“So,” enquired the food critic, “what do sports journalists have for lunch?”
She asked it as a learned Senior Counsel might begin an examination of a sweating witness – sceptically, I thought. Judgementally. She may as well have had her thumbs in her lapels. And the worst of it all is that she was thoroughly entitled to her low expectations.
Sports journalists eat, in general, a quality of lunch barely a rank above the cardboard packaging it arrives in. We eat whatever is there – wherever “there” happens to be at that particular time of day. We eat at press conferences, we eat on trains, we eat at service stations. We graze. We pick. We belch, if you’re lucky.
We eat like we are 19. Greedily, noisily and, if you insist, for free. We are the world’s foremost authority on catered sandwiches. Our idea of a health kick is to forgo the white sandwiches served up at whatever product launch a GAA star has been lined up to bless with his face and make sure he sees us doubling up on the brown ones. You and me, Michael Darragh. Kindred spirits, kid.
There was a time, fadó fadó, when we would occasionally meet an interviewee for lunch and make an extravagant show of picking up the bill afterwards. Nowadays, most sportspeople would rather drink molten gristle through a straw for sustenance than share an hour with a hack. Maybe they’ve seen us turn a sandwich tray to sawdust and can’t face the horror of walking that particular street alone.
It’s not all bread-based stodge. Given more spare time in the off-season of whatever sport we mainly cover, the occasional pang of conscience will press us into actually cooking food and actually eating leftovers for lunch. We would do this all the year round if we could but, y’know, deadlines and whatnot.
At least that’s what we tell ourselves when we see someone from another paper casually take out a lunchbox in a press box and lovingly fork through the remains of last night’s homemade Thai curry. “It’s well for Yer Man,” we say to each other, glumly. “Probably only has one piece to do, the jammy bastard.
“Anyway, I’m going up for a sandwich – d’ya want one? Chicken and stuffing or ham salad?”
