THEY say everyone has a book in them. Paddy Coyne dragged it out kicking and screaming.

Unemployment arrives at the door with plenty of baggage. Lots of us know it all too well these days. For the 35-year-old, Coyne, opportunity knocked too, however.

The north Tipperary man no longer filled his days on the floor at a factory. Instead he cracked open his laptop and wrote his first novel The Drinker with a Hurling Problem. When no-one would publish it, he did so himself.

The book, on the surface, is about someone who returns to the homeplace for one final lash at the junior title with the local club. It’s about a lot more besides, one suspects.

“I suppose I was trying to have a conversation with myself about why I played hurling and became so obsessive about it over the years,” Coyne — who played junior hurling, but ‘was never any good’ — tells me.

“It worked to an extent in that I got those feelings down on paper in a structured way. The story isn’t completely auto-biographical, but it certainly does reflect how I feel about hurling. An old axiom suggests that writers write about the one thing that bothers them so much they have no choice, but to write about it.

“One day I came across something that Maurice Mitchell had said in 1973 — ‘not enough young men and women arrived in university without ever having shipped a punch in the nose’. That really struck a chord with me and got me thinking about writing a book about the GAA. In Ireland now we have this excruciating problem whereby every man and his family seem to be run like a private company.

“Our sense of community is being diluted. And, I think the GAA matters more now because the old certainties of rural life no longer hold. That, I suppose, is the point I was trying to get across, that the GAA can still help a man to find a sense of himself.”

Having read the opening pages however this is no Fáilte Ireland, soft-focus clip through an idealised rural Ireland. Put it this way, if it’s ever adapted into a movie, Cillian Murphy rather than James Nesbitt will play the lead.

It’s a long way from the silver screen now admittedly. Coyne, the sound of slamming doors ringing still in his ears, took a punt and published it.

“I sent off a draft of the book to several mainstream publishers and was, as I expected to be honest, roundly rejected. I then turned my attention to self-publishing. I wrote the book for myself, as an exercise in self therapy if you like, so I was never banking on making a lot of money off it. But since I had written the damn thing I reckoned that I should try to make people aware of its existence.

“Self-publishing is easy enough and free which is always nice. With Amazon you can quite easily piece together a physical book and an eBook. It’s ridiculously easy to be honest. Once you have that accomplished the idea is to market it. I have not made much progress with that, but am hopeful that a couple of reviews, whether good or bad, might help it to get some traction in the market.”

And though the market may be crowded, Coyne — who devours sports book obsessively — isn’t impressed with those present. That perceived lack of quality in sports writing, on this side of the Atlantic particularly, prompted him to add another spine to a tower of books.

“I suppose I have been frustrated with the sports books I have read over the past few years. None have really come close to capturing what it is like for someone to play with a less than glamorous hurling team or with any hurling team for that matter. I don’t know if I have managed to capture it in the book, but at least I have given it a go. Some GAA books are fairly insulting efforts. A child could do a better job with a crayon.”

So now the cruel world can judge his effort too. Though he may not be in the parish if and when his tale of local rivalry and universal themes finds its audience.

“I’m not sure what I am going to do with myself now,” he answers when I enquire to his situation.

“Emigration is an obvious option. Personally, I don’t think I’m good enough a writer to make a living out of it, but I really enjoyed writing the book and might try something more mainstream next time round.”

* You can buy the eBook (€2.99) or a physical copy (€9.99). Both can be ordered off Amazon.com, search for ‘The Drinker with the Hurling Problem’.

* Email: adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first apepared in the Irish Examiner ion October 14.

Mind your heads while I throw in the first cliché, if I may; in sport, there’s no gain without pain.

Mostly however, there’s no gain despite the pain. Just ask a Waterford hurler.

I pulled on a pair of running shoes and fell in behind almost-greatness as he lapped the local GAA pitch these past pregnant days before the season’s end.

