Recollections from the road: The highs, lows and what I’ll miss after 32 years as a GAA Correspondent

Life in the press box started in Swan’s Lane. The 1989 All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Cork was all-ticket. I was due to go to New York for a family occasion and in my enthusiasm to plan ahead, I loaded the washing machine with laundry, including the shirt off my back.The following morning, waking with a nagging sense of unease, I realised that my press accreditation had been in the breast pocket of the shirt. I rang Croke Park and in the uncomplicated ways of those pre-mobile days, immediately got GAA public relations officer Danny Lynch and explained the situation.I was directed to Swan’s Lane where he would leave word with the stewards. Having sidled up the narrow laneway – now incorporated into the new stadium, then used for access to accredited matches – and gingerly explained there was a pass for me, I was crestfallen as peals of laughter broke out in a contagion all around.“You’re the fella that washed his ticket!”READ MOREIn the years to come I became very friendly with Danny and could only imagine the chortling discourse as he briefed them that an eejit would be presenting himself that afternoon.It was in its own way, a useful lesson. Prolixity is – ahem – the scourge of reporting. Never embark on a rambling narrative when a simple “I’ve lost my ticket” will suffice.So, life in the press box started in Swan’s Lane after I had lost my ticket.Conversation was originally like oxygen in the GAA. Endless and often intense discussions about whatever was current were widely available. The association represents the collective triumph of ordinary people.At whatever level they operate, these members as administrators or coaches and selectors or players, are part of the chain that holds together a central paradox.The same people by and large look after both the minutiae of an enormous volunteer-driven organisation that arranges community-based recreation for all ages and also runs an elite, mass-spectator sport, which at this time of the year fills one of the biggest stadiums in Europe.[ All-Ireland football final by the numbers: For Mayo, 75 needs no explainingOpens in new window ]From an early stage, I took advantage of this disposition to chat. The late Eamonn Coleman got calls from me all the time when he became manager of Derry. I discussed his team and general matters, and he gave me the benefit of some bracingly frank views.In the early days, before I had actually met the Derry manager, a colleague asked him a question in the post-match scrum that followed a league match. He looked at him quizzically and asked, “Are you the boy that rings me all the time”.“I am,” came the brazen response.Derry manager Eamonn Coleman in 1999. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho Interminable telephone conversations with managers would prove to be an unsustainable modus operandi. As media outlets ballooned in numbers, even allocating a few minutes to all the reporters who called became impossible.Access to players and team management has atrophied over the years. It’s not all to do with the unfeasibility of taking calls from everyone and management have actively restricted the engagement of their players.Even “press nights” that originally provided an abundance of players, free to be collared and interviewed one-to-one, have evolved into antiseptic routines with mass interactions. Sometimes, the answers are genuinely arresting but they will be spread across all titles and platforms.Ordinary conversations have in some cases become obsolete. Social media is used for basic announcements, one impact of which has been to render obsolete some phone calls to county officers and public relations officers.These were useful for the range of topics broached and the opportunity to get ground-level view of how things were going, including on the playing field.Not that they were always productive. One public relations officer, who was an exemplar of best practice, came home one night tired and my droning conversation put him under – I became aware when snoring could be heard on the other end.He snapped out of the reverie and was terribly apologetic but realistically, it was more a cause of embarrassment for me.There’s no way of avoiding bad feeling if it’s the outcome of genuine differences of opinion. To get by, we need the engagement of everyone, administrators both national and local as well as managers and teams, even if that has become almost entirely curated by product launches or post-match protocols.Unpleasantness can ensue but it is unavoidable unless media become latter-day Monkees – too busy singing to put anybody down.Kerry’s Bryan Sheehan meeting the press in 2008. Photograph: Lorraine O'Sullivan/Inpho My career was the era of technology’s first steps. Ostensibly, it made things easier, but in the early years of dial-up we had to go out into the world looking for hotels where we could work and ask to access phone lines.Some establishments would warily refuse as if the little lead with the telephone jack might be capable of sucking a season’s profits out of their business. Others were more co-operative but we still had to get down on our knees and disconnect the fax machine in order to get a direct line out.In general, though, the hospitality industry was very helpful in giving us the use of rooms or business centres, deserted on a Sunday, in return for which they did some trade in tea and biscuits.On the first international tour to Australia in 1986, the only such trip I didn’t make, The Irish Times was the only newspaper with a fax machine. Four years later, I had the late, lamented Sunday Tribune’s Tandy, a primitive laptop with a modem that worked by Velcro-ing “acoustic couplers” around the earpiece and mouthpiece of a telephone handset.On unstable lines from the other side of the world, transmission was uncertain and usually cut out after issuing 200 words to Baggot Street before the connection expired, exhausted.We used to be amused by the confounded demeanour of older colleagues as they tried to master mobile phones and laptops but it hasn’t taken long to become the new generation of “Pissed