THERE I was sleeping on a Sunday afternoon in the foyer of the Carrickdale Hotel in 1998 with a half-finished pint of Guinness on the table in front of me when my girlfriend (now current wife) woke me out of my slumber.
She urged me out of the door quite briskly, stating that a crowd had gathered with one seemingly annoyed individual remarking: “Is it any wonder Armagh can’t win a bloody Ulster title when our goalkeeper is lying paralytic on a Sunday afternoon in a hotel?"
Thanks be to God, there were no mobile phones at the time or I would have been flashed around Facebook or Twitter in an instant with any amount of people ready to cast aspersions on my state of dishevelment and lack of athleticism.
Ironically, I was not in any state of stupor and no alcohol had crossed my lips in three days. But I had just returned home from a three-day military-style training camp with Armagh in Thurles under the Brian McAlinden regime. I was waiting for a lift home and drifted off due to my state of exhaustion in front of a table which had drink left on it.
It still rears its head in my nightmares every now and again.
Obviously, only a few people had seen me so aspersions were limited, unlike Wayne Rooney last week who decided to have a few jars after an England friendly match and was headline news in week that saw Donald Trump voted in as the president of the greatest superpower in the world.
Rooney was rightly annoyed that pictures of him mingling with wedding guests and also having a few beers should make the headlines in the same British press that I remember from my adolescence once ran a headline ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster!'
Whether we like it or not, the media has the power to influence people regardless of how ridiculous the story may be. And although many will not feel any genuine sympathy for Rooney as he earns more in a week than most do in a decade, it doesn’t justify slack and inaccurate journalism.
We have it in our association too when personal and ill-informed statements are casually thrown out in print, but can have far reaching consequences for the people involved. Bernard Brogan, for example, didn’t have his normally brilliant season this year and the Dubs still won an All-Ireland. However, one columnist put it out there that had Brogan spent more time thinking about his game than all the endorsements he was currently receiving then he might experience better form. It was not only unfair, but totally unsubstantiated.
Football or hurling in the amateur ethos has always been an escape from the rigours of everyday life whereby men and women can throw their lot into representing their counties. That should bring with it a sense of pride and achievement and not a concern about what some columnist or journalist may write about you the following day.
I literally cringe when I see pundits or columnists personalising their critiques of matches or individual performances. And while they go about justifying it in a sort of
grow-up-and-take-your-medicine manner, it infuriates me even more.
The golden rule in life, as I have been led to believe, is treat others the way you would like them to treat you. Admittedly it is not always possible, but I have noticed that sledging in our game and personalised media attacks on players and management have become all too commonplace.
While it may be par for the course in the English tabloids, I feel that it shows a poor representation of our amateur sport at a time when we are fighting against dropping attendances and standards.
As a new year approaches, I feel we in the GAA owe it to ourselves to distance ourselves from sensationalist media coverage designed to provoke rather than inform. We should not conform to the modern ideology of social media where to ridicule is now more commonplace than to congratulate.
ONE man who I never heard sledging or instigating personalised attacks on anyone and who lost his battle with illness this week was Armagh’s former county chairman Joe Jordan.
Joe will be sadly missed by his family foremost and then by all who met this interesting but unassuming gentleman. You would normally associate county chairmen with being strongly opinionated and driven men. Yet, Joe was one of the few that blended into a room without anyone noticing.
He was more comfortable picking up the cones at the end of a county training session than having to chair meetings or deal with the many intricacies of being a county chairman.
It was probably his humility that attracted so many people towards the soft-spoken servant of Middletown and Armagh. And his knowledge as a historian brightened up many a bus journey, even if some used it as a chance to engage him in juvenile banter about the year of the ‘big snow’.
He, of course, was aware of it, but it never halted him as he engaged us and laughed his way through our jibes. Joe’s tenure took in the greatest era of Armagh GAA history with a first All-Ireland and National League title alongside an U21 crown as well.
In his own inimitable way, he contributed to that and always without seeking glory or recognition. I remember on the night of the All-Ireland win sitting beside Joe and his wife Sadie in the Citywest Hotel when he pulled out about eight file pages of a speech that he was going to orate.
Joe and I started wrestling with the pages as I attempted to get rid of half of them, hoping to shorten his speech by about two hours. And while many a person would have got annoyed at my infantile behaviour, Joe just laughed it off as absolutely nothing could detract from his happiness and pride on that special day.
A true servant to his family, parish, club and county. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.
