Long before it was popular for prominent sportspeople to build a career in the media, Dave Guiney, who died on October 14th aged 79, had made the transition, seamlessly. He did it in British Sunday papers, some of which are long since defunct and mean nothing to the current generation - titles like the Sunday Graphic, Empire News, Reynolds News and the Sunday Dispatch.
The son of John Guiney, a solicitor, and Mary (nee Buckley), Dave Guiney was a native of Kanturk, Co Cork, which he liked to insist was in the Barony of Duhallow. Indeed Duhallow is the name of his house on Dublin Road, Sutton, where he and his wife Phyl raised three children. And it was from here, in a converted garage, that his prodigious output of writing, for books, newspapers and magazines emerged.
In the foreword to one of his many books, The Friendly Games, about the 1932 Olympics, he described "a greying image of a parade in the little town where I was born". He continued: "I can remember that I was still at the old-world national school at the top of Percival Street, labouring, perhaps unwillingly, to absorb my lessons in English, Irish, history, geography and arithmetic.
"But down through all the years since then, once I search for the memory, I can hear the muffled pounding of the band, I can vaguely picture the parade - and the gathering in the market square. And the excitement of the day is still vividly with me . . . "
The celebration was to mark the homecoming of Olympic hero, Dr Pat O'Callaghan, who arrived back in triumph to Kanturk, having won a second gold medal for the hammer at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles. And as the author put it: "With him he had brought the supreme prize of international sport."
That was written in 1982, by which time a life-long fascination with the Olympic Games had gained expression in his writing. Some years earlier, he had savoured the sweet taste of Olympic competition while putting the shot at the London Games in 1948.
Though some accomplished practitioners bristle at the very concept of born sportsmen, Dave Guiney could reasonably have been described as such. For instance, on one particular day of extraordinary endeavour in 1941, he captured a record five all-Ireland youth titles, for the shotputt, javelin, discus, high jump and broad jump. And a further reflection of sporting versatility was his rugby-playing activities with Clontarf.
In a distinguished athletics career he won a total of 30 Irish titles, the last in 1956. More importantly, in an international context, were triumphs in the British AAA championships of 1947 and 1948 and his involvement as a competitor in the 1948 Olympics and in the European Championships. Later in life, he would readily acknowledge that his shot-putt technique was flawed. And as an indication of how supple his body remained into the autumn years, he would think nothing of demonstrating, in his living room, his own method and what it should have been.
For all that, he set an Irish record of 48ft 11 3/4ins for the event in Dublin in June 1950. And 10 months later, improved his own record to 49ft 10ins, which stood until 1961 when Dubliner Ronnie Taylor set a new mark of 50ft 6 3/4 ins. The 50-foot barrier, which tantalisingly eluded Dave Guiney, had eventually fallen to a younger man.
But by that stage, he was already gaining a reputation as a sports writer of some stature, having switched to Irish newspapers. Indeed, the sports staff of the Irish Press in the late 1950s and early 1960s will recall the intriguing file-name "Irhis", which was an acronym for "It Really Happened in Sport", a long-running series of fascinating stories unearthed by Dave Guiney through endless hours of patient research.
In fact, he was the first person to discover that John Pius Boland, who won a tennis gold medal for Britain at the 1896 Olympics was, in fact, a native of Dublin. His vast knowledge of things sporting made him an invaluable source of information for journalistic colleagues and would-be authors.
After a spell on the staff of the Irish Independent, he returned to Burgh Quay as sports editor of the Irish Press. One of his first assignments in that capacity was to cover the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, from where he filed some memorable pieces. His next Olympics was Montreal in 1976, by which stage he had moved to the Sunday Mirror, while still based in Dublin.
He also attended the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, Los Angeles (1984), Seoul (1988) and was press attache to the Irish party at Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta in 1996. Against that background, it is hardly surprising that for him, the Olympics was something of a passion. Indeed, it is fair to say he was the acknowledged Irish expert on the movement.
His many books include The Days of the Little Green Apples, A Little Wine and a Few Friends, Ireland's Olympic Heroes, Ireland's Olympians and The New York Irish, quite apart from books on various sports for the Dunlop company.
A favourite quotation of his was: "I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with. He is not a great mind, he is not a great thinker, he is not a great philosopher. He is a storyteller." In word and print, Dave Guiney told wonderful stories.
He is survived by his wife Phyl, daughter Gillian and sons, Roddy and Philip.
David (Dave) Guiney: born 1921; died, October 2000