereas Kizzy the slave is as black as the hobs of Hell, the panting bundle on my knees is the colour of scone dough.
So, not being one to spurn a lazy analogy, black becomes white as Tipperary becomes Limerick. And in time, Limerick becomes Tipperary again.
But even our reveries will not hurry up the game's arrival. Time will not be chided. It will not lift its step. And when Sunday arrives like Pierrepoint the last hangman, you may be sorrier still.
Anyhow, let's anchor ourselves in the present for a while. It is the Thursday before Tipperary's championship opener. The very gaze of heaven is adjusted downwards. The pitch is being marked. Newspaper men are rousing hibernating metaphors. Mass times are being consulted. Parking spaces are being pre-empted. A pair of tickets for the uncovered stand are slipped into a wallet to replace the 50 euro note they cost. From the burning thatch of Adare to the banks of the sullen Maigue, where the poetic form that was to become the limerick was fostered, fadó, fadó, the expectation rises annual as sap: sure, we have nothing to fear from Tipperary:
There once was a man from Nantinan,
Who saw clouds but not silver lining,
But even this bollix,
When he read The Fear Matrix,
Said we'll bate Tipp rain, hail, or sun shining.
While Woody (woodpecker, not midfielder) has flitted to another drilling station, your whole being is still consumed: your gut has contorted itself into a Möbius strip; the hairs on your arms are crisp with static, aloof as Russian sentries; your thoughts seem to form coherent patterns, but are actually diffuse and unnested, like a murmuration of starlings:
Is Barrett fit? Who's at 6? Will he start Bubbles? What about Jason?
Eamon O' Shea was interviewed at an event to mark Poetry Day Ireland in Thurles recently, and he said that he tries to read a poem a day. If I could suggest a poem for Eamon today, it would probably be a poem by EE Cummings titled XIXthat ends:
Rain is no respecter of persons
the snow doesn't give a soft white
damn Whom it touches.
This imagist classic by the American poet may have become as worn as tyre bearings through the weight of meaning, but it still sends me a simple message: we underwhelm the universe. And yet...
2015 is Eamon O' Shea's chance to carve his name in the bark of eternity. Some felt that it was his hand on the penknife in 2010, but the initials continue to confound that:
L.S.
The day is still digging into me like a dog's claws.
The starlings still swirl: wet sod, dry ball, Babs and Bennis in an awkward embrace, Brian Carroll wearing two jersies. The day when Bonner saved us. And through the tumult, one man above all others. It is said that Christ performed forty miracles in the Bible, but not having been around then, I can only speak for a day on a terrace in 2006 when Eoin Kelly showed us fourteen moments of unfathomable genius. His man marker that day has become manager, and cajoled a win out of fourteen men the last day.
Let's hurl like Cummings' rain: no respecter of persons (That's persons persons, and not Premierview persons.) Not a soft white damn should we give for the opposition. A Munster Final awaits us.
The Silver Apples of the Moon...
Bartizan, 13/07/2015
"Early in November (1923) a journalist called to show me a printed paragraph saying that the Nobel Prize would probably be conferred upon Herr Mann, the distinguished novelist, or upon myself, I did not know that the Swedish Academy had ever heard my name.
"Then some eight days later between ten and eleven at night, comes the telephone message from the Irish Times saying that the prize had indeed been conferred upon me; some ten minutes after that comes a telegram from the Swedish Ambassador; then journalists come for interviews. At half past twelve my wife and I are alone, and search the cellar for a bottle of wine, but it is empty, and as a celebration is necessary we cook sausages."
(William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies: p. 533)
Make no mistake about it, winning the Munster Final on Sunday will have occasioned sausages rather than wine in Professor O' Shea's kitchen in his adopted Galway. Or abroad in Borris-Illeigh for that matter, where Brendan will exult in joining a list of Munster captains from his famous parish, but will not spend too long polishing the silverware. His every syllable in picking up the "Man of the Match" award on "The Sunday Game" spoke of unfulfilled destiny. Mention of sausages and Borris-Illeigh in the same paragraph remind me that Brendan's clubmen spent the day in Semple selling hotdogs to raise funds for their new facilities. At a euro returned per hotdog sold, they need to sell a lot of sausages, but best of luck to them in producing another All-Ireland winning captain to follow Sean Kenny, Jimmy Finn, and Bobby Ryan. Brendan doesn't need me to remind him that he was born the year the last Borris-Illeigh man lifted Liam McCarthy!
