WHAT a sporting weekend just passed. We had the Ryder Cup, which apparently is now third behind the World Cup and the Olympics in terms of its television audience popularity and we had the All-Ireland final replay in Croke Park.
Now maybe the All-Ireland is not quite as global an event as the Ryder Cup but try telling that to the thousands of Mayo people from Singapore to San Francisco who have to suffer for another year.
I was in Croke on Saturday evening. From a neutral’s perspective, it was a thrilling spectacle and Dublin just about deserved to win but I didn’t half feel sorry for Mayo at the end.
The other great sporting event this weekend was Dromintee GAC’s brilliantly organised under 10 football tournament.
Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Epic’ talks about the massive importance of a family dispute in Monaghan between the Duffys and the McCabes. The dispute comes at the same time as the second world war, or as Kavanagh describes it, ‘the Munich bother’. Kavanagh says that because of the importance of the war, he was ‘inclined to lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my ear.
He said: 'I made the Iliad from such a local row. Gods make their own importance’.
And so it was on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning under Slieve Gullion.
Rory McIlroy may have been engaged in battle with the Americans on the golf course and Mayo’s Lee Keegan was warming up for another big tussle with Dublin’s Diarmuid Connolly in Croke Park but at Dromintee GAC, it was all about the under 10 boys from the likes of Culloville, Crossmaglen and Killeavey, battling it out like their lives depended on it. Along with our wee city slickers from Belfast of course.
We were a bit of an unknown until we played well in our first couple of games and then one of the Dromintee lads said to me, ‘I can see why you boys came down now’.
He was beginning to think an ambush was on the cards. We made our way through to the semi-final and found ourselves up against Cross. It was a great game, robust and fair and it came down to virtually the last kick. One of our boys had a difficult but kickable free to take the game to extra-time.
The boy who got fouled had thrown it to the kicker as soon as he had dusted himself down from the offending tackle and the free kicker stepped up to kick.
Like Cillian O’Connor five hours later, he missed and the game was lost. There were tears everywhere from our boys, they had the majority of the play and missed a number of good chances but of course the free kicker was the most distraught.
Between sobs, he was saying it was all his fault. I told him it wasn’t, that we’d missed chances before that and I also said I was proud of him, particularly because he’d stepped up and taken responsibility for the kick.
I did think to myself afterwards that the concept of responsibility was maybe a bit much for an emotional 10-year-old but actually, I think he got it.
That notion of responsibility and its relationship with leadership stuck with me over the weekend. Cillian O’Connor’s captaincy and leadership of Mayo and his near-faultless kicking was a joy to watch.
Darren Clarke had a very hard job on his hands and he handed the leaderships roles to his experienced men like McIlroy, Stenson and Rose. McIlroy was pumped like I’ve never seen him pumped before. He embraced the responsibility given to him and for the most part, he delivered, succumbing only to Patrick Reed in the singles in the most thrilling of matches.
Away from the excitement of Croke Park, Hazeltine and Dromintee, I try to take responsibility in business very seriously too.
In a small business, I think it’s crucial. The retiring Dean of Stanford Business School in California, Robert Joss said: “Too many leaders get caught up in thinking about power rather than their responsibility to those they lead”.
In his farewell address, Joss talked about how the official Stanford organisation chart had his job at the top but the unofficial one had him in a box at the bottom connected to boxes above representing alumni, faculty, students, staff and the advisory council. Beneath the inverted diagram was a four-word note: "And everything runs downhill."
For me, that’s it in a nutshell. Leadership on the sporting field or in business is about the responsibility conferred upon you by virtue of your role or position. It’s what you do with it which shows whether you are a real leader or not.
It’s hard for Mayo but there will be other All-Irelands. There will be other Ryder Cups and we will get another crack at Crossmaglen, maybe next year back in Dromintee. I hope so, it was a great day.
:: Paul McErlean (paul @mcepublicrelations.com) is managing director of MCE Public Relations Ltd
:: Next wee: Claire Aiken
