SPORT/The Road to Croker: A GAA Fanatic on the Championship Trail: For those of us who were reared in traditional Irish homes where begrudgery was handed down as a higher virtue there is an unshakeable belief in the old credo that it is better for your neighbour's horse to die than it is for you to have two horses.
Thus it was that when Eamon Sweeney's new tome dropped through the letter box the other day, I galloped down the stairs, tore the wrapping from the book , surveyed the title and greeted the day with a mighty harrumph. Hah, I knew it.
I first saw Sweeney a couple of years ago at a reading by the novelist Tobias Wolff. Sweeney was pointed out to me across the crowded room as "Eamon Sweeney, the genius".
Minutes later I was aware of the same party pointing me out to Sweeney. I feel sure I heard the words "Tom Humphries, the gobshite".
I've been wary of Sweeney ever since. When it befell me to review his soccer book, Only One Red Army (his novels, of course had to be reviewed by other geniuses!) a memoir about the love which dare not speak its name, I was just a little more than lukewarm about it.
Something about the gruelling subject matter, his family's unseemly passion for Sligo Rovers Football Club, seemed to mark it down more as shameful sub-Frank McCourt darkness than chirpy post-Nick Hornby fun.
And now, years later, this! The Road To Croker , A GAA Fanatic On The Championship Trail. What happened to Sligo Rovers? Jilted? Amicably separated? Running around town with another fan? Sweeney, dabbling effortlessly in the field of sports hackery, has been producing sports books with an annoyingly regular gestation period and it seems, with a genius unsuspected even of him, mutating from one species to another.
One day a hopeless, broken down League of Ireland mainliner with scant regard for the oul gah. The next day an incurable scoffer of hang sandwiches and sipper of bogwater brown cups of tae of a big match Sunday.
I expected half a book's worth of tortured recanting. A chapter filled with Sweeney's handwringing renunciations of Sligo Rovers and all their works. A painstaking description of the precise moment of Pauline conversion.
Instead Sweeney just plunges straight onto the broadway of a GAA summer taking time out only to lead us down little sidewalks and alleys filled with the knick-knacks and gew gaws of nostalgia hawkers.
It's a charming excursion.
As Sweeney bravely points out early on there has been no better GAA book written than Over The Bar by Breandán Ó hEithir. Indeed O hEithir's seminal work gives a 21-point hiding to just about any GAA book which has come since. The harder one tries to explain the GAA, the more elusive and contradictory the soul of the association becomes.
Wisely then, Sweeney steers largely clear of the didactic and presents a GAA summer as a sort of travelogue of people and places, a hubbub of voices joined in the communion of the season.
He doesn't quite deliver a full- on shoulder charge to O hEithir's legacy but he adds significantly to the slender canon of worthwhile books of a much neglected cultural phenomenon.
Several times, reading Sweeney's crystal clear prose and his joyous recollections of happy summer days in the arms of the GAA, I put the book down and wondered if there is anything else in modern Irish life which we take quite so much for granted.
The fact that in this packaged and franchised world this little nation performs a county by county Mexican wave of local celebration every summer is a matter little discussed in the drawing-rooms of Dublin 4. We assume that in the face of overwhelming market forces the GAA will always be able to take care of itself, will always be able to propagate its message and its games. We're wrong.
Sweeney sets out his credentials by means of the detail he excavates. The conversations he picks up, the saloon bars he visits, the hotels he goes to (perhaps the first Sligo Rovers fan to have passed time in the Killeshin in Portlaoise in the company of Roscommon footballers). He gathers together the familiar and unfamiliar and presents it all as the wonder it is. It's defiant. It's fun. It's the best of what we are.
There is little of the games but plenty of the landscape and the people here, a wonderful recreation of the sense of wonder and anticipation which every forthcoming weekend brings. And a warm conveyance of the delight which comes from being immersed completely in a Gaelic summer.
Despite the clunky title the book finishes, rightly, not in Croke Park, but at the Cork County Football final between Castlehaven and Clonakilty. The chapter (and the delicate epilogue on the death of Cormac McAnallen) takes care of all explanations. All GAA is local and Sweeney truly learned that when he came to live in Castletownshend, Co Cork.
Perhaps it doesn't take a genius to appreciate that small pearl but very few geniuses have. At the start of another millennium, Sweeney holds the GAA between his thumb and forefinger and examines it against the light. He likes what he sees, seduces with the way he sees it.
Even the begrudger bows.
Tom Humphries is an Irish Times journalist
The Road to Croker: A GAA Fanatic on the Championship Trail By Eamon Sweeney Hodder Lir, 367pp. € 11.99