Sport

Danny Hughes: Modern players face more temptations than ever before

I MISSED a lot – stags, weddings, and weekends away.

I suppose while my peers were travelling and living their best lives,

I was living my own particular dream. Playing for Down was the only thing I wanted to do.

Blessed with the experiences of 1991 and 1994 as a young kid, this became a very realistic target.

I was fortunate to be a very committed and determined person  and while some of my brothers were more naturally gifted footballers, silkier even, I knew that I could make up for any shortfall in this area via endless practice.

I was also rather fortunate to have both a family and friends all immersed in sport, particularly Gaelic football.

I played soccer in my teenage years for Rockfield United, a local team in Newry.

The Carnbane League at that time was competitive and you had past Irish League players like John ‘Shorty’ Treanor (one of the greatest ever club players to have played the game) and Lee Anderson of Newry Town, as the club was then known.

The local pub where we changed into our kit contained three teams and, after the games, everyone involved congregated over a few drinks, and the rest, to dissect the match. The slagging was the best part of the day.

I was in my late teens. At that time, you could play a club GAA game on a Friday night, a game of soccer on a Saturday and train again with your club on a Sunday morning.

Hangovers? No problem. You had to sweat it out.

The consumption of alcohol was never a big issue for me.

I always took a very proactive and healthy approach to alcohol consumption. I never drank spirits.

If you happened to have had a few drinks on a given night, I would make it my mission to undertake a tough aerobic session the next day.

During Paddy O’Rourke’s tenure as Down manager, the county team used St Malachy’s Secondary School in Castlewellan as our training base.

Next to the school was the lake and forest park and, with international cyclist Barry Monaghan as our strength and conditioning coach, the 2.3 miles of the path through the forest adjacent to the lake became a graveyard of hungover players in pre-season.

You also had a ‘figure of eight’ pathway within the parkland and, during the championship season, this became a second home for us while we tried to secure those extra percentages critical to success.

Danny Hughes: Never underestimate the power of  a sub

The Irish, as a nation, have always had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and this continues to be the case nowadays. Other substances have, of course, come to the fore and are seemingly readily available.

Sport and elite level participation is no longer a guarantee of healthy lifestyle choices and the infrequent use of drug testing at inter-county level is no longer a deterrent.

It appears to me that some rural club or county players are no less likely to flirt with alcohol or substance abuse than those in urban areas.

In a way, it is a very sad indictment of modern society. It’s the pressure of having to be at your best or having the best – an endless cycle driven by social influences and overnight celebrity. We want perfection. We want more and more.

The big house, the big car, the big salary. Go big or go home, as the saying goes.

Somehow, we have lost the fundamentals. And in the pursuit of happiness, the question is: ‘Do we even know what that looks like?’

Sport too has become a commodity.

Something that was once pure can now be bought by the highest bidder. Even  a questionable human rights record is irrelevant if the bid is right.

As Rod Tidwell in Jerry Maguire stated: ‘Show me the money’.

The collateral damage has been felt at grassroots level by the consumers of the game.

Whether this is via constant bombardment of betting advertising or alcohol sponsorship of tournaments, every sporting association has felt the fall-out.

The GAA have not escaped and has had to undertake a number of initiatives at club level in order to educate and re-educate its members.

In terms of mental health support, gambling and awareness talks, alcohol and drug abuse help seminars, the GAA have adapted and continue to adapt to modern-day life.

When I was heading into my 20's, player burn-out was an emerging and much-discussed issue. All of a sudden, the clubhouse has become much more to many more members.

Our club bars and lounges, home to parish functions, card schools, the club lotto and presentation nights continue to be a vital sources of contributors to the overall costs of running a club. As a venue for people to socialise and discuss the issues of the day – especially in the GAA – in many cases it is a lifeline to the lonely and isolated.

Even now, an unhealthy approach to inter-county football in so many counties will see some players abstaining from touching alcohol for months and months and then


binge-drinking when presented with the opportunity to do so.

Again, this ‘all or nothing’ approach is a prevalent culture and often leads to a very unbalanced existence.

I have a very balanced approach to alcohol, however, in one area of my life, I cannot possibly argue to have similar success. Chocolate. Not sweets or crisps or fizzy drinks, but chocolate.

Retaining fitness was never a problem I experienced personally, nor did I struggle with weight gain – quite the opposite where I struggled to even put on a single pound – I could live comfortably with a high sugar diet as I was burning it off quickly.

However, in recent years, while I still train hard, it is admittedly not at the level it once was.

My chocolate consumption has remained the same, yet my metabolism has caught on to the fact that I no longer train as I once did.

The vicious cycle is that I try to train harder to stay still – which is as useful as trying to stop the tide from coming in.

I have sought out and actively tried to eat ‘clean’. It never lasted very long.

It is expensive too and replacing a Dairy Milk and cup of tea with fresh fruit mixed with natural yogurt with coconut water just doesn’t belong in the same price bracket.

In the early noughties, we were given inter-county diaries that tracked our daily diets and training workloads.

Barry Monaghan reviewed it sporadically and, on one occasion, pulled my diary in for a look.

Bacon, eggs, soda bread, white bread, Dairy Milks, Toffee Crisps, tea, mince pie (my mum loved making anything with mince as we had seven people in the house), potatoes (we went through a half-a-hundredweight each week),

Sunday steaks or roast beef.

There was no dieting and my water intake was confined to times when


I was thirsty only.

Barry took one look at the average week. I trained every day and, in my eyes, that was all that mattered.

Barry’s response? '‘That’s a disgrace.’'

I never changed. Like the alcoholic who lives with the disease, chocolate is simply my vice.

And I would contend it’s one of the least dangerous addictions facing the modern-day player.