Sport

Video: Conor McGregor - a visionary in the Michael Cusack mould?

Floyd Mayweather (left) and Conor McGregor exchange harsh words during a promotional stop in Toronto on Wednesday July 12 2017, for their upcoming boxing match in Las Vegas. Picture by Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)
Floyd Mayweather (left) and Conor McGregor exchange harsh words during a promotional stop in Toronto on Wednesday July 12 2017, for their upcoming boxing match in Las Vegas. Picture by Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP) Floyd Mayweather (left) and Conor McGregor exchange harsh words during a promotional stop in Toronto on Wednesday July 12 2017, for their upcoming boxing match in Las Vegas. Picture by Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via AP)

As the clock ticks down to tonight's Floyd Mayweather v Conor McGregor boxing blockbuster in America, in this edited feature, author and lecturer Paul I Gunning sees striking similarities between McGregor and one of the founding fathers of the GAA, Michael Cusack ...

Like GAA founding father Michael Cusack, Conor McGregor, has similarly sustained significant personal abuse.

Just as Cusack was ridiculed concerning the GAA’s formation, McGregor has been slated as the Dublin Ultimate Fighting Championship star repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of boxing in the build up to this weekend's rumble against world boxing legend Floyd Mayweather.

McGregor's response is brash, arrogant and classically Cusackian – the latter’s opening salvos in the public mind, concerning the GAA’s formation, was a cool contempt of international sanctioning bodies.

During heightened public clamouring the bould Mícheál remained steadfast to his principles.

Beyond the cursory similarities of these master showmen, visionaries and disrupters, what has a brawl under Las Vegas’s lurid lights in common with the dawning of GAA sports on Ireland’s arcadian green fields?

The analogue is: Changes rule.

McGregor’s asymmetrical preparations generate repeated establishment scorn.

Can this bout’s result warrant an epoch of embraced changes or usher in a clarion call of cracked noise?

Can he reclaim lost fighting skill-sets to refashion in a newly demonstrated neo-Prize Ring mentality?

In achieving his central sportive aim, to harness kinetic aggression as controlled savage motion, is `Notorious' a guru in the art of fighting, a master in deeply comprehended combat or simply a dreamer?

The GAA faced significant early dilemmas itself concerning man-to-man on-field contests.

Fighting was considered both legitimate and permissible – even in hurling!

Here too seemingly contradictory worlds collided when merging to create a new entity.

Irish folk culture long recognised the complementary activities of dancing and scuffling necessitated neat footwork as they transferable skillsets were valuable both inside the squared circle or the enclosed pitch.

But when the GAA was posed with the problem of what to do with physical contact in individual clashes, with no championship, league or disciplinary point system existent, how did the ancients deal with individual honour and playing the game fairly, what was the answer?

It was contained tucked within the early GAA’s flexible rulebook concerning the lesser known skill to include ‘handygrips’.

Having contended for the ball under the referee’s watchful supervision, players were permitted to legitimately engage in various stand-up Collar-and-Elbow wrestling moves when contesting for a ‘fair fall’.

Handygrips, most probably did not permit kicking or leg strikes. After one fall the contest was decided.

Anything beyond this meant the challenge had degenerated into a fight which was not permissible.

The precursor in hurling’s folk origins to contest an on-field duel was simply to hurl the stick to the ground.

Whilst the inter-locked players struggled to secure individual supremacy the game had moved on in pursuit of the ball.

Whether a post-contest hand-shake was obligatory or not, in any event, this one-on-one challenge assisted in resolving a pre-existing ill-feeling.

Indeed what was Irish ‘football’ and how did it contain the inevitable ‘barbarism’?

Could it be compared to a species of running handball as in Britain that ultimately ended in a river?

Prior to the GAA’s establishment, folk football was played often with a sphere probably resembling a medicine ball’s size, on occasion, made from a local champion race-horse’s leathered hide, filled with the corks and crafted by a local cobbler – a prized trophy to bring Abhaile, as the game was widely-known.

