SIDELINE CUT: Ballooning surely has as much right to be categorised as a sport as, for instance, darts or curling or Ireland v Montenegro

IT IS common for famous GAA coaches, by way of explaining what amounts to an unhealthy obsession with their games and teams, to detail all the hardships – the standing in the rain, the searing disappointment of defeats, the way particular referees haunt their dreams, the impossibility of wearing those yellow bibs with even a modicum of style, the wish they could still be out there playing – and then shrug cheerfully and ask the floor: “Sure, what else would you be doing?”

This is clearly meant as a rhetorical question. It is not as if you are expected to helpfully suggest a game of Scrabble or advise them about the new Johnny Depp show down at the Omniplex. But, deep down, they probably feel a hint of anxiety common to us all, a gnawing realisation that, when all is said and done, there is more to life than hurling or football and that maybe they should be spending their allotted time on God’s good earth doing other stuff as well.

The thought occurred yesterday that a good answer to the GAA chestnut, “Sure, what else would you be doing?”, would be to introduce our celebrated managers to the kind of pastime the now globally famous – or infamous – Heene family enjoy. I imagine I was not the only person left faintly dizzy by the information: “When the Heene family aren’t chasing storms, they devote themselves to scientific experiments that include looking for extra-terrestrials and building a flying saucer to fly into the eye of the storm.”

Many children, during that brief period before they come to understand that, by and large, the old man is a klutz, will find themselves asking, “Dad, will you build me a spaceship?” in the very real hope he might do and in full faith that, using just a hammer, the washing machine and that box of rusty nails, he could do.

The replies will always be the same – a wary look from the behind the newspaper followed by a vague “Maybe later”, or a variation on the old Billy Connolly line: “Spaceship? I’ll give you spaceship. I’ll spaceship you.”

But for young Falcon Heene, the answer was not only, “Yes, course I’ll build you a spaceship”, his auld fella threw in a hot air balloon for good measure.

Falcon Heene was the six-year-old who made the world look skyward for a few hours on Thursday when he – allegedly – took the family air balloon for a hair-raising ride across Colorado. For four hours, police and slack-jawed citizens looked on as this silver balloon drifted across the skies, and, as word spread that it contained a child, a gripping psychodrama unfolded, a story that was half Ian McEwan and half Hollywood. As it turned out, the youngster was not even up there in the balloon but at home hiding in the attic, afraid he would get into trouble for releasing the contraption from the back yard of the family home. Everyone went “Phew”, and because the child takes a winsome photograph it ended up as nothing more than one of those peculiar, feel-good stories that seem to travel around the world at speeds no hot air balloon could hope to match.

Then, of course, yesterday young Falcon managed to inflate – so to speak – the story further by accidentally suggesting it had all been “a show” concocted by the da.

But the way the Heene family drama filled the skies was a timely reminder that there are still plenty of wonderfully nutty people out there. I am not sure whether hot air ballooning qualifies as sport. It hasn’t been inducted to the Olympics (yet) and you don’t really have to do much besides not fall out of the wicker basket, adjust the little gas valve every so often and pack a lot of sandwiches. But surely it has as much right to be categorised a sport as, for instance, darts or curling or Ireland v Montenegro.

The “boy in the balloon” (who, one suspects, could cost his parents an awful lot of money for what amounted to a dull afternoon in the attic) brought to mind that period when circumnavigating the globe in hot air balloons was all the fashion. Those of you old enough to remember the 1980s will hold hazy recollections of Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Records, setting out to cross the Atlantic by balloon. It seemed like an important moment for English prestige at the time, a Shackletonian expedition in a dark and trashy decade. Branson was clearly enthralled with ballooning and duly set about traversing the Atlantic in record time. His co-pilot, Per Lindstad, then set the record for the highest solo flight, soaring to 65,000 feet – surely another exercise in asking for trouble.

The fear the balloon may not come back down – that he might, as The Floaters used to sing, float on – must have crossed Lindstad’s mind. There is a fine line between breaking an eccentric world record and ending up in the same predicament as Major Tom.

And there is something fundamentally insane about wanting to fly that high in a wicker basket in the first place. But he did it; he went up there and made it back to walk around with the ordinary folk again.

Balloons also proved an irresistible lure to Steve Fossett, the billionaire adventurer who, having mastered everything from the Iditarod to the Paris-Dakar rally, may have been one of the greatest odd-ball athletes of the last century. Fossett’s lust for adventure, of course, ended in tragedy two years ago, but, sad as that was, the man was never going to toddle safely home and die in bed.

Sport – even our precious Gaelic Games – becomes more business-like and sleekly presented with every passing year. The bigger games – football and basketball, gridiron, boxing – are monsters in that they are always there, always on television, almost impossible to escape. And that is fine for most of us, those sports are enough to distract and thrill and great to play, however badly or however well.

But there will be those for whom the conventional sports will never be enough.

It is good to be reminded every now and again that there are people out there who make up their own sports. Some climb mountains, some dive into oceans, others run 100-mile races in off-beat locations. For these people, the glamour of big-time events like the World Cup or the Olympics is meaningless: it is just entertainment.

Over the coming days, Mr Heene, father of the intrepid Falcon, may or may not be criticised for leaving something as enticing as a hot air balloon in a back garden where a six-year-old is playing. Still, you can’t knock the spirit behind it. It is reassuring to know that even as the rest of us while away our time by tuning into the World Cup play-off draw or wondering if Gerrard will play or worry that Munster are finished, there is at least one man in the world who wakes up thinking: right, have to finish off the flying saucer today so I can fly the kids into the eye of the storm. And that he doesn’t think that remotely odd. That he can’t, in fact, comprehend what else he would be doing.

(But then, he probably hasn’t heard of hurling).