The Deadline
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Mr Trichet is about to kick open the door and take away your first born, the former construction industry are dropping off their lorries at Leinster House on the way to the ferry and the IMF are gonna burn the motha-flipping place down while we all move west of the Shannon in the next 24 hours.
Soooo… here’s my friend and yours, Mr Mike Tyson, re-enacting Bobby Brown’s video for the 1989 classic “Every Little Step”. Why not.
Golf may be a good walk ruined, but the Ryder Cup – with some planning and strategic alcohol mixing – can make a good party this weekend. One of the greatest spectator events in the sporting calendar is made for those armchair quarterbacks among us – with hours of trans-Atlantic showdowns unfolding over four days – and in prime time.
So ladies, here’s what you’ll need!
Television: This year’s Ryder Cup will be the second delivered in high-definition to viewers in Europe, so every Celtic Manor blade of grass will be drawn vividly in our living rooms. Like the way some porn stars are finding HD brings its own challenges to the industry, so too Monty will find every nervous twitch is noticed and each yip a nervous rookie feels in his elbow will be brought to you in wonderful, clear techni-colour. Get yourself a HD-ready flat screen to do the occasion justice
Friends: If you don’t have any, don’t worry loser, see above. A nice plasma will bring friends.
Seats: It’s just not on to expect everyone to watch hours of golf while perched delicately on a poof while you shout the odds from your LazyBoy3000. Get the emergency chairs out of the shed or fill the room with beanbags, cushions and pillows like an Arabian prince’s tent. This will lessen complaints emanating from behind your LazyBoy3000.
An American: I watched Ireland equalise against Germany in the 2002 World Cup while in New York with a roommate from Leipzig. Great craic! Try to draft in a patsy from Stateside to be the lightening rod for your witty remarks and mild xenophobia.
Food: US jailbird and domestic goddess Martha Stewart offers a swath of football related nibbles and recipes for a Superbowl Party but has failed to get into the golf swing it seems. I suggest a veritable atlas of food spread out like General Montgomery’s war map of 1940s Europe on your living floor. Provide stodgy, salty meats from Bavaria, tapas from the Iberian Peninsula, Taytos from Ireland and pickled herring in honour of our Scandinavian team-mates.
Dress up: Encourage your friends/pets to wear the uniform colours of the European team. Sitting around on a Sunday evening in pink polo shirts, cream slacks and white loafers with everyone you know is a biennial experience. It’s what makes us European.
Activities: Children and/or women may be present, depending on who your friends and the American bring along. A Playstation in a nearby building or room with Tiger Woods PGA Tour may be of interest. A cinema room showing a double bill of Happy Gilmore/Tin Cup is a gimme. Everyone loves Adam Sandler, right?
So happy entertaining sports fans, and rememeber, whoever wins, make sure your guests don’t lose.
Monty is cleaning his spikes in anticipation of next month’s action at Celtic Manor while the Americans are checking their passports are valid and changing their money to Euros.
They say horse racing is the sport that sees kings and paupers mix; but the Ryder Cup allows cub reporter and the world’s most influential to walk together.
At the last Europe vs America extravaganza held on these islands, in 2006, I was pretty new in the job. Sent to the K Club in Straffan, Co Kildare, I envisioned rubbing blazered-shoulders with sport’s great and good by the roaring comfortable fire, after a hard day over a hot Remington typewriter.
Perhaps I’d quaff flutes of chilled champagne while Sam Torrance tells one of his expertly-timed and rehearsed stories about late night hi-jinks with Payne Stewart (“And then he said, no that’s not what I meant by practicing my swing!”).
Maybe I’d witness sporting history unroll at my feet – I’d obviously have a wonderful viewing position for the entirety of the weekend, right? – before filing a few hundred words which would win a shelf-creaking number of awards and form the basis of a best-selling and pension-securing book.
Not quite – but it was still pretty good.
After checking in at the media centre at the same time as Gary Lineker, I resisted the urge to tell him his jokes on Match of the Day usually ruin my weekend as he seemed to be enjoying the goodie bag too much. I later approached Boris Becker while he ate a banana (just like when, as a lad, I watched him at Wimbledon!) and asked if I could grab a few minutes for a quick chat. He refused my humble request with extreme prejudice. Though, in fairness to the German – a hero of mine really – he did approach me later on and said ask away. He is taller than expected and wears nice shoes, FYI.
