In the 1990s, it seems that the enthusiasts of any field of human endeavour are not content to have it recognised as excellent in its own right. It has to be Art. Pop Music is Art, Stand-up Comedy is Art and, above all, Sport is Art.
Albert Camus's handful of appearances in goal for the Algerian national team have been transformed into a fact of such universal significance that Shamrock Rovers and Bohemians must feel that they should be addressing requests for funding to Sile De Valera rather than Jim McDaid.
In these post-modern times, the term "art" itself is probably of shaky provenance and doubtful value. But it's safe to say that Rugby League and classical sculpture are very different creatures and that the affinities between 22 hung-over men playing junior soccer on a Sunday morning and Pablo Picasso starting work on Guernica are doomed to remain forever mysterious.
When discussing sport and art it's probably as well to get proceedings under way with a healthy cry of "Get thee behind me Hornby". Nevertheless, there are sports which, at their highest level, possess similar aesthetic drives and offer similar consolations to the dreaded "A" word. Darts, skittles and croquet are probably not among them. Hurling most definitely is.
Gaelic games generally manage to escape most of the barbs aimed at sport by those who consider it a sorry hangover from the days of the Roman Circuses. The absence of an international dimension means that they don't conform to the Orwellian stereotype of sport as a substitute for war. Local rivalry may be keen in the GAA but a Cork win over Mayo doesn't persuade the victors that they are in some way ethnically superior to the vanquished.
And the continued amateur status of the GAA means that the stars of the game continue to be motivated by the purest of ideals. Like great artists, they perform because they must. They have discovered the area in which their self-expression finds freest rein. Gaelic games are pure performance and hurling has special qualities which lift it far above its brother sport.
Chief among these is difficulty. Hurling remains an arcane skill with only eight counties, at the most generous estimate, having any hope of winning an All-Ireland. Many counties possess just a handful of hurling clubs whose skills fall below that of the wonderful camogie players in the stronger areas. The majority of GAA fans do not identify with the great hurlers as much as admire them. Like traditional music, hurling is seen as something which is geographically specific. An indefinable magic in the soil and water of certain counties means that their players will always be superior to the adherents of the game from outside the heartlands. For Sligo flute players, Clare box players and Donegal fiddlers, read Tipperary full-backs, Kilkenny midfielders and Cork wing-forwards.
Like the great artists, great hurlers are surrounded by stories which stress their austere devotion to excellence. In the film The Art Of The Game, which was screened at Kilkenny Arts Festival on Saturday, Kilkenny's D.J. Carey speaks of childhood years spent playing the ball off a gable wall in the quest for perfect control. Lory Meagher, his 1930s equivalent, is reputed to have spent every spare moment of his youth pucking the sliotar around his family's paddock. I once met a Corkman who claimed to have worked with Christy Ring, the game's Pele. If Ring found himself away from a field, the Corkman said, he would take his hurl and ball and practise hitting signposts 50 yards away from him. He never missed. Maybe it's a likely story but it's the accretion of apocrypha which creates legend, after all.
Hurling, then, lends itself to interpretations far beyond the reductive "men chasing a bag of wind around a field" readings offered by the sports sceptics. This is what inspired the organising committee of Kilkenny Arts Week to this year include a pageant based on the game as centrepiece of the festival. Festival PRO John Purcell comments that, "We wanted to make the local community feel they were part of Arts Week and nothing is more important in Kilkenny than hurling."
Saturday's pageant was successful even beyond the wildest dreams of the organisers. Close on 10,000 turned out to watch a parade which snaked through the Marble City from the Castle to the Market Yard. The pageant pride and joy was a 20-foot-high fibreglass statue of D.J. Carey, made by sculptor Patrick O'Reilly. He's from Ballyragget, the kind of local detail vitally important to GAA followers. Ahead of him was a team of Macnas drummers, local kids painted the Kilkenny colours of black and amber, marchers carrying huge mock-ups of John Hinde photos, flag-waving youngsters, dancers doing the boy-band and girl-group shuffle, and a mock match between Kilkenny and Tipperary (although the sounds of hurls clashing suggested that this wasn't being taken in completely light-hearted fashion). And, just in case you were tempted to think that this was a far cry from the Artane Boys' Band, the Band themselves led the way.
