Tom Humphries on why the Championship goes right to the very heart and soul of Irish life, urban and rural, winners and losers
One of the best sports books ever written was a collection of baseball pieces by Thomas Boswell. Certainly it had the best title - Why Life Imitates the World Series. You couldn't leave a book with a title like that just sitting on a shelf in a shop.
Of course Boswell's theory only stood up with crutches. In truth life is modelled on the Championship.
Firstly, life ain't fair but then neither is the Championship. You can be the Ronaldo of Gaelic football but if you are born in Leitrim or Antrim or Waterford you should take up the trombone while you are young because the only way you are going to play Croke Park is in the boys band.
The Championship isn't fair because it takes every ounce of energy you have from the first session and weigh-in sometime before Christmas and hands it back to you after 70 minutes of football just when the full back who has held you scoreless is shaking your hand and saying hard luck and giving you the stare that says "Me winner, you loser". Not fair.
Championship. It is about love. The boys are bursting their berries for free. They could walk away. And it's about courage. Ever stand and tremble under a Hail Mary pass? And about honesty. No hiding place this afternoon lads, he says thumping the table. And doing the right thing and the gathering of wisdom and the passing on of lore. It's about history and optimism and the will to keep on keeping on.
Of course we've evolved and life has followed suit. A man can lie on a table and be given a new heart. Teams have second chances. If their habits don't change, if their lifestyle doesn't alter, if their will isn't strong enough they'll die but the qualifiers have been championship enhancing, diverting and fun.
The Championship divides us and binds us. The summer begins with the tribal longings but come September it's different. Croke Park on All-Ireland day is one of the last cultural experiences we share. Not having tickets for Croke Park on All-Ireland day is the other.
It begins with private hopes, survival being the bottom layer on the hierarchy of needs. And it finishes with self-actualisation, with the full flowering of potential. It ends in celebration, concludes with an experience of accelerating commonality, semi-finals, finals, the matches becoming more and more of a national event.
Last summer the football season broke in a great crescendo. An eruption of nature. Dublin, for some reason, had caught their own city's imagination. Manager Tommy Lyons was voluble and media friendly. The team scored goals like men on a piece rate. In metropolitan fashion circles sky blue became the new black.
And when Dublin fell we were ready to absorb the phenomenon that was Armagh, to learn from the serene calm of Joe Kernan, the obsessive excellence of Kieran McGeeney the precocious scoring of Ronan Clarke.
Look up sometimes and you realise that Championship is a journey. Not just a linear procession from A to Z, preliminary round to qualifier, but a series of visitings. It takes us to places we would never go to or notice.
What impression, if any, had you of Mullaghbawn before McGeeney's emergence? What's Crossmaglen's image without its football? Did they build west Kerry around Páidí's pub?
Championship is part of the folklore we hand on.
Was Larry Stanley roughed out of football? Did the same folk pull a similar stunt on Tommy Murphy? Were Down too scientific in the 60s? Was there no fitness before Kevin Heffernan pulled Jimmy Keaveney out of the bar in St Vincent's? Which came first, the chicken or the egg, Mick O'Dwyer's vision of Kerry or the extraordinary players he had?
There are the no-hopers, of course, poor damned souls who set out every year without a map and without equipment. What do they tell themselves on January nights? That they must start training come the spring? That the big man loves a trier. Hardly.
They are born kicking. And born knowing that life isn't fair. That's the rule of Packie McGarty.
The gaps are closing. The number of genuine tragic cases are fewer even if the blue bloods are no more numerous.
The qualifier system has made heroes of men who otherwise would have played all their football in shadow. In Sligo and Westmeath and Limerick and Wexford they are looking forward to the summer in a way that perhaps they oughtn't.
In our turn not only do we respect their right to Championship but we are looking forward to their days in the sun. Rory O'Connell, Dessie Dolan, Mattie Forde, Eamonn O'Hara, Dessie Sloyan, John Quane, Muiris Gavin. All of them have blossomed towards the light.
And there are the traditional forces who have always roamed the earth. Something atavistic and primordial there.
In Dublin, right now the people instinctively look askance at the border. The ominous silence from over in Meath is more than a little worrying. Word is that in Croke Park last year Lyons and co got a little bit too far up the nose of Seán Boylan. He was uncharacteristically tetchy afterwards and his winter will have been spent planning some old-style shock and awe.
Kerry and Cork's cheek-by-jowl existence rolls on with scarcely a chink of light between them. Munster is a duopoly until the Limerick football revolution is complete.
In Ulster the peasantry spent so long mired in neighbourly feuding that documentary teams rather than sports journalists used to cover the Championship there. Now they are standing on a hillock high enough to see the rest of the country.
Gaelic football there caught up with the world 12 years ago and mostly has stayed abreast of it.
Tyrone yearn this summer to end a losing streak in the big time. The streak is generations long. Worse, it's longer than Donegal's, Derry's, Armagh's, Down's and Cavan's. It's a losing streak frilled with black comedy. Vanished under-21 sides. Losing the only All-Ireland final to see a man sent off twice in the same game. The thought that Peter Canavan would succumb to the law of Packie McGarty.
We are all born equal but in Championship there are big figures, the great ones. Mick O'Dwyer looks only a few days older now than when he finished his playing days. Since his abdication in the Kingdom he has wandered the country evangelising and now he brings to Laois the most hope they have had since the Delaney era.
In the footballing sense O'Dwyer (and the west Kerry landscape) spawned Páidí Ó Sé and though Páidí will be hermetic this summer his broad shoulders and squinting eyes will be one of the faces of the season.
In the West the inscrutable Grand Master John O'Mahony is plotting quietly. Glimpses of his Galway team suggest that he is ready for the offensive. The thought of adding Micheál Meehan to a forward line full of wile will have stayed any thoughts O'Mahony entertained about brief retirement.
Kevin Walsh is back and Michael Donnellan is recovering. Surely they are booked in for a run in Croke Park.
It's about rituals.
The Ulster Championship, of which each instalment was once known as "The Pullers and Draggers Big Day Out" has opened up and allowed itself to breathe. Under the qualifier system every encounter is fraught with desperation but a little less than of yore. Teams play a bit more football now.
Yes it's rituals. Huddles. Flags. Hustlers. Touts. It's the way Meath people fill Croke Park with a gutteral roar and then in moments of high ecstasy a mass bleating "Me-eeeth Me-eeeth".
It's Dublin swagger and Kerry black propaganda and Mayo's fear of the big time. It's the ferocity of Tyrone's following, the self-conscious lyricism of Galway's tribe. It's the just happy-to-be-here faces of the downtrodden set free.
It's family. It's parish. It's village. It's nation. It's song. It's dance. It's Colm Cooper and it's Colin Corkery. It's Killarney in the sun. Clones in the rain. It's Croker in September. It's rules. It's talk. It's gossip. It's press bans. It's press nights. It's injuries, suspensions, controversies. It's veterans. It's whizz kids. It's picnics. It's car journeys. It's railway specials. It's adoration. It's slagging. It begins in hope and ends in despair. It's finite.
It's here.
Don't settle for life. Choose Championship.
Accept no imitations.
