Memoir: It was George Orwell, more than 50 years ago, who made the point that serious sport was bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of the rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. Little, it seems, has changed, writes Bill O'Herlihy.
I remember that most urbane of sportswriters, Paul McWeeney, reflecting on the US Masters and saying that to be among the azaleas at Amen Corner and getting paid for the privilege of being there made him one of the luckiest people in the world.
Tom Humphries would argue that Paul McWeeney was part of a different era when sportswriters were kings. They had elegance, they had dignity, they had an audience. Now, says Humphries, sportswriters are a withering breed - further and further from the action, shouting louder and louder to make themselves heard.
There was a time when a good sportswriter could hold a city, a country even, by the lapels and make them listen while the story was told. We're smaller now, less relevant, he writes in his introduction to Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo: A Sportswriter's Year.
Not you, Tom, not you. For a week in May, Humphries, the man I believe to be the greatest sportswriter of his generation, can and did hold this country by the lapels through a story which, in his own words, consumed more newsprint and spawned more theories than the Kennedy assassination: Roy Keane and the World Cup.
Inevitably, Keane dominates a book rich in background, observation, insight and humour. Humphries is sometimes the reluctant observer, "one of the bottom feeders of modern sport", but he brings what all good sportswriters must bring us, the smell of the dressing-room and the crunch of the tackle. A sportswriter, someone once said, is one of those creatures trapped between two real professions, either one of which he would like to be good at: sport or writing. Humphries is one of the lucky ones - he writes beautifully and, in 2002, he had that gift of great timing, being in the right place at the right time. More than that, he not only reflected the news, he helped make the news. It makes this book compulsive reading.
Keane appeals to Humphries because he's a flinty individualist, something of a prickly misfit like so many great sportsmen - and indeed a bit like Humphries himself. We meet Keane early in the book, on a wet day outside the gates of Tolka Rovers football club in Dublin. Dealing with the Irish football team has become for Humphries one of the great chores of the job, when once it was fun. In 2002, journalists were in a state of almost perpetual conflict with the team, he tells us, and Mick McCarthy was paranoid to the borders of psychosis about the media. There are some fine people among the team, but, in his view, when the players get together, they radiate the surliness of supermodels "who have just woken up to find acne all over their faces".
And Roy Keane? Humphries's view is fascinating and, in the main, admiring, even if sometimes Keane radiates intimidation. There are people in this world who you don't want taking shortcuts through your personage, he writes, and Roy Keane is one of them.
You see him coming at you menacing as a shark's fin above the water's surface on a crowded beach. He has a vein on his temple that looks as though he's got a worm crawling under his skin and the heat off his eyes would give you third-degree burns.
Wonderful stuff. Yet, for all this, Keane was "a perfect pleasure" to interview because he is witty and self-aware and, "unusually for a footballer", considerate and kind. No interview that February day at Tolka Rovers, for Humphries is still suffering a hangover from having given Keane's telephone number to a journalist friend thinking he was doing Keane a favour. "Favour," Keane says incredulously, and there follows a marvellous passage that made me laugh out loud even if, by the end of Keane's tirade, Humphries felt he had been splashed with battery acid. Jason McAteer would know the feeling.
If Humphries missed the interview in the rain in Dublin, he got it in the sunshine in Saipan and, as they say in the cliché, the reverberations changed Irish soccer forever.
Humphries's book covers the Winter Olympics, golf in California, the All- Ireland finals and the Ryder Cup - which he dismisses as a "crock" - but the World Cup is the heart of the book, and totally engaging from the time Humphries watches Keane leave Dublin airport "with a personal entourage of demons".
Saipan produced, arguably, the greatest Irish sports story of all. It is a tale of mismanagement, half-truth, rumour, hidden agendas, paranoia, a Python-esque media occasion built around the Keane TV interview, a training ground bust-up, a comedic barbecue and a 5 a.m. drinking session at the Beefeater Arms, the like of which Saipan had never before experienced. Humphries's coverage in the eye of a storm is brilliantly, if sometimes testily, observed as he battles time zones, competition, demanding editor Mal, implacable deadlines; and a press operation that functions "like an arm of the Official Secrets Act".
Humphries, "the master of strategic lounging", got the Keane interview that was the Saipan catalyst, but he's a bit of a moaning Minnie about the pressures it imposed - or so he says, positioning himself as someone with no appetite for controversy and with the news instinct of a three-toed sloth. I can't vouch for the news instinct, but for colour, comment and clarity, there's no-one better.
Against the background of such drama and controversy, the World Cup games were, for some, almost irrelevant. Humphries believes that Keane, alone of the Irish squad, felt Ireland could win the World Cup, which ended in a classic Irish moral victory of the sort Keane despises - along with shamrockery, blarney, "half-arsed Irish charm", and the willingness to substitute passion for professionalism. As for McCarthy, it is odd, writes Humphries, to think that his finest success was wrapped around the seed of his greatest failure.
For Humphries, the major Gaelic Games occasions were the perfect antidote to the morale-sapping days with "the miserable professionals" of Ireland's team. The dignity and pride of Andy Comerford and the winning Kilkenny All-Ireland team was the story of the season for Humphries. Kerry press days were a different story, "all foreplay and no consummation", with Páidí Ó Sé "buttoned up like the most devout girl in the Amish community" when it came to the pre-final interview.
Kieran McGeeney, the Armagh captain, was a different proposition, an awesome character, approachable and articulate with "a purity of passion unpolluted by money or agents or all the considerations of a professional life".
The McGeeney piece is evocative and beautifully observed, and tells us much about Humphries himself. Looking at McGeeney made him regret that he was never a better player.
It's not just a regret that I never had the talent or the will, but a sense of loss that I never got to be good enough to sit in a dressing room with somebody like Kieran McGeeney or Roy Keane and to draw inspiration from their excellence.
Beneath the "so what?" sceptic, the romantic peeks through.
Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo is a rich record of the year in which Humphries believes sportswriters had influence but not respect. There's a melancholic streak in his writing and in his view of his trade. Generally, he pursues his principle that a large part of sports journalism should consist of extinguishing flammable hype, and that writers should be sceptical "about the raging idiocy of fame and the vacant lives of heroes".
But heroes are important - they offer us time in the best possible company. Humphries knows this and, in bringing us the big names and the big occasions, warts and all, has given us a wonderful journey through 2002.
Bill O'Herlihy presented World Cup 2002 for RTÉ Sport and is the current Sports Journalist of the Year. He is chief executive of Bill O'Herlihy Communications
Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo: A Sportswriter's Year
By Tom Humphries, Simon & Schuster/Townhouse, 373pp, €11.99