Sport, I remember reading once, is not a metaphor for real life, it exists not to enlighten but to be experienced.
Or, to put it Tom Humphries' way, sport just gives us the harmless simulacrums of triumph and disaster in the face of war, hysteria, wealth, poverty, famine, pestilence and the Beckham family.
So how did 2001 measure up? It was not, in Humphries' view, a vintage year, rather, he declares in the introduction to the book, a year of unrelenting bad times, book-ended by the "biblical darkness" of foot and mouth and the "epochal images" of September 11th. But he enjoyed it anyway - and so can we again, through the images in words and pictures of the Irish Times sports team.
What's been called the treadmill of daily journalism, with its unrelenting deadlines, is hardly the perfect creative milieu for words or pictures. But reflecting on the year in sport through this compilation, edited by Irish Times Sports Editor Malachy Logan, I was struck by the elegance and vision and force of so much of what we take for granted day by day.
With 18 pieces, Humphries inevitably dominates the book; irreverent, trenchant, illuminating by turn. Subjective, too, notably in his pieces on the OCI election and his friend Pat Hickey, the best show in Irish Sport he says, through "he and I have more bones to pick than a couple of vultures hovering over a mass grave".
Or taking no prisoners in his forensic analysis of the background to the decision by the GAA to refuse Croke Park to other games . . . a reversion to "the peasant sleevenism of those old accomplices, Fianna Fβil and the GAA".
This was an angry piece but with brilliant insight. "For once," he wrote memorably, "the GAA had arrived at a junction when the interests of the Association precisely met those of the society it exists in. It was a time for graciousness and pragmatism. Both were spurned." Sean Moran called the Congress a Yeatsian occasion. "Faced with the opportunity to act in a spirit of generosity, the association duly emulated these old Abbey audiences and disgraced itself again", he declared.
Mary Hannigan's writing has none of Humphries' social overtones or anger, but she is a writer of wit and style whom I read always with anticipation. Her piece on the launch of Jaguar's new Formula One car made me laugh again, partly for her retailing of the night Peter Collins slept with a mouse in a Magny Cours hotel and partly for her sketch of Eddie Irvine. Had he a role model, he was asked by the media pack. "No, but models oooh, I've had hundreds of them." Game, set and match, if I can mix my sports.
Some lovely gentle pieces too. Moss Keane talking to Keith Duggan and wallowing in Munster's win over the All Blacks - "I got a bit of pleasure out of their fecking agony". Andy Hayden was crying after the game and he went up to him and said, "We're used to this losing, Andy. You're not. We could write a thesis on it". Once, perhaps, no longer in the new professional era of rugby.
Dermot Gilleece's affectionate piece on Arnold Palmer, who hasn't won a major since 1964 but who, at 72, can command $90,000 for a company day - a far cry from his time as a manufacturer's rep making $500 a month. Arnie is reputed to be worth $400 million but he had to borrow money for a ring when he eloped to marry Winnie, his wife of 45 years.
The events of the year are reported with insight and humour. Johnny Watterson observed McEnroe creating "chaos from order" after the great man won the KPMG challenge and headed for New York; Michael Walker reflected Neil Lennon's view that those who said the Neil Lennon RIP hang-man graffiti was an isolated prank "are not in my shoes"; Dermot Gilleece wondered how much Tiger Woods tipped after winning the Masters, set against Phil Mickleson's normal $3000 for a win. "Green is a tough colour for Tiger", he wrote. Brian O'Connor on Red Marauder, "probably the worst jumper ever to win the National" and Colin Byrne, caddie to Paul Lawrie, on the new definition of LOFT on the backswing. If you've forgotten you'll find the answer on Page 114.
So much to enjoy and remember. Brilliant pictures and the important results to jog the memory too. But let's return to Tom Humphries and his reflection after September 11th on the value of sport at a time when some would say sport isn't worth what it used to be. In the aftermath of the Twin Towers he wrote: "It is commonplace to denounce sport as trivial, to say that all this death has put sport in perspective. Yet I stand with sport right now. It is nothing trivial. It better frames our perspective on life than mass destruction does." From the sidelines, I applaud.
Bill O'Herlihy is chief executive of the Bill O'Herlihy Communications Group and a sports presenter on RT╔ television