Autobiography: George Hook is a media star for good reason. He is very intelligent, articulate, and most of all, dauntingly well-prepared in his analysis of the sport of rugby.
But there is something else. He is likeable and vulnerable, a sixtysomething little boy.
It was his charm that no doubt enabled him to stay afloat in business when he apparently had entrepreneurial feet of depleted uranium. Or so he would have you believe. In fact, he could not have been nearly as incompetent as he says he was during his years in the catering trade, one of the most exacting professions this side of harpooning killer whales from a rubber life-raft.
In his determination to tell us what a lousy son, husband and businessman he was, he reads like someone confessing all at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Hook clearly had an addictive personality but if he had an addiction he doesn't reveal what it was.
I'd guess he only managed to become a media celebrity in his sixth decade, once he had put proper order on his life.
One of the defining features of this type of personality is their determination to show the world how truly worthless they once were. This is what he vigorously sets out to do, and though he clearly was an appalling husband, he must have been an appealing one also. No wife would have stayed true as Ingrid did unless he had considerable qualities, even though he has gone to great lengths to conceal them here.
As a businessman, Hook says he owed much of his survival to the three-day gap of the pre-computer epoch - the gap between the presentation of a worthless cheque, when it was instantly logged into your account, and the moment it bounced in the central clearance. A constant whirl of valueless scrip through myriad accounts created a hall of fiscal mirrors in which the banks could never grasp reality. Of course, this requires a phenomenally agile brain and a Buddhist calm, and for all his considerable intelligence, Hook is not the Dalai Lama. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, as pressure mounted, he came close to killing himself.
Yet the real story here is that his associates - even those he had in essence defrauded - invariably bailed him out from his little scams, the worst of which involved him getting a loan against his mother's house without her knowing.
Of course, when the next wheeze - inevitably - fell apart, and foreclosure loomed, friends again stepped in, and his mother was not evicted.
Why? Because people like George. That's one reason why he is a hit on television. Another is his courage. Rugby punditry in Ireland for years was dominated by journalists for whom dispassionate criticism was seen as national disloyalty. Hook, then in his 50s, appeared on the journalistic scene when Irish rugby was a joke, and his well-honed opinions, drawing from his own coaching career, were precisely what an infuriated rugby-viewing public were crying out for - though they made him enormously unpopular with players who had understandably come to assume that Irish rugby journalists were fans with laptops.
However, Hook is not an unfailingly good writer, and he is not always well served by his publisher. Encountering a metaphor such as "The legislators were frantically putting their fingers in the dyke against a tidal wave of under-the-counter payments" is like undergoing an uphill struggle against a haystack of wet Sundays. The Battle of Stalingrad was not in 1944, and unless it has some recondite existence neither I nor the Shorter OED knows about, I can only suppose that "grammer" is "grammar".
Moreover, the index is truly deplorable: two references to the 1987 World Cup, but none whatever to any subsequent ones or, worst of all, to the definitive 1999 defeat by Argentina, the very nadir of Irish rugby fortunes, which Hook (and Brendan Fanning) had been predicting.
I read this book in two sittings. It is a wholly compelling account of the greatest rugby journalist of his generation as he comes to terms with his many demons, even if not all of them are named. It will sell well, and deservedly, not least because George Hook is a good man, and, despite his best efforts, it shows.
Time Added On: An Autobiography, By George Hook, Penguin Ireland, 246pp. €24.99
Kevin Myers is an author and an Irish Times journalist