Kilkenny have reached the All-Ireland final this year, and the whole affair had an air of celebration, community pride and general hilarity. Rivalling D.J. as star of the show was a streaker, reliving the famous 1990s incident when a brave exhibitionist raced on-field in a Kilkenny Championship match only to make contact with the business end of a hurl wielded by one of the county's best players. The man in the hairy rubber suit, his assets protected only by a fetching Kilkenny rosette, was Macnas veteran Paul Fahy, the man behind the parade and obviously someone who believes in the old maxim of never asking anyone to do anything you wouldn't do yourself.
Back in the clothed world, he explained how the event had taken shape. "The festival committee asked me to organise the parade for them, so for the past few months I've been liaising with the local GAA. I can't over-emphasise how helpful they've been; they've given us everything we wanted. With the exception of the drummers and the band, everyone involved is local. Our hurlers come from three local clubs: Gowran, Kilmannagh and Ballyragget. I think it's gone really well and the Kilkenny County Board are interested in having us come back the weekend of the All-Ireland."
Macnas was a fitting choice to help portray the spirit of hurling. Their name after all is taken from the Irish phrase referring to the leaping of a frisky young calf in a field, something which has clear parallels in the burst of enthusiasm which hurlers show as they run out at Croke Park, Semple Stadium and Pairc Ui Caoimh. The parade brought a Bacchanalian feel to a usually reserved town, but there was a more subtle frisson to be felt afterwards in the Market Yard when The Art Of The Game, a half-hour film about Kilkenny hurling made by local man Kevin Hughes, received its world premiere.
There was an immense resonance to the sight of thousands of local people standing silent and proud in the open-air as their local heroes paraded before them on the big screen. It was a moment which any artist would have been proud to inspire, describe or replicate. And one hurler interviewed for the film eloquently and simply came close to explaining the hold that Gaelic games have on a huge proportion of this country's population when he said, "If we didn't have the GAA in rural Ireland, we'd have nothing."
FOR much of its first century, the GAA served the needs of a people bedevilled by poverty, emigration and repression, first political, then religious. In a tight-lipped society where standing out from the crowd was frowned upon and, as John McGahern has said, being dour was considered a virtue, it provided the country's rural communities especially with their sole means of self-expression. Before even Fleadh Cheoils had come on the scene, the big matches were people's only chance at carnival.
In a society where the written word was censored and any kind of performance strictly monitored, the GAA functioned as a kind of popular art form. There was tragedy, the 1931 All-Ireland hurling final where Kilkenny's Lory Meagher, his ribs broken, was forced to watch white-faced from the sideline as his county lost a second replay to Cork. There were collisions with drama and history, the 1939 final between Kilkenny and Cork, supposedly the best ever played, took place in a thunder and lightning storm as the second World War began in Europe.
And there were occasions when the players seemed to sense that they were taking part in an act of theatre. In the 1956 final, Christy Ring, seeking a record ninth All-Ireland medal was denied what could have been the winning goal by a miracle save from Wexford goalkeeper, Art Foley. Ignoring the rest of the play, Ring rushed in to shake Foley's hand and congratulate him.
Ring came from Cloyne, a small Cork village whose defining quality is its status as his home place. The great stars of the game went as far as to redefine the map of the country. When a GAA fan passes through Cloyne, Tulla in Clare or Tullaroan in Kilkenny, he's not passing through a quiet and outwardly undistinguished village, but connecting with Christy Ring, Tommy Daly or Lory Meagher. In their own ways, these places are as connected with myth as Ithaca, Crete or Rhodes.
Hurling's qualities are both powerful and almost intangible. And when you see D.J. Carey in action, a small man from a small village transformed by arcane genius into a talisman for an entire community, it becomes obvious that great sportsmen are not artists at all but something more primitive and powerful altogether. Carey, like Christy Ring and Lory Meagher before him, is a magician.
