There’s a gorgeous little story hidden away in a single, lonely paragraph of Paul Rouse’s new book. It’s a throwaway anecdote, almost an afterthought. But of all the morsels and observations in this collection of essays it was the thing that stayed with me the longest.
“As the years passed,” Rouse writes in a chapter titled Family, “the hurlers of the 1930s – the Limerick ones and the ones they played against – were brought together at occasional reunions and awards ceremonies and at golf outings. Increasingly, though, they met at funerals, as they buried the men whom they had played against.
“In 1975, when John Keane, the great Waterford centre back who regularly marked Mick Mackey, knew he was dying he set off for Kilkenny and stayed the night with the great Jim Langton, another star of the 1930s. He went then to Cork to hurlers he had played against and on to Tralee, where the old Limerick hurler Jackie Power was living. The following day he set off for Limerick to meet Mick Mackey. He died on the way.”
The fact that Rouse was able to smuggle such an evocative tale into the bottom of a page as a small diversion on the way to telling a wider story about Mackey himself is a fairly telling pointer to the rest of the book. When that’s what you’re using as an aside, the depth of quality elsewhere can only be worth the plunge.
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Sport In Modern Irish Life is ostensibly a collection of essays, musings, observations and yarns. You wouldn’t really say there’s any particular through line other than the author’s weakness for sport. Rouse is, of course, a noted historian, columnist and Offalyman – and all the shades and colours that run through him get their outing here.
It is similar in format and spirit to last year’s The Game by Tadhg Coakley. While Rouse wouldn’t be as deft or as lyrical a writer as Coakley, his eye for detail and forensic nose for the root and background to any sports story propels the book along at a fair old lick. There are 47 separate essays – if one doesn’t grab you there’s another one coming right behind it.
As you’d expect some of the historic stories are where Rouse really hits his groove. Mabel Cahill was born in Ballyragget, Co Kilkenny, in 1863. She took up tennis, emigrated to Manhattan, won five US Opens, wrote some novels, sang in variety shows, fell on bad times, moved to England, lived in workhouses, died of TB and was buried in a pauper’s grave in 1905. A jaw-dropping life, lost to the ages, revived with a historian’s zeal.
Things get a little more uneven the closer to the modern day we get. There’s a magnificent chapter on Hillsborough, told through the medium of the RTÉ television footage of the day, with George Hamilton and Johnny Giles doing their best to communicate sport’s worst day. An email from Paddy Power on Christmas Eve prompts a gloriously pissed-off polemic on the vampiric tendencies of the gambling industry.
Less engaging, though, are some of the more esoteric snapshots. A chapter on school feels a bit thin. Ruminations on Covid and the Ukraine war towards the end are light on the storytelling that drives the earlier part of the book. The final chapter, Endgame, bounces around a laundry list of subjects in modern sport – identity, AI, electronic sports, globalisation, etc – without really getting into the nitty-gritty of any of them.
Where the book is at its best is when Rouse finds himself easing into the unknowable endlessness of sport. What it is, what it does, where it goes. There’s a lovely chapter early on where he goes, as a man in his 50s, to buy a new pair of boots. By pure chance, he runs into an old rival, a chap he used to play against back when they were younger men.
The fella spots the boots in Rouse’s hands and wonders – at full volume – what in the name of God a man of his age is doing buying new football boots. They fall into conversation/slagging. There are only vague flashes of John Keane’s gallant admiration for former foes on show here.
“I wallow in the nostalgia,” Rouse writes, “ignoring the fact that we would gladly have poisoned each other for the best part of two decades.”
At one point his friend calls over his two sons and Rouse almost hides the boots, not wanting to have to explain to a pair of teenagers that a small but stubborn part of him is unwilling to let the dream die.
“The lads are great, though,” he writes. “They’re too sound to laugh out loud. Their mother must be some woman.”