Old Hacks Baffled by New Technology,” as designated by Private Eye.In the early days, The Troubles were still a presence. Just months before I started in The Irish Times, the IRA ceasefire had been announced and the slow progress to peace began.Those awful 25 years took a heavy toll on the people of Northern Ireland, and the GAA as a cultural symbol of Irish identity found itself at times on the front line.Yet, almost as the herald of an increasingly resurgent community, Ulster football rose to the top in the very years leading to the beginning of the end.Down led the way with appropriate symmetry, having been the last pre-Troubles All-Ireland winners in 1968, when they carried off the province’s next Sam Maguire in 1991, followed by Donegal and Derry before rounding off the ceasefire summer with another title in 1994.No more than others on the island, the GAA had to make its own cultural accommodations. The old Rule 21, prohibiting members of British security forces from membership of the association, had to go for fear that the GAA would be effectively blocking young nationalists from joining the newly established PSNI.In time, the related ban on other sports using GAA grounds would also go and we had God Save the Queen played at Croke Park before a rugby match. And the sky did not fall.Down’s Paul Higgins celebrates after the 1991 All-Ireland football final in Croke Park. Photograph: Billy Stickland/Inpho I remember an older colleague once saying that he wasn’t particularly interested in being a GAA correspondent because he would never again set foot on a plane.That wasn’t always the case. In my freelance days, as an investment in my then uncertain career I took a loss-leading trip for the 1990 international rules series. The Sunday Tribune and a couple of other places took stuff from me – and most paid – but not enough to cover costs.I reasoned that I was also getting to see Australia and never regretted the trip. It left me with an abiding interest in the possibilities of the hybrid game, which by now look fairly limited given the trajectory of the constituent sports.Other occasions included the golden jubilee of the Polo Grounds final in New York in 1997 when Rudy Giuliani, on the road to first acclaim as America’s mayor after September 11th and latterly disgrace as a hapless Trump toady, threw in the ball for the Cavan-Kerry commemorative league match.I also spent a freezing couple of days in Scotland when the GAA flew us out to watch the hurling-shinty international rules. At the pre-match lunch on Saturday, the Provost of Inverness spoke about the challenges for shinty in the modern (1999) world and how there was simply so much for young people to do in Inverness.Having sampled the nightlife the previous evening, we stared into the cock-a-leekie soup and said nothing.[ ‘It was a lifestyle, not a job’: Confessions of a sports writer who mostly saw it allOpens in new window ]Paddy Downey, my immediate predecessor, once told me about how one May morning in 1950, coming out of his flat in Ballsbridge, he began to pick up rumours that PJ Duke, the Cavan All-Ireland winning football star, had died. Sadly, this proved true.Duke was only 25, a dentistry student in University College Dublin, but already had two All-Ireland medals. He took ill so suddenly that he was named on the Cavan team to play Kerry in a league match but was unable to play and died the following day of tuberculosis.It was hard to avoid the parallels when waking up in March 2004 to the news that Cormac McAnallen, the just appointed captain of All-Ireland champions Tyrone, had died in his sleep at home at the age of 24. The shock was palpable and haunted the county despite its continued success.Ten years later to the day, Tyrone trailed Kildare in a league match by five as the match entered injury-time, when two goals in little over a minute turned the match on its head, a deliverance that manager Mickey Harte was invited to attribute to otherworldly influence.“I’ve no doubt there was. How else could you win a game like that? It had to be some divine intervention.”Tyrone’s Cormac McAnallen died in his sleep at home aged 24. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho I have previously recounted how when my car packed it in one night after attending a 1990 Down training session in Ballykinlar, my rescuers, including now late county selectors John Murphy and Barney Treanor, suggested that my car with its Free State number plates be moved somewhere out of sight.Barney towed me to Newry the next day, my first experience of getting the AA out of the GAA.Ten years later on a hot June bank holiday after an unusual Monday championship match in Tullamore between Laois and Westmeath, I sat in my car in the Dunnes car park on the outskirts of the town.Like an idiot, I had the radio on and the air conditioning at full blast and was nothing if not irritated when both shut down suddenly and the awful truth dawned on me.Pat Teehan, future chair of Leinster Council and a presidential candidate, was one of the invaluable public relations officers on my list and I rang him at about eight o’clock. Within 15 minutes, as reliable as Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction, Pat had sent a big van hurtling into the car park and its formidable battery jumped me back on to the road home.Never a quick learner, only two weeks ago I had to disturb my friend and colleague Gordon Manning on his way home with the same problem, forcing him back out on the road with jump leads to get me moving again.I’m not sure if this service lasts into retirement.The Semple Stadium press box in Thurles, Co Tipperary. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho It’s common to hear retired players say that it’s not the medals they won that count but the friends they made.That’s not a bad summation. I won’t miss the growing constraints of the work, but in a strange way I’ll miss the camaraderie of suffering – the bleak humour of a winter press-box surrounded by darkness, the support, particularly in recent years, and fellowship of colleagues all trying to do the best they can.And maybe the odd time, the feeling that a piece has said exactly what you wanted it to say.