And so, to the notion of Province. It is a vexed subject. The people of Galway, who have never taken banishment well, from Cromwell down the years, have proposed an open draw in hurling from 2017. The Dublin football jackboot is proving equally persuasive. And while I know we do not need to see everything refracted through the Kilkenny prism, in the matter of provincial titles we seem to be taking our cue from the frosty reception given to Bob O' Keefe on the previous Sunday. Kilkenny showed little love for a cup named after a man from Mooncoin, and their body language reminded one of John (The Ginger Original) Power's line about "sticking another bale on the trailer" (except that 70 Leinster titles might occasion more than one trailer; it depends on the bale; and on the trailer, come to that.) Anyhow, the contrast with Holden's practiced September speech as Gaeilge was obvious.
And so, to Waterford: unerringly bracketed with the word "system" in all talk of this game. As if management were down in De La Salle fiddling with fancy Euclidean diagrams. One had a sense of Derek McGrath as a summer recluse staying awake by candlelight in a dim library, while Dan fetched DVDs of past Tipperary performances. There is a documentary called Stanley Kubrick's Boxes that featured over one thousand of said boxes, each containing snap shots, newspaper clippings, film out-takes, notes, and fan letters which the director used for research towards each of his films. Kubrick long wanted to make a film about Napoleon, and had a series of flash cards listing an incident or episode from every day of his life. Perhaps Bubbles merited a similar file in Derek McGrath's light-starved cavern?
In actual fact, it seemed to me before the game that Waterford had a callow centre-back that was being given protection fore and aft, a couple of galloping forwards who work best in space inside, a midfield that graft until exhaustion, allied to a couple of very tight man-markers too, perhaps the best in the game. It's not complex, said I. It's not a blasted "code" to crack. Well, ask me was I wrong! I was wronger than the wrongest man in Wrongtown. All they had was a system. A suffocating, unrelenting cyborg of a system:
Listen, and understand! That Waterford system is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
It took the hurling equivalent of the 1000-ton hydraulic press at the end of the movie to crush Waterford. But they will spawn anew in a sequel against Dublin, where 16 points may be enough to enough to prosper this time. And if you hated watching the fare on Sunday, wait until you watch Terminator versus Tyrellasaurus.
On the Friday before the match, Novak Djokovic cruised into another Wimbledon final. His French opponent, though beaten in straight sets, was so full of grace notes and unavailing artistry that he prompted a useful tweet (inasmuch as any tweet is useful):
If there is winning ugly, there must also be losing pretty.
Though it is not our default setting, Tipperary learned to win ugly on Sunday. And they did not think beyond Sunday. I brought my son to his first Munster Final, and was on a caution from home to cauterise my cursing. But some things are as eternal and unchanging as the Queen's haircut, so I figured he'd need to galvanise his ears as I did forty years ago at my first. But it was not a match for cursing, funnily enough. It was a match for headshaking and quizzical looks:
Did Paudie really do that?
Did Maurice think he was communing with the angels when he hit that?
When we walked onto the sward afterwards (the grass greener than a Johnny Cash lyric, the grass longer than might have been expected), and faced Brendan lifting the cup, I had a prevailing sense that life has moved on since Richie Stakelum, and we all know it. Sure, it is a second prize, and it beats a League title, but ask Declan and Tommy how much thanks they got for their double Munster. Even though we all grew up on "the glory of it", it only amounts to a plate of sausages now.
There is only one currency: the golden apples of September sun.
Every Saint Has a Past
Bartizan, 30/06/2015
It was fitting that they took his remains from a house in Bóthar na Naomh, the road of the saints; more fitting still perhaps that he lay in repose in the Social Centre of a club he adored and adorned all his life: Na Sáirséaligh, Dúrlas Éile. For Jimmy Doyle was in many ways a saint from a time when saints prospered little on a hurling field. And his life ended as it started: at the centre of his club; the name on all lips, the cynosure of all eyes. It was whispered around his coffin that when Jimmy Doyle bled, as he often bled on a hurling field, he bled blue, the colour of club and county. After word of his demise eddied in aching circles around the country on the day after the summer solstice, he was mourned across the town he was raised in and represented; mourned across an entire county for which he was the flourish on its very signature; mourned in living-rooms all over the country. This was about more than the death of a hurler. This was the lowering of the very emblem of all that is good about Thurles and Tipperary.
