FINTAN O'Toole was commenting elsewhere in this paper recently about the huge gender gap in attendance at arts events. Women are three times as likely to go to a musical, he wrote, and twice as inclined to attend a play, art exhibition, classical concert or opera. Which for him raised a question: "Have Sky Sports and Setanta filled the hole in men's lives where Beethoven and Shakespeare used to be?", asks Frank McNally
I'll come back to the substantive issue in a moment. But Fintan's question took a cruel twist for us male sports fans on Wednesday, when high winds forced the postponement of racing at Cheltenham. Suddenly we had a hole in our lives where RTÉ and Channel 4 used to be. In search of solace, I for one turned to Shakespeare (The Tempest, of course).
Wistfully, I imagined the deserted racetrack in the Cotswolds, the empty parade ring, the storm-swept hospitality village. And as usual, Shakespeare seemed to have something to say about it: "These our actors,/ As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/ Are melted into air, into thin air,/ And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,/ The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,/ The solemn temples, the great globe itself,/ Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve/ And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,/ Leave not a rack behind."
But amid my Shakespeare-tinged grief, I also remembered that on my first visit to the Cheltenham festival, five years ago, I stayed in Stratford. This was not an aesthetic choice. Stratford had the nearest B & B available, because The Irish Times only thought of sending me the day before, by which time every dog kennel in Gloucestershire had been booked.
Even so, it was an interesting experience to commute daily between the worlds of sport and culture, with the 30-mile tailback allowing plenty of time for reflection.
To some extent, Cheltenham and Stratford complemented each other. In its rude vigour, for example, Ted Walsh's English held up very well against Shakespeare. As I noted at the time, Cheltenham was one of the few places where you could have a "good touch" on a "game mare" and not have to apologise afterwards.
But there was a moment back then when I did worry about the growing philistinism of my gender. It was one morning on the way to Cheltenham when our bus driver, a cultured chap who insisted on giving his male audience an erudite running commentary, pointed towards the Malvern Hills where, as he said, "Elgar was born".
The silence that greeted this news was profound. But somehow it was not the right kind of profundity. You sensed that the question in many passengers' heads was whether Elgar was a trainer or a horse. And you blushed.
So I'm not sure how many Irishmen had a Beethoven- or Shakespeare-sized hole to fill before Sky and Setanta came along. But undoubtedly, we are as a gender obsessed with sport. Not only that, increasingly we are obsessed with betting on sport too.
(Which reminds me that Fintan quoted a recent report on arts attendance as saying: "The odds that a man read no kind of literature in the previous 12 months are more than double those [ for] a woman. . ." Really? I would wager anything that the person who wrote that sentence had never been in a bookie's shop, or s/he would have known that the aforementioned odds were "half" rather than "double". In the Haven't-Read-A-Book-Lately-Handicap-Hurdle, men are the short-priced favourites, women the outsiders. But I digress.) The problem for the arts, if not for men, is that sport supplies many males with all they need in terms of drama, emotional uplift, and even enlightenment.
It certainly never lacks for Shakespearean-style plots. Take the rugby last weekend, in which Eddie O'Sullivan played Macbeth to Warren Gatland's Macduff. No amount of equivocation by the Weird Sisters Consultancy Group could save Macbeth, we knew. And yet it was gripping to see him brought down by the flaw that all tragic heroes possess.
But beyond the mere entertainment value of any event, men will also talk about sport - and sport alone - endlessly, because they can find in it all the lessons about life they need.
The defining event of the past decade for many Irish males was Saipan - a drama in which every man saw a metaphor for something bigger. I was no exception. As the saga unfolded, I wrote a column about the striking similarities between Roy Keane and Shakespeare's Coriolanus - the war hero whose attempt to graduate into Roman politics leads to disaster.
Both men were proud and aloof, skilled in the martial arts, but contemptuous of the prawn-sandwich brigade, the fickle mob, and the need for public relations generally. The scene in which Coriolanus is forced to display his wounds in the marketplace to win votes had terrible parallels in Keane's Tommy Gorman interview. So much so that, in the latter's immediate aftermath, I wrote that a quick-thinking theatre company somewhere should revive Shakespeare's play and adapt it to the events.
Yes, the idea was staring me in the face. All I had to do was write a smash-hit musical, give it a catchy title - "I Keanius", or something - and who knows? I might have been out of this crummy job forever. Unfortunately, my fondness for Shakespeare did not extend to all branches of the arts. Like most men, I could not voluntarily attend a musical then, never mind write one. So, tragically, the chance passed. There has been an I Keano-sized hole in my life ever since.