The pre-GAA C19th realm of Irish folk football is generally perceived as a mere patchwork or strange sub-set of hybridised rules, but it was regularly played according to deeply localised and agreed codes.

The GAA, as an institution, had to contend with those drawn from folk or festival football background as early players emanated from this loose confederation of codified skill-sets.

In its most pure running form, located along the coastal fringes of Munster, it could resemble, to modern eyes, a five-mile long game of rusticated rugby.

Beyond the Pale, tripping was long attested to as a vital skill; in the West, a player was only permitted to use his hands if punching the ball to goal; while Ulster’s would-be GAA footballers, seemingly, never used their hands when playing ba’, but that’s another day’s work!

Aside to the core players, a centipedal scrummage, comprised fellow parishioners, when amidst this pushing and hectoring 200-a-side crowd, eager Amazonians, known, in many cases to hurl, whatever came easiest to hand, (be it stones or sticks) at the opponent.

Alternately, would-be sweethearts were said to refuse to speak to their hero for a week upon giving a poor performance.

So, from running games in towns that permitted players to hop the ball, or parish-to-parish matches across beaches, marshes and fields, where off-side was not permitted and kicking was only to clear a ditch or river, the match was a half-day long event dominated by tall, heavy and stronger players, or others exclusively designated as trippers or speedy wingers.

Outside the emergence of codified rugby in Dublin or soccer in 1875 Belfast, in the Midlands those fortunate enough to attend elite Jesuit colleges, played ‘Catholic College football’ with a sphere no larger than an orange with its elite displaying skills allegedly surpassing association internationals.

In 1886, the crisis surrounding Michael Cusack’s venture to ideologically contest with Archbishop Croke would soon see handygrips and wrestling expunged from the GAA field-game rule-books.

Significant rancour was expressed when this element was withdrawn most vociferously in the south-east and midlands.

It was considered a ‘gross libel on our fellow country-men to assert that they cannot wrestle without quarrelling’.

But various new rules and reconstitutions, endeavoured to improve the gaelic games.

Though the GAA’s incomplete flirtation with wrestling waned, the sport (comparable to modern eyes with that of judo) saw regional competition based in Dublin.

With this skill set decreed as illegitimate, new opportunities arose when tryos from counties Louth, Meath, Kildare, Wicklow and beyond, travelled to the Phoenix Park of a Sunday to seek a rival that dared figuratively to step on his cotamor.

As in February 1885, when the GAA adopted football rules re-invented from many previous forms, McGregor now – with equal Cusackian self-belief – claims his victory will re-make combat sport.

He argues as Mohammed Ali, in his 1976 mixed-martial arts contest against Antonio Ionki [which inspired MMA’s creation], had failed to learn how to strike a defensive, though not downed fighter, Ali was about to be placed in a lock-hold when his feet were almost swept away by a kick only for the referee to intervene.

This seismic moment alone would have provided the impetus to reinvent combat sport immediately.

(Editor: The Ali v Ionki fight lasted the full 15 rounds, described in the media as 'pure slapstick')

Now, against Mayweather, does McGregor’s relationship with John Kavanagh, Ido Portal and Owen Roddy, form the basis for creating something amorphous, phantomesque and potentially clinical?

What conjoins both Cusack and McGregor is a combative philosophy that irrespective of all vicissitudes, despite all who deride and diminish, the Irishman will always ‘prevail’.

Pitted against the most refined exponent of sweet science’s defensive armoury, it remains a ‘hazardous experiment’ to determine whether McGregor’s creative rule flexing is the brave-hearted decree of an all-seeing eye or the ersatz hurrah of combat’s ‘innocent … crathur’ – as Mr Cusack dubbed himself in self-deprecation.

Paul I. Gunning is the author of ‘The Divil Ye’ll Rise’ scufflers: Wrestling In Modern Ireland.’


He will present a paper entitled: ‘Grappling With the Identity of Irish Folk Football’ before the British Society of Sports History conference, at the University of Worcestershire, England September 2 2017