On the Ball, Off the Wall – Frank McNally on the mysterious origins of a Dublin phrase

News that England's Football Association is considering limits on the amount of heading players are allowed do outside match days, to reduce possible long-term effects on the brain, set me thinking about an old Dublin phrase and how it originated.

It’s a jocular expression, often used with affection, but it suggests at least a mild disorder of the mental faculties in the person under discussion. Is it possible, I wondered, that in calling certain people “head-the-ball”, Dubliners were decades ahead of the neurologists?

In search of clues, I went first to Terry Dolan’s A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. That defines a “head-the-ball” as “a crazy, happy-go-lucky sort of person”. As to when and why the phrase originated, however, it doesn’t help. The only example of usage offered was: “He’s a real head-the-ball if ever there was one”, which is attributed vaguely to “Dublin”, without date or author.

The Irish Times archive is a little more enlightening, suggesting that non-sporting use of the term was becoming general by the mid-1980s, when the columnist John Healy – who else? – referred to what "a few political head-the-balls" were doing then.

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That didn't sound so affectionate. But from more recently, there was also an example that illustrates just how benign the phrase can be. For it was also among the terms used about the late Seamus Heaney, and by his own family. In a eulogy at his funeral, fellow poet Paul Muldoon recalled ringing their home once and chatting to Heaney's then teenage son, who said: "I suppose you want to speak to Head-the-Ball".

The other instructive thing I found in the archive was a reminder of the challenge the phrase presents in other languages, or at least French, which may struggle with Hiberno-English generally.

When the (1997) crime-comedy film I Went Down was shown in Brussels, our Saturday column (quoting an Irish MEP) reported that the word “bollocks” had been transformed to “Mon Dieu!”. As for “head-the-ball”, francophone audiences were informed that one character had accused the other of being “un joueur de football”, which must have made them marvel at the things we considered eccentric here.

Hoping to trace the term back to earlier decades of the 20th century, I guessed that Brendan Behan might be helpful to enquiries. He didn't disappoint. There he is in Borstal Boy (published in 1958 but describing events from circa 1940), apparently introducing the term to England at the expense of one of the supervisors at his juveniles detention facility: "Some screws came running into the orchard and the elderly Principal Officer came in, leading his bicycle, shaking his head and talking to himself. 'Oh, bejaysus, and we're all caught,' said I. 'Here comes Head-the-Ball'. The fellows in line nearly burst out laughing and that was his nickname from that good day forward. Even the screws took to calling him Head-the-Ball, though not to his face."

Interestingly, Behan seems to have diagnosed a mild case of some actual disorder on the part of the officer, although it may not have been anything more than the idiosyncrasies of age, viz: “He was a decent old sort, and we might all live to have worse ailments than head-wagging and talking to ourselves...”

None of this has anything to do with football, overtly anyway. And it may be that the only link between the phrase “head-the-ball” and the concept of mental trauma may be via another another term that spans respectable soccer usage and Irish slang, ie: “Header”.

But in the course of my trawlings, I also chanced upon a (to me) hitherto unknown character from 18th-century Dublin who went by the name of “Hae-Ball”, or to give him his full title, “Hae-Ball King of the Beggars”.

Forgotten as he is now, he was famous enough once to feature in a series of drawings by the artist Hugh Douglas Hamilton, illustrating "The Cries of Dublin" in 1760. He was also such an institution on the streets then that, in a pamphlet of a decade before that, he had been the subject of a grandiose toast in which sympathisers hoped he would never "be reduced to lay down his chariot, for want of friends to draw it".

“Hae-Ball” must have been one of Georgian Dublin’s licensed, badge-carrying beggars (there were about 1,000 at one time, paying five shillings each for the franchise, every six months).

As to the nature of his disability, or what his nickname referred to, I cannot for the moment discover. But I wonder if, to mix a metaphor, it was a long etymological ball from him that Brendan Behan got on the end of in 1940, to head past the borstal keeper from close range?