LockerRoom: Depressing sort of weekend all round until yesterday when Galway and Kilkenny coughed up an epic just as we were about to file this column.

Got up way too early on Saturday and knew already that I was so tired and hurting that I'd never think of a column for Monday. Went south. Watched the Dub minors lose and got sunburned. Watched some pretty poor camogie. On the way home read Conor O'Clery writing about his six hundred years of glamorous adventure in journalism. Felt sad.

Conor's is a career which, of course, is in many ways identical to my own. Apart from his achievements, his foreign postings, his big stories, the evidence that he has an expense account, those dinner parties with famous people, his cameo appearances in films, and the KGB's failure to take an interest in anything I've ever done, we have trod the same path.

It struck me, sadly, that while Conor worries about where to place Gerry Adams at a dinner party, the Conor O'Clery whom I once met at the Sydney Olympics was probably the most famous person I've ever bumped in to.

Once, in New York (but not at a dinner party), I had to interview the OJ lawyer Barry Scheck. He was a forlorn sort of fella (who wouldn't want to be called the OJ lawyer) and our laborious afternoon together was only brightened when a journalistic friend of his from the New York Post burst into the office with his arms spread wide and then stood for a second or two in embarrassment as he realised that the guy from The Irish Times who was with Scheck wasn't actually Conor O'Clery.

He was able to tell me, though, that Conor O'Clery was coming back to America. Real soon. He made it sound like the end of famine. He looked at me as if I were the beginning of pestilence. I suggested we all have a dinner party at the Algonquin but no go.

Anyway, I was coming back from Kilkenny digesting all this and rubbing my neck which was redder than a Dub's neck should ever be and thinking about Conor O'Clery. Were it not for the fact that my journalistic talent has been to arrive in all the dullest places at the dullest times I might have been him.

It struck me that I still had no inspiration for a Monday column and that if I went to dinner parties with famous people I'd get no end of column fodder out of what Becks said to Keano and how we laughed when Ali spilled the apple sauce, etc.

Bitter, dark stuff to be thinking on a sunny Saturday.

There's been opportunities, though, apart from Conor O'Clery. Oh yes. I met Nuala O'Faolain once. I sat beside her on an Irish Times course about how not to get sued for lots of money. I was brilliant and witty and in the half light of the classroom I looked passably thin. I told everyone afterwards that I was now a good friend of Nuala O'Faolain's.

It was crushing, then, to not even get a passing mention in her subsequent controversial memoir which sold billions without its author getting sued. I refused to read the novel that followed but friends tell me that one or two characters were clearly based on me. It didn't take away the hurt.

Still on Sunday morning (yesterday!) she did me a favour. I was up too early, still hurting, still uninspired, still sunburned and still thinking about the dinner party circuit that the rest of the world is on and I went leafing through the columns of the Sunday papers looking for an idea to steal.

Nuala seemed to be having one of those days yesterday that columnists frequently have. The sort of day which forms a perpetual part of my life. She was struggling through a column waiting for a theme to come along and dress it all up. Nuala was waxing lyrical about growing up around the Croke Park area and going to games and following Clare hurlers and Dub hurlers, etc, etc. And at the end she arrived at the notion that the semiotics and social codes of Gaelic games were closed off to immigrants and maybe on the road we're all on soccer would be the door into which the freshest new Irish faces poured.

Soccer certainly has an international dimension which makes it the Esperento of the sporting world and any sporting avenue which new arrivals in this country take should be enjoyable and fulfilling for them.

But I suspect that the biggest strides in integration will be made through Gaelic games. There's something about coming to a country and playing the sport of that country which makes people feel part of things in a way that few other things do.

If you like baseball you know. The great Yogi Berra was Lorenzo Pietro Berra, the son of Italian immigrants. The DiMaggios were the sons of Zio Pepe DiMaggio who came to San Francisco from Isola delle Femmine off Palermo. The grandfather of Johnny Podres of the Brooklyn Dodgers was a Russian miner. Babe Ruth's folks were Germans and so on.

Baseball today resounds to the cries of Cubans and Mexicans and kids from the Dominican Republic.

Hurling and football will go the same way. We get so many calls to feature desks and hard-pressed columnists about kids teams with black faces and Eastern European faces etc, etc, playing away we have practically lost interest.

So I put Nuala O'Faolain's column in my pocket and said "thanks babe, I'll wring the bloody 1,200 words out of a refutation".

And not an hour later I was sitting in Croker losing heart. It was raining. The crowd was thin and expecting nothing. I'd write little snatches of column and think of Conor O'Clery. A friend of mine was once in his New York apartment and said you had to pass through a time zone to get from one end to another.

Conor O'Clery was probably having brunch with the bloody Clintons in his cavernous New York apartment as we sat there all wet in Croker.

Then Kilkenny and Galway just exploded in front of us.

It was like being in the GPO getting phone credit when 1916 happened.

But it was more spectacular and more without warning and just breathtaking and to be there was to feel at the centre of Irish culture and celebration.

It's been said often (and often copied into this column) that to know America you must know baseball. To know Ireland you must know the feeling of days like yesterday, the rugged, viscerally-stirring beauty of the world's finest sport.

So immigrants will come to Croke Park, first, I suspect, to play (as they are in Cumann na mBunscol games often) and then to celebrate.

Gore Vidal never calls me. Nuala never gives me a mention. And not only is there no expense account in this job but the sandwiches in the Croke Park press box are rationed after some hoor from Offaly catered for his daughter's wedding with the amount of chicken and stuffing he lifted.

Still. It's wonderful life. You know where to find me Bill and Hillary.