SPORT:Four sportsmen all reveal a defining crisis, an event forcing them to look in the nirror without the light of success.
SPORTING CAREERS are like life speeded up. Hence this rash of memoirs from Donncha O’Callaghan, Kenny Egan, Michael Duignan and Joe Kernan, men who, with the possible exception of Kernan, should still be too young to be making definitive judgments about their time on earth.
Yet all four have reached the top, or something like it, of their sports. And even the youngest of them, the boxer Kenneth Egan, has looked over and seen the other side. So each of them has already had a defining crisis, when he was forced to look in the mirror without the sympathetic lighting of success.
It doesn’t always happen within the confines of the chosen sport. In the case of Duignan, for example, the moment of revelation concerned the number of fights the former Offaly hurler was getting into while drinking. Whereas for Egan, whose job is to fight, the problem was the bouts he was missing during his epic binges in pubs and clubs that, unlike Duignan’s, were largely peaceful places.
Egan's My Story (Paperweight, €19.99) – the story of Icarus writ small – is in some ways the most startling. Previously unknown to most Irish people, he became something of a household name (albeit as "Kenny", a diminutive that, as he points out, nobody who really knows him ever uses) overnight in 2008 after winning silver as a light-heavyweight at the Beijing Olympics.
He hadn’t exactly reached the summit. And even in a sport as ruinous as boxing, the Olympic medal would usually have been a launch pad to greater heights, at least in the short term. But in Egan’s case the descent was immediate and precipitous.
His boxing defences were powerless against the temptations that good looks and a modicum of fame brought. Consequently, on the first of the two days into which the book is symbolically split, he is in the midst of yet another drinking binge, this time in New York, where he and a friend had flown with that specific purpose, only months after the Olympics.
He wakes up badly hung-over and with a grazed eye, the latter not from captaining Ireland in a boxing international, as he was supposed to be doing that week, but from a fall in an elevator the night before, en route to another blacked-out sleep. For Egan, taking a hard look at himself in the mirror meant just that.
Duignan, though, needed more than a mirror. His crisis was brought on by the death from breast cancer of his wife, Edel, and the long illness that preceded it. To him, in Life, Death & Hurling(Irish Sports Publishing, €15.99), the succession of scraps he seemed to be getting into every time he went out for a drink were just part of the life of being a successful GAA player turned media personality, and it was usually the other guy's fault.
But six weeks after his wife’s passing, a friend intimated to him that socialising with the two-time All Ireland winner was not much fun any more because it was always only a matter of time before trouble started.
Even then the epiphany wasn’t immediate. It was shortly afterwards, while travelling to Birr for another funeral, this time for the father of Duignan’s former team-mate Johnny Pilkington, that Duignan suddenly realised the effects on him of a long-drawn-out family tragedy. “Everything crystalised in my mind,” he writes. “The N52 between Tullamore and Birr became my road to Damascus.”
Despite the successes of their protagonists, all the books use personal trauma as their starting points. Failure makes for better reading, after all. So even Donncha O'Callaghan, usually cast as the joker in the Munster and Ireland rugby packs, pulls a serious face on the cover of his autobiography, a look echoed in the title of Joking Apart(Transworld Ireland, £18.99).
Now 32, O’Callaghan has still not endured the death in life that is the end of a top sportsman’s playing career. But the shadows are lengthening, and his book (written with Denis Walsh) begins with a premonition of mortality: that moment last January when, after eight years of automatic selection for every Munster game that mattered, he was dropped.
Affectingly told, his description of the week that followed makes the experience sound almost like a bereavement. After being brought on as a sub in the next game, and helping the team to win again, he cries in the dressing room for the first time in his career.
Sport being what it is, O’Callaghan’s 2011 was to have another Himalayan high and corresponding low, this time in the green shirt of Ireland. He’s still at a loss to explain why the team underperformed in the World Cup quarter-final – they were “on fire” in training – other than to say that it was the first game of the tournament before which he and his team-mates did not have a “private chip” on their shoulder about something.
But of interest to those who study sports psychology is a point he makes about the build-up to the famous win over Australia. Often it’s a casual comment by the opposition that gets inflated into a major insult around which the slighted team rallies. The Aussies’ mistake, it appears, was what they didn’t say.
Declan Kidney’s men knew everything there was to know about each of the players they would face. But in interview after interview it became clear that, beyond one or two names, the Australians had not similarly familiarised themselves with the Irish. And even though one of the names they would have certainly have identified was Brian O’Driscoll, it was he who diagnosed their arrogance. “Drico spotted it,” writes O’Callaghan. “They didn’t know who the hell we were.”
The trauma that begins Joe Kernan's book, Without a Shadow of a Doubt(Irish Sports Publishing, €19.99) is perhaps the most prosaic of the four. Like many people who had money to invest at the time, the Armagh man spent the boom years building up a property portfolio. His resulting bankruptcy coincided with an unhappy spell managing Galway. But you sense that the former event had more to do with his writing a memoir.
Central to Crossmaglen GAA club’s rise from military occupation to national supremacy, as well as managing Armagh to a first All-Ireland, Kernan certainly has a big story to tell. And his offstage dramas can compete with any in the other books, especially his recollection of the time, back in the early 1970s, when he still believes he was seconds from “accidental” death at a British army checkpoint.
There are also occasional insights into his management style, like the time his reigning All-Ireland champions suffered a shock defeat to Monaghan in the first round of the Ulster championship, and Kernan ensured the team bus went home through the centre of Clones (not a geographical necessity), ensuring that, amid the derision of Monaghan supporters, his men would not escape the lessons they needed to learn in time for the qualifiers.
Yet, for all that, Kernan’s autobiography abounds in well-worn truisms and is the least confessional of the four. Maybe it’s the GAA code of honour that prevents any real indiscretions. Or maybe, despite being the senior member of the quartet, Kernan is still thinking about dressing rooms to come, and remembering the imperative never to give hostages to fortune.
Frank McNally is an Iris
h Times
columnist