As we have no paper on a Sunday, I didn’t have a whole lot to do on the Saturday afternoon apart from be there and witness the action.
After ignoring a steward’s request to not walk across a pathway, I accidentally stood on Zach Johnson and Stewart Cink’s stray ball during the foursomes (“That dude just stood on the ball, dude” I heard one dude say, before I slipped back into the crowd) I was stopped by another steward and dutifully halted.
As we waited in the rain in a field in Kildare, a buggy rolled past with the greatest basketball player that ever lived hanging jauntily off the back. Michael Jordan, chomping on a wet cigar, reciprocated when I gushingly lurched forward for a high five, and was happy to give me a quote. I’d left my professionalism at the first tee box.
However, the following the day it was to get better. As Ian Woosnam’s Europe humbled the stars of the US on the way to a record equalling Ryder Cup win, I walked inside the velvet rope for the first time. Each media organisation was given its share of bibs – the colourful vests with ‘media’ emblazoned across the front and back, as well as an unique number in case someone stands on a ball – and on the final day I was entrusted to leave the cosy media centre and spoil a good walk.
Following Darren Clarke’s progress on his most emotional of rounds – having just returned after the death of his wife Heather – I was very much part of the elite (Ray Houghton asked me what was happening ahead!).
Later as I stood behind the tee box at the 15th, I think, watching Clarke tee off, it started to rain heavily. I shuffled back a few paces under some trees for shelter. After Clarke drove his ball on, sensing I was a little too close for someone’s comfort, I glanced quickly at the gentleman behind me.
After a comedy double-take I realised it was former US president, Bill Clinton. As I stared, he reached out his hand to me for a quick grip-and-grin before his security guys drove forward and his whole party strode on.
As they marched towards the 16th, with the tournament’s emotional denouement about to unfold, I realised that as well as a couple of White House secret service men, Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly was bounding up the course with his former president.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The pair played a round of golf together in 1995 which Reilly wrote a famous SI piece about. “He’s the sort of guy who keeps a tee in his mouth as he walks and yes, putts with his glove on and leans on your shoulder as you pencil in the scores, writhing or celebrating depending on how the match is going.
‘That’s my pards!” he’d say when I hit a good shot and ‘I gotcha, Partner,’ when I didn’t,” Reilly wrote, “He was charming and warm and amazingly normal.”
It was just a handshake and a smile as we all sheltered a moment from the rain. But I’d say the same.
Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, September 24, 2010
Katie Taylor was crowned world champion again on Saturday night in Barbados.
It was clearly the extra hours on the punch bag with me in the National Stadium that saw her over the line. I really hope everything goes smoothly between now and London so she can do her thing on the biggest stage. She deserves it.
The great world spins towards another All-Ireland Sunday. Around the world – for an hour or two at least – Irish feet will not make footprints on the fine sands of south–east Asia’s beaches. Friends will meet on familiar corners of oblivious American cities before pushing the door open on a little wet embassy with a satellite pointed homewards. Phones of those abroad will buzz with succinct updates – but never often enough in the last few crucial moments.
John Canty is a 26-year-old from Innishannon in Cork. After two happy years working as a pensions administrator in Zurich’s Dublin office, like a lot of guys his age, he set the Facebook status thus: going to Oz with the lads for 12 months.
And he was off.
Two years later, when I ring him this week, he picks up the mobile in Zanzibar.
“With the financial crisis and everything else I’ve been gone now for longer than I expected. I just arrived in Zanzibar this morning and the place is incredible. The people are really genuine, unlike in some touristy places and there’s a real happiness in the air, I must say.
“I went travelling with my friends but I left them all in Australia and I’m on my own now. But I’m not on my own really – there are plenty of German and English backpackers – and I usually just slot in with those groups.
“I’ve been trying to suss out where to watch the match. There’s an Irish bar in Dar es Salaam called – listen to this – ‘O’Willy’s Irish Whisky Tavern’. And I’ve been talking but there are Premiership games on and they’ll be showing them. I’ll probably just stay here ‘til Monday and listen to it on the radio in an internet cafe.”
