Malachy Clerkin: Golf restarting would be much needed good news

People are starting to flag this week. You can feel it around the place, sense it in conversations. I ran into a county footballer in the park at the end of our street the other day, sitting on the grass alone with his thoughts and a bag of O'Neill's finest beside him. "Season's done I'd say, isn't it?" he said. "Not looking great," I agreed. "I only come up here for my head at this stage," he said, nodding at the balls. "Need something."

Amen, brother. Who doesn't? The slog of it all is starting to properly kick in now. The novelty, such as it was, has worn off. The interesting new discoveries of the early phase are neither new nor interesting anymore. People are starting to hate Zoom, a company they hadn't heard of six weeks ago.

The concept of a pastime will never have meant more than it does the first time you get out for a couple of hours. Paradise

Every call now is like the exchanges in the great John McGahern novel That They May Face The Rising Sun.

“Any news?”

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“No news. Came looking for news.”

“You came to the wrong place. We’re waiting for news.”

We’re all waiting for news. Waiting for something different to come along. Waiting for the nod from on high that says, “Go on, go do your thing.” Some day next week, probably towards the weekend, the government will start to leak out whatever easing of restrictions they have in mind for May 5th. We know already that there won’t be much of anything in there for team sport but there have been a few hints when it comes to more solitary pursuits.

It looks increasingly possible, for instance, that golf clubs will be among the first avenues of leisure to get the go-ahead. Maybe not in the immediate future but soon enough.

Prof Sam McConkey said as much to Gavin Cummiskey in these pages a week and a half ago and doubled down in the Indo on Tuesday.

He has also given science’s qualified blessing to things like singles tennis, cycling, single-handed sailing and horse racing. Running the roads, fishing – basically anything you can do while maintaining social distancing has a reasonable chance of coming back over the next month.

If these sports are your bag, whistle a happy tune. Imagine the cloud of boredom lifting, bathe in the imminent distraction. The concept of a pastime will never have meant more than it does the first time you get out for a couple of hours. Paradise.

It’s going to be interesting to watch how everyone else reacts, all the same. In general, the vast majority of the population has abided by the restrictions. The twin drivers of compliance have been fear and solidarity. We don’t want the virus in our homes so we don’t take chances. We’re reasonably sure everyone else’s world has been reduced to four walls and a kettle the same as ours so we don’t take chances.

That solidarity could be flimsy enough, we may find. It will get tested when some people are allowed out to do the thing that makes them happy while others can’t do theirs. If your outlet was two nights’ training with the hurling club and a game on weekends, it could well stick in the craw when you see the next door neighbour loading their clubs and trolley into the boot of the car and heading off for a leisurely 18 holes. If you’re missing your Monday night five-a-side game, you might not be exactly comforted by the thwack-thunk-whap suddenly coming from the tennis club next door.

Closing all sports clubs was the right thing to do at the time, if for no other reason than conveying the seriousness of the situation

Sportupmanship is a curse at the best of times but just watch it crank into gear when there’s a whiff of sporting apartheid in the air. It is unlikely to go down well among the general population that the first people allowed back into their sports are golfers, tennis players and sailors. Cyclists don’t need a pandemic to get it in the neck. Horse racing is in the bad books already.

If we’re any way grown up about it, of course, we should wish them all good health and tell them to have at it. Closing all sports clubs was the right thing to do at the time, if for no other reason than conveying the seriousness of the situation.

None of us will get far overstating our virology expertise at this point but we know enough by now to see that a sport like golf probably offered very little threat by way of spreading coronavirus. But shutting it and all the other sports down carried a huge symbolic heft.

The same goes for when they’re opened up again. Even just a little, even in highly restricted ways. You may very well think that the golfer next door is a gobshite – you may know it in your very bones, in fact. But you need to see their return to the bosom of gobshitery as a chink of light.

Yes, for now, it will be their chink of light. But it will be yours too. It will be a sign that we’re on the road back. Most of all, it will be news. Good news. News to hang onto.

We could do with some of that fairly soon.