The thrill of victory

It might have been cinder tracks, roped off canvas, scorching tarmac, or the cobbled roads of Northern France that spawned vivid memories, but for most Irish sportsmen and women, the step over the line onto a patch of green remains the most glorious of escapes both for themselves and for the greats they watched.
An escape from occasional drudgery, from unemployment maybe, from the longing for home, but above all from the humdrum. Ordinary people have been transformed by their actions. Farmers became gods, civil servants were heroes, and apprentices took on the mantle of leadership.
How many times were the closing bars of the national anthem to be drowned out by a rising roar from impatient supporters? A roar so primal that even the most poised of competitors couldn’t help but feel the hairs stand up on the back of their necks.
With the smell of cut grass in their nostrils, winners became losers, and losers lifted lumps of silverware to the skies. Sometimes the sun was on their backs, but even when clouds smothered the contest, those images of goals, points, tries and medals over three quarters of a century are inevitably recalled in vivid technicolor.
At a time when Micheal O’Hehir’s iconic, crackling radio commentaries were all some people had to sustain their passion for the two codes, great moments of Gaelic games were imagined as much as they were experienced. A story is told of a group of people outside a village shop in rural Ireland who were enraptured by O’Hehir’s word-pictures of a game that eventually came down to a last-second free.
O’Hehir built up the tension with a description of how the freetaker placed the ball, of how he reversed slowly backward, of how he spied the posts and of how he prepared himself to win the match. Just as O’Hehir paused to let the image of the lone freetaker with the burden of responsibility on his shoulders sink in, one of the listeners broke the silence with: “Stand back won’t you, give him a bit of room.”
It was said that when O’Hehir was at the microphone, there was never a dull game to call. He had the power to move the GAA out of its parochial enclaves and to make Croke Park a mecca for its ardent followers. Ireland was a bigger place back then with an economy largely based on agriculture, and with a society riven by emigration. In that post World War II gloom, with the regeneration of the 1960s a distant prospect, Christy Ring emerged to cast an incomparable spell on Irish sport. For discerning people who watched him slash and swish a hurley with such grace and power, they unhesitatingly spoke of the Corkman’s genius.
For others who only heard the tales of brilliance, and for a new generation of GAA devotees, the legend grew with the telling. Ring was part of Cork’s unrivaled four All-Irelands in a row team from 1941-44, but, astonishingly, those achievements were only baby steps in his career.
A future taoiseach, Jack Lynch, was more of an architect of Cork’s supremacy in that era, but Ring’s time would come. He’d laid down a marker in the 1944 Munster final with a long, mesmeric solo run from his own half deep into Limerick territory to create a memorable goal. Two years later, he tore through the Kilkenny defense in the All-Ireland final and finished a 70-yard journey with a classic goal of his own.
From Cloyne in East Cork, this shy intense man provided wondrous entertainment to GAA lovers when there wasn’t much entertainment around. The myths remain of what was said and done on the pitch, but that has as much to do with a reluctance on the part of Ring’s family to leave both a written and oral legacy after his untimely death at the age of 58 in 1979.
If some of his deeds have been dimmed by the years, his haul of eight All-Ireland medals, nine Munster titles, four National Leagues, 18 Railway Cups and 14 Cork county medals with Glen Rovers at least puts some statistical flesh on the legend.
For all we know, D.J. Carey, Kilkenny’s current talisman, or Brian Lohan of Clare, who represent hurling’s flair and ferocity in the new millennium, may have the edge on Ring in certain areas, but no one has made such an enduring impact on Irish sporting life. And if the people who watched him play are to be believed, no one was ever more accomplished with hurley in hand.
If Ring’s career was marked by simplicity and modesty, the career of another Corkman has been symptomatic of the complexity that surrounds the current breed of superstar. While Roy Keane’s legacy can never be as unambiguous as that of hurling’s genius, he still casts as long a shadow as any of Ireland’s leading sportspeople.
Love him or hate him, Keane’s undoubted standing as the greatest soccer player Ireland has ever produced came under renewed scrutiny when he clashed with national team manager Mick McCarthy during preparations for the 2002 World Cup finals.
The Irish squad ended up acclimatizing on the Pacific island of Saipan before they traveled to Japan and Korea. However, the facilities at the camp were not to Keane’s liking, and his uneasy truce with McCarthy fell apart in a bitter dispute that culminated in the manager sending his captain home.
At issue was the notion of professionalism. McCarthy was prepared to train on a hard, bumpy pitch, to essentially relax with his players before the serious business of the finals began, whereas Keane wanted everything to be perfect; every i to be dotted and every t to be crossed. The player railed at what he saw as sloppy preparation Irish-style and said so in a couple of newspaper interviews. McCarthy was stung by the criticism and following an either-he-goes-or-I-go showdown, Keane packed his bags.
On the eve of one of the world’s biggest sporting events, Ireland had lost its best player. If Keane’s manic overreaction to a situation that could have been smoothed over was typical, his complete rejection of a “twill do” attitude that has characterized much of Irish sport at international level generated made the TV news headlines and generated heated debate on the front pages of the papers.
