Different sort of support for sports stars of the past

The reason we love sport is because of the extremes it throws up; the chasm between winning and losing – the euphoria of victory and the utter misery of defeat. It’s the backdrop to our greatest memories and the source of our lowest points.

And of course that might seem to be overstating things, because for most of us – as mere supporters – it’s not actually real life. We follow our teams for sure and our world is lifted when they win, but our participation in that process is limited to shouting encouragement from the stands.

Sometimes ‘our’ teams are on another island and other times they’re the lads you went to school with – or by now, the sons of the lads you went to school with – who are lining out for the honour of the club and parish.

You can have more than one team of course and you can follow many sports, but if I had to pick just one over all others, it would be Galway United.

I was there in the seventies when they entered the League of Ireland as Galway Rovers and like so many others I was there long before they turned the Terryland Park pitch to face in a different direction.

Eamon Deacy, Miko Nolan, Gerry Daly, Kevin Cassidy, Kieran McDaid, Tommy and Tony Murphy, Tommy Lally, Denis Bonner, John Herrick, John Mannion; then later Gerry Mullen, Noel Mernagh, Peter Carpenter, Stephen Lally, Tommy Keane, Johnny Glynn and so many more – everyone of them giving their all for the cause…and on top of that we actually knew them.

I was lucky enough to write about them for this paper for six or more years, back in a time when you could ring sports stars up and ask them what they thought about the weekend’s match – not wait until one of them got a few bob from Lucozade or Addidas and they’d talk to you only then.

But the romance of the game itself belies another reality – the same one endured to a greater or lesser extent by all sports people; the difficulty in adapting to your second life when retirement calls and the noise of the crowd fades.

Perhaps it doesn’t affect GAA players as much because so much of what’s great about Gaelic Games is the fact that its greatest players don’t just play for their native county, they are also intrinsically embedded in their clubs.