Keith Duggan Sideline CutThere is nothing to bring an All-Ireland medal winner, a certain All Star and a probable Footballer of the Year quite literally down to earth like a well-delivered fist into the face. What happened to Tomás Ó Sé in the Kerry championship last weekend might well have been sickening but it was not all that surprising. For on his own turf, the county man leads a perilous existence.
By all accounts, Ó Sé, who not only has performed splendidly for Kerry this season but also conspicuously shone through the travails of last year, did not know what hit him in Austin Stack Park last Saturday night. The aggressor has not yet been named and really, his identity doesn't matter. Maybe this was the first time he ever threw a foul blow in his life. Maybe he was just a kid nervous and flustered in the situation that flared up and so lashed out blindly at poor Ó Sé, whom he undoubtedly cheered on in the All-Ireland final a fortnight earlier. Or maybe he was one of the many habitual enforcers commonplace in the make-up of GAA teams across the land, the ubiquitous hard man, the one not to be messed with.
The occasion of an All-Ireland final looks so polished and big-time now that it is easy to slip into the illusion that county players, amateur or not, are to some degree pampered. With every summer comes a veritable Watergate of spoken and written evidence of the lifestyle that governs county men during the preparation for the summer championship.
They live in a strange borderland between the reclusive and the extrovert, wilfully cutting themselves off from the social hotspots of their locality while partaking in the high-profile training camps and expeditions organised for the county teams on which they star. Inter-county players queue up at cash points, they go see the latest Tom Cruise flick on a Friday night, they fancy the same girls as the non-inter-
county men - whenever they do go to their local night club. In essence, county players live regular lives - the appeal of the All-Ireland championship is partly based on that fact - but in reality, they are different.
For every guy that makes it on to the county panel, there are probably 10 other players that fall just short of the criteria. Often, they might have eclipsed the chosen one growing up and (as the producers of Underdogs inherently knew) may have an axe to grind because they feel their potential was never truly recognised.
In many ways they might be better ballplayers than the guy who regularly plays in front of 60,000 but just lacking for a first step of speed or the leanness of spirit or the confidence - whatever. Fine footballers but ultimately just club players, one among thousands.
The evening out of standards in the All-Ireland football championship means that more and more club matches scheduled for the theoretically balmy days of June and July are shelved. Fixtures gather dust, are scrapped and rearranged. The longer the county team progresses, the more fuss the team creates in the county and the more forgotten about the clubs feel.
They train and train in empty fields. Eventually, the All-Irelands end and so they get to play a game or two, in late September or October, when it is wet and cold and the dark is closing in. Speak to any club manager or trainer and he will tell you of the frustration and difficulty of trying to keep guys interested through that long period of limbo. Serious club players make sacrifices comparable to those of county men but sooner of later a 25-year-old is going to ask himself why he shouldn't go out on the tear on a Friday night when he doesn't even know when his next game is. So a dose of Lynx, a new shirt from Next and out on the town by eight o'clock. The Lads. Pints. Aftershocks. The old bump and grind.
And always, always in the nightclubs of Irish provincial towns a low current of violence, beneath the DJ's best Tony Fenton voice, simmering between the young men from different towns, different schools or different clubs. Sometimes a row, sometimes not. Most of the time, nothing happens. The odd time, some poor bastard gets his teeth bashed in to the soundtrack of the Lighthouse Family.
Either way, sprints in the field at eight o'clock on Monday night and tall tales to recount in between. F****in steamboats drunk. Twisted. Great night.
Enter the county men, back from their high-flying adventures in Croke Park. They are exhausted after a long season but racked with guilt at not putting as much into the club as they feel they should have. So they are there at training, one of the lads, leading the field during sprints, encouraging, working hard. When all is said and done, they still love the club scene; it is less complicated and it made them what they are.
So when the radio broadcasts reports of the assault on Tomás Ó Sé last weekend, the immediate jolt was the fact that the man was playing football so soon after the All-Ireland triumph. The instant question you had to ask was: do these guys ever rest up? Then came the implication of his injury and the description, redolent of Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, of Tomás and his brother Marc sitting in Kerry dentist chairs "having their teeth rearranged".
Ó Sé was a victim, of course, and right now the Footballer of the Year bauble he deserves to win seems like a poor compensation for the wired jaw he has reportedly had to tolerate for the last week.
The GAA's inability to stamp out these gruesome, illuminated moments of violence has long been a problem for the association. It is true that hard men - basically lads with short tempers or lads that feel compelled to act on their reputation for being unflinching frontiersmen - have found shelter in the games. The fact is the role of hard man guarantees a kind of cult celebrity.
But it is also true that the profile of the GAA player is getting younger and the problem of violent behaviour among young men in this country is casually reaching frightening and uncontrollable levels. Now and again, that is going to be translated on the field in grim and horrible ways.
As long as the culture of abusing the referee remains acceptable in the GAA - in others words, as long as authority is held in contempt - violent incidents are always likely to happen. With the clubs feeling increasingly disenfranchised due to the extraordinary popularity of the All-Ireland championship, the atmosphere is going to be even more antagonistic. It is guys like Tomás Ó Sé, a big scalp to take in the flash point of a local brawl, who tend to suffer most.
Violence is no more going to disappear from the playing fields of Ireland than it is from the dance halls. County men have already been asked to forsake their nights out in order to be able to contribute at the highest level. The next step, surely, is that they will feel less inclined to put themselves through the butchery of playing for their home town. Who wants to sip from the Sam Maguire through a straw?