Running alongside Dan Shanahan, we drew right angles in the corners of Dungarvan’s Fraher Field as if Davy Fitz himself was watching us on Google Maps on his laptop back in Clare.

A relaxed Shanahan did not seem like a man marching inexorably towards his last game. After 13 years on the inter-county dance floor, the final game of his Waterford career is now rising in the east.

If he was frisked on the way through the Croke Park gate on Sunday morning, the Garda would toss four Munster championship medals and three All-Stars onto the floor beside the Lismore man’s wallet and car keys. I’m sure he doesn’t carry his National League medal around.

Later that day, a defeat to Tipperary in Dublin will see the curtain fall at last on the Lismore man’s time in the national spotlight — after almost a decade and a half of wonderful goals’n’gums.

But defeat their near neighbours and rivals and the blue and white roadshow stays on the tracks as Kilkenny’s freight train whistles into sight again.

If it ends there — a casualty to history while the Noresiders park the drive-for-five — Shanahan will know he’s trained as much as any of those marching behind the Artane Band. You control that much. And live with the rest.

Now, he’s trotting down the sideline in an Argentina shirt, distinctive tattoos flicking from beneath his short three-striped sleeves. Like Marco ‘Matrix’ Materazzi — the Italian centre half/footballing assassin who commemorated his World Cup and Champions League victories with vivid tats of the respective trophies — Shanahan will surely have to ink a painful portrait on his body of the Liam MacCarthy Cup if Tipp and then the Cats are accounted for?

“My god,” he laughs, “You can do it yourself — full size and on my back or something, with the date underneath it .” Silence for a moment, “That’d be nice.”

But, no pain, no gain — in tattoos and sport.

This is supposed to be a day off the training for Shanahan. He was put through his paces by Fitzy and co last night. And the same tomorrow. After this run he’ll go back to work. Tonight he might grab a quick massage or a swim.

“The sport now is a completely different ball game compared to when I started . The stuff you would have got away with wouldn’t happen now for sure,” he day dreams.

“You could go out every night and still play a match — the speed of the game, the skill, the mental side has all changed since myself, Ken and Tony started I suppose 12 or 13 years ago. But it’s changed for the better.

“Players are much faster and much stronger. When you see what has to go into it to even stay competitive… It’s certainly semi-professional. Games are harder to win.

“I do a lot of my own. You get a programme at the start of the year. I kept back on the weights this year and concentrated more on the flexibility and core work; that’s all the rage at the moment.”

And has ‘Dan the Man’ filed into the local community centre for a yoga class, like Roy Keane?

“I’ve never done the bit of yoga — you wouldn’t have the time — with your own training and your hurling training with Davy then and the selectors. It’s time consuming.

“I’m lucky enough to be in full employment at the moment. So it’s hard to fit in all the training. Your family suffers, to be honest with you. I’ve a daughter now who’s 11 and she’s never been on holiday.

“But I’ll call it a day after this season — it takes up an awful lot of time — but I love it. I absolutely love it, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I finish. If I’m not playing I love encouraging the lads when they play and stuff like that.”

The sweat, as we head past the grandstand again, is now hopping off one of us. (I’m reminded of Carla’s response, when Norm admits he ‘may perspire a bit’, in Cheers; ‘We could grow rice’) Shanahan however seems as cool as one of his finishes in to the far corner. He looks like a man who’d stand up well to harsh studio lights in a life after sliotars.

“I’d like to get into the media side of things after I finish. I know the game having played it up to now. The speed of the game and everything. Some people can’t see things on the line that should be seen and I would be interested in that now. Radio or television… it would be interesting.

“It’s nice to put your point across, to give players that aren’t maybe getting the thanks for runs that aren’t seen or whatever, rather than the players who are getting the points and then the credit.”

