ANALYSIS:Cork hurler Dónal Óg Cusack's disclosures about his sexuality challenge the rest of us more than him, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
WHEN DÓNAL Óg Cusack sat down in the living room of his family home and told his father, Dan, that there was in fact truth in the rumours that had come to the front door about his sexuality, his Dad shook his head and commented that things had been bad enough with Dónal Óg’s use of short puck-outs. But now this!
The short puck-outs are a good place to start with understanding Dónal Óg Cusack. Tradition in the GAA is that when a team concedes a score or if the ball goes wide the goalkeeper takes the sliotar into his hand and drives it to some point safely over the horizon.
Donal Óg was part of a team and a game plan that challenged convention and went with the notion that playing a short puck-out to a free player some 30 or 40 yards away and creating something from there would be preferable to launching scuds into the high heavens. The problem with short puck-outs is that when they go wrong the punishment is severe: the concession of a goal and the entirety of the blame coming down on the goalkeeper like a cartoon boulder dropping off a cartoon cliff.
For Dónal Óg Cusack that has always been acceptable. If it makes things better for the team, for others, he is happy enough to be the bogey man, for the boulder to land on him.
On a cold Saturday afternoon last February, more than 10,000 people marched through the streets of Cork in support of the county’s senior hurling panel who were at that time in dispute with their county board.
That morning I met Dónal Óg Cusack in Cork. He set off walking at a brisk pace around specific parts of the city that he loved. For a bogeyman he met little but good cheer from the citizenry as we walked, but the hostility towards him is usually more slyly expressed than the goodwill.
I tried manfully to keep up with him, listening intently as he began outlining the reasons that he wanted to write a book and detailing those things that he wanted to include. His head is so crammed with ideas that he would have needed half-a-dozen books just to create a little breathing space in his brain.
Like anybody else in Cork that morning, I had assumed that if Dónal Óg Cusack was writing a book, the principal and perhaps sole subject matter would be an explanation and description of the various ruptures between players and county board in Cork.
Dónal Óg is seen as the principal driver behind those periodic campaigns and that, along with his prominence within the Gaelic Players Association and his unconventional use of those short puck-outs as a goalie, has made him a sore vexation to dyed-in-the-wool GAA traditionalists for many years now. Any book, I assumed, would be a hard-hitting justification of the various stands he has taken. He would take a machine-gun to his enemies and make a book out of the carnage.
Instead he outlined his hopes for a story that would be honest but, like himself, truly devoid of bitterness. He wanted to write about Cloyne, growing up there, his love of the place and his club and the town’s history, his shared ownership of the Alley Bar across the road from his house, the mad complexities of life in a small town. He wanted to explain the extraordinary comradeship of the Cork hurling team, of which he has been an indispensable part for over a decade now.
And he wanted in passing to put an end to the rumours and the sniping about his personal life. We kept walking as he sketched to me, a virtual stranger at the time, the broad outline of a part of his existence that is nobody’s business but that he had been forced to explain in similar circumstances again and again to family, friends and team-mates.
He wished to explain all this, but in a tangential way. Just as a small part of his story. Nothing that would make him the poster boy for this or that campaign. Nothing that would add another label to the series of labels that have stuck to him as if he was a well-travelled suitcase. He is a hurler who happens to be many other things too.
I remember him saying that he wanted it to be the case that if somebody was asked a year after the book came out to quickly write down 20 words that they would associate with him, that any reference to his sexuality would be well down the list.
He wanted to be, and still does wants to be, that hurler who just happens to have a different type of private life. He didn’t want to justify himself because he has never felt he had too. He never wanted to deny himself. He set out to give an honest picture of himself and if in doing that he could help anybody else who was confused about their identity that would be a happy bonus.
That was then, this is now. The initial reaction to Dónal Óg’s book, Come What May, has predictably revolved around his sexuality a subject that bizarrely is a complete non-issue for anybody who knows the man. Where would he get the time for a private life is the only outstanding question friends have about Dónal Óg’s private life.
The fuss overshadows the broad content of the book, but that is perhaps inevitable and no bad thing for the rest of us. Dónal Óg has led us to another small landmark in our development as a society.
Anybody who was in Semple Stadium last summer to hear Dónal Óg abused steadily by a lout with a megaphone will know a little of what the man takes on his shoulders every time he goes out to stand between the goalposts and a lot about how far we still have to come as a society. Nobody, not least the Garda, to whom at least one complaint was made, attempted to silence the man with the megaphone.
As such Dónal Óg Cusack has yet again done the GAA and Irish society a huge favour. His refusal to accept that things within Cork hurling would always have to be as they were in the past has changed the GAA landscape there forever. His insistence that GAA players should stand together to improve their lot has angered many, but has brought the GAA into the 21st century in terms of player welfare issues.
And now as the first prominent sportsperson on this island to come out and speak frankly about his sexuality, the first to insist on his right to be judged as a sportsperson first and last, he has challenged that boorish machismo that still underpins a lot of Irish society and a lot of GAA life. And he has challenged those of us who by our silence are accomplices in that culture. From now on we have to judge ourselves, not Dónal Óg Cusack.
He is an extraordinary man, a whirlwind of energy and ideas and good humour. There are many in the GAA who would gladly crucify him at any given time, but the association is most fortunate that Dónal Óg Cusack will be playing a part for decades to come.
This debate, like others he has provoked and inspired, is one we needed to have.
Tom Humphries is chief sports writer with The Irish Times. He assisted Dónal Óg in his autobiography, Come what May, which is published on Friday by Penguin Ireland