Once upon a time in this office a refugee from the serious part of the newspaper strayed into the sports department with the kind of nervously flickering eyes which whitey wears when he strays into Harlem late at night.

The interloper approached me with a question. He needed some information on a sports related topic and wondered if there had been a book published on this area which he might lay his hands on.

Always glad to break down the barriers between the sports department and the real world, I gave him the name of a particularly relevant publication.

"I don't suppose," he ventured further, "that you know the publisher?"

As luck would have it I did know the publisher. For some reason an image of the spine of the book had fixed itself in my head. I could see that ornate little Bloomsbury logo nestling down the bottom.

"Ah" he said, heading off greatly cheered: "that's the wonderful thing about people who don't read books. They remember everything about the odd one they do see."

All this is by way of seamless introduction to the topic for the day, what my friend, the GAA correspondent of this paper, described to me this week as the dumbing down of sports, a unique process limited to this particular corner of the earth.

Reading Don de Lillo's dense and teeming book Underworld, which might be the last serious shot at writing the great American novel we will see this century, it is striking how easily sport fits into the American psyche. Underworld starts with sport and a famous epochal sporting moment, with a baseball in a child's hand. A baseball which is prised away to become a thing of commerce.

The prologue, an ambitious, dreamy, cinematic remembrance of the final game of the 1951 pennant battle between the Dodgers and the Giants at the Polo Grounds, is a breathtaking piece of writing.

How is it that those half-bred Americans and their loathsomely brash American culture can feel so comfortable with sport and welcome the possibilities for discussion and exploration which the endless drama of games offer, when we, who pride ourselves on the antiquity and passion of our sport, have no place for it within our general culture apart from the odd droll piece by P G Wodehouse.

Only the Americans have this keen awareness of sport's core importance to society and its potential as a metaphor for so many other things.

AMERICAN literature is littered with great writing about sport. John Updike, whose essay Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is one of the most sublime pieces of sportswriting ever committed to paper, begins his Rabbit series with a beautifully realised scene whereby the former college star Rabbit Angstrom scuffles a basketball about a court with a bunch of slightly alarmed kids.

Rabbit's progression from the womb of school sports star to the big world outside, is a reflection of similar journeys made by other characters.

Richard Ford makes Frank Bascomb a sportswriter before he falls into the murky world of real estate in Independence Day. American characters are always leaving sport and the outdoors behind or placing those things into some aspect of growth.

Bernard Malamud. Hemingway. Faulkner even, who, beyond Ike McCaslin and Yoknapatawpha, covered ice hockey and a Kentucky Derby for Sports Illustrated in the 1950s. Mailer (not just in the reportage of The Fight but among other places in the gridiron scene in Why Are We In Vietnam). Robert Coover. John Irving and his wrestling. William Kennedy's assorted bowlers and pool players and baseball men, Francis Phelan, who dropped the baby in Ironweed, was a wonderful baseball fielder. John Sayles in print and celluloid.

Even Saul Bellow, the novelist who least reeks of the LockerRoom, starts his first novel Dangling Man with what seems like a cry of frustration from the outsider, concerning the central role which sport has in the process of American mythmaking and hero-making.

If those dumb Americans aren't making heroes they are creating anti-hero characters alienated from sport. In mentioning these guys we leave out of course the entire realm of football or baseball fiction as practised by the mainly Texan school of Dan Jenkins, Frank Deford, Ring Lardner, James Whitehead, Peter Gent.

This literary ease with sport is reflected well in the cinema too. From Field of Dreams to Eight Men Out to Cobb or The Hustler or Raging Bull, Americans make serious attempts to pinpoint or paint an important part of their world.

The heroism, the rituals, the ritual heroism, the masking, the choreography, the sentimentality, the romance, the character in extremis - it seems a natural well spring. Yet in this part of the world we seem manacled to the notion that if it deals with sport it can't be serious.

What do we get? Scarcely a worthwhile or convincing chapter from a single writer of note which tells us something about sport or offers us a different way of looking at sport. Not even a decent impersonation of L'Equipe or Sports Illustrated or any other form of intelligent sports publication.

We get Know Your Umbrella the RTE sports quiz.

We get They Think It's All Over with its lazy dosage of single entendre, crap comedians and clapped out sports stars. We get Saint and Greavesie and Sky SuperbleedingSunday. We get Escape to Victory and When Saturday Comes (the turgid film, not the magazine); we get Inside Sport magazine with its insulting and degrading images of women on the cover and Total Sport with its shallow, cheeky tabloid approach. We get Eamon Dunphy jokes from Roddy Doyle. We get Under the Moon. We get tabloids providing the lingua franca of soccer.

With the exception of Perfect Pitch we don't get a single publication devoted to seriously good sportswriting. Where is our Granta?

The only thing which TV and most newspapers can think to do with sport is to dumb it down to strip it of its social context and place it within the imagined coarseness of a terrace. RTE sent a comedian to cover the 1994 World Cup. ITV stuck a comedian on the panel for the 1996 European Championship.

Is it any wonder that the sports department is a no go area, any wonder that £20 million to the GAA is seen as some sort of governmental betrayal?

Don't think we don't know the regard in which the cultural and intellectual elite of this country hold us poor sports saps. They look upon us aghast. The elephant men of the mind.

We are human beings. Good man Don de Lillo, good hurling.