After running less than a mile in his shoes, we sit back into Shanahan’s car. the familiar tattoo flashes across his forearm: “If you don’t know me, don’t judge me.” If the last full stop in his artful career is inked on Sunday, we will certainly feel we’ve known him. But maybe his final hurling judgement will come in September.

Dan Shanahan uses the adidas micoach. To become faster for your sport, download the adidas miCoach app and run in Supernova trainers. Visit facebook.com/adidasrunning to find out more

Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This story first appeared in the print version of the Irish Examiner newspaper

Like boxing, America’s Game is one that lends itself to great sports-writing. And it entices some of the best to huddle here with us in the damp, shadowy corners of the back pages.

When John Updike – one of the bold-face names of 20th century literature – gambolled into Fenway Park one sunny afternoon, he unknowingly sat into the bleachers of the famous old chocolate box of a stadium on the last day of the legendary Ted Williams’ career at bat.

The smiling writer watched curiously for the duration and was ultimately so exercised by the theatre that played out in his lap that he submitted a now-celebrated piece to the renowned New Yorker magazine.

Updike sketches wonderfully Williams’ curmudgeonly farewell speech to Boston, before he typically spits a final rebuke to those in the press-box or “the maestros of the keyboard up there”.

Ultimately, Updike explains how Williams dotted a full stop in his cartoon-strip career with a final, predictable home run.

“Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs – hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after, he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

Gods do not answer letters. Home run, John.

(Incidentally, Ted Williams – the greatest they ever saw in Boston – died in 2002 . Sparking a very messy legal mud fight, two of his children froze his head cryogenically. Some insisted that the signature they insisted franked his approval of this unusual request was merely an autograph. Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly visited the icy head once, starting his subsequent column: “Hung out with Ted Williams the other day. Pretty cool. He’s spending his time in a one-storey cement building in a warehouse district next to the Scottsdale, Ariz., airport, frozen, upside down, waiting for science to bring him back from the dead.”)

Some time ago, I wrote here of Clare man Flan Marsh. A roofer by trade, he filled the now yawning days in his workshop at the end of the garden where he developed – slowly but surely – a hurley, that like himself, does not break.

His patent-pending technology involves lacing the hurley – still an authentic piece of ash – with a filament that holds it together safely as it cracks in the white heat of battle. This grit in the oyster prevents the familiar sight of half a hurley spinning dangerously into the summer sky.

I drove up to Broadford and stood in the centre of the club’s field before witnessing a full-blooded demonstration. It works.

So… here come the fast-talking Americans in ten-gallon hats and smelling of crisp dollar bills. A friend of Marsh’s in the States read the article online, opened up the Gmail account and fired off an email to baseball’s biggest of wigs.

Ten minutes later, a reply dropped in from ‘the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball’ on Park Avenue in New York. Now we’re in business.

This morning in Broadford in east Clare, the out-of-work roofer is waiting on 60 bats to arrive from the MLB.

It’s estimated – in the big leagues alone – that players go through approximately one bat every 50 at-bats. Where these sharp, fast-travelling missiles land, nobody knows. A firm of New York lawyers are kept busy with law suits caused by broken bats spiking into the cheap seats. With his new technology, Marsh will send the suits to the Hamptons early.

He plans to pump the bats with his silver lining and bounce them back to the new world where they await inspection in a lab by MLB’s experts. In the meantime, he’s kept going with the hurleys in his shed.

On Tuesday he bumped into former Banner manager Ger Loughnane and pressed one of the sticks into his hand. The Sunday Game pundit swung it around, examined the unusual spine with the intelligence that won two All-Irelands and offered Marsh his congratulations.

When Christy Cooney, GAA president, was in the county for the Feile na Gael last week, so too he was treated to a new hurley.

“I’m delirious. It’s very exciting,” he said this week. “The bats are made from ash – same as the hurleys – and we can fix them no problem at all.

“I’m run off my feet with the hurleys too – more than ever – and that’s great. But the baseball bats could be massive; they have a problem – and I can solve it.”