A brother of Cork senior hurler, Kevin, John will surely soon be back swinging a hurley with Valley Rovers – but, like Cork and Down, there’s a few peaks to be scaled yet.
“I might try Kilimanjaro – I’ll see how the money is – and the idea then is to circumnavigate Lake Victoria so it’ll be Rwanda, Kenya, maybe fly out of Ethiopia. I told the parents I’ll be home by Christmas. So we’ll see how we go.”
He’ll nearly run into our troops somewhere so. Comdt Ronan Corcoran picks up a crackling phone line in Uganda. Part of a European mission to the country, the officer shows immediately that you can take the boy out of the Kingdom, but…
“I’m from Killarney and to be honest it’s going to be very strange to not be watching my county in the third week of September. I’m not being cocky or arrogant – but growing up in Kerry, it’s what you associate with.”
Sorry you’re breaking up there, Cmdnt…
“But I’ll be cheering for the Rebels this Sunday. Am I sure? I am; we have two Cork lads in our small unit out here. And I’ll certainly be cheering them on,” he adds.
“I’m in Kampala and there’s one Irish pub, Bubbles O’Leary’s – very unusual name. Two Irish lads have it here and they brought the bar itself all the way from Dundalk. There’ll be a gang of ex-pats in there and there should be good craic. The locals come in obviously and they don’t know what to make of us, the Mzungus, as they call white people – but its good fun.”
Now imagine twirling the globe or Google Earth westwards on the same morning. Treasa Smyth from Cobh is winding through the broad streets of New York City from her home in Queens to a small studio on a college campus in the Bronx where she will present the station’s Sunday Game coverage.
“I usually open with two pieces of music – this year it will be the Banks and the Mountains of Mourne. That gets us off on a nice note and tells people what we’re about as well as paying tribute to the teams,” says Treasa, wife of ESPN soccer pundit Tommy – who started the annual broadcasts for the Irish in the Big Apple.
“We take the feed live from RTE – but the station in the Bronx is non-commercial so it’d be fined about $150,000 if there were adverts aired. So when they go to the breaks in Dublin, I come in and give bits of information about the teams, managers or the jerseys this year or whatever.
“I love doing it; it keeps me… well for that day I’m home again. People can find the pictures live these days if they like but we still have a lot of people in hospitals, cops, nurses who listen. And you’d be so surprised at the amount of second-, third-, even fourth- or fifth-generation Americans who sit down and listen every year.
“I really don’t know how many people we get every year – but if it didn’t go out there’d be a riot,” she adds.
As Colm McCann wrote in his New York-based novel about an Irish priest, a French tight-rope walker and so much more: ‘The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.’
Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
At the turn of the last century, as the hem of American society was dampened by wave after wave of European immigrants, the Irish stretched out their legs beneath the table, threw a cap onto the coat hook behind the closing door and made themselves at home.
Conductors swinging off the San Francisco tram as it climbed crooked Lombard Street whistled Irish airs. Miners in Montana sent coal-smudged envelopes home across the Atlantic. And the hard-working criminals who ran the boxing game in New York and New Jersey sang ballads and made threats in distinctly green brogues. Welcome to America.
Around this time, Frank Sinatra’s father, Martin, a “ruddy and tattooed little blue-eyed Sicilian born in Catania” boxed under the name of Marty O’Brien. It was safer than wearing a gum shield.
In fact, in those days, and in those places, with the Irish running the basement-level of city life, it was quite common for Italians – particularly those who clocked on for an evening’s work when the ringside bell was struck – to wind up with such names.
It’s understandable, when you consider that most of those who migrated from Italy around the 1900′s were poor and uneducated, were excluded from the trades unions dominated by the Irish, and felt on their necks the stout-scented breath of the police and politicians.
Across the Hudson, Hoboken, a blue-collar New Jersey town offered the world the black-tied Frank Albert Sinatra. Not a million miles away, in the newly-constructed Meadowlands Stadium in the same state, on Monday night, another Irish name will climb into the ring as the bell rings on another American Football season.
Meet, Rex Ryan, head coach of the New York Jets.
