LOCKER ROOM:On county training grounds all around the country this month there must be older players who have come out of the heavy slog of winter dolefully doing the maths. They have been passed by enough younger players to suddenly be dispensable.

IT'S A funny business filling this little space every week. Sometimes you gird your loins (do my loins look girded in this, love?) and unleash an opinion you feel in your modest, self-effacing little way will spark a modern trial of Socrates. And nothing happens. You have to check with people that your Socratic monologue was actually published. Generally they blush and say, eh yeah, think it was, fairly sure I, eh, glanced at it.

On the other hand, there are some topics visited by this column which cause the sky to be darkened by poison-tipped arrows dispatched from the bows of angry readers. These archers are often fundamentalists who feel that all sports columns should be all Premiership all the time, or that all columnists should be crazy for all sports all the time.

Curmudgeonly outbursts concerning elitism in rugby or the Ryder Cup draw plenty of stings, but two topics in particular cause such pain and anguish to a cohort of readers that the backlash of responses range from the threat of assassination through to an exploration of safeguards from such drivel as offered by the European Court of Human Rights.

The topic of camogie - especially juvenile camogie - draws more ire and consternation than a 1,100-word column confessing to being the sole cause of global warming and Third World poverty would cause.

After that, any rumination on American sport is reliably unpopular and likely to draw responses from readers disgusted United's draw with Blackburn wasn't discussed.

So the good news is that this isn't a column about juvenile camogie. It is about Lou Gehrig. So sorry about that, but late April is a good time to write about Gehrig, and Gehrig is a good topic to write about. He may be an American sports topic worth discussing with juvenile camogie players. Who knows?

April? Well, apart from the month containing many Gehrig-related dates of importance, April is a time of dawning truths for older players. If you are a Premiership soccer player (see, caved in already!) of a certain age you will start feeling the weight of your mortality in April, just as the season climaxes and you look around and appreciate that the young lad who used to clean your boots will probably be filling your boots next season. These games are the last of your peak.

And on county training grounds all around the country this month there must be older players who have come out of the heavy slog of winter dolefully doing the maths. They have been passed by enough younger players to suddenly be dispensable.

And what do you do? Play less in the hope of gathering your energies and contributing more? Go gentle into that good night, or rage, rage against the dying of the light?

It's probably best to remember the story of Wally Pipp and Lou Gehrig; better still, to absorb it in its mutated form wherein the tale provides a little moral twist.

Lou Gehrig first. Gehrig was spotted by the New York Yankees when he was a student at Columbia University. In baseball terms he had it all. On April 18th, 1923, on the day Yankee Stadium opened with Babe Ruth making it his homeplace by smacking the first home run, a Yankee scout was elsewhere watching this young fella Gehrig put on an exhibition of pitching, striking out 17 batters in a colleges game. Ten days later Gehrig hit a home run in Columbia's South Field Park which landed on the street at Broadway and 116th. By mid June he had made his debut for the New York Yankees.

Wally Pipp was 10 years further down the line. He'd started his pro baseball career with a dozen games for the Detroit Tigers in the summer of 1913 and had joined the Yankees two years later. Apart form one injury-poxed season, he would play at least 136 games in every 162-game season from the time of his arrival.

Pipp wasn't a powerful player but good technique meant he was the first Yankee to win a home run title in the American League. He helped out by scouting a little for the Yankees and working at bringing on younger players. He was among those who scouted and encouraged the signing of young Lou Gehrig and worked with the young lad, developing his game.

One day, in 1925 (and this is a version of events which Pipp himself subscribed to for a long time, although given how long it was before he was asked to recall the day that is understandable), Pipp was overheard by the Yankees manager asking a colleague if he had an aspirin for a headache. The Yankees manager decided to bench Pipp for the afternoon and give another try to the young Gehrig, who had been appearing sporadically in games.

So Lou Gehrig got into the starting line-up and it would be April 30th, 1939, when he would end his run of playing 2,130 consecutive games for the Yankees.

Pipp went on to be one of the first writers on the Sports Illustrated line-up. He played in seven World Series and was the fulcrum of two of the greatest line-ups in baseball history, the Ruth-inspired Yankees of the late Twenties and the DiMaggio-blessed Yankees of a decade later.

Gehrig had an epic career the stats of which are testimony to his enduring legacy. What is loveable about his story is his modesty and his contentment. In terms of media interest in New York, he happily stayed in the shadow of first Babe Ruth and then Joe DiMaggio, and fate seemed to tell him that it should be that way.

In 1931, he tied Ruth for the title of Home Run king with 46 homers in the season. Gehrig would have had 47 save for a bizarre incident on Easter Sunday when he drove a home run so hard it hit the concrete bleachers and bounced back into play, where it was caught. A team-mate of Gehrig's who had been on base assumed it was a clean catch and that he was out and just headed for the dugout. Gehrig happily lapped all the bases but was called out because his colleague had vanished.

The following year he pulled off the rather epic feat of hitting four home runs in a game, the first time in 36 years anyone had achieved this. It was the same day legendary New York Giants manager John McGraw quit. After 30 years of managing the Yankees' great rivals. Gehrig was a minor story the next day.

Gehrig's record of consecutive games was eclipsed by Cal Ripken jnr in 1995, and he is remembered, sadly, for the disease which terminated his career (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and his life being generally named after him in US medical circles. (Yes, it would have been too weird and too good a story if Lou Gehrig had died of something already named Lou Gehrig's Disease.)

On the fourth of July, 1939, the Yankees held a farewell day for Gehrig at Yankee Stadium. He gave one of the greatest and most moving speeches ever given by a sportsman. Despite his condition, he began his brief remarks with a sentence or two of quiet gratitude: "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

Three years later (and just a year after his death), Hollywood recreated the moment with Gary Cooper playing Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees. Typical of Gehrig's luck was that Hollywood felt the need to chop 100 words off his famous speech (a mere 275 words to start with) and rehash it all.

Still, for every Darragh Ó Sé or Ciarán Whelan limbering up this April for a last tilt at the windmill, there must be a few Wally Pipps who will blithely cede their place to youth and begin the slide into anonymity.

It's better to rage, rage.