Christy O’Connor’s account of his 20th year as keeper on the Doora-Barefield hurling team is both love letter and fierce critique
THE CLUB HOLDS a curious place in the affections of the GAA. In theory it is the holiest of holies. In practice, however, the match programme of the club – and the jewel in its crown, the senior hurling or football team – is shunted into the bleaker months of the Gaelic calendar and the elite teams are habitually forced to play their most meaningful games during baleful Sundays of February or November. (Hence the best club hurling and football teams in Ireland are tapping their fingers at the postponement after postponement caused by our Nebraskan winter.)
The most-decorated GAA heroes, who light up Irish All-Ireland summers with their incandescent play, never tire of declaring that the club always was and always will be their first love. The club championship has undergone a spectacular rise in profile in recent years, with the inevitable consequence that all serious clubs aspire to mirror the training techniques and approaches of the best All-Ireland championship county teams. Nonetheless, the club culture within Gaelic Games remains definitively parochial, to the point where each club is like a sect within each county. If, in John McGahern’s view, Ireland is made up of families, “each family being a kind of independent republic”, the same holds true of the GAA and its clubs.
Christy O’Connor is not the first person to write about the importance of the club, but his account of his 20th year as goalkeeper with the Clare club St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield is both a love letter to and a fierce critique of that club. In retrospect this seems like a book that O’Connor was born to write. Over the past decade he has established himself as a highly respected sportswriter specialising in hurling. He is also a terrific goalkeeper, and his first book, Last Man Standing, was a wonderfully vivid and memorable portrait of the single mindedness, and reflexes, that distinguish hurling goalkeepers and the camaraderie they share.
He has followed that with The Club, which has just won the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year. It was probably inevitable that he should set his mind to write about the entity that consumed so much of his physical and psychic energy: St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield. What results is a staggeringly honest and unadorned account of the 2009 season. Nothing is glossed over or glorified: whatever happens appears on the page, and The Club is about as far from the cliched romance of parish sport as can be imagined.
Grief was O’Connor’s spur for writing this book. Two deaths dominated that hurling season for St Joseph’s. Róisín O’Connor, the second child born to Christy and his wife, Olivia, lived for just five minutes after birth before succumbing to a rare degenerative condition. The couple had been told in advance that their baby could not survive.
“It seems almost vulgar and selfish to make a comparison between hurling and a daughter’s impending death but that was all I had to draw on,” O’Connor writes early on. “You come conditioned to steeling your mind, getting ready to deal with whatever is thrown at you. But you soon realise that it’s only wet sand against the tide of reality and the trauma of death.”
Five days after Róisín’s funeral Ger Hoey, a veteran St Joseph’s player, dropped dead from a heart attack while training for a 10km run. He was 40 years old. The season revolved around the huge void left by Hoey and something tangible through which O’Connor could wrestle with his personal grief.
What follows is understandably sombre. Not joyless – there are moments of humour – but The Club shines a light on the disillusion, the frustrations, the difficulties and the disappointments of committing oneself to sport. O’Connor writes as administrator as well as sportsman and takes the reader into late-night committee meetings, heart-to-hearts in idling cars and the long dissections that go on in every dressing room. Anyone who ever played any sport will recognise the promises and accusations and tribulations.
In places O’Connor writes with admirable bravery about the bereavement he and Olivia suffered, and it seems that, had he wished, he could have written an entire book about his own journey through that painful season. Elsewhere he writes as a detached spectator or as crestfallen goalkeeper or as head-scratching underage coach, battling to coax indifferent teenagers away from the joys of weekend boozing and the indoor life. He also chronicles the rise and fall of St Joseph’s from All-Ireland club champion a decade ago and spiritually rural in outlook to its present position as a fading “big name” in Clare hurling, struggling to adjust to the overnight mushrooming of suburbia.
Another fascinating theme that emerges, incidentally, is the universal sportsman’s dilemma: calling it quits. St Joseph’s produced two of the greatest hurlers of modern times: Sean McMahon and Jamesie O’Connor, stellar names during the forest fire of success that swept Clare in the 1990s. In this book we meet McMahon in the winter of his hurling life while Jamesie is persuaded, reluctantly, to make a comeback. It is giving little away to reveal that Jamesie’s return ends on the most poignantly humdrum note – a chipped bone in a challenge game – rather than some scripted winning point to match his immortal score in the closing minute of the All-Ireland final of 1997.
Those, as they say, were the days, and the quixotic attempt to return to them is central to this book. With Christy O’Connor also facing up to the fact that his days on the team are numbered, this book is like a paean to the games he and his friends have already played and that boyish, foolish belief that there will always, always be one more game.
That, of course, did not happen. For most clubs in Ireland, that victory never comes. Players like the St Joseph’s veterans rise higher than most, and so the descent is all the more dizzying.
This is a book to grace any bookshelf, honest and dignified to the last. The back sleeve, by the way, shows a photo of a small, empty stand in a GAA field. Above it reads the note: “Half the royalties from the sale of this book will go to the Jack and Jill Foundation and to Croí”.
Keith Duggan is an Irish Times journalist
