Sideline Cut/Keith Duggan: Barely had the last GAA man skipped daintily away from the Cullinane Hotel swimming pool, munching grapes and draped only in a toga woven from silver South African moonlight, than word sped across the oceans to the travelling All Star party in San Diego.

A midnight swim involving three or more counties! Much/little shedding of St Bernard briefs/Next boxers, depending on which paper you might read. Other tourists swooning in shock/delight! Sternly worded telegrams of denial hastily dispatched back home! It was not us stop/Sure the pool was jammers when we arrived stop/Any crack at home stop.

Naturally, those of us free-loading alongside the All Stars wondered at the implications of the story for the touring party. Would out-going president Seán McCague and president-elect Seán Kelly offer a joint edict on the GAA's policy on late night swimming? Would Danny Lynch supervise the boarding up of all pools in the greater California area just as a precaution? Would the tour be cancelled immediately? Or would everyone just shake their heads and forget about it?

Naturally, the rumours brought to mind last winter's incident involving a billiards room and the Roscommon football players, and the obvious conclusion to be drawn was that the South African GAA scandal simply brought the concept of naked pool to a more sophisticated level. And given that the players allegedly involved in the lowering of standards, jocks and anything else you care to mention were said to have been from up to three counties, you had to wonder.

South Africa is a big place. There is an element of "Of all the gin joints in all the world" about three high-profile GAA teams squeezed into one hotel.

But that said, it is their right. It is also their right to go away for a couple of weeks' holiday without their every move making it into print. The only sensible response to the reports that filtered back from South Africa is, so what?

That this nothing incident made it into print just serves to highlight the untenable role of the GAA player in modern Irish society. The teams on holiday in South Africa were victims of the vacuous celebrity gossip that fills up the bulk of the material found on news and magazine shelves today. It would be commonplace to see a similar story involving English Premiership soccer stars plastered over the front of a Sunday newspaper. But GAA players are not the same as Premiership stars.

At the height of the season, they play in front of crowds twice as big as most Premiership matches command and they train with an intensity and focus that exceeds all but the most driven of the English game's most celebrated players.

But in lifestyle they are a world apart. The funniest story from the GAA All Star tour in San Diego illustrated the GAA player's relationship with celebrity. A bunch of players headed up to LA to see the Lakers play against the Clippers in an NBA game. The Lakers regularly attract America's A-list to the front row and this night was no exception. Against the odds, it was a close game and, incensed by a bad call, the actor Jack Nicholson, dressed in all black, jumped up from his courtside seat and started gesturing at the officials.

His animated protest caused a bit of noise through the crowd, but when all had settled down Nicholson was still going for it. At which point Armagh goalkeeper Benny Tierney seized the day and yelled, at the top of his considerable voice, "You want the truth? You Can't Handle The Truth!"

There were probably 20,000 people in the Staples Centre that evening, small by GAA standards. But the Irish players present were as star-struck and seduced by the glitter and hoopla of the occasion as any other tourist willing to shell out big bucks for a ticket to see Shaquille O'Neal in the flesh. It would have been impossible to guess from their demeanour that some of them will be playing in front of the biggest sporting crowds in Europe later this summer.

A GAA player's celebrity, in so far that it exists at all, does not extend beyond the 30-mile speed limit signs in his hometown. It buys him a bit of credit in the local pub and night-club. Thing is, during the season, most of them are too terrified to show a face inside the local night-club for fear of stories finding their way back to the trainer that they were on a blow-out. Once the league begins, many of them will curtail their social activities drastically. Some county teams establish a ban on drinking for the duration of the season, some players impose the same voluntarily. The fun stops.

Which brings us back to the holiday. The idea of the GAA team holiday was that it represented some sort of tangible reward for the amateur player who has trained like a lunatic for six to eight months at the expense of his social life and that of his friends/family/partner. The idea is that they head off, a bunch of fellas in their mid to late 20s, and let off steam.

"It was drink, drink, drink from morning to night," was the reported complaint from one Dublin woman staying at the hotel in South Africa. Jeepers. Sounds like nothing so much as a good summary of many a fine championship Sunday I have enjoyed.

Of course, it is this lady's right to be offended by whatever she chooses, and maybe the hotel in question was not best suited to a bunch of amateur athletes engaging in one last blow-out before a return to winter training. But her point of view should have been printed only in the hotel files, not in Irish newspapers.

Whatever happened in South Africa, it was not sensible. And thank God for that. You talk to so many young GAA stars now and they are at pains to come across as eminently sensible and safe, petrified of speaking their minds or of allowing their true personalities to come across in case there is some sort of backlash.

The emergence of the South African story is not going to contribute anything to lifting the siege mentality that has made many of their public utterances sound so joyless and stretched.

Maybe many of them feel that way now, given the pressure and magnitude of the modern championship. More and more are walking away from the games in their prime, and if it has come to a stage where what little free time they have is now open to public scrutiny, the premature farewells will become commonplace.

At a core level, the irresponsible reportage of this frolicsome nothing is tied in with the bigger debate over amateurism and to where it is all leading. The old traditions have been creaking for some time, and that an association that offers no financial return to its best practitioners should be in such robust health is little short of a miracle. It is a precious thing, the amateur championship, and the only way to preserve it is to treat the players better but also to treat them as they have always been treated.

Which is to say, lay out the conditions that makes devoting such vast chunks of time to an amateur game possible and maybe even a tiny bit attractive. And after that, leave them alone. Treat them like the everyday people they are. And if you bump into them on holiday, well, point out where the lifebuoys are, just in case.