Four times national champion, the bantamweight couldn’t get time off from work recently to attend the weigh-in for this year’s nationals.
Since the first step towards qualifying for the Olympics is winning your weight class at that event, McKenna’s absence effectively cost him his chance of a trip to Athens next summer. One more romantic sporting fantasy killed off by an unhelpful employer.
Amateur boxing is a noble pursuit. Neither glamorous nor lucrative, it’s a physically and mentally tough game where the rewards are hardly ever commensurate with the investment.
Even a guy like McKenna, who has represented his country over 50 times, will usually remain a largely anonymous figure unless he strikes gold or silver or bronze at an Olympics. Now, he might not have been good enough to ever do that but the problem is that we’ll never know. He didn’t even get the opportunity.
An employee of An Post, McKenna’s application for five weeks special leave to train (this being an Olympic year and all) was turned down. That news was only relayed to him after he’d returned from a fortnight at a national team training camp in Cyprus.
This meant the time already spent away was now counted against his holiday time. With every spare day he was entitled to used up, he had no choice but to skip the weigh-in and give up his shot at glory. Married with a child and a mortgage, he did the responsible thing.
That a company behaves like this towards somebody chasing down the most Corinthian sporting dream of all sums up how primitive our approach to sport is. When Sonia O’Sullivan or Gillian O’Sullivan or one of the rowers comes back from Athens as Ireland’s only medallist next year, there will be much caterwauling about falling standards and failure to support athletes properly. Now is the time to be doing something about that. Not then.
In a totally related story, John O’Donoghue, the Minister for Arts, Tourism and shameless opportunism to do with sport, gave his hardly unbiased view of the current controversy surrounding Croke Park last Friday. If nothing else, I suppose we should applaud him for his barefaced cheek. The great man was addressing the grand issue of the day while one of the best boxers in the country has to effectively retire from the competitive arena because he can’t get a morning off from a semi-state company.
“I understand where the GAA is coming from,” said O’Donoghue. “But I really believe that the GAA would be doing this country a great service were it to decide that, independently, it would from time to time make the stadium, Croke Park, available to other sports. Now they could decide the times and the events themselves. But I really would think that would be of enormous benefit.”
This little bit of advice would have been far easier to stomach had it come from anybody else. Not O’Donoghue. Not the man who sauntered into the sports ministry just over a year ago and almost instantly blew any shot he had at credibility. How can we take this guy seriously? Among his first acts once he got his hands on this juicy portfolio was to ensure three sporting concerns in his own Kerry South constituency received more money from the capital grants system than the entire counties Carlow, Cavan, Laois, Leitrim, Longford, Monaghan, Sligo and Westmeath.
There is political patronage and then there is this sort of blatant disregard for all notions of fairness. Once O’Donoghue signed off on that classic example of pork barrel politics last summer, he forfeited the right to pontificate on any major sporting topic.
And Croke Park is the biggest sporting topic of this winter. It has to be. The FAI are staring down the prospect of embarrassing weekends in Liverpool, the IRFU are moving at their usual glacial pace towards finally doing something about creaking Lansdowne Road, and sooner or later, the government are going to have to admit they can no longer waste hundreds of millions of euros on a national stadium in Abbotstown.
Our favorite snippet from O’Donoghue’s interview ‘The Last Word’ though was his declaration that it would be “in the best interests of the country” and “a patriotic gesture” if the GAA gave every other major sports organization access to its magnificent headquarters. These sort of quotes would be funny if they weren’t so wholly ridiculous coming from him.
It would be “in the best interests of the country” if his government had a proper policy on sport, not an ad hoc approach seemingly pulled together from whatever the back page of The Star (put on your ould Arnotts’ jersey for the photographers there Bertie) deems populist any particular week.
“A patriotic gesture” would be ensuring the employees of semi-state companies could catch a few breaks if they are also elite athletes. Or announcing that from this point onwards, his own constituency, and those of the Taoiseach and Minister for Finance would no longer be ridiculously favored in the distribution of sports capital grants each year.
In that scheme last summer, O’Donoghue’s hometown of Cahersiveen got 354 euros per resident to fund two projects, and Ahern’s Dublin Central stronghold got more grant aid than 21 entire counties. A simple piece of legislation prohibiting any repeat of those excesses would prove that the Minister for Sport was actually intent on doing his job properly. Certainly, the case of McKenna adds one more item to the mounting pile of evidence that he isn’t.
We’ve said it before but it sure bears repeating. The GAA should open up Croke Park whenever they themselves see fit. Not at the behest of any politician trying to score a few points. Judging from the increased chatter emanating from various counties, that time is drawing nearer.
Which probably explains why O’Donoghue is being so gung-ho about it now.