Everyone had a glad word about Jimmy Doyle. Even Cork men. Especially Cork men, in fact. I remember meeting Jimmy Doyle once, before a Tipp-Cork match in Semple. It might have been the mid-1980s. My father made tracks for a slight man walking towards the gate of the greyhound track, grabbed his hand, and pumped it vigorously as if he was drawing water from a village well. When my teenage gait caught up with his gallop, he was shouting at me to meet the one and only Jimmy Doyle. My father was more than fond of Jimmy. A prince, he used to say; a noble hurler. My father spoke of battles past, epics that Jimmy must have been more weary of hearing about than living through. But Jimmy batted away all flattery, and wished the man with the Cork accent and his starstruck gom of a son all the best of luck. With that, he slipped into the crowd like an eel among the weeds.
That was the Jimmy my father saw play: elusive and classy. Jimmy Doyle never did it by the numbers. He was more off the cuff, a floating, flamboyant genius. But when it came to numbers, he had the full set; he had more numbers than an entire series of Sesame Street.
Consider the following:
1: Hurler of the Year award
2: All-Ireland Senior Hurling titles as captain
3: All-Ireland Minor Hurling titles
4: County Minor Hurling titles
5: All-Ireland Senior Hurling championship top scorer awards
6: All-Ireland Senior Hurling titles
7: National League Hurling titles
8: Railway Cup Hurling titles
9: Munster Senior Hurling titles
10: County Senior Hurling titles
If you smelted down that lot, you'd have a decent-sized battleship. Sure, Jimmy could also lob in a County Senior Football medal from 1960 as a makeweight. Instead, Jimmy gave them all to the Tipperary GAA Museum, Lár na Páirce.
Mention of medals reminds me of the story of another Munster hurling legend, Jack Lynch. In 1996, Lynch gave all of his medals to another GAA museum in Croke Park. When the GAA officials called to Lynch's home to collect the medals, his biographer movingly records: "Lynch, now enfeebled by serious illness and only a shadow of his former self, betrayed uncharacteristic emotion as he handed the unique collection to his visitors. 'Take good care of them. They were hard won', he said".
And if Lynch's medals were hard won twenty years before, even he cannot have suffered the attrition Jimmy endured. The clip shown on the main evening news on the night of his death showed Jimmy soloing through the Kilkenny defence (was this the 1967 All-Ireland?) before getting an unmerciful slash from the opposing centre-back that smashed his hurl and damn near broke his arm as well. Jimmy kept moving, and defiantly attempted to hit the sliothar with the foot of ash he was left holding (it's a wonder he didn't score all the same!) He got a free (when frees were hard won too.) But what the clip also showed was that Jimmy strode up to the Kilkenny man and put him right. In a Tipperary team that could and did dish it out, Jimmy would rather a reproving word than a vengeful swipe. Indeed, his father Gerry offered his now slowing son some advice as his third decade with the Tipperary senior team dawned: walk away before you hurt someone, he said. And Jimmy was never minded to hurt anyone.
But maybe too much is made of his size in any event: while he would never be used as a model to cast a statue of Fionn MacCumhail, he was no flat jockey either. And as Babs Keating tells it, he was more in the style of Messi: the man who made it happen despite seeming to lack either size or notable speed (another contemporary on the fringes of the Tipperary team for a fair portion of the 1960s says that he expected Jimmy to be faster than he turned out to be; John would be by far the faster of the pair, he said.) But you had to catch Jimmy first...
And in this regard, a contributor to a Clare hurling website makes a very telling contribution by way of tribute.
I had a great chat with a fella (in a pub in Sligo of all places) a few months back. He was telling me that he marked Eddie Keher and Jimmy Doyle twice each in Schools hurling. He said that Keher was good, but you would get some bit of change off him. But Doyle when he marked him last, in his last year in school, was just unmarkable.
He got loads of advice before going out, pull on him, grab a hold of his jersey, give him a dig etc etc etc.... but that was all fine and well.... if you could catch him....!!!!
He said a ball would be dropping and he would be still sizing up his options, and Doyle would be gone with it.