Accused of behaving like a prima donna and of abandoning his teammates at a crucial moment, some of Keane’s critics invoked the innocent, patriotic spirit that had seen Ireland defeat the old enemy England, 2-0, in 1949. He was the face of new soccer, of a selfish generation of overpaid brats who had left home to seek their fortune in the brash English leagues — at least that was what some said.
While acknowledging Keane’s at times ridiculous refusal to compromise, others recognized a drive and a fury that transformed a skinny kid into one of the world’s greatest midfielders at one of the world’s greatest clubs. Rejected as too small during his formative years in Mayfield, a harsh suburb of Cork city, Keane would write to English clubs imploring them to give him a trial.
That he eventually succeeded at Manchester United and steered them through a period of unprecedented success in England, culminating in a European Cup triumph in 1999, says as much about Keane’s unswerving determination as his talent. Equally, he had done more than any other player to drag Ireland to those World Cup finals in Asia before his relationship with McCarthy exploded.
Others had smelled the cut grass before Keane. John Giles and the gifted Liam Brady weaved sublime patterns but never experienced the heights of a major championship finals. Shamrock Rovers took center stage during a golden era for the domestic game when they won six FAI Cup finals in a row from 1964-69, making household names out of Frank O’Neill and Johnny Fulham, but, typically, it took an Englishman to put Ireland on the map.
Bluff, gruff Jack Charlton arrived, having earned the job of international manager by default, and shook things up. Suddenly Ireland were at the European Championship finals, and then at the World Cup in Italy in 1990 when, bizarrely, and joyously, Irish commerce and family life were put on hold whenever the team played. Such was the momentous feel good that the veteran writer Con Houlihan was moved to pen the line: “I missed the 1990 World Cup. I was in Italy at the time.”
It was much the same in 1994 when Italy were memorably subdued at the Giants Stadium, and if Keane was later to embody the snarling, hard edge of Irish sport, Paul McGrath emerged during Charlton’s stewardship as a player of such skill and generosity that he and Keane became two sides of the same golden coin.
While McGrath, again like Keane, had his personal demons and is still struggling to win his battle with alcohol abuse, he was Seamus Heaney to his teammate’s Eminem. The rhythm has not always been perfect, but at least Irish soccer has come of age in an international context.
If the snapshots of the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia, are faded, Ronnie Delany’s run into immortality still resonates nearly half a century later. The leggy Wicklowman, who’d blossomed under Jumbo Elliott’s tutelage at Villanova, had always said he was less interested in times than in winning races, so his surge to take the gold medal in the 1,500 meters final was made with the cool head of an accomplished tactician.
Later, when Irish athletes plied their trade on bouncier more forgiving surfaces, Eamonn Coghlan had to endure the pain of two fourth-place finishes at Olympic Games before running to 5,000 meters gold in the inaugural World Championships in Helsinki, Finland, in 1983. If Delany had a slightly stunned look on his face as he crossed the line, Coghlan knew he was going to win 200 meters from the finish.
To anyone who didn’t know him, and the crushing disappointment of twice missing the podium, Coghlan’s premature celebrations smacked of arrogance, but, in fact, he was so relieved to have fulfilled his potential in a major final.
Later the halting stride of John Treacy would take him clear of the bunch in the sweltering Los Angeles heat and bring him a marathon silver medal at the ’84 Games, and if Sonia O’Sullivan may never emulate Delany by winning an Olympic gold, she has already earned the right to be called Ireland’s greatest-ever sportswoman.
If her exploits at World and European Championships have also marked her down as one of the greatest women distance runners of all time, her Olympic experience has been more nightmare than dream. She has a last shot in Athens, Greece, this August, where her target is the 5,000 meters, so even in the twilight of an impressive career, hope remains.
But there is no hope that Michelle Smith De Bruin will ever enjoy such a comfortable place in Irish sporting history as O’Sullivan. At one time, it seemed as if her astonishing three gold medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics would have granted her exalted status. However, there was already poison in the pool.
Michelle Smith, as she was then, had become too good too late in her swimming life. An average athlete from a country without a 50-meter pool was suddenly a world beater, and while some Irish commentators air brushed over what was staring them in the face, the skeptics raised serious doubts over both the authenticity of her performances and the training methods of her husband, Erik De Bruin.
Amid the storm, she came through all the doping controls and then won another batch of medals at the European Championships the following year. It had to end, and when it was found that her test sample had been tampered with — the laboratory concluded that the sample had a very strong whisky odor — she was banned, disgraced, and disowned.
When all along it had been the naughty Eastern Europeans and North Americans, and with Ireland cozy in the misguided belief that all its athletes were purer than the driven snow, Michelle Smith De Bruin changed everything forever.
Stephen Roche’s legacy, highlighted by that monumental year in 1987 when he won the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the World Championships, was called into question recently when it emerged that his name had appeared in a file seized as part of an investigation into doping in Italy.
Roche’s class, and the power and bravery of his colleague Sean Kelly, meant that elite cycling caught the Irish imagination for a time, but now with so many doping scandals surrounding the sport, even the most na