God may not answer letters. But he replies to his emails pretty quickly.

adrianrussell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

UPDATE: My former Irish Examiner colleague Gavin Sheridan reminded me that we actually bought a very nice kodak Zi8, in the end.

I brought it with me to Broadford, Co Clare for the piece I did with Flan Marsh – the former roofer who invented the wonderful shatter-proof hurley.

He brought a few lads – including Banner senior Brendan ‘Bugsy’ Bugler – down to the club house and we went up to the pitch where I was treated to a full-blooded demonstration.

The footage, here, is pretty ropey, admittedly – but I enjoyed using it for the first time and Flan, and the patent guy who’s helping him with the process, were delighted to have it on Youtube. I’ll know better the next time I suppose.

I’ve a big feature in the pipeline as part of our World Cup coverage and we hope to use the Flip again for that.

In the meantime, have a look at this clip I found on The Story (with thanks to Mark Coughlan).

It’s a profile of a former gridiron star from Eric Seals of the Detroit Free Press. This is the kind of stuff I’d like to think we’ll be producing in the years to come.

Courtney Hawkins comes home to make a difference from Eric Seals on Vimeo.

AT THIS time of year, American football teams are tasting the white heat of intense pre-season training. Gridiron giants take part in a violent annual ballet as a hulking, heaving mass of athletic hardware crashes into each other in a frantic bid to forge a team ready for the NFL season.

Amongst this chaotic scene however, one, particular, man is an island. While the team of coaches on the sideline watch these full-blooded practice sessions unfold on days when the season’s playbook is inked, there, invariably, wearing a brightly coloured cap, is the author of so much of it: the quarter back.

This orange hat, which crowns the QB, offers his enthusiastic and often much bigger team mates a very clear message: “Take it easy on this guy; he’s the franchise”. Neither Galway, nor county champions Portumna, make Joe Canning wear a luminous cap – but everyone knows this guy is worth a few Superbowl rings to the Tribesmen.

It’s fair to say, the 21-year-old is the key to at last unlocking All-Ireland success. But not his year. The westerners, as we know, were dumped out of the championship, after an encouraging run, which began in the Leinster SHC, by Waterford who picked the victory from Canning and co’s pocket in an All-Ireland quarter-final in Semple Stadium. Another year wasted.

But, despite his box-office name and his face now plastered on Dublin buses, the Portumna man is not one to swaddle himself in a burgeoning reputation it seems. As he beats a familiar path – from his club’s dressing room to the centre of the well-worn pitch – he is half feeling his left shoulder while he inspects the balding surface underfoot.

The day before Canning is to teach me some broad-brush strokes in the art of the sideline cut – an art in which he is a master – his club side take on Tipperary ahead of Sunday’s All-Ireland decider with Kilkenny.

Essentially, it’s a chance for both sides (Portumna are at the business end of the county championship) to click through the gears in preparation for the real battles ahead. Not so for the LIT student who roars full throttle into a shoulder challenge with Premier county man-mountain Michael Webster. “I saw him coming and I thought ‘hang on now’. He’s a great player obviously. And a really big guy.” Canning comes off the worse in the crisp exchange. But he’s ready for a few sideline cuts nonetheless.

“I don’t practice that much realty – maybe 20 minutes once a week you’d fire a few over. But you’d say you practice them all the time, you know,” he says as he leans over the sliotar which he places very deliberately (it’s the same position for every attempt, you might notice).

“I read a lot of books from sports people – Ronan O’Gara’s one was very good I thought, Roy Keane’s and Jonny Wilkinson’s. The routine I go through is a bit like Wilkinson’s. And I do try to take what I can from other sports and apply that to my own game.”

We’re in the south-east of the county of Galway, the only bodies on a deserted pitch, but he could be under a full stand at Twickenham, trying to angle a conversion between the posts, such is the marked similarity of the routine.