He told me he played a bit of Senior for Laois afterwards before going to London and playing rugby for years but he was never as utterly knackered after a match as he was after the last time that he marked Doyle. He never ran so far on a field in one day and yet as he said himself, he hardly touched the ball.
(Thanks to BNA)
On the Premierview site, there are three Tipperary hurlers immortalised (to which pieces this column owes a debt): The Doyles, John and Jimmy, and Jimmy's Sars teammate Mickey "The Rattler" Byrne. Only The Rattler fights the good fight still, birdcage or no birdcage. Born in 1923, it would be a brave man that would bet against him seeing out his century. But the field of mythic Tipperary figures of our past - of our parents' eras - is thinning out.
The immortals are being made mortal.
Bartizan Column 20/06/2015
It is the Thursday before Tipperary's championship opener. The week has been the backyard snarl of a lawnmower through triple-glazing, but today Woody Woodpecker is going full bore in your brain. There is nothing for this drizzling tension but time; even Nurse Ratched doesn't have the drugs you need.
My mind goes back to another summer Sunday from the time when children still looked out car windows. A red Renault 12 estate noses its way to Ballyheigue. A small boy in blue shorts sits in the back behind his mother, coolness flurrying in her window. A smooth-haired terrier running to fat hunches on his lap, claws insistent. In an irony that escapes the four children sticking to the plastic seat, she is named after a character from the American TV series, "Roots": whereas Kizzy the slave is as black as the hobs of Hell, the panting bundle on my knees is the colour of scone dough.
So, not being one to spurn a lazy analogy, black becomes white as Tipperary becomes Limerick. And in time, Limerick becomes Tipperary again.
But even our reveries will not hurry up the game's arrival. Time will not be chided. It will not lift its step. And when Sunday arrives like Pierrepoint the last hangman, you may be sorrier still.
Anyhow, let's anchor ourselves in the present for a while. It is the Thursday before Tipperary's championship opener. The very gaze of heaven is adjusted downwards. The pitch is being marked. Newspaper men are rousing hibernating metaphors. Mass times are being consulted. Parking spaces are being pre-empted. A pair of tickets for the uncovered stand are slipped into a wallet to replace the 50 euro note they cost. From the burning thatch of Adare to the banks of the sullen Maigue, where the poetic form that was to become the limerick was fostered, fadó, fadó, the expectation rises annual as sap: sure, we have nothing to fear from Tipperary:
There once was a man from Nantinan,
Who saw clouds but not silver lining,
But even this bollix,
When he read The Fear Matrix,
Said we'll bate Tipp rain, hail, or sun shining.
While Woody (woodpecker, not midfielder) has flitted to another drilling station, your whole being is still consumed: your gut has contorted itself into a Möbius strip; the hairs on your arms are crisp with static, aloof as Russian sentries; your thoughts seem to form coherent patterns, but are actually diffuse and unnested, like a murmuration of starlings:
Is Barrett fit? Who's at 6? Will he start Bubbles? What about Jason?
Eamon O' Shea was interviewed at an event to mark Poetry Day Ireland in Thurles recently, and he said that he tries to read a poem a day. If I could suggest a poem for Eamon today, it would probably be a poem by EE Cummings titled XIXthat ends:
Rain is no respecter of persons
the snow doesn't give a soft white
damn Whom it touches.
This imagist classic by the American poet may have become as worn as tyre bearings through the weight of meaning, but it still sends me a simple message: we underwhelm the universe. And yet...
2015 is Eamon O' Shea's chance to carve his name in the bark of eternity. Some felt that it was his hand on the penknife in 2010, but the initials continue to confound that:
L.S.
The day is still digging into me like a dog's claws.
The starlings still swirl: wet sod, dry ball, Babs and Bennis in an awkward embrace, Brian Carroll wearing two jersies. The day when Bonner saved us. And through the tumult, one man above all others. It is said that Christ performed forty miracles in the Bible, but not having been around then, I can only speak for a day on a terrace in 2006 when Eoin Kelly showed us fourteen moments of unfathomable genius. His man marker that day has become manager, and cajoled a win out of fourteen men the last day.
Let's hurl like Cummings' rain: no respecter of persons (That's persons persons, and not Premierview persons.) Not a soft white damn should we give for the opposition. A Munster Final awaits us.
