I’m in a long-distance relationship with the GAA.

I’m in a long-distance relationship with the GAA.

It was a long time coming but Sunday was the first day I felt like I was missing out on something at home. I was in the kitchen on Sunday morning, bagel in hand, coffee in the pot and Shannonside on the radio (phone) when the 2019 GAA championship kicked off properly. Though nothing beats being there, the television comes in a close second. Unfortunately, despite the heroic efforts of Willie Hegarty (a commentator whose style might best be described as ‘feverish hysteria always’) the radio is a poor third. With radio commentary I can only feebly visualize the action and I have to rely on the increasing franticness or pitch of the commentary to alert me to developments, which doesn’t really work with Willie Hegarty’s modus operandi. To be fair to Willie, I didn’t fare much better with Marty later on RTÉ. Auditary deficiencies aside, I felt I was missing out on something; that there was craic going on somewhere without me. So what was the ‘something’? Well, it was three things actually; entertainment, the craic and a pretty basic sense of belonging. 

FYI: I’m grand like. Nothing doing the shopping and going for a good walk didn’t sort out.

It’s possible that sport has never have been as important as it is now. We used to gather under an umbrella of national myths but the myths now are outdated; U2 are old, many of us are on the fence about uniting Ireland, Irish identity has evolved far beyond ‘not English’ and it turns out our emigrants weren’t the only ones who built America. The debunking of myths is generally a good thing when such myths are largely sustained by the turning of a blind eye, but it does make it harder than ever to bring communities or citizens together. However, at a time when polarisation reigns supreme, sport can unify. Think of the Euros, or the Olympics when the Donovan brothers pulled like dogs. Think of the World Cup and the world as we know it when Ireland qualify. Crowds, strangers, opponents brought together – however temporarily – by sport. It applies to the local level too, as local even as the family, and I missed that on Sunday. Had I been at home I’d have been at Roscommon and Leitrim with friends or siblings. For other matches I might have gone across the road for a pint, or popped in the road that evening to watch the Sunday Game with the neighbours. In Dublin, most likely, I’d have gone to town to watch a match and stayed all day (and would’ve had a great time).  Hardly the Paris Climate Agreement I’ll grant you but still, it’s bringing people together. Not being the athletic sort, I had never much thought of how much I had benefitted from sport (arragh just the GAA, this would be a very different posting if it had been the League of Ireland starting) but I knew it well on Sunday. It’s Emigrant 101 isn’t it, being used of something at home and wishing you had it here.

I wish I had it here because sport and culture are communal activities. I don’t want to watch it on my own! I don’t want to listen to it on my own! I’ve had great nights out out-foreign watching matches and I’d assumed it’d be the same here. It’s not or, at least it’s not yet. A match starting at 15:00 at home will be starting at 09:00 here. Most people don’t bother – a barman told me I’d soon forget about it (I won’t) – but those who do bother generally get the GAAGO for the year for $150 to watch everything at home. Grand. Sound. But eh, what about me? See, I’d kind of decided on GAA Sunday being the summer routine. And that, by extension, settling in would be grand because on Sundays there’d be craic. That’s how communal an activity I consider GAA to be; I was going to build a whole routine around it! It’s early days yet and if Mayo and Dublin meet in the Super8s then you can be sure there’ll be a crowd somewhere in this city. But for May and June it looks like I’ll have to look elsewhere for the craic (which is tricky because ‘the craic’ stubbornly defies definition). In a city of nearly thirteen million I reckon I’ll be okay, thanks in no small part to the wonder of MeetUp.com

Now, the ‘meh’ of Sunday morning might not have been as visceral as the above suggests. Sport is, after all, entertainment and seventy minutes of intercounty hurling rarely fails to deliver. Football usually doesn’t either. But Sunday morning got me wondering if the entertainment value of sport (or theatre, a concert or seeing Riverdance live) lies in the display itself, the sharing of that display, or a combination of both? The radio didn’t do it for me on Sunday but I remember another time out-foreign when I ended up in a hotel lobby listening to Roscommon and Mayo with some Dub – an earbud apiece – and I’d a great time. So yeah radio; it’s not you, it’s me. I’m not worried though because by God,  I’m in the right city for sporting entertainment. There’s basketball going on somewhere and it’s baseball season here (162 games in six months!) and American football will also be a thing at some stage too. In fact, I think that May and June are the exact right time to test on baseball my theories about sport’s unifiying powers. And sure, if nothing else, won’t I know for sure if I am or am not in a long-distance relationship with the GAA.

A year or two ago I was watching Mayo and Kerry in a bar out-foreign and I got chatting to a girl from Ballina who was teaching there. She’d  just spent the school holidays in Mayo and a mate of hers was messing with her, good-naturedly, about choosing Ballina when the whole of Asia was on her doorstep. She smiled and simply told him that the heart wants what the heart wants. She was dead right. In one of the finest cities in the world, in an age of globalism, I may well look the pure eejit looking for Irish people to watch Irish sport witb, but you know what they say,

The heart wants what the heart wants.