Last year the corpulent Oklahoma native took the long-suffering Jets to within one game of the Superbowl in his first season in the hot seat. But more than that he earned a name as the biggest personality – and physical presence – on an NFL sideline.
Ryan is, according to the New York Times this week as: “An immense man whose thick foothills of neck and haunch swell into a spectacular butte at the midsection, he possesses a personal geography that, from first-and-10 distance, assumes a form that follows his function — Ryan looks like nothing more than an extra-large football.”
Like his GAA cousins, the 47-year-old Ryan is known for naming a side in the match programme and in the media during the build-up to crucial games – before we find the team lines out completely differently.
Frank Sinatra: Jersey boy was possibly a Jets fan.
The Jets are Ryan’s first head-coaching job, but long before the team hired him last year, he was already known as a ‘defensive auteur’ — a man with “a beautiful football mind.”
Like Donal O’Grady master-minding an original short puck-out strategy or Micky Harte imposing a blanket defence on Gaelic football, Ryan offers a philosophy of innovation. His scheme of “organized chaos,” – an unpredictable approach that keeps the opposition constantly guessing – is unique. And it’s bringing results; the Jets, eternally cold in the shadow of their glamorous neighbours the Giants, haven’t been warmed by a Superbowl success since the famous Joe Namath dragged them to one in 1969. Now they’re closer than ever.
Every year the TV station that brought us Jersey-set The Sopranos follows one NFL side in their pre-season as part of the Hard Knocks programme (Please someone make a GAA version). This year predictably they chose Ryan’s Jets. Where he brings new thinking to the backroom chalkboard, so too he is imaginative in his swearing (fans produce pie charts that detail his penchant for bad language; ‘slapd**k’ made a debut this week).
And his bowel-irritating secret eating habits in ‘Cafe Ryan’ – the area he filled with garden furniture outside his office where he hosts KFC picnics with his defensive staff – have been exposed.
But it’s his relationship with his players that has shone through the haze of a tough preseason.
“I’ll always tell you” is one of his signature phrases, and blunt as he is, his players trust his OCD level of preparation and canny reading of a super-complicated game. In fact, he does see football more acutely than others. After taking routine psychological tests for the league he learned he is dyslexic. The results also showed that he can watch football in real time and grasp what all 22 pawns on the chess board are doing. He doesn’t understand why, but he sees it all.
As the only other team he ever worked for, the Baltimore Ravens, come to New Jersey on Monday night for the first game of their season, Ryan – the Irish name pulling the strings in New York – will stalk the sideline with a smile – probably because the Jets are winning. He’s doing it his way.
Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This piece of indigenous hip-hop is more intercounty than Intergalactic.
And as fan-produced All-Ireland final songs go recently… it’s pretty good. But I’m biased.
Somewhere south of the Mason-Dixie, however, Caleb Followill is spinning in his skinny jeans.
Ok, last week you might have seen Sky Sports’ Jessica Kastrop getting pinged in the back of the head while reporting with Scholl at a Bundesliga game.
This week during Germany’s Euro 2012 qualifier it became apparent that Scholl has developed some post traumatic stress issues as he sees footballs whizzing towards him as soon as the cameras go live.
Incidentally, last night I read Malcolm Gladwell’s piece The Art of Failure in The Only Game in Town: sportswriting from the New Yorker – which I really recommend sportswriting nerds – in which he explains the nuanced difference between ‘choking’ and ‘panicking’.
It’s safe to say, Scholl is panicking.
HT Hot Clicks
Picture credit: Killian Kelly
Remember the bit in the old baseball movie ‘The Natural’ when the eponymous Robert Redford is lamenting his sorry past (he was shot by Barbara Hershey), beating himself up to Glenn Close?
Redford: “But I didn’t see it coming.”
Close: “How could you know she’d hurt you? How could anyone?”
Redford: “I didn’t see it coming.”Close: “You should have?”
Redford: “Yes. But I didn’t. Why didn’t I?”
I’d like to see the Sundance Kid hurtling precariously through – as I did on Wednesday – the beautiful Ballyhoura Forest which hugs the border between north Cork and south county Limerick, on a sophisticated mountain bike.
