Sport

The Boot Room: Kind acts of local sports figures on our own Route 66

There are many moral lessons in the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck
There are many moral lessons in the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck There are many moral lessons in the 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, written by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck

“The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket—take it for the baby.”The Grapes of Wrath (Chapter 14), by John Steinbeck, 1939

IT’S exactly 12.31am. The early hours of Thursday morning. The writing of this column was meant to begin at 10 o'clock.

It was aspirational. Like everything in life right now.

This new, surreal working-from-home regime catches up on you.

Kids’ breakfasts. Home schooling. Lunches. Nursery rhymes. The WhatsApp work group pings. A penalty competition in the back garden at the behest of my daughter. We're a few days in and the grass has already worn away in parts.

Cooking. Cleaning my hands. Cleaning the kids' hands. Hugs are allowed.

The WhatsApp pings and pings. Twitter. Stay away from the damn thing. It’s an energy-sapper.

A visit to the supermarket. Social distancing. Empty shelves. And just like that the day runs away from you.

More WhatsApp messages. 10.22pm, another message pings. A friend is on a ventilator with coronavirus. Seriously ill, the message reads.

Jesus.

All day and all night, the laptop is opened on the dining room table but the seat is never warm.

What was once a sports column has now morphed into a weird diary of these times.

On Tuesday night, I took Rosa, my six-year-old daughter, out for a run. It’s our second jog since the schools, along with everything else, closed down.

It’s a familiar route not far from home. I can tell Rosa doesn’t like running. She’d rather be in the garden practising her drag-backs and scoring into the portable nets.

I realised that we hardly spoke a word to each other as we ran side by side, holding hands as we crossed roads and streets.

All I could hear was the light rhythmic tap of her black and pink training shoes against the pavement. I stole a glance of her rosy, red cheeks and her sad face.

There’s one gruelling hill on this route where your gaze automatically gravitates to the dark turquoise sky. It is so beautiful.

Running is good thinking time. A stress buster. But the endorphins aren’t out tonight.

Your mind is too busy racing, thinking of what’s up ahead.

One of my favourite books is The Grapes of Wrath, written by the great John Steinbeck.

For some reason, I always remember chapter 14. Steinbeck's writing style, both epic and sparse.

I latched on to the American novelist’s work after first hearing Bruce Springsteen’s version of ‘This Land is Your Land’, originally written and performed by lauded protest singer of the 1940's, Woody Guthrie.

It’s one of the most romantic, most generous, hopeful songs ever written about America – at a time when the country had just crawled out of the hungry 30’s and when social injustice was never more stark.

The novel charts the desperate lives of the small farming class, many of whom were ‘tractored’ off their land by the banks following the fall-out of the Wall Street crash. Many families suffered at the hands of a terrible drought too that became known as the Oklahoma Dust Bowl.

As a result, thousands of the dispossessed took to Route 66 – the main highway that cuts across eight American states and ends in California - where there were promises of fruit-picking work for all those who made it.

But, when many of them reached the ‘Promised Land’, there wasn’t enough work to go around.

Steinbeck tells the story through the eyes of the Joad family and the good and evil they encountered along Route 66.

These were the people, America’s new underclass, who no longer had a stake in American society.

The underclass never really went away.

As Rosa and I ran together, I was thinking that nothing has changed throughout the years and because of so many cliff-edge economic policies practised on the NHS many people will perish over the coming weeks and months.

And yet, we expect those who have no stake in society, the homeless for example, to self-isolate, to social distance, to wash their hands and be part of this great human effort to keep a devastating and deadly virus at bay.

On the opposite end of the spectrum you have the stockpilers, the panic buyers who clear the shelves, the kind of people who wouldn’t know civic responsibility if it slapped them in the face.

You see, the early bird catches the worm. Always.

While we may curse this Hobbesian greed, there is also a huge swathe of good in people that has come to the surface during this crisis, people who are prepared to make sacrifices for the common good.

Nobody summed it up better than Patrick McBride.

In an interview with the Antrim footballer last week, he talked about “flattening the curve”.

“The way I look at it is: it’s a sacrifice that you have to make as an individual. When you make an individual sacrifice you usually get a reward for it.

“When I mean an individual sacrifice, I mean not going on holiday so that you can play Championship. But this is different. This individual sacrifice is for other people. Your focus should be on others instead of yourself.”

Before we were all condemned to our homes, members of Newry City Football Club visited one of their biggest fans Daniel Murphy.

Daniel suffers from cystic fibrosis and is high risk to the ravaging effects of Covid-19.

Newry City manager Darren Mullen and player Decky Carville decided to pay Daniel a visit and played a bit of football with him in his back garden.

“I was reading that ‘sport doesn’t matter - but it does’ because you have to think of people’s physical and mental well-being and sport has a huge part to play in that,” Mullen explained.

The Down camogs are embarking on a big fundraising drive to help front-line services during and after this impending human crisis.

The O’Neill’s sportswear factory in Strabane has reopened its doors to make protective gear for front-line staff of the NHS.

Amid the chaos, there are countless uplifting acts of altruism – acts that will never be forgotten by those who lived through these terrible times.

Rosa’s little training shoes tapped the pavement as we ran in silence.

This is our Route 66. There is nothing romantic about this journey. Nothing at all.

And I know that it is no road for our children.

We kept running…