Sideline Cut: "Chess is war over the board," said Bobby Fischer, the egomaniacal, paranoid and fascinating chess savant who died in January still raging against the world.
"The object is to crush the other man's mind. I like to see them squirm."
There is surely some form of cruel chess-playing going on in Cork this week. Regardless of whether you care or not about the machinations between the county's finest Gaelic games players and its GAA administrators, the row has been impossible to ignore. And whatever the outcome, nothing has illuminated the differences between the GAA administrator and the GAA player quite so brilliantly.
The GAA administrator's soul is the antithesis to the soul of the GAA player.
The GAA administrator is a breed apart. Although a rare few end up running for the relatively glamorous and public office of association president, many more are content to toil for years in relative obscurity, pushing their way through realms of paper- work and spending countless winter nights attending excruciatingly long meetings about fund-raising or the new stand or league structures or any of a thousand problems common to the superstructure of the GAA in every county.
Because the mechanisms and the rule book that govern the GAA are about as readily understood as Finnegan's Wake, most of us are just happy the association has a willing quota of administrators to keep the GAA ticking over. In caricature, they are rather like the faceless, conservatively turned-out and helplessly loyal apparatchiks that walked the corridors of the old politburo in the communist states. The reality is, of course, different and those who run the GAA offices are as wildly different in personality and attitude and interests as any group of people who share an office environment - although admittedly, I have yet to meet a GAA administrator who likes to tour with the Grateful Dead or attend the Burning Man festival in his spare time.
However, the one thing GAA administrators share is a willingness to implement change in the GAA according to due process. Their glories and triumphs - the legislation they push through - are almost perversely private and unheralded, and met with a deafening silence. The association teaches its clerical men patience and usually they are there for the long haul. Because of that, lifelong GAA administrators tend to see players in the way that hotel managers see glamorous visitors, passing through a revolving door of a vast building. Players - heroes - come and then they go.
That is not to say administrators do not like or even form friendships with some of the players over the course of their careers but, generally speaking, their belief is the county boys are just the top of the heap of many hundreds of players in their church. The county boys advertise their promise with sensational underage careers, they play minor, with luck and hard work they progress to senior, they hopefully get to experience the adulation of the crowd and even win something special and then, sooner or later, they retire and melt back into ordinary life. The administrator has seen this pattern hundreds of times. Cork County Board secretary Frank Murphy has seen it hundreds of times.
Of course, players and teams, by their nature, can see nothing beyond now. They are taught to focus on nothing but the season ahead and as the bleating about the professional standards of the GAA grows ever more deafening, they are almost morally obliged to ensure they have the people and the structure in place to make sure they have every chance of operating and playing to the best of their potential.
It seems clear the Cork footballers and hurlers genuinely feel the county board have almost wilfully and needlessly placed an obstruction in their path by the imposition of selectors and by prematurely selecting Teddy Holland as football manager. They find this situation vexing and infuriating. It seems equally true the Cork board members are sick to their teeth of hearing the voices of the Cork players representing their panels in this and other rows. They probably feel these players are better treated than most other county squads and are certainly better treated than any squad in the history of Cork GAA. And still not happy! This is why the call for Murphy to quit office was so incendiary and dangerous. This is not a squabble involving the secretary of the local rounders club. This was calling for a man to quit his job!
And as Shelley Levene says in Glengarry Glen Ross; "A man is his job." Who knows, maybe the resentment caused by the reforms the hurlers agitated for some six years ago is causing this seemingly unsolvable combination code for a resolution. Maybe good old-fashioned revenge is at the heart of it all.
But this situation has been dragging on too long. It is like watching a drunken couple at a wedding still locked in an unseemly waltz even though the band are packing away their instruments. And it is probably true patience is wearing thin across the country. Smaller counties are looking on with suspicion, wondering if the GAA would send its chief on missions to solve their internal rows. Meath have warned their footballers will not be dictated to as to when their postponed match with Cork should be played. Who could argue with them? Antrim have suggested while it would be regrettable to see a Munster hurling championship without Cork, they would be honoured to act as replacements. Nature abhors a vacuum.
I remember not long after starting this job standing in front of Phillip Clifford, the pale wraith from Bantry who starred in Cork's 1999 run to the All-Ireland football final. Cork had just beaten Mayo in the semi-final and Clifford had been outstanding, running the Connacht men ragged as he scored 1-4. He would become the youngest Cork captain to lead a team out for an All-Ireland final. But in the dressingroom, he seemed matter-of-fact about the win and was concerned with tying his shoelaces as fast as he could. He was 22-years-old and in a rush. Then, someone told me the team were hurrying to make the evening train from Heuston station. Nothing I have ever seen or heard since has made me understand quite so clearly what it is that separates Cork from other counties. In most counties, a young forward who had made it to his first All-Ireland would be too drunk on euphoria to even think about his train. But in Cork, it was expected: there was no danger of these kids getting too big for their boots, not if they wanted a lift home.
For decades, the Cork County Board brought teams up to Croke Park to win All-Irelands in much the same way as headmasters and teachers might bring a class on a daytrip to the zoo or the museum. It worked. Then it stopped working and the players figured out a new way for a new time. In the current crisis, administrators and players have fallen deep into the fault line that has split the old ways and the new.
So Sunday's glamour hurling tie between Kilkenny and Cork has been scratched. In Kilkenny, there is a notion that maybe in the deepest caverns of their subconscious, the Cork hurlers don't want to field a team this year because if they are not in the championship then it will lessen Kilkenny's achievement of winning the three-in-a-row.
The thought may be preposterous to the Cork hurling team, who have always conducted themselves as sportsmen. But they will have to countenance more wounding interpretations than that if they lie idle all year. Time is ticking. There can be no winners here. The bravest man will be the one who backs down. Otherwise, the regret will be permanent.
"I just want to play chess," poor Bobby Fischer claimed. And he did too. It was just that politics kept getting in the way.