Two steps back from the ball. Two deep breaths. A quick glance at the posts – and a visualisation of the sliotar sailing over. He then kneels into his target, reaching low and flinging the hurley face – at a 45-degree angle, a fraction beneath the ball. He winces as his shoulder aches but the contact is painless and it floats gracefully towards the goals he’s played into as long as he’s played the game. “Now your turn,” he states.

The sideline cut is the game’s alchemy – Canning and few others on the intercounty scene can create gold from scraps. Teaching that magic, is a tougher science. Canning runs me through the routine slowly like someone who’s sitting next to a nervous flier on a trans-Atlantic take-off. “That’s just the wheels coming up, that sound is engines whirring, this tablet will make you sleepy.” But though I understand each component part, thanks to his tutelage, doesn’t mean I can fly.

After my first attempt skims along the grass towards the town, the Galway man asks casually, “You’re a soccer player, are you?” A dirty stroke. A few attempts and I can see a slight improvement, while Canning steps in again to show me, like a club pro, how my swing is letting me down.

When I ask why he isn’t laughing at my clumsy attempts, he insists no sideline cut expert scoffs at any effort; it could happen to anyone.

What’s the first sign of madness? Talking to yourself? Suggs and his bandmates walking up your driveway? Try, offering to stand in goal for a Joe Canning penalty. The anaemic grass in the goalmouth area of both goals in Portumna’s pitch has been replaced with coarse astro-turf. The club elders sought a solution many in clubs throughout the country will be familiar with.

“The grass never got a chance to come through at all really; especially in this goal. Below in the far end it’s just the square is replaced. Here it goes all the way out to the 20 because young fellas were coming in and playing in the near goals. Was I one those lads? I suppose I was for a long time.”

This local boy has fired a million arrows from a quiver he developed in this couple of acres of rural real estate, in the shadow almost of the town’s picturesque castle and its abbey. Never before has a journalist agreed to stand in his crosshairs.

Respecting his new opponent so much, he adopts a clever rope-a-dope tactic and takes it handy enough for the first few. I save at least three I think and I tell him one particular stretched save, which the photographer captures will be on Facebook within the hour. The next shot whizzes by my head like a deadline. And the next. I get to the last but it’s so powerful it knocks me over the line anyway. That one won’t be going up online.

Afterwards as thoughts turn to the All-Ireland final this Sunday, a date circled in red on the calendar all year, though Galway and their young star will not fill the role they had hoped, Canning admits he’ll be in the stands anyway. As Michael Webster and his Tipperary team mates run out onto the Croke Park pitch on Sunday, he’ll be in his civvies, with friends.

“The Galway lads decided we’d go up as a group and support the minors. We can chill out a bit and relax together after a long year. It should be an excellent game anyway. Will I have a pint? No, we have a big championship game coming up with the club and there’ll be none of that.”

Galway supporters will hope he looks after himself between the sidelines in the meantime and returns to Jones’s Rd next year for a champagne moment in September. This guy is certainly the franchise.

Contact: adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in today’s Irish Examiner.

The news broadcasts are creaking under the weight of cliches like ‘blankets of snow’, ‘big freezes’ while footpaths are engaging in treachery.

As the country has slowed ground to a halt, the sporting world has been the same.

Meanwhile, in today’s Irish Examiner, despite the present icy inertia, about two dozen of our staff writers and columnists have looked ahead to the events that will define the Irish sporting year. I can’t link to the website as it’s a graphic but check it out in the hard copy if you’re in Ireland. There’s some surprising calls.

In the meantime, here’s my effort:

Q1: Who’ll be a big winner in 2010?
Irish rugby and soccer, as a whole, who will open the redevoloped Lansdowne Rd as the Aviva Stadium (The Pallendrome anyone?) in August.

Q2: You’ll soon be hearing about…
Swimming talent Grainne Murphy is the real deal. The 16-year-old, who set an Irish senior and junior record for the 800m freestyle last month, is facing a vital season ahead of London 2012. Remember the name.

