Carry on over sports award winners is quite simply outrageous
WHEN exactly did we all starting getting outraged by everything? And by everything I mean everything. It seems that nothing can get past us nowadays without it getting a good kicking on the way through. Maybe it has always been so, just that there are so many more vehicles to ferry our outrage to those who care and those of us who don’t. Where once the angry and outraged could only howl at the moon or vent to a like-minded (or poor misfortunate) soul in the local pub, now there is Twitter and Facebook and online forums and radio phone-ins on which to bombard all and sundry with our indignations.
Don’t get me wrong here. I can be as outraged as the next man. The political inertia regarding the homeless crisis makes me angry. The witch-hunt of Sergeant Maurice McCabe was and continues to be outrageous. Someone not having the compassion to welcome a few dozen refugees from a war-ravaged country like, say, Syria get my hackles up. You know, the important stuff.
There’s even some non-life-ordeath stuff that can cause me to throw a wobbler now and again. The super rich and their tax avoidance schemes. RTE three-peating every programme and having the bloody cheek to think about raising the licence fee. My Fantasy Football team captain missing a penalty. All things that one can be justifiably - and fleetingly - outraged about, but things that really shouldn’t extend beyond a simple pointed tweet to everyone and no one in particular.
One thing that really should also fall into the ‘inconsequential things that really shouldn’t upset us at all’ category, but for some unfathomable reason seems to land into the polar opposite category every year are sports awards. Especially the ‘end of year’ and ‘greatest of all time’ variety.
Exhibit A: The RTE Sports Award, which aired last Saturday night, and seemed to draw an untold amount of outrage from an untold amount of people. The awarding of the Sportsperson of the Year gong to soccer player James McClean seems to have been a pretty unpopular choice, until it dawns on you that the Republic of Ireland player was actually the winner of a popular vote. Personally, I was a little surprised that McClean won the award, but I can live with it. I can live with it mainly because I couldn’t really care which of the 15 nominees won. All 15 are very fine sportspeople who excelled in their own discipline, and I doubt any of them need the TV-sponsored award to validate their achievements.
Put it this way. Line up an apple, and orange, a grape, a pear, a plum, a grapefruit, a pineapple, a mango, a strawberry and a passion-fruit and ask the nation to vote on their favourite. Chances are the apple or the orange will win, either because that’s the fruit most of the people eat most of the time, or because the majority are simply stating that apples and oranges are, in fact, their favourite fruit. Me? I’m a pineapple man and will be ever so, but I’m not going to start jumping up and down that everybody doesn’t agree with me.
Sport, like fruit, is a matter of taste. Take another recent RTE show: Ireland’s Greatest Sporting Moment. It was, as we all know, doomed to failure - or at least scorn - from the moment it was conceived of in some creative boardroom out in Montrose. Any TV programme that attempted to isolate and elevate one Irish sporting moment - from all the sports from across 50 years of a rich sporting history - above all others was in for one hell of a beating. We’re back to apples and oranges again. We all know from trying to make comparisons between individual GAA players or teams across eras what an impossible and futile exercise it is. Who can say definitively who was better: Mick O’Connell or Darragh Ó Sé? Mikey Sheehy or Colm Cooper? The Kerry team from 1975 to 1981 or the 2004-2009 Kerry team?
Now try to compare Jack O’Shea to Liam Brady? Sean Cavanagh to Ronan O’Gara? Roy Keane to Brian O’Driscoll? Then you take those six, who all played as part of a team, and you start to compare them with sportspeople who operated as an individual. Sonia O’Sullivan. Katie Taylor. Padraig Harrington. Then you start throwing in other variables like bicycles and horses and rally cars and sailing boats. Who’s better: Sonia or Ruby Walsh? Ruby, of course, sure hasn’t he four legs under him.
When you pause and think about it for even the briefest of moments you realise how preposterous these pan-sports sports awards really are. There was an amount of outrage that the Dublin footballers were rewarded as Team of the Year last weekend or that Jim Gavin wasn’t named Manager of the Year. The Team award went to the Irish showjumping team that won European team gold in Gothenburg. I don’t know if that’s a better or worse achievement than Dublin winning Sam Maguire for a third year in a row, or if Aidan O’Brien, who set a new world record by training 26 Group 1 winners in one calendar year, is more deserving of the Manager of the Year accolade than what Gavin did with the Dublin footballers. The reality is that no one can say for sure because we’re back to apples and oranges again.
As it turned out, Ireland’s Greatest Sporting Moment - as voted on by the great unwashed - was the Republic of Ireland’s World Cup penalty shoot-out win over Romania at Italia 90, and with 35.6 per cent of the public vote it’s obvious that Packie Bonner, David O’Leary, Jack Charlton and even George Hamilton’s finest moment still resonates far and wide and deep with the Irish public 27 years after that tumultuous night in Turin. Others, I’m sure, don’t know what we’re on about.
All sport is off its time, even those moments that live on years and decades after their time. As a child of the 80s and early 90s I clearly remember staying up late on a Sunday night to watch Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis in the 1985 World Snooker Championship Final. I can still see Stephen Roche coming over that crest on La Plange in 1987 to the excited commentary of Phil Liggett. Of course I fondly recall Houghton’s header in Stuttgart and O’Leary’s penalty in Turin and Robbie Keane’s goal against Germany in Ibaraki in 2002.
Being there helps too. I was lucky enough - as a fair-weather rugby supporter - to be in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium in 2006 to see Munster win their first Heineken Cup, and I was in Croke Park nine months later for that historic Six Nations meeting between Ireland and England.
And then there are the more localised occasions. The All-Ireland finals. The national championships of this sport and that sport. The provincial finals and the county finals. Down to the parish leagues and the school sports day. It’s all relative. Soccer men will go to their graves swearing there hasn’t been a finer sporting moment anywhere ever than Pat Bonner’s penalty save from Daniel Timofte. The sheepskin and hip-flask brigade will hail Ronan O’Gara’s Grand Slam winning drop goal at the moment of Irish sport. Fans of the sweet science will laud McGuigan or Dunne or Taylor as our very finest. Those predisposed to running and athletics will surely make the strongest case for Coughlan or Treacy or Sonia. Today’s Dubs will forever revere Brogan and Connolly and Gavin above all others. Kerry folk can’t see beyond Micko, Jacko, Sheehy, Maurice and Cooper. Offaly people have Seamus Darby framed between the Pope and JFK.
The thing is that they’re all great sportspeople and great moments in sport. Your favourite is just as relevant as mine. The point is that it’s all sport, and sometimes we just miss the point. Among all the competitiveness and the winning and losing and the awards and the outrage we tend to, too often, lose sight of the sportiness of sport. I’m not sure I can say with absolute certainty what my favourite sporting moment of 2017 was, never mind the last decade or four. All I know is that I prefer pineapples to apples. Will you allow me that?