I pulled on the gloves they gave me inside out, bunny hopped around the car park thanks to the teenager-sensitive front brakes and was told, with a smile, to fasten my ‘brain bucket’ helmet. Perhaps I should’ve seen it coming.
In total, Ballyhoura offers more than 90km of biking trails along this single track, as well as on forest road climbs, which marks it apart as one of Europe’s top mountain-biking destinations. These loops range from the relatively easy six kilometres of Greenwood Loop, which would take a slow-ish biker (hi there!) about an hour to complete, to the leave-it-to-the-experts 51km Loop.
This, the ‘brown path’, is for the absolute headers. It could take a biker up to five hours to finish, including as it does l’Alpe D’Huez-like climbs and tough-to-negotiate features in a slaloming, long descent.
Local company Trailriders rent out the bikes to those who visit the recently-developed facility (€25 for a nice bike couple of hours, for example). Jonathon Mansell has just completed his Leaving Certificate and is about to start an exciting outdoor pursuits course in Kinsale, Co Cork.
For now, he works full-time for Trailriders and is known around here as one of the most proficient mountain bikers to yet turn the pedals up the hill. At the moment however he’s staying out of the saddle due to a hip injury. Another clue.
“We’re pretty busy at the moment – we had about 47 bikes out on the mountain on Saturday – and guys just keep coming back.
“It’s not for everyone – some don’t know what to expect to be honest – but we had three lads earlier flew around in a couple of hours and then went for a trip around the green course. And that was their first time. So they’ll be back.”
Mansell wheels out one of their newer bikes and sits me up on it.
“The brakes are very sensitive, so just feather them like this,” he says, spreading three fingers across each lever and touching them softly. “You’ll be grand.”
Diarmiud O’Leary is a retired secondary school teacher from the local town of Kilfinnan. He’s kindly volunteered to spend his morning guiding me up – and then down – the mountain side.
A highly interesting man with a love of the locality having been involved in the development of the Ballyhoura Way, he peppers generous encouragement (“you’re more confident now, you have the fitness anyway etc”) with some saddle-soiling scare stories (see that rock there, the greatest advertisement for a helmet…)
I follow him tentatively as we wend up the incline in a narrow pathway which is hemmed with large rocks and carpeted in moss, earth, whatever. He explains later that one group walked their bikes around the trail having expected the route to be tarmaced. “I don’t know why they wanted mountain bikes, really,” he shrugs.
I soon grow a bit more at ease and happily tail Diarmuid’s wheel as he offers, like an F1 technician, insigts into little corners that cause trouble while he’s not afraid to stop and admire the impressive 180degree vista that swallows the Golden Vale to the Galtees.
After a lung-busting crawl to the top of our route, we begin to peel back down. O’Leary is fearless as he skids across long and winding 2-ft-wide timber bridges that stretch across yawning drops.
Surveying the footprints and wheel tracks in the soft mud below – evidence of past falls by better riders than me – I choose to dent my pride rather than backside and wheel the bike across the bridge like a small child crossing the road to school. I’m not ashamed to tell you this.
The US air force have an expression for the period of time immediately after a young pilot fully qualifies and arrogantly thinks they can do it all: the death zone.
As we reach the end of the trip and I’m comfortable enough to stand cautiously on the pedals as Diarmuid encourages me, so to better manoeuvre the bike beneath I realise that I am in fact a natural. If I come up a few times a month, perhaps London 2012 might yet be a possibility.
Then comes that rock. An innocuous nick of the pedal. A skid. A screech. And you’re picking yourself out of a rabbit hole.
“The most important thing is to get back on straight away,” said Diarmuid. “It’s like they say with horses isn’t it? You must always get back on.”
After a giddily enjoyable few hours in Ballyhoura, I’ll be getting on again soon I’m sure.
Ballyhoura Forest hosts one leg of the 2010 An Post cycle series on Sunday, September 12. The Rebel Rush presents cyclists and mountain bikers with a choice of three trails between 6k and 35km. Visit www.corkrebeltour.ie. Registration closes this Wednesday.
Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
New video for Cee Lo’s latest tune. Dunno how they’re gonna make it look like ‘Forget You’ for TV, which is the plan apparently.
Dude looks like he could play for Baltimore Ravens.
H/T John Riordan