Q3: Your own wish for 2010?
Tiger Woods to face the music. For his own sake, he needs to go head-to-head with the world’s media until they run out of questions. And then get back to golf.

Q4: The defining moment of 2009?
I hate to say it, but from our point of view, it has to be Henry’s hand ball. We’ll never forget it.

Q5: Most bizarre moment of the 2009 season?
Watching an intimidated Lance Armstrong hop off his bike at the bottom of St Patrick’s Hill in Cork at the climax of the Tour of Ireland. Do the girls in St Angela’s know they go to school halfway up a more intimidating climb than l’Alpe d’Huez?

Q6: Who’ll win the FIFA World Cup?
The FAI’s first guests at the Aviva Stadium. Anyone who writes off a talented Argentina team with low expectations and led by Leo Messi is madder than Maradona. And wouldn’t it be some story if they won it despite/with him.

Q7: Who’ll win rugby’s Six Nations?
With Ireland having to go to London and Paris this year, it won’t be the defending champions. Decland Kidney’s charges will be very close however and I wouldn’t be surprised if they lost out to France on points difference – again.

Q8: And the Heineken Cup?
The pendulum has swung back in Munster’s favour again and having qualified from the pool, you wouldn’t then bet against them. With the scar tissue from last year’s defeat hardly healed, they have more than enough motivation to take the trophy again.

Q9: Anyone to beat Kilkenny and Kerry in the Championships?
I’d look to a Joe Canning-inspired Galway to at last rattle the Cats and rejuevenate the game. Kerry are by no means invincible and Tyrone will fancy their chances again with Sean Cavanagh especially having a point to prove.

Q10: The biggest Irish sports story of 2010 will be…
Rory McIlroy stepping into a Tiger-shaped hole in world golf and winning a major or two. What the boy lacks in fear, he makes up for in talent.

Portumna and Loughrea will meet on Sunday in the county senior hurling championship final. Much delayed by the controversy surrounding the alleged assault of a referee after one of the semi-finals, there may yet be another few dirty strokes pulled in anger.

These two wildly successful clubs are the Stadler and Waldorf of Galway sport – but the last time they met in county final the neighbourly rivalry boiled over into a graphically violent affair with Portumna’s young star – the game’s brightest talent – sufferring appalling injuries.

Last summer, After I asked Canning about his WWE “you-can’t-see-me” celebration, we spoke about that ordeal. Shrugging his shoulders, he admitted a reunion was on the cards but insisted any revenge would be earned with the sliotar.

And then he fired a few penalties at my head.

This is no real shock, it has to be said, to anyone with an interest in hurling but for a guy who is still playing – and a goalkeeper – in the ultra-conservative world of GAA this takes some balls.

Here the Senator – campaigning in New York – meets Cork hurling legend Christy Ring in the famous Gaelic Park.

There was many a home on Cork city’s northside, where I’m from, with a picture of Ring and a Kennedy – more likely Bobby’s brother, of course – above the mantlepiece. A portrait of the Pope may have made up a familiar triumvirate.

RFK, was shot dead on June 4, 1968, just hours after he won a huge step towards the White House with victory in the Democratic primary in California.

He addressed some supporters and media in the early morning of the next day at LA’s Ambassador Hotel.

Leaving the large ballroom, through the busy kitchen, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, opened fire and shot the candidate. Kennedy died soon after.

Ring lived just under a decade after this point; he passed in March 1979. Ring’s graveside oration in Cloyne was delivered by a former Rebel and Glen Rovers teammate and the then Taoiseach, Jack Lynch – who had met Bobby’s brother John in Cork City Hall in 1963, incidentally.

Many have guessed, through the years, what Mackey said to Ring in that famous GAA photograph depicting two old enemies captured in conversation on the sideline. I’d like to know what Bobby said to his new friend on the Gaelic Park turf.