Sportstar of the Year 2019

Between rowing gold, a golf hero, a boxing legend and a certain football winning streak, Vincent Hogan runs through some of this years’ great Irish sporting feats

THE late, great old American college basketball coach John Wooden once described the key to greatness as a compulsion to “make each day your masterpiece”. It’s a line that resonated along the North Antrim coast on a remarkable Saturday afternoon last July when Shane Lowry took charge of the 148th Open Championship with a course-record 63, effectively placing one hand on the famous Claret Jug.

Lowry’s bogey-free round broke golf’s strongest field and will forever stand as one of the greatest rounds ever played in a Major. It allowed him ease to a six-shot victory the following day and become only the fifth Irish winner of the Open, the championship being staged on Irish soil for the first time since Éamon de Valera was in his inaugural year of his second term as Taoiseach.

Maybe the most enduring stories in sport are those you don’t see coming and it’s fair to say not many were talking up the Clara man’s chances beforehand of outplaying superstars like Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka, Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson over four days around the famed Dunluce links.

Lowry, a 50/1 shot, created the masterpiece on Open Saturday, and his win brought a E1.7 million cheque to supplement the million-plus won in January when securing the Abu Dhabi Championship. Sportstar of the Year credentials? Undoubtedly.

So even in a truly extraordinary year for Irish sports men and women, it’s difficult to look beyond Lowry.

There are, after all, few more popular or admirable Irish sports people than Katie Taylor, whose recent Manchester Arena victory over Christina Linardatou made her a world boxing champion across two weight divisions. In doing so, Taylor joined Steve Collins and Carl Frampton as the only Irish boxers to have that distinction.

One week later, we had the Irish women’s hockey team holding their nerve under the most withering of pressure to ease past Canada in a penalty shoot-out and finally secure their place at next summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

Yet, is it even possible to consider that achievement in the same breath as Dublin’s footballers securing the historic five-in-a-row under the now retired Jim Gavin, led to the steps of the Hogan Stand – for the fifth time – by a teacher from Coolock?

Changing

Stephen Cluxton is widely credited with changing how Gaelic football is played today and, truth to tell, is probably entitled to inclusion in any debate about football’s greatest goalkeeper.

Of course, Dublin’s women secured a three-in-a-row of their own, while Galway collected just a third senior All-Ireland in camogie.

We had Limerick hurlers backing up their 2018 All-Ireland win with victories in the National League and Munster Championship, only for Seamie Callanan’s remarkable feat of scoring a goal in eight consecutive championship games propelling Tipperary to a spectacular Liam MacCarthy Cup triumph.

We had the rowing heroics of Sanita Puspure, successfully defending her World Championship gold – and Paul O’Donovan mounting the top step of the podium for a fourth year in a row. Or the same O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy winning gold in the lightweight double-sculls at August’s World Championships.

We had the European Indoor bronze medal wins of Ciara Mageean and Mark English, not to mention Mageean’s glorious defiance when finishing 10th in the 1,500m final at the World Championships in Doha.

Racing of the equine kind, inevitably, threw up a broad sweep of heroes. Joseph O’Brien became the youngest trainer to win at the so-called “world championships of racing”, saddling Iridessa to take the Filly and Mare Turf Race at the Breeders’ Cup in Santa Anita.

His father Aidan’s return from 2019 is 14 Group One wins, including Anthony Van Dyck’s triumph in the Epsom Derby and Sovereign’s in the Irish equivalent at The Curragh.

Willie Mullins finally won the Cheltenham Gold Cup after six second-placed finishes, Al Boum Photo getting home under Paul Townend just weeks before that combination was pipped at Punchestown by another Mullins horse, Kemboy, ridden by the peerless Ruby Walsh.

Few watching could have imagined that they were witnessing the greatest jump jockey ever seen ride his final race that day, Walsh surprising even Mullins afterwards with the announcement of his retirement.

Dundalk winning the league and Shamrock Rovers the FAI Cup were the big domestic football winners here at a time when so much of the game became obscured by turmoil within the FAI that still looks like it has a distance to run.

So ‘masterpieces’ aplenty for the Irish Independent readers to assess. Is Lowry to come out top of the pile?