Remembering the men who kept rugby alive in Connacht
Date Published: {J}
It would have been too much to hope that Connacht would beat Toulouse – but this was more, about the ‘Field of Dreams’.
This was about a rebirth for Connacht rugby and as one of the few who stood in the side pitches at the Sportsground 40 years ago, I could name those who were cheering in the background.
They included people like Claude Warner, Chris Crowley, ‘Lex’ Ryan and a gallant few others who went to the matches on Saturday afternoons.
The names just keep on rolling – Jo O’Donnell, Paddy Beatty, Frank Howard all of those in the ranks of referees and players such as Don Armstrong, Padraic Casssidy, Tony O’Sullivan and Johnny Dooley spring to mind.
The sports journalism part of this tiny group was led by Jimmy Lydon, Johnny McMahon and John Foley – at weekends all three were at various venues like the Sportsground, Fahy’s Field or Glenina as they collected the results of games involving the likes of Corinthians, Galwegians and ‘College’ (NUIG).
It was a small-time operation for the Press compared to the facilities laid on for the 9,000 attendance last Saturday night. It was not unusual to have just a handful of spectators at these games and the ‘Press Centre’ was the phone at Tom Holland’s house on College Road, while further Press ‘facilities’ were in Cullinane’s Pub on Eglinton Street and a few years later in the rather posh clubhouse built by Corinthians at Ard Na Cregg.
As the junior amongst the group, I would occasionally be pressed into action to cover the less important games on the side pitches on the Sportsground. The important part of the day was the meeting in Cullinane’s after the games and after the more important score lines had been rung in from Tom Holland’s phone.
If we are handing out tributes to people who kept Connacht rugby alive in the bad days, then Tom Holland surely played an important role.
You see, this was like a small club of people who were interested in a sport which could get a few thousand for an inter provincial, but on the average weekend the total attendance at one of the ordinary level games in the Sportsground might be Lex Ryan, Chris Crowley, Chris Crowley’s dog, with Jimmy Lydon and Johnny McMahon making up the Press gallery, which was in one corner of the then stand where the rain and wind swept through on Saturday afternoons which seemed to this reporter to go on forever.
At the Press Centre in Cullinanes, where the results were all put together, Jimmy Lydon or Johnny McMahon would scribble out the ordered 200 words about the game involving maybe, Corinthians and Galwegians, the great Galway rivals. Then there was a mad scramble to the few phones that were available.
These exotic Press facilities included the phone booth outside the Garda Station in Eglinton Street, just across from Cullinanes, Tom Holland’s in College Road, or the phone owned by the long suffering owners of Cullinanes, who on a Saturday afternoon knew their phone would be tied up for nearly an hour.
The system then in the newspapers and radio and television involved the use of copy takers, a group of highly competent typists who worked in the newspapers and typed out the copy from journalists as they stood in phone booths around the countryside.
For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.